Max Blumenthal, the son of the Clinton family confidant Sidney, began his career as a fairly run-of-the-mill—if not particularly discerning—left-wing journalist, with his first book being an assault on social conservatives. But sometime thereafter he turned his attentions to Israel, in 2013 producing a book so viciously anti-Semitic that even the leftist columnist Eric Alterman of the Nation couldn’t approve of it. Then, as Bruce Bawer recounts, he took another turn for the worse:

At the time of Columbia University’s founding in 1784, notes Meir Soloviechik, the leader of the local synagogue, Gershom Mendes Seixas, was made a member of its board of regents. A Jewish student even gave a commencement address, composed by Seixas, in Hebrew. In the 20th century, Columbia attracted numerous Jews with the relaxation of quotas, and was the first secular university to create a chair in Jewish history. Barnard College, Columbia’s all-women’s school, was itself founded by a Jewish woman, and today has a large number of Orthodox Jewish students.