The Hatred Stalking Europe

The rise of anti-Semitism across the Continent and the fight to resist it

- Vivienne Walt

THE NOTE JAMMED ONTO A WINDSHIELD IN Sweden in March last year was designed to terrify. WE ARE WATCHING YOU, YOU JEWISH SWINE, read the message to a retired professor, written on paper with the logo of the Nordic Resistance Movement, a Swedish neo-Nazi organization.

In the bucolic university town of Lund, with its cobblestone streets and medieval buildings, the threat seemed jarringly out of place. More notes followed. “I was really scared,” says the professor, a small woman of 70 who is too fearful of a further attack to reveal her name in print.

Finally in October, an attacker broke into the professor’s home before dawn and set it alight. By a stroke of luck, the professor was not there. But her living and dining rooms were reduced to ash. So too were the writings of her late mother, detailing her internment in the Nazi concentration camp Ausch witz. “For the first time in my life I have needed therapy,” she says, over tea in a sunlit café in Lund. “I have not known what to do with my life.”

The professor was targeted because she is Jewish, and in that she is not alone. Anti-Semitism is flourishing worldwide. Attacks on Jews doubled in the U.S. from 2017 to 2018, according to the AntiDefamation League (ADL) in New York City. That included the shooting in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue last October, which killed 11 worshippers.