“The taxation system is astounding, rendering it nearly impossible to accumulate enough money to truly retire,” Saad wrote about the first reason for his decision. It’s true. The typical Canadian pays 70 percent more in income taxes than the typical American. The second reason is far more alarming. “The government’s open immigration policies have made it unsafe for my family to remain here (due to the exponential increase in Jew-hatred),” he wrote.

Saad said basically the same thing on Joe Rogan’s podcast in May. “I’m now leaving in large part because it became difficult for me, if not impossible, to be a high-profile Jewish professor who supports the right of Israel to exist.” Saad had already taken a leave of absence from Concordia University in Montreal and will continue working as a scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi.

Saad’s decision made it even more painfully obvious that Canada has an antisemitism problem. As of mid-July, B’nai Brith had documented 27 violent antisemitic incidents so far this year, compared with 10 during all of 2025. As The Free Press’s Rupa Subramanya reported in June, Jews account for about one percent of Canada’s population of 41.6 million, but were the targets of more hate crimes reported by police in 2024 than all other religious groups combined.

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This debate speaks directly to my life’s work. As the director of the Antisemitism Research Initiative at The George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, I document the point at which the normalization of antisemitism becomes operational—where the chant becomes a plot to action, and the plot becomes the basis for a federal complaint. I am also a historian from Mosul, in northern Iraq, who did not merely study the death of history but stood inside it, wrote about it under a death sentence, and spent the years after the war unearthing the deepest erasure my city ever suffered: the deletion of its Jews.

One of my credentials belongs to the world Ferguson is warning about. The other belongs to the world he believes is already lost. From where both meet, I can report that his alarm is justified, and his conclusion is wrong.

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The settlement by the prestigious liberal-arts college in Portland, Oregon, was announced Wednesday and resolved two federal Title VI complaints filed against Reed by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Title VI, part of the Civil Rights Act, prohibits discrimination by recipients of federal financial aid. The Brandeis Center and ADL said that the comprehensive reforms promised by Reed amount to a national model for responding to antisemitism on college campuses, which surged after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023.

On November 9, 2023, protesters on the Reed campus marched behind a banner that said “INTIFADA EVERYWHERE” and chanted an anti-Israel slogan. The protest was led by Reed’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and occurred on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the 1938 pogrom against Jews by the Nazi regime. The SJP chapter claimed that it did not schedule the protest to coincide with the anniversary, according to The Reed College Quest, Reed’s student newspaper. Four students were arrested after the protest spread to downtown Portland.

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So wrote Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson after publishing, along with artificial intelligence researcher John-Clark Levin, a provocative essay titled “The Death of History.” In it, they argue that the institutions and methods that for decades have helped preserve historical truth are now being overwhelmed by AI and social media. Ferguson’s conclusion? “I have to admit: I have failed utterly.” It is an extraordinary admission from one of our nation’s leading historians, and one that has raised many questions in the days since: Have historians failed? Is truth itself losing its authority? Or is this just a new battlefield in an old fight?

To explore those questions, we turned to a group of leading historians, writers, and public intellectuals. Below, Victor Davis Hanson, Deborah Lipstadt, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Ben Shapiro, and others weigh in on whether we really are witnessing the death of history—and what, if anything, should come next. —The Editors

Victor Davis Hanson: Historians Must Rise Up

Niall Ferguson is, of course, correct that AI and social media supercharge sensationalized pseudo-history offered by the half-educated. He is also correct that the spread of pernicious lies allows a fake past to alter a real present.

But these dangers hardly suggest history is dead, and that historians are now defeated. The message of history is timeless, the medium of the new technologies transitory. Just because modern pumps deliver 3,000 gallons of water per minute versus 19th-century hand pumps that strained to produce three gallons does not mean the essence of water itself was changed by radically new delivery systems.

