The surest way to work up a crusade in favour of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behaviour ‘righteous indignation’ – this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.

Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

Anti-Semitism ­– the socialism of fools – is a shapeshifter supreme. The oldest hatred has taken many forms, and is enjoyed by Christians and Muslims, communists and fascists alike. Now it can add another string to its bow. Anti-Semitism has become deeply fashionable. You might say it’s all the rage.

Years ago I coined the phrase ‘fresh’n’funky anti-Semitism’, to define a new strain of the disease which had broken free of its stale, pale, male origins and become quite the belle of freshers week balls. Jewish students had been systemically bullied since the founding of the universities – though there was a brief pause for decency after the second world war – and the first wave of banning Jewish student societies started in 1975, when the National Front was perceived as a threat, and many students’ unions adopted a ‘No Platform for racists and fascists’ policy in which they included Jewish groups. Students were drip-fed hatred of Israel along with 2-4-1 Jägerbombs at the SU bar, and then they graduated and joined the BBC or the Guardian, where they were paid to spread the message worldwide.

Fresh’n’funky anti-Semitism is still around, and has spread outside the campus. There has been the greatest incidence of anti-Semitism in Britain since records began over the past two weeks, and, judging by the louts caught on camera, it’s not prejudiced pensioners smashing kosher restaurant windows, vandalising schools and writing ‘COLONISER’ over posters of murdered toddlers. We’re usually told that this group of young people are less prejudiced than any other, so some might think it a bit of a shock that a recent poll on anti-Semitic attitudes – measured by asking 11 questions about Jewish stereotypes and seeing if people agree with them – found the disease most prevalent in the 18-34 age group (13 per cent) and least from the over-50s (8 per cent).

When you think about it, there’s a dismal predictability to anti-Semitism’s popularity with today’s kids. In the past, the younger generation always craved more freedom, but this one wants less. That’s why it supports for the policing of language (when the Labour Party promise two years in jail for ‘misgendering’, it knows the age group most likely to vote for it) and the persecution and cancelling of those with rebellious views. In 2019, a survey conducted by the Hanbury Strategy for the centre-right think tank Onward claimed that two thirds of 25-34s would prefer a ‘strongman leader’ who does not ‘have to bother with parliament’. The same poll described London as ‘the most authoritarian part of the country’ because of its ‘younger and ethnically diverse population’. Under-35s across the country were described as ‘considerably more authoritarian than older generations’. How weird it would be if the demographic who have spent the last few years screaming that everybody they don’t like is literally Hitler turned out to be quite keen on Hitler. Literally.

Thugs and trustafarians now unite in Jew-hatred, a macabre crusade with echoes of the Salem Trials and the Cultural Revolution. I’m sure that everything, from not being able to get on the property ladder (Jewish landlords) to climate change (if Israel haven’t been blamed for that yet, it can’t be far off), will be used to justify yelling ‘Death to the Jews!’ at some point. But of course it will really be about the Crome Yellow Huxley quotation. A generation to which ‘bully’ is the worst word will now enjoy the thrill of bullying by telling themselves they’re standing up for the bullied.

This kind of neuroticism is everywhere in today’s anti-Semitism. We’ve all sniggered at those ‘QUEERS FOR PALESTINE’ photos and thought: ‘Don’t they know how they’d be treated in Gaza?’ Owen Jones was quick to blame Hamas’s murderous treatment of homosexuals on the British Empire, leading Darren Grimes to write: ‘Owen Jones is correct; before the British arrived in Palestine, it was wall-to-wall Pride marches, same-sex marriages and Lady Gaga tours.’ The ‘Harvard Arab Alumni Association’ has been asking for donations to help students’ ‘mental health’ after they were subjected to ‘relentless bullying and intimidation’ for calling Israel ‘entirely responsible’ for the pogroms which Hamas carried out, including murdering children in front of their grandmothers. Remember that old definition of ‘chutzpah’: the boy who murders his parents and then asks for clemency on the grounds of being an orphan. The hard fact we have to face is that the more evidence of atrocities they see, the more they’ll back those who carried them out. Cheerleading for evil while masquerading as caring for the underdog is part of the fun for these people.

Where will it end? We fought a war which we thought would end anti-Semitism, but the Cenotaph was graffitied while police looked on and no poppies will be sold on the streets of Brighton this year. How long till we apologise for our role in the Second World War? Nothing would surprise me now. Berlin and Barcelona are alive with mobs demanding the destruction of Israel, and a 13-year-old girl (with relatives in Israel thought to be among the hostages) at a British school reports being told by her classmates ‘Go back to the gas chambers’, adding ‘I get called “Jew” by most kids in my year at school, I get it yelled at me in corridors and at lunchtime.’ If the 18-34 cohort surveyed are increasingly anti-Semitic, there’s every sign the next generation will be worse, raised as they are on the BBC telling them that Israelis kill babies in hospitals when it was actually ‘friendly fire’ by some particularly cretinous jihadis.

How familiar the tinkle of broken glass from a synagogue on the streets of Berlin sounds

The Jews really can’t win. As a child learning about the Holocaust, one of the things that shocked me most was learning that Jews who survived the camps and returned to their homes were often murdered anyway. The most famous was the Kielce pogrom of 1946, in Poland, in which 42 Jews who had returned ‘home’ were murdered by their neighbours. Jews are hated for ‘letting’ themselves be killed and hated for surviving. If they fight back, they are hated even more.

It’s the loneliness of the British Jews that I keep thinking of – these supremely loyal compatriots who have often annoyed me with their insistence on singing the national anthem as well as Hatikvah. As Hadley Freeman wrote sadly in the Times: ‘On Monday I went to the Jewish Vigil for Israel opposite Downing Street. It was nice, but it was also strange, because everyone I could see there was clearly Jewish… Across town a pro-Palestinian rally was happening. I looked at the photos in the papers in the next day and was struck by what a mixed crowd it was… everyone marching together in defence of – what? Pogroms? Meanwhile, the Jews just had themselves.’ I thought of when Hadley was happily ensconced at the Guardian and wrote a piece making fun of gentiles who were admirers of her people –‘I guess I’ll just have to live with the burden that I am the object of envy and adoration of Burchill, Amis and Mensch. Truly, we Jews suffer’ – and I felt a pang of nostalgia for the days when I could be told that my philo-Semitism was an embarrassment, rather than this strange, yet somehow horribly familiar, new world in which the oldest hatred is the latest craze.

As Douglas Murray wrote here this week: ‘There are times when you wonder how history happened. And other times when you realise how it did. The past two weeks have been one such time.’ As Europe recommences its once-loved if barely-remembered danse macabre, we see that the muscle memory was there all along – how familiar the tinkle of broken glass from a synagogue on the streets of Berlin sounds. No one will be allowed to sit this one out. Sooner or later, we will all have to pick our side. Or that side will pick us, as the mob – young and strong – gains velocity and the madness of crowds seeks to finally finish what it started so many times before. I know which side I’m on – but then, I am an old lady now, one who chose her side when she was a child, back in those wonderful days when only bad people screamed ‘Death to the Jews’. Back when we truly lived in modern times.