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.”

Yesterday I saw an unconfirmed report that the Biden administration has offered Israel a massive arms deal in exchange for a promise not to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. Even if the report is incorrect, there is plenty of other evidence that the White House has been trying to dissuade Jerusalem from mounting such an attack. The thinking behind this pressure is hard to fathom, as there is little Israel could do that would better serve American interests in the Middle East than putting some distance between the ayatollahs and nuclear weapons. Aaron MacLean explains why this is so, in the context of a broader discussion of strategic priorities in the Middle East and elsewhere:

If the Iran issue were satisfactorily adjusted in the direction of the American interest, the question of Israel’s security would become more manageable overnight. If a network of American partners enjoyed security against state predation, the proactive suppression of militarily less serious threats like Islamic State would be more easily organized—and indeed, such partners would be less vulnerable to the manipulation of powers external to the region.

[The Biden administration’s] commitment to escalation avoidance has had the odd effect of making the security situation in the region look a great deal as it would if America had actually withdrawn [from the Middle East].

Alternatively, we could project competence by effectively backing our Middle East partners in their competitions against their enemies, who are also our enemies, by ensuring a favorable overall balance of power in the region by means of our partnership network, and by preventing Iran from achieving nuclear status—even if it courts escalation with Iran in the shorter run.