For a few days, Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government behaved as if it were an institution with a moral compass. But it didn’t take long for Dean Douglas Elmendorf to realize that taking a stand against woke intellectual fashion to oppose antisemitism isn’t a good career choice.

After all the deals he made to get the votes of recalcitrant conservative Republicans, the new Speaker of the House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy has a lot of promises to keep. But one vow the California Republican will have no problem fulfilling is one he made a year ago to boot Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., from the House Foreign Affairs Committee when the GOP regained control of the House.

In his initial phone conversation with new Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen, to congratulate him and the rest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government on taking office, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken conveyed two contradictory messages.

Like the Democrats who went into the streets in their millions the weekend Donald Trump was inaugurated president in January 2017, Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu’s foes clearly intend to act as a “resistance,” rather than a loyal opposition.

When the news spread in the fall that nine student groups at the University of California’s Berkeley School of Law amended their bylaws to ensure that no Zionist or pro-Israel speakers would ever speak to them, it sparked outrage throughout the Jewish world. The groups had, as Kenneth Marcus, chairman of the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law termed it, created “Jew-free zones” on the campus of one of the country’s most prestigious public universities.

According to the most recent authoritative study of American Jewry, conducted in 2020 by the Pew Research Institute, approximately 80% of respondents said they owned a menorah or, as it is properly known in Hebrew, a chanukiah. They weren’t asked, however, whether they lit it on the holiday.

As he has done with just about every other issue, former President Donald Trump is sucking the oxygen out of any discussion on the antisemitism of rap star/fashion mogul Kanye West and his far-right allies. Rather than express remorse for his unfathomable dinner meeting at Mar-a-Lago with West, Holocaust-denier Nick Fuentes and fellow alt-right hater Milo Yiannopoulos, he characteristically refused to apologize.

If pro-Israel Republicans think former President Donald Trump will apologize or make amends in any way for choosing to have a public dinner at his Mar-a-Lago resort home with two notorious antisemites, they haven’t been paying attention to how he has conducted his public career.

A curious thing occurred at the end of 2020. A program that had been promoted by the organized American-Jewish community was proven to be a tremendous success. But not everyone was happy about it.

The Zionist Organization of America took a lot of flak for choosing to honor former President Donald Trump at its annual gala Nov. 13. Trump isn’t just disliked by the majority of American Jews who remain loyal Democrats. They hate and blame him for antisemitism and anything else bad that they can think to pin on him. But to the pro-Israel community, Trump remains a hero, and the cheers for him at the ZOA dinner were loud and long.

As Benjamin Netanyahu begins forming the next Israeli government following his victory in the latest Knesset election, some on the left have begun a last-ditch effort to prevent him from forming a coalition with the parties that ran as his allies. Their argument is that anything must be done to keep the Religious Zionist Party and especially Itamar Ben-Gvir out of power.

The votes in Israel’s latest Knesset election confirmed the worst fears of the Biden administration. While Israel isn’t getting the same kind of obsessive attention it has received at times in the past, there’s no question that President Joe Biden and his foreign-policy team have strong opinions about who should be running the Jewish state that are echoed by most Democrats and the liberal mainstream media.