I recently came upon a basket of old magazines gathering dust in the attic, and found some relics I decided were worth keeping: an issue of the Atlantic from October 2020 with the lead story about “making America again,” and the January 2021 Washingtonian with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on the cover cheerfully announcing it was “our turn.”

The sadness I felt about the optimism in those mags was nothing compared to my surprise upon opening an edition of Azure, an experiment that for its years of publishing aspired (and to my mind succeeded) to build new bridges that “spanned deep abysses of misunderstanding, alienation, suspicion, and even hatred.” The lead article in the issue I found had me doing a double-take about the pub date (Summer 2011): “The Secret Passion of the New Antisemitism,” by the then editor-in-chief, Assaf Sagiv.

Anyone caught up in discussions of today’s global antisemitism can’t avoid the question about whether and how new it is. We’re reeling in a barrage of essays pining for that “golden era” of Jews in their chosen “golden land,” along with other commentaries warning that we’re about to have a rerun of 1930’s Germany. Whether our situation today is better, worse, or about the same as it’s been for millennia has always been a hard question, now made more complicated by the latest acts of linguistic acrobatics. We are reassured, for example, that being antizionist is OK: if we are for human rights and social justice, deeply Jewish........

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