There is, as Greenwald observes, nothing new about the leftist-jihadist alliance, which was very much in evidence when Jeremy Corbyn led Britain’s Labor party and allowed it to become overrun with anti-Semites. During that time, Tracy-Ann Oberman, a British stage and television actress, used her celebrity to stand up to anti-Semitism and the studied efforts to deny its existence.

She now plays Shylock in The Merchant of Venice 1936, a Royal Shakespeare Company production set in London’s East End, once home to a large Jewish immigrant community, during a time of intensifying anti-Semitism. Abigail Green writes in her review:

At first, it kind of makes sense to stage Merchant in the East End of London during the 1930s against the background of rising British fascism. Brits find it too easy to forget that moment and how it felt for Jewish Eastenders like Oberman’s family to watch the rise of Hitler on the continent and see Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts marching in the streets of London where they lived. Turning the nobles who taunt Oberman’s Shylock into homegrown fascists makes it easy to hate them—and to understand her own loathing for these Jew haters.

In Green’s view, a female Shylock is a brilliant conception, and Oberman’s performance, as well as those of her castmates, is praiseworthy. But the play “falls apart” in its second half.

The Merchant of Venice isn’t a play about racist, genocidal anti-Semitism; it’s more complicated than that. Shakespeare’s play is rooted in Christianity—the old world, not the new—in which a simple conversion is enough to resolve the entire predicament. His plot doesn’t make sense in 1936 London. Why, to take a small example, is the duke wearing a large crucifix in a courtroom adorned with a British flag, when anti-Catholicism is such a central pillar of British national identity? The problem with all the heavy-handed Nazi echoes is that what seems a compelling conceit actually lets Christianity off the hook.

Shakespeare wrote a comedy in which the uncomfortable fate of the Jew is set against the glamour of Venetian Christian lives; that is the real darkness at the heart of the play. Oberman’s production tells a less complicated story; it is a thoroughly modern and straightforward tragedy told from the perspective of the victim—not just a vicious moneylender but a loving mother as well.

And this brings Green to her sharpest criticism, that the play “turns Shylock and the whole history of European anti-Semitism into an opportunity for a feel-good moment.”

Stephen Daisley writes about the slaying of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim:

Yaron and Sarah were murdered in a climate of lies and vilification and hatred. . . . The more institutions participate in this collective madness, the more madness there will be. The more elected officials and NGOs misrepresent the predictable consequences of asymmetric warfare in densely populated territories, where much of the infrastructure of everyday life has a dual civilian/terrorist purpose, the more the citizenries of North America and Europe will come to regard Israelis and Jews as a people who lust unquenchably after blood.

The most intolerant anti-Zionism is becoming a mainstream view, indulged by liberal societies, more concerned with not conflating irrational hatred of Israel with irrational hatred of Jews—as though the distinction between the two is all that well defined anymore.

For years now, and especially after the October 7 massacre, the call has gone up from the pro-Palestinian movement to put Palestine at the heart of Western politics. To pursue the struggle against Zionism in every country, on every platform, and in every setting. To wage worldwide resistance to Israel, not only in Wadi al-Far’a but in Washington, DC. “Globalize the intifada,” they chanted. This is what it looks like.