Recent articles in Jacobin magazine—the flagship publication of the American hard left—have responded to the upsurge of violent attacks on Jews with articles declaring that “to defeat anti-Semitism we must defeat capitalism” and “only the left can defeat anti-Semitism.” For its part, the likeminded Jewish Currents has simply blamed the victims. Ari Hoffman, noting socialism’s long and well-documented history of hostility toward Jews, takes stock of these arguments:

Jews are being shot and macheted, the editors [of] Jewish Currents collectively mused, because they are more effective at developing real estate and extracting government services. “Fifty-five percent of ḥasidic households in New York City live below the poverty line and have been extraordinarily organized in applying for social services en masse, creating stiff competition for public assistance,” they write. And “for historical reasons involving redlining and white flight, many landlords in the area are Ḥasidim; as a result, members of this community function as the faces, and sometimes the scapegoats, of the ongoing gentrification of these neighborhoods and their worsening housing crisis.”

[Setting aside] this ugly portrayal of Jews, . . . the simplicity of blaming everything on “material conditions,” gentrification, and the existing order is indeed tempting. The Jews become the natural victims of the system that they benefit from, and those who attack them are structurally absolved; their acts of violence get added to the bill of particulars in support of the need for revolution. “Context,” [a favorite term of these writers], does all the work, and what’s left over is picked up by “solidarity,” which can mean anything at all except that Jews deserve protection from those who seek to harm them.

In fact, the relationship [between socialism and anti-Semitism] goes the other way. As with the far right, the socialist left is relentlessly bad news for the Jews. Its most successful contemporary avatar, Jeremy Corbyn, presided over the transformation of one of the great political parties in the West into a [den] of anti-Semites. And its most successful tribune in the United States, while himself a proud Jew, seems unable to quit those like Linda Sarsour who speak for him and see behind him a movement more amenable to their hateful commitments.

In an interview on Sunday, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan stated that the Biden administration remains committed to nuclear negotiations with the Islamic Republic, even as it pursues its brutal crackdown on the protests that have swept the country. Robert Satloff argues not only that it is foolish to pursue the renewal of the 2015 nuclear deal, but also that the White House’s current approach is failing on its own terms:

[The] nuclear threat is much worse today than it was when President Biden took office. Oddly, Washington hasn’t really done much about it. On the diplomatic front, the administration has sweetened its offer to entice Iran into a new nuclear deal. While it quite rightly held firm on Iran’s demand to remove the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from an official list of “foreign terrorist organizations,” Washington has given ground on many other items.

On the nuclear side of the agreement, the United States has purportedly agreed to allow Iran to keep, in storage, thousands of advanced centrifuges it has made contrary to the terms of the original deal. . . . And on economic matters, the new deal purportedly gives Iran immediate access to a certain amount of blocked assets, before it even exports most of its massive stockpile of enriched uranium for safekeeping in a third country. . . . Even with these added incentives, Iran is still holding out on an agreement. Indeed, according to the most recent reports, Tehran has actually hardened its position.

Regardless of the exact reason why, the menacing reality is that Iran’s nuclear program is galloping ahead—and the United States is doing very little about it. . . . The result has been a stunning passivity in U.S. policy toward the Iran nuclear issue.