Alan Bloom, perhaps modern education’s greatest post-war critic, wrote presciently on Western elites’ decaying moral and intellectual fibre. Bloom’s 1987 best-seller, The Closing of the American Mind, parsed the corrosive effect the pervasive ethic moral relativism was having on student bodies at the elite universities where he taught.

None of the foul, wicked manifestations of antisemitism on campuses across the Western world since October 7 would have surprised Bloom, an American Jew born and raised in the Midwest.