The nature of war remains understandable because human nature is constant—despite the bewildering new technologies of death that each generation conjures to supposedly “reinvent” war. In other words, figures such as Darryl Cooper, an online historian and Holocaust revisionist, have no monopoly on such methods of dissemination, some of which could equally be used to correct his nonsense—if there were a will to do so.

One reason why these electronic provocateurs succeed is the silence of historians. Too many are reluctant to wade into the online miasma and use their expertise for the public good. Academics as a species are not adverse to publicity—in fact, they yearn for public recognition—but rarely at the expense of crossing the internet mob. Daryl Coopers proliferate because the university turned history into melodrama and campus historians, too often, into nodding human bots.

Similarly, the farce that was The New York Times’ 1619 Project lived on far longer than it should have, since only a few American historians took the time and the heat to dismantle the faddishness and incoherence of its progenitor, Nikole Hannah-Jones.

But as the university continues to lose credibility with the public, and as renegade podcasts proliferate, historians must accelerate their own public outreach through online courses, intellectually honest historical podcasts, and, yes, new technologies that can crowd out the chaff of counterfeit history.

To suggest this is impossible is not just to surrender history to electrified ignorance, but to surrender learning itself.

Victor Davis Hanson is the author of hundreds of articles, book reviews, and newspaper editorials on Greek, agrarian, and military history. He has written or edited 24 books, including The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won.

Deborah Lipstadt: Our New Age of Holocaust Denial

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The article is entitled “The Death of History.”

It describes an America caught in the grip of a double antisemitism which, on the right, no longer bothers to conceal its nostalgia for Nazism and, on the left, believes it has found, in the denunciation of “genocidal Zionism,” the ultimate weapon.

It shows that Holocaust denial, the keystone of the whole edifice, has emerged from the sewers where it had languished for decades to become a force in history.

And it emphasizes the effects of artificial intelligence, which—with its fabricated voices and content orchestrated from digital farms—has given this torrent of lies and hatred an unprecedented power of dissemination.

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But this time is different: In the past, the best, and indeed the only, response to antisemitism was the truth. Myths of Jewish malevolence were confronted and debunked by those who knew better. But today’s technology—in particular the algorithm and artificial intelligence—has changed that. Today, truth is being sacrificed on the altar of spectacle.

What that means, says Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson, is that historians like him have utterly lost the battle. In today’s Big Read, he joins AI researcher John-Clark Levin to examine how this technological frontier has enabled antisemitism to spread and fester—and, in their words, to offer “a remedy, if there is one.” —The Editors

As the algorithmic age takes Holocaust denial mainstream, historians must admit a bitter defeat. When the two of us met at Harvard 15 years ago, one was a professor teaching modern history, and the other was an undergraduate interested in the future of artificial intelligence. The elder of us had published a succession of books concerned with one of the most important and intractable questions of the 19th and 20th centuries: Why did the successful economic and social integration of the Jews after their emancipation or westward emigration produce such a vitriolic backlash?

I (Ferguson) had written a history of the Rothschild banking dynasty and a biography of Siegmund Warburg. I had studied the German hyperinflation of 1923 and its corrosive impact on the Weimar Republic. I had written books about the two world wars, one of which—The War of the World—offered a novel interpretation of the Holocaust as one (the worst) of a series of episodes of mass murder. I not only lectured on these issues at Harvard and other universities, but I also sought to reach the widest possible audience by engaging in journalism and broadcasting, producing more than 30 hours of documentary television for PBS, and Channel 4 or the BBC in Britain.

My animating goal was to ensure that citizens learned the lessons of history—including the vital lesson that antisemitic rhetoric can be translated into genocidal reality if it is adopted by a modern state. Yet today I see this hatred normalized, the Holocaust trivialized. Popular and influential conservatives such as Tucker Carlson and the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) crowd now tolerate traffickers in Nazi revisionism. And the poison being peddled to young conservatives by radicalizers such as Nick Fuentes is even worse than traditional Holocaust denial. They don’t so much deny the Holocaust as mock it and celebrate it.

