In Zionism’s Maritime Revolution, Kobi Cohen-Hattab describes the slow and painful process by which the yishuv developed commercial shipping and fishing, and even a rudimentary navy, in the three decades prior to the declaration of a Jewish state. Matti Friedman writes in his review:

If Jewish maritime efforts ended up succeeding, Cohen-Hattab tells us, it was thanks in part to two important competitions. The first rivalry was with the Arab sailors, workers, and unions who controlled the sea and the Jaffa port, and who became more hostile as Jewish immigration increased. When Arab workers wouldn’t repair Jewish ships, the Jews built their own shipyard in Haifa in 1933. When the Jaffa port became less accessible to Jews and was eventually closed to them altogether amid the anti-Jewish and anti-British riots of 1936, the Zionists opened their port in the city they’d just raised from the sand, Tel Aviv.

The first captain in charge of the port was another of Zionism’s great nautical pioneers: Volodia Itzkovitz, who’d been the only Jewish cadet at the Odessa naval academy and was by then going by the name Ze’ev Hayam, literally, “Wolf of the Sea.”

The second maritime competition of those years, only slightly less bitter, was between the dominant Labor Zionists, led by David Ben-Gurion, and their rivals, the Revisionists of Vladimir Jabotinsky. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Revisionists took the lead in maritime activities and accused the socialists of shamefully neglecting the sea. One of the most vocal Revisionists, Captain Jeremiah Helpern, linked this to ideology: the socialists, he thought, were discouraging fishing as too individualistic and too distant from the communal lifestyle of the kibbutz. The Revisionists set up a sea-training school at Civitavecchia, Italy, where cadets practiced on a boat called Theodor Herzl under the tutelage of an Italian captain until the operation was shut down by Mussolini in 1938.

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.