Ruth Wisse, the great scholar of Yiddish literature, argues that anti-Semitism is best understood as a political ideology opposed to liberal democracy and a threat to society as a whole—not just Jews. In a wide-ranging conversation, she also discusses hatred for Israel on college campuses, its relationship to the decline of the university, and how to fight it. How did she arrive at her positions? In part from her study of Yiddish literature, whose lessons remain important to this day. Watch the video below (interview by Bill Kristol, about 100 minutes):

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].