While attending the University of Berlin in the late 19th century, the African-American thinker W.E.B. Du Bois studied under the tutelage of the anti-Semitic historian Heinrich von Treitschke, and after returning to the U.S. occasionally deployed anti-Semitic stereotypes in his writings. By the second decade of the 20th century, however, he had rejected such ideas, as Harold Brackman writes:

Du Bois’s attitude . . . changed when he worked with Joel E. Spingarn, Henry Moskowitz, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, Lillian Wald, and other Jews prominent in forming the NAACP. Zionism [also] provided a model for Du Bois’s own pan-African ideology: “The African movement means to us what the Zionist movement must mean to the Jews,” [he wrote].

He condemned anti-Semitism in Poland and Hungary, as well as in Germany, and commended Albert Einstein. In May 1933, he editorialized about the dangers of Nazism, and [attending] Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Olympics, . . . decided that Nuremberg was worse than Alabama.

In 1940, Du Bois warned against African-American anti-Semitism, inflamed by German and Japanese propaganda. Despite initial doubts about America entering World War II, Du Bois remained steadfast in denouncing Hitler’s war against the Jews and supporting Zionism. As the Nazi war machine rolled east in June 1941, Du Bois joined African-American intellectuals like Ralph Bunche in warning of the threat of “a new slavery and barbarism, terrorism and darkness” engulfing the world.

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.