Deborah E. Lipstadt’s new book, “Antisemitism: Here and Now,” was already at the publishers last October when Robert Bowers walked into a Pittsburgh synagogue and opened fire, killing 11 worshippers. But the 71-year-old Emory University historian hopes her analysis of a recent surge in anti-Semitism can motivate people to fight it....

The Anti-Defamation League found that the number of anti-Semitic incidents committed in the United States rose nearly 60 percent in 2017 over 2016, the largest single-year increase on record and the second highest number reported since ADL started tracking incident data in the 1970s.....

The new book is structured as an exchange of letters between two composite characters — a Jewish college student and a non-Jewish law professor — and Lipstadt, who answers their questions about the recent scourge and how to think of it.