Last weekend’s stabbing of five Orthodox Jews at a Hanukkah party in Monsey, New York, is deeply disturbing. It comes after a series of violent, antisemitic attacks in the New York area, ranging from a shooting at a Jersey City kosher supermarket to beatings on the streets of Brooklyn. Shockingly, in New York, the capital city of diaspora Jewry, some are now afraid to display visible signs of their religion. And so, the question becomes: What is to be done?

Unfortunately, in both the Jewish institutional and political world, centrists have produced a pernicious, mystifying response, one that will not only do nothing to fight antisemitism, but that may make things much worse. Only the Left has a real alternative.

Centrist pundits insist that hatred of Jews transcends politics. As Tablet writer Yair Rosenberg tweeted in the wake of the Monsey attack, “Anti-Semitism predates the modern left and right . . . No community or ideology is immune. Attempts to pin the hate on one part of the political spectrum are attempts to excuse one’s allies at the expense of Jewish lives.” At the Forward, opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon wrote the bizarrely titled “Why No One Can Talk About The Attacks Against Orthodox Jews,” even as discussion of the heinous assault proliferated in major newspapers and on social media. Because the perpetrators of recent attacks have not been white, Ungar-Sargon argued, they have proven difficult to assimilate into liberal narratives about Trump and white supremacists: “In the fight against anti-Semitism, you don’t get to easily blame your traditional enemies.” According to the Forward editor, we therefore need to break free of “those rigid ideologies to which so many are enslaved” and “fight this fight together.” Benjamin Wittes soon made the same argument for the Atlantic.