Jews settled in the Alsace region of southeastern France in the 9th century CE, and the region became part of the cradle of Ashkenazi Jewry. Today, Jews in Alsatian cities live under constant threat of violence and harassment from Muslim neighbors, while both the political right and left flirt with anti-Semitism. Even though Alsace lost most of its Jewish population during the Holocaust, anti-Semites have been defacing Jewish graves. Adam Nossiter writes:

The defacing in December of gravestones in the [Jewish] cemetery in Westhoffen, a sleepy village in Alsace, was not isolated. . . . Last year there were 50 similar incidents targeting Jews in Alsace. . . . Cemeteries, schools, and village walls were daubed with swastikas or obscure references to the Third Reich. In Westhoffen’s cemetery, 107 tombstones were defaced; in the one in Quatzenheim, a village to the east, 96 were.

During World War II, the mass-defacement of Jewish graves by both Nazis and local collaborators and sympathizers was commonplace throughout Europe, and Alsace was no exception:

A large bald patch amid the headstones in the Wintzenheim graveyard is testimony to the day in 1945 when the retreating Germans forced inhabitants of the village to dig up the headstones to be used as an anti-tank barrier against the advancing Americans. The barrier was never used. But the residents of Wintzenheim, where Jews had lived since the 15th century, never put the headstones back. They used them instead in their postwar garden walls, or as paving stones.

[In some towns and villages], surviving Jews who returned after 1945 found that former neighbors didn’t want to give up the apartments and furniture they had seized with the help of the Germans.

But today’s local authorities found intolerable the image of old Jewish graves in contemporary France being defaced with the Nazi symbol. So they took an unusual step [of] organizing volunteers to patrol Alsace’s 67 threatened rural Jewish cemeteries, protecting some of these neglected vestiges of a time when Jews, excluded from the city, were forced to flourish in the Alsatian countryside.

The Biden administration’s apparent abandonment of Israel is matched by the White House’s feckless handling of rising anti-Semitism. Seth Mandel explains:

On Thursday, May 2, Biden made public remarks condemning the campus pro-Hamas protests. The very next day, major Jewish groups pulled out of a White House meeting on anti-Semitism with [the domestic policy adviser Neera] Tanden and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona. The reason? Jewish activists who have spent their careers opposing Israel, attacking the Jewish community, and now supporting the very anti-Semitic demonstrations [the meeting was called to address] were added to the meeting after the mainstream groups had already accepted.

When Joe Biden speaks about anti-Semitism, he usually says the right words. But in charge of his deeds, he has put political incompetents manifestly unqualified for this responsibility. He should fix that immediately, because his speeches won’t much matter without a way to implement the ideas animating them.