The University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles. Two prestigious institutions where the spirit of antisemitic hatred has been raging in the U.S. since Oct. 7, 2023. These students claim to follow French theory and Michel Foucault. Well, I am here to talk to them about the Foucault I knew: the one who had just returned from California and who, in 1975, was among the first, alongside Jean-Paul Sartre, to protest the United Nations General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism.

Los Angeles is the first stop on my 10-day campus tour of North America, which I announced on these pages last month. Next is the Claremont Colleges, where a group of woke activists are outraged that the author of “Israel Alone” is invited. It’s a double occasion: A Holocaust studies professor has invited me to guest-teach her seminar, and there’s a meeting where I urge students not to succumb to intimidation: “Israel, this multiethnic and multireligious democracy that has endured 75 years of war without falling into the abyss of the state of emergency, can and should be defended—not in spite of but because of your progressive beliefs.”

Election night at Stanford, where French philosophers Michel Serres and René Girard once taught. A giant screen behind me, muted. The students’ eyes I see tell me all I need to know as the map turns red. By midnight, it’s over: These young liberal Jews know they will now have, as an ally, a president with whom they share almost nothing.

A stop in Vancouver, then Toronto, where Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur who relentlessly accuses Israel of “genocide,” is scheduled to speak. I don’t want her to have the last word, but her supporters seem equally determined not to let me have a word at all. That is why my address takes place in a heavily secured basement auditorium, guarded by student leaders worried about an incident. I say that I know from experience what a genocidal project is—Bangladesh, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, Ukraine. An army that, just this morning, coordinated the transfer of 231 Gazan children with rare diseases to Emirati hospitals obviously has nothing to do with genocide.

The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor is among those where the anti-Zionism that disgusted Sartre and Foucault is most entrenched academically. Law classes, film, art history, economics, geography, literary disciplines—all are breeding grounds for rants against Israel and “genocide,” Israel and “apartheid,” Israel and “colonialism.” To members of the Board of Regents visibly overwhelmed by the scale of the upheaval: “Why not take these people at their word, invite the best experts in the world, and schedule true, comprehensive colonial, apartheid, or genocide studies courses?”

Philanthropist Tom Kaplan feels at home at Harvard, and he introduces me at the annual dinner hosted by the law school and Chabad. News has just broken of the pogrom in Amsterdam. As usual, the refrain of denialism is starting to drown out the cries of victims who were chased, beaten, thrown into the city’s canals, and accused of “starting it.” Even if they behaved like hooligans, the students ask, why should it be permissible to lynch them because they are Jewish? Well said, guys!

My theory of the day, developed at Columbia University in front of a hundred young people gathered at the campus’s Chabad House: The Jews of Europe and the U.S., until today, enjoyed, with the Enlightenment’s triumph, unconditional protection. What happens now when they are told, “You have the right to be protected, but only if you aren’t openly or excessively Zionist”? Or when, on the other side, Donald Trump warns in his September speech before the Israeli American Council that Jewish voters will be to blame, and the Jewish state can’t survive, if he loses? In both cases, the protection granted to the Jews is subject to conditions set by the would-be protector. Therein lies, in the new Jerusalem envisioned by the Founding Fathers, a terrifying moral regression.

The University of Pennsylvania is where this madness has done the most damage—up to the resignation of President Liz Magill, unable to answer the question posed during her congressional hearing: Is calling for the murder of Jewish students a violation of your institution’s rules? I listen to the assembly of professors who have come to share their distress as eminent scholars humiliated by “public ruffians” (Nietzsche) interrupting their lectures with chants of “Free Palestine” and “Globalize the intifada!” Didn’t my generation also have its share of aspiring Red Guards? Certainly. But Benny Lévy, their leader, stopped short when anti-Semitism reared its head.

How should we respond, a brilliant and distressed student of Ohio University asks me, to professors who tell us that Israel is a “colonial creation”? You need to interrupt them. Impeach them. You need to treat them the way the students of May 1968 treated the most reactionary teachers. Explain to these ignoramuses that half of the Jewish founders of Israel were indigenous and that, if the others did indeed often come from Europe, they weren’t conquerors but refugees—escapees whom Europe regarded as garbage.

A remark made at Princeton by my comrade Prof. Michael Poliakoff of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni: “You see this desk? It was Einstein’s desk. I don’t know if Einstein would still be deemed worthy of teaching in this holy of holies of the Ivy League. Not woke enough. And what a strange idea to have one foot at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem! Too Jewish, this Albert Einstein . . .”

George Washington University is the final stop on the tour. Michael Feuer, the dean, introduces me to his 100 or so students. Fatigue. Melancholy. But when I see the determination of these brave Jewish students standing tall, there’s hope.