In today’s popular imagination, American Jews and guns, or violence, don’t go together. Fighting is seen as the business of Israeli Jews. Adam Kirsch reviews two novels and a collection of short stories that with varying success portray gun-wielding Jews. About the last, Jewish Noir, he writes:

These stories vary widely in quality and interest, but they have in common a certain aroma of wish-fulfillment. If the violence in Jewish Noir is frequently tongue-in-cheek, that is because violence is for most of these writers something purely imaginary and cinematic—more [Quentin] Tarantino than [Isaac] Babel. In the absence of actual violent anti-Semitism, of the kind that terrorized Jews for centuries, it is easy for American Jews to enjoy dreaming about beating up, stabbing, or shooting fantasy anti-Semites. There is a tendency in American Jewish literature to react against a legacy of Jewish passivity—in particular, against the image of Jews [supposedly] going “like sheep to the slaughter” in the Holocaust—by glamorizing violence. But the glamorizing of violence is a habit of comfortable civilians, not of actual soldiers—or actual victims.

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.