The popular Israeli imagination contrasts “secular” Tel Aviv with “religious” Jerusalem. But it was not as ever thus, as Yitzḥak Bar Ze’ev, the rabbi of the former city’s Great Synagogue, writes:

Between the 1950s and the 1970s, Tel Aviv had around 700 active synagogues, many located on the most important streets in the city, like the Allenby, Rothschild, and Dizengoff synagogues. . . . In the early days of the city, dozens of famous rabbis, yeshiva heads, and religious judges were active in Tel Aviv. Five of Israel’s chief rabbis were first chief rabbis of the city. . . . During those years, dozens of religious educational institutions for girls and boys were founded, [along with] a few famous yeshivas, some still active today. [In addition], more than twenty rebbes (spiritual leaders of the ḥasidic movement) have lived in Tel Aviv at some point. During the 1950s, there were as many if not more rebbes in Tel Aviv than Jerusalem.

The religious neighborhoods of Tel Aviv are older than the city itself. Whoever wanders the streets of Neveh Tzedek, Shabazi, or the Yemenite Quarter today sees dozens of old synagogues, most of them more than 100 years old. These neighborhoods were built as suburbs of Jaffa more than twenty years before Tel Aviv was established, and were later attached to the new city.

And although the city has indeed secularized greatly since then, that process is far from total, although much religious life is concentrated in the southern part of the city, which is less affluent and more diverse than the north. Moreover, Bar Ze’ev sees signs of a religious revival, spurred by, among other things, an influx of French Jews:

A new “traditional” lifestyle has developed in Tel Aviv: young men and women from all across the country, who grew up in religious families and moved to the city to live alongside Diaspora immigrants who sought to preserve communal life, particularly on Shabbat and holidays. Some members do not strictly observe the Shabbat; after shul, some may go to the beach. But they still want to belong to a religious community. These are the people who are renewing the synagogues of Tel Aviv.

In October, a young Mauritanian national murdered an Orthodox Jewish man on his way to synagogue in Chicago. This alone should be sufficient sign of the rising dangers of anti-Semitism. Nathan Diament explains how the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (AAA) can, if passed, make American Jews safer:

We were off to a promising start when the AAA sailed through the House of Representatives in the spring by a generous vote of 320 to 91, and 30 senators from both sides of the aisle jumped to sponsor the Senate version. Then the bill ground to a halt.

Fearful of antagonizing their left-wing activist base and putting vulnerable senators on the record, especially right before the November election, Democrats delayed bringing the AAA to the Senate floor for a vote. Now, the election is over, but the political games continue.

You can’t combat anti-Semitism if you can’t—or won’t—define it. Modern anti-Semites hide their hate behind virulent anti-Zionism. . . . The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act targets this loophole by codifying that the Department of Education must use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism in its application of Title VI.