During World War I, most of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Jewish subjects were eager to show their devotion to their fatherland and, despite the persistent claims of anti-Semites to the contrary, were quite willing to risk their lives at the frontlines. The historian Tim Grady, in his new book A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War, pushes this observation a few steps farther, making much of those Jews, and Jewish converts to Christianity, who distinguished themselves by their hyper-patriotism—such as Fritz Haber, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist who weaponized poison gas. Jews, argues Grady, even played a role in concocting the myth that a socialist “stab-in-the-back” precipitated Germany’s defeat, which was quickly transformed into a myth about a Jewish “stab-in-the-back.” Allan Arkush writes in his review:

Together with other Germans, [Grady claims], Jews left a number of “dangerous legacies” for their country. In contributing to the “specifics of Germany’s First World War,” they unwittingly played a part in establishing “the foundations for Hitler’s eventual path to power.” . . . Grady does not intend to say that the Jews reaped what they sowed, only that they reaped what some or even most of them together with others helped to sow—which is still a grave enough judgment, if not exactly an accusation.

One can’t say that it is utterly unwarranted, but it is overblown. As Grady demonstrates, German Jews were surely caught up in the wave of war enthusiasm, persisted for the most part in supporting the war effort to the end, and by and large acquiesced in Germany’s most egregious misdeeds. And a number of individual Jews bore a considerably greater degree of culpability. Still, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that some of the worst things that Grady repeatedly attributes to “Jews and other Germans” were really the work mostly of other Germans—and some Jews. Nor are the Jews in question always as representative or as numerous as his account, at first glance, makes them appear to be.

One has to wonder, [moreover], about Grady’s regular identification of converts from Judaism as Jews. . . . But can one on these grounds count any ex-Jew as a Jew, without further explanation, as Grady generally seems to do? I am not entirely sure that this is how he is counting Jews, but if it is, he doesn’t do it with perfect consistency.

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.