In 2020, the vice-president of the University of Southern California’s student government resigned after being subjected to constant anti-Semitic abuse. The school’s president, Carol Folt, responded by launching a “Stronger Than Hate” campaign, which, Jonathan Marks writes, “addresses anti-Semitism only as one among a grab-bag of other hatreds, . . . and recognizes only one kind of anti-Semitism, the right-wing kind.”

But another anti-Semitism scandal has recently prompted Folt to issue a very different kind of statement:

[This] statement was occasioned by the social-media pronouncements of an engineering student, who said, among other things, “I want to kill every motherf**cking Zionist” and “yel3an el yahood” (curse the Jews). Perhaps the “Stronger Than Hate” campaign, looking solely to its right, didn’t reach this particular student who was serving as “diversity, equity, and inclusion senator” for the engineering school’s Graduate Student Association.

President Folt says that USC will now form a new Advisory Committee on Jewish Life to “review a number of proposed actions to tangibly support Jewish and Zionist students, faculty, and staff.” . . . USC’s belated move to include anti-Semitism among the affronts to campus values it aims specifically to address is laudable. One applauds, too, Holt’s recognition that “Zionist students, faculty, and staff” have confronted hostility—in one instance, in a statement released by an academic department—on campus.

Prime Minister Varadkar’s meretricious messaging concerning the freeing of a kidnapped child is only one example of the Irish government’s perverse reaction to Hamas’s assault on Israel. Varadkar has accused the IDF of pursuing “something approaching revenge” in Gaza, and compared the Israeli war effort to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. His parliament, meanwhile, came close to expelling the Israeli ambassador. Terry Glavin writes:

In a recent interview, . . . the retired Irish diplomat Niall Holohan put it this way: “We feel we have been victimized over the centuries. It’s part of our psyche—underneath it all we side with the underdog.” But there’s something else in the Irish psyche that’s impolite to mention in the comfy Dublin pubs and bistros. . . . Not a few of Ireland’s gallant and celebrated champions of the underdog, its heroes of Irish freedom, were vulgar anti-Semites and Nazi collaborators.

And in recent years, Irish Jews are commonly baited, harassed, and badgered every time there is some eruption in Israel involving Palestinian “resistance.”

The republican pamphleteer Arthur Griffith approved [of anti-Jewish agitation in Limerick in 1904], calling Jews “usurers and parasites.” Griffiths was one of the founders of Sinn Féin, in 1905, and he served as Sinn Féin’s president in 1911.

There was always a deep division in the Irish nationalist movement between Irish republicans who felt an affinity with the Jews owing to a shared history of dispossession and exile, and Catholic extremists who ranted and raved about Jews. Those Catholic shouters are still abroad, apparently unaware that for half a century, Catholic doctrine has established that anti-Semitism is a mortal sin.