Aharon Appelfeld, a prolific Israeli novelist who died in January, based most of his works on his own childhood experience of the Holocaust. In Adam & Thomas, published in English translation in 2015, he tells the story of two Jewish boys—one religious, one secular—who spent the war years hiding in a forest. Amy Newman Smith examines the book’s central conceit:

In writing the book, Appelfeld seems to have split himself and his life story between the two title characters: resourceful Adam, a boy of the land whose knowledge of the forest keeps them safe and fed, and bookish Thomas, a doubter in both faith and his own abilities. In the novel, alert Adam cannot survive without inward-looking Thomas. Appelfeld himself seems to have needed the memories and teachings of both his assimilated parents and his observant grandparents to carry him through the war and the difficult years after. The split is doubly fitting, because at its heart, Adam & Thomas explores a theme that has fascinated Appelfeld—Jewish survival as “a people who lived for more than 2,000 years among aliens, and by being so different, developed a kind of character that is very different from the character of the surroundings,” a character marked by both “restlessness, a permanent alertness, a kind of insecurity” and “deep belief . . . deep philosophy, mysticism.” . . .

Although the Holocaust is a near-constant presence in Appelfeld’s work, it would be false to characterize him simply as a “Holocaust writer.” As Alan Mintz observed, “Everything having to do with what the French call the concentrationary universe—the transports, the camps, the Einsatzgruppen, the fascination with the Nazis and the paraphernalia of evil, that is to say, the entire stock-in-trade of conventional Holocaust literature—all this is left out. . . . ”

Instead, [in this work and others] Appelfeld gives us archetypes for the Jews the Nazis tried to eradicate: the Ostjude and the assimilated Jew who longs above all for “an artistic experience,” the Jew who asks for acceptance in a voice that is “soft and conciliatory” and the one who demands admittance in a tone that is “clear and sharp.”

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.