According to a recently released survey of Jewish college students, 70 percent of those queried said they had experience anti-Semitism, and 50 percent reported having hid their identity to protect themselves from harassment. Bari Weiss sees in these results evidence of rapidly growing hostility toward Jews in America:

My own inbox is a microcosm of this acceleration: I used to receive a note every other week of a story that deserved to be told. Now I sometimes get word of several in a single day. Some of those stories have made headlines. The machete attack at a rabbi’s home in upstate New York during Hanukkah. The attack outside a sushi restaurant in West Hollywood during the recent war between Hamas and Israel. [The rapper and record producer] P. Diddy hosting Louis Farrakhan on Revolt TV for an Independence Day address last July.

But you probably missed the story of Rose Ritch, a young Jewish woman who was hounded out of her role as a student vice-president at the University of Southern California. “Impeach her Zionist ass,” her fellow students proclaimed, echoing Communist-party apparatchiks of another time. Or the book, published by Hachette, called In Defense of Looting, in which the author argues that Jews and Koreans are “the face of capital.” . . . Or the swastikas drawn on schools in Georgia in the days just before this Yom Kippur.

In . . . an era in which the past is mined by offense-archaeologists for the most minor of “microaggressions,” the very real “macroaggressions” taking place right now against Jews go ignored. Assaults on ḥasidic Jews on the streets of Brooklyn, which have become a regular feature of life there, are overlooked or, sometimes, justified by the very activists who go to the mat over the “cultural appropriation” of a taco. It is why corporations issue passionate press releases and pledge tens of millions of dollars to other minorities when they are under siege, but almost never do the same for Jews.

Between the explosion of thousands of Hizballah pagers on September 17 and now, Iran’s geopolitical clout has shrunk dramatically: Hizballah, Iran’s most important striking force, has retreated to lick its wounds; Iranian influence in Syria has collapsed; Iran’s attempts to attack Israel via Gaza have proved self-defeating; its missile and drone arsenal have proved impotent; and its territorial defenses have proved useless in the face of Israeli airpower. Edward Luttwak considers what might happen next:

The myth of Iranian power was ironically propagated by the United States itself. Right at the start of his first term, in January 2009, Barack Obama was terrified that he would be maneuvered into fighting a war against Iran. . . . Obama started his tenure by apologizing for America’s erstwhile support for the shah. And beyond showing contrition for the past, the then-president also set a new rule, one that lasted all the way to October 2024: Iran may attack anyone, but none may attack Iran.

[Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s] variegated fighters, in light trucks and jeeps, could have been stopped by a few hundred well-trained soldiers. But neither Hizballah nor Iran’s own Revolutionary Guards could react. Hizballah no longer has any large units capable of crossing the border to fight rebels in Syria, as they had done so many times before. As for the Revolutionary Guards, they were commandeering civilian airliners to fly troops into Damascus airport to support Assad. But then Israel made clear that it would not allow Iran’s troops so close to its border, and Iran no longer had credible counter-threats.

Now Iran’s population is discovering that it has spent decades in poverty to pay for the massive build-up of the Revolutionary Guards and all their militias. And for what? They have elaborate bases and showy headquarters, but their expensive ballistic missiles can only be used against defenseless Arabs, not Israel with its Arrow interceptors. As for Hizballah, clearly it cannot even defend itself, let alone Iran’s remaining allies in the region. Perhaps, in short, the dictatorship will finally be challenged in the streets of Iran’s cities, at scale and in earnest.