Kathryn, your piece on anti-Semitism is right on target. Of course,

that an increasingly Islamic Europe is also concurrently anti-Jew is

not surprising. What is surprising and more troubling is the

continued rise of anti-Jewish rhetoric on the American far left, where

the charge that the “neo” in “neo-con” means Jew is getting less

subtle by the day. I heartily recommend Philip Roth’s “The Plot

Against America” for a chilling portrait of our own country sliding

down an alternate history in an earlier decade of Jew hatred. Roth’s

theme, it seems to me, is that Jews everywhere are always less than a

heartbeat away from getting blamed for everything. (And please don’t

write to tell me that Roth was indicting the Bush administration — he

wasn’t, and he said so in an essay in the Times:

“Some readers are going to want to take this book as a roman clef to
the present moment in America. That would be a mistake.”)