Probably the scariest sentence in the Bible, and maybe in all of Western literature, comes early in Exodus. “Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph.” It suggests how era changes to era, way leads to way, evening darkens to night and home turns ominous and mean. Of course, in our age, it’s not the pharaoh who sits on the throne but mood, trend, fashion. And the computer is its sword, social media its scepter. All to say, it’s not as it was to be a Jew in America.

If you go online and read the comments on any story about Israel or George Soros or search certain terms on Twitter, you begin to feel the golden age of the American Jews was just a moment in time. Perhaps the old paranoia stirs in me, but I see ominous signs everywhere: In an article about stubborn, black-hatted Jews who refuse to sit next to women on airplanes—a phenomenon I don’t believe is happening in a statistically significant way—which echoes depictions of Russian Ostjuden, strangers from the East condemned for making the rest of us look bad; in a review of an Ezra Pound bio, which makes the poet’s diatribes sound like quaint digressions. (“The poet’s vitriolic attacks on the banking system … have a particular resonance for twenty-first century readers: and however unworkable the solutions (emphasis added) Pound offered, his volcanic anger at the pain caused to ordinary men and women during the Depression by the greed and malfeasance of financial institutions allows us, Moody contends, to see the raging poet as a ‘flawed idealist’ whose quest to bring about more equitable systems of government [read: Fascism] was, at bottom, principled and decent, however tarnished by anti-Semitism.”) In imbroglios at UCLA and Stanford, where students have been asked to explain their affiliation with Jewish groups. According to a Trinity College study, 54 percent of Jewish students reported experiencing or witnessing ant-Semitism on campus.

President Obama? I don’t blame him, but I do think his disgust with Benjamin Netanyahu, which seems almost physical, as if repelled by the stink of the man, has given certain practitioners the sense that it’s safe to come into the open. It’s a frequent topic of conversation among my friends: Do you feel that chill? That sudden drop of barometric pressure? “That UCLA girl, the Orthodox airplane Jew … the message is slowly getting out, we are now post post-holocaust,” a friend emails. “It’s like leaves budding or animals leaving warrens or girls without coats; all these signs of it being OK, coming tentatively back into season again.” It’s as if Jews are bell-bottoms or fringed coats. Once upon a time, we’d been in fashion, but not anymore. What you have now is a return to the green-screen hatred, which, like malaria, spikes and remits but never goes away....

For me, who remains just as Jewish as ever, who is so Jewish it’s absurd, the question haunts: What does it mean, this return of the old hatred? First and foremost, it means losing the ability to define yourself. It means being defined by those who believe they know you before you’ve even met. Your name tells them everything important about you.