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But what I saw in 2015 was this: In the months following Donald Trump’s entry into politics, nationally known Jewish conservatives (like Ben Shapiro) and others known for their presence online (like Bethany Mandel) found themselves under mind-bending assault from the right. Right-wing social media accounts sent millions of threatening messages—often suggesting they be sent to concentration camps and shoved into ovens, accompanied by the most nightmarish images imaginable.

Two years later, a group of self-described “white nationalists” encouraged by Trump’s presidential victory marched on Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting, “The Jews will not replace us.” The ultimate suggestion was that the emergence of Donald Trump had caused a very heavy and very deeply embedded rock on the right to shake itself free of the earth and let loose heretofore buried demonic forces.

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When hate turns quiet on campus, it can mean one of two things: First, that the hate has been eliminated from the university, or second, that it has morphed into more insidious forms. What we, as Jewish and Israeli faculty, staff, and students at Harvard University have witnessed over the past year, appears to be the latter.

While incidents of overt antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias have diminished throughout this academic year at Harvard, Jewish students still report feeling uncomfortable and isolated. These students, with whom we have been in direct contact, said they feel compelled to hide their full identities on campus in order to avoid ostracization and bias. Unsurprisingly, they report these choices and circumstances while insisting on anonymity for fear of retribution.

This alarming trend persists despite the emergence of now thriving and welcoming Jewish and Israeli safe spaces such as Harvard Hillel, Chabad, and Harvard Faculty for Israel. Some students and faculty have told us that outside of these trusted Jewish spaces, they are afraid to express their full identities; reveal details of, or even mention, connectivity to and work in Israel; include experiences on their CVs that indicate that they are Jewish; wear their kippah; or uncover their Star of David. A number of these students say it is a matter of self-protection and the only way to get through their educational experience at Harvard.

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A number of the victorious candidates in Tuesday’s primary had indistinguishably progressive platforms from those they defeated, with one key difference. This had less to do with policy than rhetoric: a willingness to speak about Israel and its supporters in the eliminationist language Mamdani showcased at a rally for his chosen candidates last week. Calling the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) “monsters,” the mayor accused the American pro-Israel lobbying organization not only of unpatriotic disloyalty to America but also of a murderous commitment to the slaughter of innocents so great that the only thing the organization found “more frightening than democracy being allowed to run its course is an end to genocide and Netanyahu’s wars.”

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On Monday morning, police responded to reports that a lone gunman had carried out an attack in Côte-des-Neiges, a prominent hub for Montreal’s Jewish community. The attack, near several kosher restaurants, Jewish schools, and community centers, led to the deaths of Montreal police officer Mohamed Lamine Benredouane, 34, and bystander Michel Mizrahi, 68. Mizrahi was a Jewish civilian and a member of the local Chabad chapter. Alleged shooter Seth Hatfield, 25, of Lethbridge, Alberta, was also killed, while another police officer was seriously injured.

The attack came just 11 days after Toronto police officer Marc Pinizzotto, 43, was killed while executing a high-risk search warrant connected to dozens of shootings in the greater Toronto area, including one at the U.S. Consulate last March and others on multiple synagogues and Jewish day schools. Reports indicate those shootings may have been part of a guns-for-hire plot, connected to Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia—a violent Islamist group backed by Iran.

Together, these incidents have heightened tensions amid what Canadian prime minister Mark Carney recently described as a “crisis of antisemitism in Canada.”

So why isn’t the media reporting on the antisemitic elements of Monday’s shooting?

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—Josh Kaplan

A congressional candidate’s comments about imprisoning and castrating “American Zionists.” A stabbing in London. More than two dozen documented attacks or threats on Jewish institutions around the world within the past two months.

Antisemitism isn’t just rising. It is being normalized all around us.

At such a difficult time, there is something even more discouraging: Just when we need one another most, the world is telling us that the Jewish community is coming apart at the seams. Since October 7, media headlines and social media feeds have told a narrative of a fracture: synagogues divided internally, American Jews disavowing Israel, debate over the causes of the rise in antisemitism.

