In Fox News Opinion, Teach Coalition CEO Sydney Altfield calls for a “whole-of-society response” to mounting antisemitism as students head back to school, following an NYPD report indicating a significant increase in antisemitic hate crimes since the start of the year. “Administrators should say plainly that antisemitism is unacceptable, whether it appears as a threat, a slur, a swastika, harassment over Jewish identity or intimidation tied to Israel or Zionism. Further, education must be more than a one-off assembly after an incident. Students should learn what antisemitism is, how it mutates across political movements, conspiracy theories and social media trends and why targeting Jews corrodes civic life for everyone.”

In The New York Times, Matthew Yglesias raises concerns about the “political judgments” of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) as the Vermont senator has sought to boost the insurgent left — causing damage to the Democratic Party along the way. “The very top electoral performers among Democrats — lawmakers who have a record of results in districts most liberals would lose, like Vicente Gonzalez of Texas, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington State, Tom Suozzi of New York and Don Davis of North Carolina — are independent thinkers who are critical of Democratic Party leaders and the establishment. The difference is that rather than positioning themselves even further left than a party that most Americans think is too left-wing, they pick issues and rhetoric that are heterodox and often more restrained.”

In The New York Times, John Galliano biographer Dana Thomas cautions against the decision by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to honor the designer, who was convicted of antisemitic abuse after praising Adolf  Hitler. “Not all great creators deserve a retrospective, and someone as incendiary as Mr. Galliano certainly shouldn’t be the subject of one during his lifetime, when he stands to profit from the honor personally. With ‘John Galliano: Horizons,’ the Met and Ms. Wintour are selling the idea that they can tell the rest of us how to think about a difficult and divisive figure. Maybe they didn’t notice that idea has gone badly out of fashion.”

The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait contends that, in order to wrest back their party from the far left, moderate Democrats will have to reevaluate some of their core stances, including support for AIPAC and Israel. “Fending off a leftist insurgency will be all but impossible unless Democrats reject AIPAC’s endorsements and stop supporting unconditional aid for an Israel that no longer works toward a two-state solution. Democrats also have to stop passively allowing multiple candidates to split the mainstream vote while the leftist vote consolidates behind a single candidate, as occurred in Michigan’s Seventh District and the Wisconsin governor’s race. But the greatest challenge for mainstream liberals is to find a way to engage in and win the substantive argument with the left.”

The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg argues that Abdul El-Sayed’s narrow Michigan Senate primary win — after polls predicted a blowout — reveals both the appeal and the vulnerability of the far left: an inability to grasp that opposition to their ideas, including on Israel, can be sincere rather than manufactured by elites and “dark money.” “He’s quick, magnetic, overflowing with infectious confidence. But he also has a blind spot, one endemic to his movement: an inability to grasp how and why people of good faith might see the world differently. Like [Sen. Bernie] Sanders before him, El-Sayed seems to assume that there’s a hidden reservoir of voters hungry for progressive populist policies, if only they can be reached and mobilized. … Either El-Sayed wins and shows anxious liberals like me new horizons of political possibility, or he loses in a year when Democrats are expected to dominate and offers a hard lesson on the necessity of pragmatism.”

Tablet’s Jacob Siegel argues that the U.S.-Israel alliance is coming apart, evidenced in President Donald Trump’s negotiations with the Iranian regime, and that the moment presents an opportunity for Israel to reduce its dependence on Washington and diversify its alliances. “A greater degree of separation between the United States and Israel is not only inevitable, it is desirable. Many supporters of Israel seem to be aware only of the significant challenges that this will create for the small country. They overlook the significant opportunities it presents for Israel’s growth. … The problem for Israel was not necessarily that Trump decided to end the war with the Iranian regime still in power. Rather, it was that he was bribing the Iranians by bartering with Israel’s vital security interests. … With the chapter closing on its role as an outsize client state, Israel needs to develop itself as an independent regional power that is a desirable partner by virtue of its ability to innovate technologies and project force.”

