Born in Turin in 1915 to a prominent Jewish family, Emanuel Artom joined the anti-Mussolini partisans in 1943; a year later he was captured by the Nazis and tortured to death. He had been a promising scholar before the war, and had, among other things, authored a children’s book outlining Jewish history from biblical times to the present. While he is well known in Italy, he remains nearly unheard of elsewhere, perhaps because his remarkable diaries have remained untranslated. Siân Gibby writes:

Emanuele was the elder child of the mathematicians Emilio and Amalia Artom. Together with his brother, Ennio, he founded a Jewish culture group, which included Primo Levi and his sister Anna Maria. . . . He had learned Hebrew to read and discuss Talmud and Torah with his father. Levi’s biographer, Carole Angier, says that the Artoms were a devout family but that Emanuele didn’t develop his personal religious feeling until adulthood. . . .

[Artom possessed] a keen awareness and expressive ability that, had he survived, would surely have placed him squarely in Primo Levi’s company as one of the greatest Jewish chroniclers of the wartime experience. [His diaries] include his literary musings—on Dostoyevsky, 19th-century Italian poetry, and a French edition of A Thousand and One Nights. He records dreams, worries about his parents, meditates on Zionism, and references his engagement to a woman he shyly refers to as “M.” . . .

Eventually, along with all these ordinary experiences of being an extraordinary young man in wartime Italy, he begins to write about the darkening political scene and the Jews’ place in 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.