But I want to tell a different story.

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This week, it was the right’s turn for the microphone. Political commentator and former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly is a member of a rising cohort of conservative voices—including Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, among others—whose opinions are increasingly interchangeable with those of the most radical anti-Zionist leftists. This week, Kelly sat down with Shawn Ryan—a podcaster who, like her, is a Trump fan turned critic—for an episode of his show.

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Last week, the British Museum postponed a lecture that Paul Collins, keeper of the museum’s Department of the Middle East, was scheduled to deliver on the histories of ancient Israel and Judea. The ostensible reason for the postponement was the discovery that some 25 of those who had signed up for the lecture, which was planned for Jewish Culture Month, intended to disrupt the event. That seems like an odd reason to postpone a presentation about historical artifacts at a museum dedicated to preserving and illuminating the past.

Prominent research institutions—museums no less than universities—shouldn’t be in the habit of postponing or canceling events simply because a few miscreants might break the rules. We don’t close our banks just because some people might rob them. The solution to rule violators is to punish and deter them, not encourage them with victory.

More fundamentally, the postponement gives those who threaten violence a curatorial role in the very institution whose history, methods, and purposes they reject. The British Museum declares its commitment to “all fields of human knowledge.” It describes its role as encouraging “critical scrutiny of all assumptions” and “open debate.” That commitment is consistent with the traditional role museums have played in open societies. The first museum, the famous Mouseion of Alexandria (built around 280 BCE), was a center of philosophical debate and research—not merely (or even primarily) a repository of historical objects. Stifling speech—whether about controversial or long-settled topics—would seem like an odd way of fulfilling the museum’s core commitments.

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At any other point in the last 200 years, the obvious answer to this question would have been America. The United States has long embodied the promise of the New World, allowing Jews to thrive and, in turn, enrich the country.

Ironically, but perhaps unsurprisingly, this safety and security has enabled a generation of American Jews the luxury of reconsidering the Bund.

The Bund, a secular socialist movement largely based in the Pale of Settlement, was the original ideological rival to Zionism. It emerged in 1897, at the same time as the first Zionist Congress, and its members argued that the way to make the places they lived in better for Jews was assimilation. It didn’t work. The Bundists were largely destroyed in the Holocaust, and the few who survived became reluctant Zionists anyway.

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The Nova Music Festival Exhibition, an immersive and heartbreaking spectacle, first opened in New York nearly two years ago and has since traveled to cities all across the world. On May 20 it opened in London, arriving under a cloud of darkness: a tsunami of antisemitism plaguing the city, kick-started by the very same monstrous acts the exhibition memorializes.

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It can feel, if you’re Jewish, like a death by a thousand cuts.

This week brought one of the more egregious examples of this trend, when Nicholas Kristof published an opinion column in The New York Times alleging a series of instances of sexual abuse by Israelis—in particular, prison guards and soldiers—against Palestinians. The problem was that the piece, which spread rapidly across the globe, was broadly based in misrepresentations, poor sourcing, and demonstrable falsehoods.

Every time an incident like this happens—and it happens more often than ever these days—it falls to the righteous people with integrity, Jews and non-Jews alike, to figure out the best way to respond. This is true when the attack comes from anonymous people on social media, and it is especially true when it comes from the most influential paper in the world, via an acclaimed, multi-Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist.

So often, across the West, the risks facing the Jewish people are those of violence and harassment. But this week, we fought a battle of words. What do we do when some of the most fundamental institutions in our society turn on us? When places we once supported and revere reveal that they find us unconscionable? Here at The Free Press, the answer is clear: We call it out, we fight it, and we make the case for reality on behalf of all those who still value free thought, honesty inquiry, and the pursuit of truth.

