Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were unorthodox Marxist academics and German Jews.

In the early 1930s, like others of their sort who could, they fled Nazi Germany for the USA. And they reported that, in ordinary day-to-day life, they encountered more anti-semitism in the USA than they ever had in Germany.

In other words, the idea of anti-semitism as something far away and long ago, unfortunate but solidly dealt with by the gallant World War 2 allies, is false.

A recent report shows that anti-semitism is on the rise in Britain today.

The Community Security Trust says that there were many more anti-semitic attacks in 2004 — ranging from assault to desecration of property — than the 609 in 2003. There were only 369 in 1996, so the rate has doubled in nine years.

That anti-semitism is growing, alongside other forms of putrid prejudice, in the rottenness that is Blairite Britain, is not a surprise. Only this form of prejudice does not get the same firm rejection from the left as the others.

Everyone on the left says and thinks that they are against anti-semitism. Many of them, however, are very much for “anti-Zionism”, meaning not just hostility to Israeli government policies, but hostility to the very existence of Israel and to all Jews who identify, however critically, with Israel (“Zionists”).

In January the Muslim Council of Britain, with the approval of the Muslim Association of Britain (an offshoot of the Egypt-based Islamic-fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood), refused to take part in Holocaust commemorations on the grounds that “the Palestinian Holocaust” was not also being commemorated.

No mourning for the unique planned industrial extermination of the Jews of Europe unless it is “talked down” so as to be equated with the killings in Israel’s war of occupation in the West Bank and Gaza — which is brutal but not of the same order.

The Socialist Workers’ Party works closely with the MAB, and did not criticise it or differentiate from it.

Meanwhile, the Tory party has stirred up a row about two Labour election posters, now withdrawn.

The Tories’ first complaint, that a poster showing Tory leaders Michael Howard and Oliver Letwin as flying pigs (because of their promises to cut public spending painlessly) was “anti-semitic” because Howard and Letwin are Jewish and orthodox Jews consider pig meat unclean, was obviously contrived.

The second, about a poster showing Howard in what could be taken as a Shylock/Fagin pose, was probably equally cynical, but not quite so ridiculous.

Is it out of the question that Blair’s New Labour is trying to reclaim Muslim votes, not, of course, by offering anything on civil liberties or on decent jobs and services, but by trading on prejudices that exist far beyond Muslim communities?

Just like it is trying to win white racist votes by demonising asylum seekers?