This year, not one but two plays are coming to London’s West End that feature sinister and wealthy Jewish businessmen. One, The Lehman Trilogy, about the titular banking family, contains—as one critic put it—“subtle but pervasive intimations of the classic anti-Semitic tropes,” with the main characters’ Jewishness playing an “unsavory role,” in the words of another. The second, Patriots, is the work of Peter Morgan, who is best known as the main screenwriter of the Netflix series The Crown. John Nathan writes:

The Jew in Patriots is the late oligarch Boris Berezovsky (played by Tom Hollander), who died somewhat mysteriously in the UK after he fell out of favor with the Kremlin. The other Jew is [Roman] Abramovich (Luke Thallon), whose Jewishness is not as conspicuous as Berezovsky’s. This may be because he is less pivotal.

According to Morgan’s play, Putin would never have become president of Russia without Berezovsky. If that’s true we may extrapolate that Ukraine may never have been invaded, thousands would not have died, and (least of all) I would not be writing this swaddled in layers of a knitwear next to an open fire as part of our Dickensian attempt to keep heating bills down.

In Patriots, religious festivals come and go but if memory serves only the play’s Jews acknowledge them. This is, one assumes, intended to remind audiences that the central protagonist is a Jew. As were the Lehman brothers, big time. To illustrate this, founder Henry (played by the always excellent Simon Russell Beale in the original production) says “Barukh Hashem” a lot.

True in Patriots there is a Jewish mentor of the oligarch who has no interest in Berezovsky’s political and money-making ambitions. But then the Jew Tubal has no interest in Shylock’s objectives and that hasn’t stopped the cutting a pound of flesh being seen as a typically Jewish thing to do. In the Almeida’s production [of The Merchant of Venice], Patrick Stewart’s Shylock placed a kippah on his head to sharpen his knife.

With the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program damaged, and its regional influence diminished, the U.S. must now prevent it from recovering, and, if possible, weaken it further. Benjamin Baird argues that it can do both through economic means—if Congress does its part:

Legislation that codifies President Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” policies into law, places sanctions on Iran’s energy sales, and designates the regime’s proxy armies as foreign terrorist organizations will go a long way toward containing Iran’s regime and encouraging its downfall. . . . Congress has already introduced much of the legislation needed to bring the ayatollah to his knees, and committee chairmen need only hold markup hearings to advance these bills and send them to the House and Senate floors.

They should start with the HR 2614—the Maximum Support Act. What the Iranian people truly need to overcome the regime is protection from the state security apparatus.

Next, Congress must get to work dismantling Iran’s proxy army in Iraq. By sanctioning and designating a list of 29 Iran-backed Iraqi militias through the Florida representative Greg Steube’s Iranian Terror Prevention Act, the U.S. can shut down . . . groups like the Badr Organization and Kataib Hizballah, which are part of the Iranian-sponsored armed groups responsible for killing hundreds of American service members.

Those same militias are almost certainly responsible for a series of drone attacks on oilfields in Iraq over the past few days