A retired history professor, the child of refugees from pre-World War II Europe, a life-long secular Jew, a graduate of Yeshiva University, a critic of “white nationalism,” and a disciple of the New Left philosopher Herbert Marcuse, Paul Gottfried is not the man most would expect to be the leading theorist of the self-styled “alt-right.” But Gottfried claims to have “co-created” the term with his erstwhile disciple Richard Spencer, now famous for shouting “Hail Trump!” at a Washington, DC conference. (Spencer insists he invented the term independently, when composing a title for an article by Gottfried.) Jacob Siegel writes:

Paul Edward Gottfried was born in 1941 in the Bronx, seven years after his father, Andrew, immigrated to America. Andrew Gottfried, a successful furrier in Budapest, fled Hungary shortly after Austria’s Chancellor Dollfuss was assassinated by Nazi agents in the “July putsch.” He had sensed that Central Europe would be squeezed in a vise between the Nazis and the Soviets and decided to take his chances in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where the family moved shortly after Paul was born. . . .

[As a student at Yeshiva University in New York], Gottfried was put off by his “bright” but “clannish” outer-borough Orthodox Jewish classmates. New York was farther from Connecticut than he’d imagined. His fellow students, [in his words], “seemed to carry with them the social gracelessness of having grown up in a transported Eastern European ghetto.”

It used to be common among assimilated Americans Jews from Central European backgrounds to look down on what they saw as the poorer, more provincial Jews from the Russian empire. . . . When Gottfried goes after the mostly Eastern Europe-originating Jewish “neocons” and “New York intellectuals” whom he blames for kneecapping his career and refusing to give him his intellectual due, it’s not just the actual injury that wounds him, but the indignity of being laid low by his inferiors.

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.