While the history of American philo-Semitism is rich, and includes many of the country’s foremost thinkers, America has also had its share of prominent anti-Semites. In 1918, amid an outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in Europe that dwarfed anything we have seen recently, the great satirist H.L. Mencken wrote, “The case against the Jews is long and damning; it would justify ten thousand times as many pogroms as now go on in the world.” In 1930, Menken called Jews “very plausibly . . . the most unpleasant race ever heard of.”

While experts on Mencken have argued about the extent of his anti-Semitism, it was certainly hard to deny. But in 1934 he took a trip to Mandatory Palestine, and found himself enamored both with the scenery and with the local Jewish population. Oren Kessler writes:

He was impressed by the Zionist towns—particularly “brisk, sunshiny, spick-and-span Tel Aviv”—but less so by Jerusalem, “only a kind of mummy today.” More than anything he was dazzled by the communal farms, the kibbutzim. . . . “Jewish achievement in that land of primitive agriculture is really remarkable,” he gushed to a gaggle of reporters who swarmed his ship lounge upon his return. The settlement of Kibbutz Ein Harod, not far from the biblical Armageddon, “is one of the finest I have ever seen in my life.”

The British, he said, were “playing their usual politics” and using the Jews as “suckers” to solidify their own control on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean.

While President Trump has begun his term with a flurry of executive orders, their implementation is another matter. David Wurmser surveys the bureaucratic hurdles facing new presidents, and sets forth what he thinks should be the most important concerns for the White House regarding the Middle East:

The cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas may be necessary in order to retrieve whatever live hostages Israel is able to repatriate. Retrieving those hostages has been an Israeli war aim from day one.

But it is a vital American interest . . . to allow Israel to restart the war in Gaza and complete the destruction of Hamas, and also to allow Israel to enforce unilaterally UN Security Council Resolutions 1701 and 1559, which are embedded in the Lebanon cease-fire. If Hamas emerges with a story of victory in any form, not only will Israel face another October 7 soon, and not only will anti-Semitism explode exponentially globally, but cities and towns all over the West will suffer from a newly energized and encouraged global jihadist effort.

After the last hostage Israel can hope to still retrieve has been liberated, Israel will have to finish the war in a way that results in an unambiguous, incontrovertible, complete victory.