When Benjamin Netanyahu visited Moscow in January to discuss pressing security issues, he and Vladimir Putin attended a screening of the film Sobibor, which is now being show in theaters in Europe and Russia. Funded and promoted by the Russian Ministry of Culture, the movie is based on a group of prisoners’ successful escape from the titular death camp in 1943, led by a Jewish Red Army officer. Its production comes as part of a general effort by the Kremlin to seize on Sobibór as a symbol of Russia’s connection to the Holocaust—breaking with the old Soviet model of papering over the Shoah’s distinctiveness—as Izabella Tabarovsky writes:

Russia today appears to be fighting for the right to be the holder of the memory of this one [aspect] of the Holocaust. . . .

The story of Sobibór must appeal to Russian officialdom because it so neatly fits into its historical-memory policy and state ideology, which view the victory in World War II as the primary legitimizing event at home. Internationally, the Kremlin has been hard at work projecting an image of Russia as the liberator of Europe from Nazism. In this narrative, Red Army soldiers as liberators occupy pride of place. The Sobibór rebellion supports that narrative in full, right next to the liberation of Auschwitz (something Moscow is traditionally wont to highlight as well). . . .

Yet, if we set aside the heavy ideological burden that has been placed on it, the film undoubtedly has inherent value. The level of knowledge about the Holocaust in Russia remains abysmally low. . . . Despite some criticisms on the part of historians, the film is a sincere and earnest effort on the part of its director, Konstantin Habensky. Among its virtues, it restores a measure of historical justice to [its real-life Jewish hero], Alexander Pechersky. Pechersky’s heroic action never was recognized in his lifetime by the country he served with such dedication—quite the contrary. In 1948 he was arrested in the anti-Semitic [purges and] prevented from testifying at a number of high-profile international trials of Nazi criminals. . . .

Will the Kremlin do more to stimulate further study of the Holocaust or drop the subject once it’s outlived its value? . . . Few in Russia realize that 2.7 million of the 6 million killed were Soviet Jewish citizens murdered in Nazi-occupied Soviet territories, including Russia proper, mostly by bullets. That part of the Holocaust is far more complex for Moscow to tackle. It raises difficult questions about local collaboration by Soviet citizens (including ethnic Russians), a wartime evacuation policy that left Jews sitting ducks in the face of the approaching disaster, and the long postwar silence.

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.