Old habits die hard, even in the New World. American Jews fear the Cossacks more than they fear the Czar and his ministers.

The Jews are in the historical habit of appealing to the power in the land, just as the Jews of medieval England appealed to their kings. Institutional patronage is the best protection against the peasants. This might not be the best strategy in the age of democracy.

We can see this reflex in the reaction to the midterm results. Jewish Americans, like most Americans, are relieved that the modern Cossacks, the Maga mob, failed to manifest in the corridors of the Capitol, this time via the ballot box. But the Jews are in a pincer. The right jaw hasn’t snapped shut, but the left jaw continues to close as steadily as a ratchet.

The midterms were a vote for the sane centre, which most Americans desperately hope still exists. But governments govern through institutions. The institutions are increasingly left-leaning, especially in the blue states, and they are being mobilised against the Jews.

The board of education in Washington State (top left corner, just under Vancouver, always votes Democratic) is edging closer to making Ethnic Studies mandatory for high schoolers. The board says it is “convinced that ethnic studies, implemented well, will benefit all studies”, and denies that ethnic studies is about “indoctrination”. The board’s own conduct belies these claims.

The board already requires its members and staff to take ethnic studies training with a non-profit called Washington Ethnic Studies Now (WAESN). WAESN’s director Tracy Castro-Gill believes in “Jewish complicity with Whiteness”, and that Israel is a “settler-colonial state” and must be “eliminated”.

“Ethnic Studies” is little more than an academic figleaf for Critical Race Theory, which is little more than a neo-Marxist theory replacing class grievance with racial grievance. This is the quintessence of indoctrination.

The Jews, as usual, are in its crosshairs. Their success, like that of other “model minorities” such as the Asians, proves that culture counts.Jewish and Asian success is an obstacle to imposing the CRT fantasy.

It’s also an obstacle to the march through the institutions of people like Castro-Gill who, thanks to the magic of identity politics, is a “they/them”, identifies as “Xincax”, and has transformed herself from middle-school teacher to WAESN’s co-founder and executive director, with the ear of the Washington State board of education.

So the Jews must be removed from Ethnic Studies and its ranking of the righteous. “Jewish people insisting on being included in a curriculum that has never been about them reeks of white privilege,” Castro-Gill says. If you’re not a victim, you’re a persecutor.

You’re a racial enemy guilty of “complicity”, just as the Jews used to be held complicit in the execution of Jesus.

We are convicted en masse by a historical illiterate with a grudge.

Talking of which, this institutional imprimatur is why Dave Chappelle’s routine about the power of “the Jews” on last week’s Saturday Night Live matters. Saturday Night Live is what registered Democrats do for laughs. Its jokes mark the barometer of political acceptability.

When it was good practice for Democrats to claim that America’s elections were faulty, Saturday Night Live pushed the idea that Ivanka Trump was complicit in her father’s alleged theft of the 2016 elections. Now, it seems to be good practice to give a platform to a comedian who’s previously compared Jews to space aliens.

Chappelle is an African American stand-up who knows exactly where the barometer of acceptability stands. His rhetorical contortions were, technically speaking, a comedic masterclass.

But his disavowal of antisemitism was played for laughs. The audience whooped and cheered whenever he joked about Jewish influence in Hollywood, said that Jews selectively punish anyone who draws attention to it, and implied that Jews blame African Americans for all their problems.

This is factually absurd. Polling shows that African Americans are more likely to blame Jews for their problems than any other group.

But, as Jewish history shows, appealing to reason is futile. And don’t expect the czar to help. Joe Biden is riding this tiger just as the czars rode theirs.

Dominic Green is a Wall Street Journal contributor, a Washington Examiner columnist, and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.