Farrakhan’s words had an immediate calming effect. I remember feeling a tug of gratitude for the shift in his tone and message, and noted how quickly a crowd can be stirred up or calmed down.

Amid the terrifying wave of anti-Semitism in the United States of late, I have thought of that scene and wondered what has stirred up such anger against Jews now.

How do we explain Jews being shot to death at Shabbat prayer in their synagogue by hate-filled white nationalists in Pittsburgh and Poway, California; and visibly Orthodox men and women violently attacked in Brooklyn and Monsey, New York, and shot down next door to a synagogue in Jersey City, New Jersey?

These headline-grabbing incidents are part of a broader pattern. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) began tracking anti-Semitic hate crimes four decades ago. This past year brought the third-highest spike on record. Jews make up less than 3 percent of the American population, but the majority of reported religiously based hate crimes target Jewish people or institutions. In a new study by the American Jewish Committee, 35 percent of American Jews said they had experienced anti-Semitism in the past five years, and one-third reported concealing outward indications of their being Jewish.

In nearly 50 years of reporting on the American Jewish community—19 years as an editor in Baltimore and the past 26 as the editor and publisher of The Jewish Week of New York—I’ve written about a wide range of incidents that ratcheted up anti-Semitic sentiment in America.

I wrote about the threat of a neo-Nazi march, four decades before Charlottesville, in the quiet Chicago suburb of Skokie, Illinois—chosen because its heavily Jewish population included a large number of Holocaust survivors. And I covered the aftermath of the Crown Heights riots in the summer of 1991, which targeted Jews in a Brooklyn neighborhood where many Lubavitch Hasidim lived. A 29-year-old rabbinical student was stabbed to death, and some black leaders, including Al Sharpton, stoked the fury of the crowds, calling for violence against Jews.

But in all those years, I never encountered such a level of palpable fear, anger, and vulnerability among American Jews as I do today, with attacks—verbal, physical, and, in two tragic cases, fatal—coming from the far left and the far right of our own society, and from attackers whose only common denominator is hatred of Jews. We had believed that such worries were relegated to our brothers and sisters in Europe, with its centuries of ugly history of Jew hatred and pogroms, culminating in the Holocaust. Now the attacks are the main topic of discussion among an American Jewish community shaken to its core.

Is it still safe to be a Jew in America?

The quintessential Jewish telegram is said to read: “Start worrying. Details to follow.”