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Well done. Sounds really interesting (as well as difficult). I'm not, sadly, greatly surprised about well-educated people not knowing about the blood libel, I probably know about it mostly because my dad is (non-religious) Jewish and, after I became a Christian, liked to tell me all the reasons why Christians are bad.

Where I work, we had a very good anti-anti-Semitism training session from a guy from Jewdas; Lev, a trainee rabbi. They specifically gear it towards left-oriented groups to draw out the sorts of anti-Semitism that often crops up in leftist circles. It included a potted history of anti-Semitism; I was probably more aware of most of it than most, but there was still stuff I didn't know about. Also analysis (from the sort of left perspective you'd expect from Jewdas) of the role anti-semitism plays in sustaining dominant power structures; Jews being used as part of an 'intermediary' class against whom popular anger can be directed when it suits the powerful. A consequence of which being that Jewish safety can never be taken for granted because the position of Jews in a particular country is fairly good at the moment. And then going over a whole load of images: cartoons, slogans on banners, etc., asking us to rate on a scale of 'totally fine' to 'outright vile anti-semitism', with discussion, which of course draws out a lot of the fine lines on Israel and Zionism.

Anyway, really useful. I think there's a lot of Labour Party branches, for example, as well as Palestine Solidarity groups, that could do with having such a session.

So I explained that Zionism is a specific political philosophy dating from the nineteenth century, and that there's a very wide range of views regarding how and whether that actually relates to the religious ideal of a return to "Zion".

See, what a lot of leftists get wrong is in many ways the flip-side of this; they think that, since Zionism is a political philosophy, that they can go all out on condemning and demonizing Zionism and Zionists, using 'Zionist' as a term of abuse, and generally attributing all manner of evil to "The Zionists", and they're not being anti-semitic because it's a political philosophy. Which, no, for all sorts of reasons.