From Every Direction

By Abe Greenwald

Thursday, March 12, 2026

 

The following occurred within the space of an hour earlier today: I read Seth Mandel’s bracing post about repeated shootings on synagogues and other violent anti-Semitic attacks in Toronto. I saw breaking news about a car-ramming and active-shooter situation at a Michigan synagogue and learned, minutes later, that the suspect was killed before he harmed anyone. Immediately after that, I was sent an alert about an attack on a synagogue in Norway.

 

At a certain point, it gets hard to say anything about such a miserable time in the West other than that it’s miserable—and shows no sign of getting better. The Jew-hunts go on.

 

There are questions, of course: Was all or some of today’s violence the work of Iran? Are these self-radicalized jihadists? Did they, perhaps, emerge from the pro-intifada left? Or were they inspired by the dissident right?

 

The answers matter, but they’re starting to seem less important than the growing number of questions. In the years immediately after 9/11, you heard news of an attack on Jews and suspected Islamist terrorism. After a white nationalist killed 11 people at the Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh in 2018, you had to factor in a new type of killer. Then the post–October 7 wave of anti-Semitism delivered the far-left Jew-hunter who allegedly shot and killed two young Israeli Embassy staffers in D.C. And, in January, the alleged arsonist behind the January synagogue fire in Jackson, Mississippi, explained his motives to police in terms that echo the woke right.

 

Violent anti-Semitism is now coming from so many directions, and has been stoked in so many different ways, that Jews rightly feel surrounded by those who want to do them harm.     

 

On Sunday, the socialist mayor of New York City hosted an anti-Semitic terrorist-supporter at Gracie Mansion. Yesterday, Tucker Carlson blamed Israel for the likely American, and obviously accidental, bombing of a girls’ school in Iran. Today, Candace Owens tweeted that this makes sense since “Israel is required to mass murder children because they worship Baal.”

 

There are times when I think this can’t last. The West’s leading Jew-haters are becoming so outlandish, and they’re making ever more preposterous claims with each passing day. Aren’t they bound to discredit themselves, I wonder, even among the most gullible of their fans? After all, there was a time not so long ago when we all understood jihadist bloodlust to be, in purely colloquial terms, crazy. Surely, we can still recognize maniacal hatred.

 

And then, there are days like today, too many of them, when it seems as if that’s a foolish hope.

 

Anti-Semitism isn’t just the world’s oldest hatred. It’s also the most impervious to reason. Jew-hatred can take hold in the most technologically advanced and enlightened societies because it functions as a superstition, and modernity cannot eradicate the superstitious impulse. At best, it can redirect it toward more benign fixations. At worst, the massive scope and breakneck pace of modern advances can leave people grasping for false gods, soothing delusions, and scapegoats. What all the anti-Semites share, no matter their particular camp, is an affinity for the primitive. Times are miserable because the savages are on the march.