On Saturday night, a man burst into a rabbi’s home in Monsey, NY, where a Hanukkah party was taking place, and began stabbing people with a machete. In North London, that same night, the walls of a synagogue and several shops were spray-painted with anti-Semitic slogans. Daniel Johnson comments on both incidents:

In recent weeks, Ankara has made a variety of gestures that suggest a desire to reestablish its once friendly relations with Jerusalem, which have deteriorated since Recep Tayyip Erdogan came to power in 2002. On Monday, unverified reports circulated in the Western press that Turkey is prepared to expel Hamas, which has had its main base of operations there since 2015. Erdogan’s reasons for seeking to make amends are not hard to divine: he faces a hostile White House, tensions with the European Union, a sputtering economy, and a rocky relationship with his sometimes-patron in Moscow. But, Lazar Berman writes, much has changed since 1949, when Turkey became the first Muslim-majority country to recognize the Jewish state: