Jews cannot afford to be naïve about the hatred that never died.

When I see antisemitism rise again, I don’t call it “a surge.” I call it history repeating and recycling itself.

photo: Toa Heftiba/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Tzlil Berko, an Israeli entrepreneur and writer.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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About 16 years ago, when I was 20 years old, I had just come straight from the Israeli army to the United States, more precisely to Washington, D.C., where my mom, Dr. Anat Berko, was a visiting professor at George Washington University.

It was during my first few days in the United States, and I decided to take the Red Line from Maryland to visit my mother’s office at the university. So far, so good.

As I stood on the platform waiting for the train, my mom called to check in. We were speaking to her in Hebrew, of course. We are Jews from Israel; it’s not like we speak Chinese.

When I hung up, a woman about twice my age approached me with a warm smile: “Wow, what a beautiful language you speak! Amazing! I can’t say I recognize it. What is it?” Her face was glowing with contagious excitement, and I remember thinking, America is going to be wonderful if everyone here is this kind!

“It’s Hebrew,” I replied with a smile just as the train pulled in and one of the doors opened right beside us. I stepped in, and so did she. “Did you say Hebrew?” she asked again, but this time her tone had changed. The smile was gone. “Yes, indeed,” I answered, still smiling, still unaware of the hate tsunami that was about to crash over me.

“You f*cking killer Jew!” she screamed into my face on a train full of strangers who did nothing but stare. “You must be IDF age, huh?! An Israeli soldier?!” she kept shouting.

I did not flinch.

“Yes. I just came back from the field actually. I teach combat soldiers how to shoot the terrorists you support, right between the eyes,” I said, unapologetic. Her aggression did not push me back.

Her mouth fell open.

“You are killing innocent children. You Jews kill Palestinians. I could spit on you,” she hissed and stepped forward. I stood my ground.

“On the contrary,” I said, “it is Palestinian terrorists who kill Jews and use their own children as human shields.”

Her face went bright red. She looked rabid, foam at the edges of her mouth, furious. I went on high alert, hoping it would not escalate into violence. I had no intention of getting my fist dirty over this Jew-hater. She threatened to spit; I was certain her inner voice wanted far worse.

The passengers stared at me, not at the woman with the crazy eyes who kept screaming, “Are you proud of yourself, Jew? Are you?” and jabbing a finger toward my forehead. “Yes, very much so. I am proud to serve my country, Israel. Thank you for asking,” I answered, not looking away.

She kept cursing at me, but at that point I was already zooming out, looking at her with complete detachment, saying nothing, almost watching it happen from outside myself. She finally got off the train, still spitting out curses straight from “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” same old blood libel nonsense.

When the doors closed, I was left standing there, under the heavy silence of everyone who had witnessed it. It felt like the end of a brutal round in a ring, the crowd frozen, the antisemitic opponent gone. And me? Unshaken, unbroken, standing alone until my station finally arrived. I stepped off the train as I had stepped on: unbowed, head high, a proud Jew.

Ah, what a charming way to be welcomed to the United States, wouldn’t you agree? This ugly encounter happened to me almost two decades ago and let me remind you, this all began with a “nice” woman asking what beautiful language I spoke. It is chilling because it reveals how easily such hatred hides among ordinary people, surfacing in the most mundane settings: a train, in broad daylight, in the heart of a Western country, while everyone else remains silent. The silence of the passengers was almost as haunting as her words. Not one person on that train had the backbone to tell her she was an antisemitic bully.

This story is not an accusation against the United States as a whole. I love the America, and there are so many good Americans who care deeply about their country, their values, their ally Israel, and the Judeo-Christian foundation of the free world. This episode proved only one thing: Antisemitism has no boundaries of space or time. It would happen on the moon if the moon were inhabited. It is an ancient hatred that keeps reinventing itself to be lethal, like a virus that rewrites its code to survive antibiotics.

“Antisemitism is overflowing!” I hear people say. “There’s been a crazy surge in antisemitism since the war began!” They warn with a hint of accusation, a subtle dose of victim blaming, suggesting that Israel’s act of defending itself against the barbarians from Gaza who invaded our land on October 7th — raping, torturing, slaughtering, and kidnapping our people — is somehow the reason for this so-called “increase” in antisemitism we are witnessing.

Well, here is the hard truth: There is no “increase in antisemitism.” It is simply less shy than before, if it was ever shy at all. The genie is out of the bottle, that’s all.

After the Holocaust, when over six million Jews were reduced to black ash (my family on my father’s side among them), much of the world did not awaken. It did not repent. It merely learned to disguise its hatred more elegantly, to mask the stench of its betrayal with synthetic perfume labeled “morality.” It laid fake green grass over scorched earth, where countless Jews were shot into a single pit and buried as one.

Then it placed a tidy bench on their mass grave and called it remembrance and “never again.” Then, with hollow faces and polished words, it performed its act of “compassion,” pretending to possess the sanctity of Mother Teresa through various rhetorical tricks. Some Jews fell for it, feeling so assimilated they forgot that first and foremost they are Jews, and only then everything else.

To say you wanted to murder Jews carried consequences in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, not because humanity had changed, but because Jewish blood still stained the Danube, where Jews were shot to the water and their bodies drifted like silent witnesses to the world’s indifference. The river itself testified that the so-called “civilized world” had watched and done nothing. Absolutely nothing. And the faint echo of its guilt died almost as quickly as the Jews it abandoned to the flames.

The hatred never left. It merely retreated into the shadows, lying dormant like ISIS cells quietly embedded in Western societies that “tolerate” them, waiting for the right moment to strike. You cannot convince me otherwise. My grandfather’s 4-year-old sister was a beautiful little girl who left this world through a chimney after being gassed to death in Auschwitz.

I have the Holocaust running through my veins, and no one can fool me for even a second. I know exactly what is lurking. And that is precisely why we, the Jewish People, have our democratic Jewish state, the one and only guarantee that we will never again be defenseless at the mercy of others. We have seen what happens when Jews depend on the nations of the world for mercy, for they have none.

Today, it is almost fashionable to hate Jews. You can even say you regret that Hitler did not finish the job and still keep your position, your friends, and your reputation as a peace-loving, morally enlightened soul, the so-called “good Samaritan” who only wants to “save humanity” from the Jews.

The masks have fallen. What once hid behind the polite language of “human rights” (unless you are Jewish) and “justice for all” (except the Jews) now marches openly under banners soaked in Jewish blood. The same people who chant “never again” at the United Nations light candles for Hamas-ISIS and wrap themselves in a flag that calls for the extermination of Jews. The institutions that preach Holocaust remembrance now host conferences that justify the next one. We know who they are.

Antisemitism did not “make a comeback.” It was waiting patiently for the world’s “tolerance” to hunt again, crystal clear, like the shattered glass of Kristallnacht. When Jewish blood flows, suddenly everyone becomes an expert in “context.” When Israelis are butchered in their beds, “peace activists” take to the streets to justify it. Hatred of Jews is the one prejudice that has managed to rebrand itself as virtue.

But here is the truth: We are not the frightened Jews of Europe in 1942. We are Israel! We are armed with memory, with truth, with faith, and with the will to survive. We are armed, period. And every time the world forgets who we are, we remind them, not through words, but through existence.

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