This week, my colleague Eli Lake debunked some of Kristof’s more outlandish claims. Our Middle East analyst, Haviv Rettig Gur, wrote about how Israel’s true prison violence issue is distorted by the propaganda machine seeking the Jewish state’s erasure. Jed Rubenfeld wrote on the legal risks for The New York Times as it finds itself facing a potential lawsuit from the Israeli government. And Matti Friedman and Dan Senor explored how the Times’ abdication of the pursuit of truth leads falsehoods like those published by Kristof to its pages in the first place.

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On the face of it, we should celebrate this news. But it also feels counterintuitive, particularly after a year in which we saw the killing of Jews across America, from Washington, D.C., to Boulder, Colorado. And the truth is, we’re not turning a corner on the rising tide of Jew-hatred. While individual incidents of antisemitism may be falling, the prejudice is getting more violent. Let me explain.

In 2024, the ADL recorded 9,354 incidents of anti-Jewish hate, its highest ever total. In 2025, this number dropped to 6,274. That can largely be explained by the cratering of antisemitic incidents on college campuses. 2024 was the zenith of the protest movement that swept across American universities. Since then, a combination of lawsuits, Trump administration threats, and congressional hearings seem to have drummed into the heads of college administrators a desire to take the problem of antisemitism seriously. That’s not to say this problem is gone; as the ADL notes in its report: “Incidents on college campuses remained almost three times higher in 2025 than in 2021.”

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On Wednesday, in my home city of London, two men were injured in a knife attack in broad daylight. The video footage is jarring; the fact that it happened at all is much less surprising. It’s the latest attack on British Jews among dozens of others in the past few weeks alone.

Growing up in Britain in the early 2000s, we never thought of our country as a place where this type of violence could happen. When incidents would happen on the continent, we would offer our pity to Europe, all the while thinking of our home as somewhere safer, more accepting—more similar to America than Europe.

But the events of the past few years have shattered that illusion. These are, of course, not novel observations. I’ve made them before, including in these pages. But the incidents have not slowed down—indeed, they’ve only grown worse. As one British rabbi, who was touring Auschwitz with a school group when he found out the news from London, put it yesterday: “There are Jewish communities that have been decimated and don’t exist anymore, and one day, in 80 years’ time, am I or my children going to take our grandchildren down the streets of Golders Green, Hendon, Edgware, Stamford Hill, any Jewish community in the UK, and they’re going to say, ‘Look at that marking on the wall. There was once a Jew here.’ ”

While the Jewish community’s heartbreak is profound, the reaction from those in British society at large has remained the same: total apathy. This indifference feels like it is becoming one of the defining features of life for Jews in the UK in 2026.

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Well, as the Yiddish proverb goes, “Man plans, God laughs.” Because while it’s true that I don’t have to worry about my children being shot at school, I do have to worry about them being attacked by terrorists every time we go to synagogue, or when I drop them off at Hebrew school. Which, okay, is not Annie Hall levels of funny. But you have to admit, that’s a heck of a Jewish joke.

Calm and reassuring are not words any Jew would use to describe life in Britain today. In the past two weeks, two synagogues near me in northwest London have been firebombed. On Monday, the Jewish neighborhood of Golders Green, just 10 minutes up the road, suffered a suspected arson attack. On Wednesday, two Jews were stabbed on Golders Green’s main high street, near the much beloved Kosher Kingdom supermarket that every Jew in London knows.

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Within hours of the stabbing, Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, called the attack “deeply concerning.” He said we must be “absolutely clear in our determination to deal with any of these offenses.” I have been a Labour Party supporter for decades and I have to say plainly: The prime minister’s platitudes are not enough. They have not been enough for some time.

This is the latest in a huge surge of antisemitic attacks in London in recent months. Only last week, a viral video circulated of an Orthodox Jewish man harassed in the street and called a baby killer. Weeks before, ambulances belonging to a Jewish charity were set on fire. Each time, the prime minister says “Antisemitism has no place in the UK,” or some similar platitude.

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