In an essay published on Monday in the far-left Jewish Currents, the senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders declared himself “a proud Jewish American” and spoke of his “pride and admiration for Israel,” while expressing his concerns about anti-Semitism on the right. He also mentioned the left-wing variety, but primarily to attack his political opponents for condemning it. But the core of his argument was that “the fight against anti-Semitism and for Jewish liberation” is “connected to the fight for the liberation of oppressed people around the world”—Palestinians included—while anti-Semitism is merely a way for “the right to divide people from one another and prevent us from fighting together for a shared future of equality, peace, prosperity, and environmental justice.”

To Izabella Tabarovsky, Sanders’ rhetoric brings to mind the universalism that the Soviet Union used to minimize anti-Semitism, and eventually to provide cover for its own:

Once we defeat the reactionary forces of the old regime, [the Bolsheviks] claimed, anti-Semitism, too, will go into the dustbin of history. Join our struggle against the universal forces of oppression and your own concerns will vanish into thin air. What did Jews have to do to join this glorious enterprise? They simply had to give up a few things that made them Jews: their “retrograde” and “oppressive” religious rites, their Hebrew and Yiddish, and their connection to the land of their ancestors—their Zionism. . . . Be like us, [they promised], and we will fight anti-Semitism for you.

History has shown how disastrous these kinds of promises turned out for the Jews the first time around. . . . Thirty years after those promises were first made, Soviet Jews . . . found that anti-Semitism was still part of their lives. But their Jewishness was now gone, leaving them with fewer resources than ever to stand up for themselves.

Given the parallels between Sanders’ promises and those of the Soviets, Tabarovsky puts to him the following questions:

Since you are staking a claim in the fight against anti-Semitism, I want to know more about what you have done in the past to do that. Where were you, for example, when Soviet Jews saw their best and brightest thrown in jails, sent to the gulag, harassed, and deprived of their livelihoods just because they wanted to be Jews in the full sense of the word? Did you march with the American and Israeli Jews who were fighting for them? Did you, perhaps, address their plight with your Soviet counterparts when you visited the Soviet Union in 1988? It would significantly strengthen your case if we were to learn that you were on the frontlines of that great struggle against that oppression and persecution of our people.

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.