Leaders of Germany’s Jewish community recently met with Chancellor Angela Merkel to express their fears that the waves of migrants streaming into Germany are bringing anti-Semitism with them. Elliott Abrams comments:

It’s a fact that the terrorist attacks against European Jews in recent years have been made by Muslims, all with North African backgrounds except for Amedy Coulibaly, who murdered four Jews at a kosher grocery in Paris in January; he was from a Malian Muslim family. So it’s not a great surprise that the arrival of very many more immigrants from countries where hatred of Jews is rife would give rise to fears in Jewish communities. It is difficult to know what should be done in the face of the risk of more and more anti-Semitic violence, which has already made Jewish life dangerous in many European cities. . . .

The general position of Jewish communities over the decades has been pro-immigration, welcoming refugees. Today some of those communities are wondering whether they are going to see the dangers facing Jewish life increase. If [it is true that] when refugees cannot be integrated well there is a great risk of exacerbating tensions with non-Muslim communities, the future will almost certainly be even more difficult for the Jews of Europe.

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.