Summer doldrums have a way of deadening the senses. That might explain why a monumental week of bad news for Jews slipped by without a collective gasp. It should have shaken up even the most languid among the tribe—if anyone truly cared.

Happy days for Jew-haters came last week with a gargantuan op-ed in the New York Times—3,620 words in length—denouncing Israel’s war in Gaza with the damning title: “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”

Rome is burning. The Titanic is sinking. And Jews, once again, are fiddling beside Nero while an orchestra goes down with the ship.

It all started with a music festival in southern Israel where peace-loving teenagers spent the night under the stars and awoke to barbarians wishing them their final good morning.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, a political scandal in France galvanized public opinion all over the world. Known as the Dreyfus Affair, at its root was the inexorable display and mass hatred of Jews. This same antisemitic fervor, which a few decades later would materialize into the Holocaust, had been around for two millennia. Occasionally, it would manifest itself in pogroms and mass expulsions. Along the way, it went from latent to lethal, and emanated from a lie.