“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” This aphorism aptly describes the phenomenon of Jew-hatred. Purim fell in March this year, while Israelis were engaged in an existential war against Gazan and Lebanese terrorists. The holiday commemorates the salvation of the Jews of ancient Persia from a genocide planned by an abominable man named Haman. Today, Iran—modern Persia—is a major sponsor of Islamist Hamans, including the paragliding, motorcycling murderers of Hamas.

Founded three years after the end of the Holocaust, Israel became the great beacon of hope for a traumatized people. The Jewish homeland took in millions of refugees from Arab nations, the Soviet Union, and Ethiopia, and Israelis proved time and again that they could defeat those seeking to obliterate them.

But this time feels different. American Jews have seen the widespread celebration in Western cities of Hamas’s torture and slaughter of their brethren, the indifference or complicity of international organizations to these horrific deeds, and their own government’s looming abandonment of Israel. This time feels like the slow-rolling thunder of a gathering storm: a war against all Jews, everywhere.

This old and new reality has prompted varying degrees of shock. European Jews can’t forget the Axis fascists as they watch new, Islamist and leftist ones multiply, form alliances, and commit hijackings, bombings, shootings, and stabbings. But American Jews, lulled into complacency by the retreat of public anti-Semitism in the U.S. from the end of World War II to just yesterday, were stunned by their fellow citizens’ reactions to October 7. The fear of civilizational collapse assails their minds.