I can confidently say that I know antisemitism and anti-Zionism in my bones. All my growing years, until early adulthood, I was immersed, submerged, always surrounded, with but a few islands of friendship. So I learned early and well what these consist of: contempt, distrust, callousness, erasure, violence. I lived it all.

Not only is anti-Zionism a form of antisemitism, it is its most venomous genocidal embodiment. The three prominent forms of antisemitism — the Christian canons of supersessionism and deicide, the racial inferiority theories which buttressed the Nazi obsession with eradicating the Jews of Europe, and Islamic insistence on keeping Jews in servile dhimmitude and threatening them with another Khybar — all acknowledge that the Jews were a people rooted in the land of Zion.

Even the kids who chased me through the streets of my town, shouting “Zydy do Palestyny,” had it ingrained in them through generations that the land known as Palestine is where Jews came from and where they rightly belonged. Anti-Zionism in its modern form is not an expression of the old Judaism-based belief that a Jewish state can come into being only at the behest of the Messiah, even if nobody knows how one would recognize a messiah. Modern anti-Zionism relies on the “stolen-land” narrative, which denies any connection of Jews to the land of Zion, thus creating a whole new category of humans reserved exclusively for Jews, a people now condemned to be without roots, without identity, without a claim for a right to exist anywhere. That’s the true nature of anti-Zionism, a preamble to the ultimate final solution.

Why the rush to exterminate Jews has once again gripped the world is beyond human comprehension. A three-thousand-year-old people who preserved their unique identity despite multiple attempts at annihilation, a people who gave the world the Book which became a foundation for faith, ethics and law, and an inexorable hunger for learning, and yet? If jews were a tribe in Papua New Guinea or in the depths of the Amazon forest, the same mobs, Greta Thunberg among them, who now scream for our demise, would demand that we be protected, saved for posterity. But Jews, once again, we are promised a real Holocaust, as if the previous one was not real enough.

When Jews are set on fire in the most iconic spot of Boulder, we read that our community should reflect on why that might be appropriate or at least understandable.

The problem, we are told, is that our Jewish “identities are rooted in victimhood and accusations of antisemitism.”

The moral depravity of this perspective defies any attempt at a rational response.

What happened on June 1, 2025, at 1:26 p.m. in front of the Boulder County Courthouse, was an act of war, the global war on Jews declared by Khaled Mashal, the acting leader of Hamas, on October 11, 2023, four days after the Hamas invasion of Israel, the massacres they perpetrated and the abduction of over 250 people into the dungeons of Gaza. Many around the world answered the call and undertook acts of war: burning down synagogues in Melbourne, spraying Jewish girls school in Montreal with machine gun fire, hunting Jews in Amsterdam, running down Jews on the streets of Brooklyn, the murder of two young people in front of a Jewish museum in D.C., hundreds, maybe thousands, of violent attacks, acts of vandalism to Jewish owned businesses, and, we must not forget, the antisemitic orgies on many university campuses.

This is what a global war on Jews looks like. And Boulder became the site of the worst of it yet. Boulder will go down in history as the place where, for the first time in the history of the Americas — the North and the South — Jews were set on fire. I was one of them.

I think that the question our community needs to reflect on is, “Do we want to bring the war here”? If the answer is “no,” then it behooves each and every one of us to think about how we will protect our town, our people, from the global war on Jews.

Rachelle Halpern lives in Boulder