On February 6, 1938, the Soviet political police arrested a Moscow Jew named Solomon Levenson; he was tried, convicted, and shot—a detail his family would not learn until 2009. Levenson was one of hundreds of thousands of victims of Stalin’s Great Terror, which disproportionately targeted Jews even though historians still debate the role played by anti-Semitism in these events. Having traveled to Moscow in search of more information, Dovid Margolin—Levenson’s great-grandson—discovered that the memory of Stalinist crimes is rapidly being repressed:

I hadn’t planned to enter the building [where the Levensons had lived], but the front doors opened with only a slight tug, so I let myself in. I knocked on what I thought was the correct apartment and explained that my grandmother had once lived here and if it was okay, I would love to take a look around. Strictly speaking, Moscow is the last place in the world where strangers allow you into their apartments (Muscovites do not give directions on the street, either, insisting briskly that they have not the slightest knowledge of whatever location you are seeking), but I got lucky. The kind Jewish woman who ended up being on the other side heard me repeat my familiar-sounding name, viewed my Semitic features through the peephole, and, after unlocking multiple chains and deadbolts, finally let me in.

“This is not your grandmother’s apartment, though,” she told me. “Three generations of my husband’s family have lived here.” . . .

The woman was friendly and helpful, pointing out the places where the Soviets had built walls to split up apartments and various landmarks my grandmother had mentioned to me. But each time I brought the conversation to the central thought on my mind, Stalin’s early-morning arrest of my great-grandfather from the same musty apartment building that I found myself in, she waved it off, preferring to focus on the more pressing issues at hand.

“What Stalin?” she dismissed. “Today we have one tsar, we have Putin, that’s all. Everyone has already forgotten all the rest of it.”

I mentioned to her that it seemed to me that Russia had never made a proper reckoning of its past. “Of course. That’s because we all, probably, were caught up in this,” she answered. “I hate the subject. I don’t even like to think about it.”

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.