In The Spectator, Alex Castellanos warns of the dangers of the Democratic Party’s “Big Tent” policy. “The Big Tent is the party’s latest dance craze. They thought they’d found a clever dodge: a Democrat in a swing district could say he did not personally favor abolishing prisons or nationalizing large industries. His party simply contained many different opinions. But voters see something more frightening: the Big Tent is the Democratic party’s public invitation to socialism. It lays out a welcome mat for communism to enter the Democratic party’s home. Establishment Democrats know that such views have moved aggressively into their coalition, but they refuse to say they are disqualifying.”

In The New Yorker, Jay Caspian Kang writes that a rising bloc of young, college-educated and downwardly mobile Democrats — for whom the war in Gaza has become a defining political litmus test — is remaking the party in the image of far-left Democrats like Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed and Melat Kiros. “The future of the Democratic Party involves a synthesis of Subaru Socialism’s disillusionment with the American promise and the polarized, hard-line moralizing of Gen Z. Young voters aren’t the only angry ones, of course; older Democrats are still understandably furious at a party that lost to Donald Trump twice and seems to have done precious little to stand in his way during the past year and a half. But it’s younger voters who have begun to give a political form and shape to that reactionary anger. You could look at the platforms of their favorite politicians and label that form ’economic populism,’ but I think that’s an imperfect assessment — what matters isn’t so much the specific policies but rather the promise of upheaval.”

Former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren contends in his Substack, “Clarity,” that the Hamas disarmament deal is likely to go the way of the U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding and become muddled in the parties’ different interpretations of their obligations. “The question is: Will Hamas really give up its guns? A closer reading of the agreement reveals that Hamas will not initially turn over its weapons but only put them in NCAG storage. Further ambiguity surrounds the definition of the word ’weapons’ — whether it refers only to rockets and rocket-propelled grenades, as Hamas prefers, or to all small arms as well. Added to those uncertainties is the matter of reciprocity. … As in the case of Iran, an MOU can be open to widely divergent interpretations and radically altered circumstances. In the Gaza Strip, no less than in the Strait of Hormuz, an MOU may lead not to peace but to further upheaval.”

Toronto-based film critic Harry Khachatrian argues in The Wall Street Journal that Canada’s political leaders have laid the groundwork for rising violent antisemitism in the country. “[Toronto Mayor Olivia] Chow may not have endorsed chucking stones through synagogue windows, but she accepts the movement’s premise that Israel — the world’s only Jewish state — is an enterprise of genocidal evil. She then professes horror when people marinating in that rhetoric begin treating Jewish institutions as Israel’s domestic outposts. The political climate is so degraded that Albertan politician Naheed Nenshi recently apologized for the ’harm’ caused by posing with Israel’s ambassador. … A country in which Jews require police cruisers outside community centers, armed guards at synagogues and reinforced windows at schools cannot credibly insist that antisemitism has ’no place’ within it. Canada has already made room. The only question is whether its leaders can muster the integrity to name the movement that put it there.”

In The Washington Post, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Behnam Ben Taleblu suggests that years of muted Western responses to Iran have emboldened the regime to carry out increasingly brazen attacks. “For starters, Tehran has come to believe it can prevail in a battle of wills. Despite being militarily outclassed by a nuclear-armed global superpower, Washington’s unwillingness to engage in a protracted war that would further spook oil markets, negatively impact midterms and expend precious munitions like interceptors is by now obvious.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker posits that the war with Iran will not be resolved until the next presidential administration. “The initial temptation is to say that how it ends is less important than that it ends, that when you’re in the middle of an unfolding calamity, getting out is your only priority. But just as you can blunder into a war, you can blunder out of one. … But we know too that to double down is to fall prey to the timeworn seduction of the sunk-cost fallacy: We’ve invested so much in this effort that to abandon it now would be worse. In war this fallacy is especially, tragically persuasive.”