On July 4, 1974, Natan (then Anatoly) Sharansky—who had spent the previous fifteen days in a Soviet prison—married Avital (then Natalia Stieglitz) in Moscow. The next day, Avital departed for Israel, but Natan was denied permission to leave the country and scant years later would be arrested on fictitious charges of espionage. It was not until 1986 that he was released, thanks to sustained pressure on the Soviet government from President Reagan, various members of Congress, and the American Jewish community. In a powerful interview with David Samuels, Sharansky describes his role in the refusenik movement and his wife’s activism during his imprisonment. He begins by explaining how he formed his sense of Jewish identity:

[As a child], I didn’t know anything about Jewish communities. I knew nothing about Judaism; I knew nothing about Jewish history, nothing about the Jewish religion. I knew very well that I was a Jew because that’s what was written on my parents’ ID cards, and there was a lot of anti-Semitism and discrimination—that’s all. . . .

I first realized that I had a history, a people, and a country in 1967, after the Six-Day War. For the Soviet Union, Israel’s victory in that war was a great humiliation. [As a result], Jews suddenly discovered that all the people around them, friends and enemies, Jews and non-Jews, connected this country with them. And so we wanted to understand what this connection meant. That’s when, in the underground, we started reading about ourselves and about our history in the books that were brought to us by American Jews. And we found out that we had such an exciting history, beginning with the Exodus from Egypt and continuing into the present.

There were Jews coming [to the Soviet Union at the time] from all over the world. They would say, “Oh, your father is from Odessa. My grandfather is from Odessa. We are family; we want to help you.” And we discovered there was the state of Israel, which also wanted to help us. So that’s how we discovered our identity, and that’s what gave us the strength to start fighting for our dignity and our freedom.

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.