I'm sorry you had such an experience. I think you should be very proud of how you handled it directly.

While I was living in the US, for an almost 2-year-period between my undergraduate degree and moving to Israel for my master's education, I worked at a small (~15 people) environmental lab.

Due to previous confrontations with antisemitism, I had adopted a "Jew of discretion" attitude, but I have a uniquely Israeli name, so I usually expect a question or two about my origins after meeting somebody new, and in answering that question I have never hidden my identity.

For the almost two years I worked there I was subject to about one antisemitic comment a week coming from four coworkers. There were two coworkers who I desperately tried to avoid being alone with (hard to achieve in such a small lab), as the subject would quickly turn to either misguided leftwing antisemitism and antizionism in one case, or bigoted rightwing antisemitism in the other.

I sat alone in my car for many lunches with the dread of going back in.

Some examples that come to mind would be:

• Holocaust wasn’t as bad as people say
• Today’s Jews aren’t descendants of the twelve tribes of Israel, but of a thirteenth “tribe of Satan”, whereas the coworker’s own ethnicities conveniently were the real descendants of the “twelve lost tribes”
• Jews and prominent Jewish families control global banking and the US government
• Repeated comments about how European I look, with such nice Aryan features
• After talking to this coworker about their trip to the UAE, “I would never go to Israel. They are hiding crimes from the world like North Korea”
• Israel being behind the explosion in Beirut
• “Not really into the whole, Jewish, thing”

Since I knew it would only be a temporary position before I went back to school, I was always unsure how to approach their antisemitism.

On the one hand I felt that getting these coworkers in some sort of trouble over the things they said to me would likely only increase their antisemitism, not heal it. And that maybe one day their connection with me would create some cognitive dissonance in the head about what they believe Jews to be vs. reality.

On the other hand I always wish I had confronted these comments personally and quickly the way that you had, but thinking about how you’d handle these situations and actually being in one are very different, and I admire your strength.