The ancient Jewish community of Kurdistan traces its roots to the first Babylonian exile; its members, like their Assyrian Christian neighbors, spoke Aramaic, the language of the Talmud. And unlike Jews nearly everywhere, they tended to be illiterate even into the 20th century. While Kurdistan, however defined, stretches from Syria and Turkey to Iran, the majority of Kurdish Jews lived in Iraq, a country they left en masse, with the rest of Iraqi Jewry, in the 1950s. Alongside this history, there is a separate history of Israeli outreach to Iraqi Kurds, and a tendency among Israelis to see them as kindred spirits. Mardean Isaac, who was born in London to Assyrian parents from Iraq and Iran, explores these connections, in part by interviewing Kurdish Jews living in Israel:

“In the 1940s, [when Zionism became a major concern], Muslims started to hate us. Kurds, however, were neutral,” [one informant stated], a point that would recur throughout my conversations. The ultimate kindness the Kurds performed for the Jews was allowing them to escape the nightmare of Iraq and return to Israel, in contrast to the institutionalized anti-Semitism and violence directed against Baghdadi Jews in the years prior to their flight. This collective memory, of a rare act of empathy by a majority group toward Jews, has percolated up to the [Israeli] political class, where it is taken as evidence of the moral caliber of Kurds, as well as their capacity for sympathy based on minority suffering and self-determination. . . .

Another old man, wearing a striking gold cap, overheard us talking, and joined us. He came to Israel at the age of thirteen, he said, from a village on the border with Iran. His father made shoes. My translator told him I’m Assyrian. . . . He started singing in Assyrian: “I climbed the mountain in a caravan!” For the first time in my life, I spoke Assyrian to a Jew. . . . My Assyrian Aramaic and his Jewish Aramaic were largely mutually intelligible. . . .

Yona Mordechai, . . . who came to Israel from [Iraq] at age twelve in 1950, is a community leader who speaks in favor of Kurdish independence. He teaches spoken Aramaic to his community, including younger members born in Israel, and has written a Hebrew-Aramaic-English dictionary. . . .

“I remember everything,” [he said of his childhood]. “Our education was all oral. One of us learned from the other, by mouth. We learned in knuhsta [the Aramaic equivalent of the Hebrew word knesset, or assembly, here meaning synagogue]—the Torah, the Tanakh—but didn’t understand the language. We would [recite] the words in Hebrew, but didn’t understand their meaning, because we spoke in Aramaic.

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.