There is a civil war among American Jews over the question of antisemitism. We witnessed in January yet another flash point as a prestigious high school fired a Jewish history teacher for their anti-Israel comments on social media. Jewish responses, from a rabbinical letter that denounced her firing and one that supported it, put this fight on rare public display, as both claimed to defend Jews against antisemitism.

In case one might think the rise of antisemitic violence in the streets, temples, and homes of Jewish Americans might unify Jews, it has actually widened the rift — often to the point of absurdity. The man who stands a good chance of becoming the first Jewish president, Bernie Sanders, has been both caricatured as too Jewish on the pages of the Washington Post, and simultaneously someone who hates the Jews in the pages of the Forward. Some on the Right cannot figure out if they hate Sanders because he’s a Jewish communist, or because he is an ally to critics of Israel and thus not the right kind of Jew. Jewishness, now as ever, has become a political identity as much as a cultural or religious one.

The publication of Bari Weiss’s 2019 book How To Fight Anti-Semitism is only the most recent and prominent book-length salvo from one side of this debate, adding to Emory Jewish Studies professor Deborah Lipstadt’s recent book on antisemitism, and a New York Times op-ed by a Jewish student at George Washington University who argues universities are overrun with antisemites.