In the two decades before World War II, American Jews occasionally returned to their or their parents’ Polish cities and shtetls, and sometimes they recorded what they saw on film. From this footage, the Hungarian cinematographer Peter Forgács has created a video installation, Letters to Afar, now on display at the Museum of the City of New York. Spliced together, set to music, and “variously doubled, frozen, mirrored, slowed down, or staggered,” the result plays on nine different screens. J. Hoberman reviews the exhibit and reflects on its unusual medium:

Letters to Afar, which was co-commissioned by the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, is also, in some ways, a belated successor to the Jewish Museum’s influential 1976 exhibit Image before My Eyes, a show that drew on YIVO’s vast collection of prewar Polish photographs. The effect, however, is different. A photograph is a memento mori; photographic motion pictures are something else. Life is not frozen but animated. The technique immerses viewers in a rich and paradoxical experience—a teeming emptiness, a pensive hubbub. Bombarded by light, one is surrounded by a multitude of phantoms massing in shtetl marketplaces, gathering in rural cemeteries, parading on Warsaw boulevards, peering out of Lodz slums, playing in open fields, and otherwise observing what the film-artist Ken Jacobs [called] the “vivacious doings of persons long dead.”

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.