Ilan Gur-Ze’ev seminal piece, The New Antisemitism (published in Hebrew, 2011), is an underexplored meta-analysis of the intellectual underpinnings of a novel form of antisemitism that emerged in the aftermath of Liberalism’s supposed triumph at the turn of the 21^st century. Formerly a scholar of Critical Pedagogy, an associate of the post-Zionist “New Historians” and a self-proclaimed Jewish Diasporist, Gur-Ze’ev underwent an intellectual transformation. He turned against the intellectual milieu and ideologies of his formative years and work and focuses instead on the morphing of the “new progressivism” into a “new antisemitism”. On January 4, 2012, a day before his life was cut tragically short by an aggressive tumor, he gave an antemortem lecture on eros, education and love.

Gur Ze’ev claims that Anti-Judaism is the meta-narrative of the new progressivism. This Janus-faced antisemitism is directed at the same time towards the two contradicting modes of modern Jewish existence: first, as a traditionalist and transcendentalist diasporic resistance to pagan-inspired nihilistic immanence; and second, as a supposedly normalized form of nationalism, which insists on maintaining its particularism. Both these forms represent narratives of Jewish chosenness and otherness, that needs to be annihilated to usher in the redemptive era of a radical Paulinian, and essentially secular, universalism. Gur Ze’ev explores three forms of the new antisemitism: (1) the dissemination of “old” antisemitism in new rhetorical forms generated by capitalist globalization and post-colonialism, and accelerated by technology; (2) The role of the Jew in Islamic political theology, that does not differentiate between Judaism and Zionism; (3) the political standpoints of the new progressivism, propelled by the rhetoric of “criticism” and “resistance”. These positions deny the right of the Jewish people to national self-declaration, and in an act of purification (“self-decolonization”) scapegoat Zionism and Israel as supposedly the ultimate evil otherwise associated with the West at large.

Exploring, through the prisms of Gur-Ze’ev’s work, the horrors of October 7 and the antisemitism that exploded in their wake in academic and academic-inspired circles, sheds new light on understanding the intellectual process long in the making, that brought the current catalytic antisemitic eruption into being.