In the midst of fighting the Nazis and the Japanese, Jews serving in the U.S. armed forces around the world organized Passover celebrations and meals. Marjorie Ingall explores an archival collection of programs, menus, and specially-produced haggadahs:

Some of these seder programs were informal, handwritten, mimeographed affairs riddled with spelling errors (“HorseRaddish”); some were beautifully printed on heavy, textured paper. Most were similar in content: a cover indicating the place and time—with the year of both the Gregorian (1944 or 1945) and Hebrew (5704 or 5705) calendar, and the time (always in military time, sometimes at the elegantly late 2200 hours). There were lists of the order of events (seder literally means “order”) and the dishes to be served, almost always concluding in “Afikomon.”

Many programs proudly told us who did what and who cooked what: at a seder in Accra in what later became Ghana, the Four Questions were recited in Hebrew by Pvt. Joseph L. Joldoff and in English by Pfc. Dorothy Steinberg—apparently the youngest soldiers present. A 1945 program from New Delhi, featuring “Bombay Matzos” and “Beef Strokanoff” credited the food to the glamorous-sounding “Madame Luba Ruperti.” . . .

The food at these seders was usually a mix of [traditional] East European Jewish and fancy French-ish; French meant cosmopolitan in those days. There was a lot of “compote.” A few menus showed the influence of the cultures the soldiers were stationed in: the seder at the Imperial Hotel in New Delhi featured “Beckti Farci a la Juife” (presumably that refers to bhekti, the Bengali word for barramundi; “a la Juife” probably refers to a preparation [resembling gefilte fish]).

Soldiers in Hawaii had fresh pineapple for dessert. Kashrut was a secondary concern: “For those observing the Dietary laws Tuna fish will be served in place of chicken,” a menu from Rome noted. One could see evidence of thrift: in New Delhi, you could have gefilte fish or matzah balls, but not both. And military comportment was expected; a menu from “liberated Italy” warned in small print: “Guests will kindly observe the regulation number of four cups of wine at the seder.”

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.