For those Jews who pride themselves on their rejection of the state of Israel, or in their commitment to condemning its supposed sins, the events of October 7 came as a brutal shock—despite the fact that Hamas has been telegraphing, and acting on, its intentions since its formation. Jewish anti-Zionists were also taken aback by the willingness of so many radical leftists to cheer on the massacre. Shany Mor takes a closer look at the responses of those he terms “Oedipal Jews.”

For all their furrowed brows and trendy glasses, this group never had a serious grasp on the situation in the Middle East. . . . What they did have were two things that were the foundation of their entire con. First, an unquenchable need to be liked by the cool kids of the radical left, and second a distended feeling of superiority toward the Jewish community they came from.

The disappointment they felt could have been an opportunity to face the difficult questions of how they got it all so wrong. But true to form, their agonizing [social-media] threads about the left “losing its values” or just not being able to “handle” the discussion focused only on their own feelings and not on the events that happened, the ideologies that motivated them, or how people who fashion themselves as pinnacles of sophistication could be so blindsided by reality in both southern Israel and Williamsburg.

Certainly absent from any of the indulgent online self-help was a reckoning with their own role in the intellectual ecosystem that produced the voices they came to be so shocked by. . . . A politics that begins from the no-doubt-harrowing experience of being lied to at summer camp doesn’t merit being taken seriously anymore—and probably never did.

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.