While it is often assumed that the old European hatred of Jews, rooted in charges of deicide and theological animus, has long since been shunted aside by racial, or Islamic, or anti-Zionist varieties, Alvin Rosenfeld observes that traditional Christian sentiments still have significant purchase among American anti-Semites. He begins his general survey by citing a graffito reading, “The Jews are guilty.”

Surrounded by crudely drawn swastikas, these words were prominently spray-painted on the wall of the Holocaust museum in St. Petersburg, Florida in May 2021. Similar graffiti have appeared time and again on synagogues, Jewish schools, and other Holocaust monuments and memorials. Their purpose is clear: intimidate Jews by defacing their most emblematic institutions with hostile markings. This one, “The Jews are guilty,” is an expression of contempt that originates centuries ago in Christian teachings about Jews as agents of evil; in one form or another, it is alive still today. Versions of it, always accusatory and damning, are part of the contemporary rhetoric of anti-Jewish vilification.

The question needs to be asked: of what precisely are the Jews guilty? Answers vary, but to anti-Semites of all kinds, Jews, and increasingly the Jewish state, are denounced as being eternally at fault for causing whatever is bad, wrong, or evil in the world.

Of course, to numerous medieval preachers, and no small number of modern ones, Jews were guilty above all of killing Jesus. Rosenfeld also notes the association of Jews with Satan or Satanism, a notion with origins in the New Testament’s reference to the “synagogue of Satan.”

The Goyim Defense League, a small but aggressive neo-Nazi hate-group . . . regularly invokes New Testament references to Satanic Jews on large banners it displays on the highways of major American cities. Others who similarly call on Satan as justification for harming Jews may know nothing of the scriptural provenance of such vilification or be regular churchgoers, and yet they have absorbed the widespread image of devilish Jews and sometimes act upon it to assault Jews.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”