Coleman Hughes & Haviv Rettig Gur on the New Antisemitism

In the nearly three years since Hamas’s attack on October 7, as the world has changed, I’ve often wondered what future there is for Jewish life in the West.

It doesn’t take much prompting to think about: One scroll on social media and you’re flooded with blood libel conspiracies. When I turn my phone off, in the hopes of touching some grass, I look up to see graffitied swastikas in subway stations or protests in a park calling for the death of America and Israel.

It’s not only Jews who are faced with this question, but everyone who believes the West is exceptional and worth fighting for.

Earlier this month, I spoke with two of the clearest thinkers in this moment: Coleman Hughes and Haviv Rettig Gur. Both are essential voices on this topic, and I’m proud to call them my Free Press colleagues. We were speaking in a Toronto synagogue, at an event hosted by the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center. The backdrop was that Canada, a country where Jews have thrived for centuries, is now a country that has experienced a 670 percent increase in antisemitic incidents since October 7—shootings at Jewish schools, synagogues firebombed, one Toronto synagogue vandalized seven times in a single year.

In our discussion, we covered a lot of ground. We discussed why the Iranian regime won’t fall the way people hope, and why many Americans insist on seeing Israel as a reflection of their own national guilt. We also spoke about growing antisemitism on the right, and why Coleman thinks it’s different from Jew-hate on the left. He spoke about the loss of the black-Jewish alliance, and how we might get it back. And despite all of that, we ended on a high note: the promise––the exception––of the English-speaking world, where, even still, the darkest predictions about Jewish life haven’t yet come true.