Memories have become so short in this era of fake news that we don’t always remember how long it has infected our world with confusion, animosity and bigotry . . . especially for Jews.

Lest we forget, that’s a backbone of much of our history.

The new feature documentary The Conspiracy offers a searing reminder based on the stories of three families with nothing in common other than being Jewish: the Warburgs from Germany, Leon Trotsky and the Dreyfuses of France.

All three were implicated in the innovative fake news that began spreading in the late 19th century that members of the “Hebrew sect” weren’t just followers of an outdated religion who murdered Jesus but were also provoking wars and manipulating financial markets, the mass media and the international monetary system to gain wealth and take over the world.

News of the plot spread like wildfire, fed by ambitious politicians; by men like Theodor Fritsch, the German publisher of The Handbook of the Jewish Question, which sold 330,000 copies by its 49th edition; the popular German novelist Hermann Goedsche; the authors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the purported minutes of a secret meeting of Jewish leaders about their plot to enslave non-Jews; Boris Brasol, the White Russian US State Department employee who promoted the theory that Jews were behind the Russian Revolution; Father Charles Coughlin, whose radio broadcasts were listened to by a quarter of the American population; and Henry Ford, who fostered antisemitism since the early 1920s by funding publications with messages like “The International Jews: The World’s Foremost Enemy.”

Their conspiratorial legacy leads directly to the “Jews will not replace us” outcries of the Charlottesville mobs; to Marjorie Taylor Greene’s comparison of COVID masks and vaccine mandates to the treatment of Jews by the Nazis; to the appearance of swastikas on city streets; to random beatings of Jews; to Kanye West’s insistence that “the Jewish community [will] take us and milk us ’til we die.”

The new documentary The Conspiracy, narrated by Mayim Bialik with voice-overs by Liev Schreiber and Jason Alexander among others, traces that bone-chilling path, using an extraordinary intertwining of old photographs, maps, letters and animation. The Conspiracy world premiered at the 2022 DOC NYC festival as a special event for the closing.