Occurring frequently in Nazi propaganda, the term Judeo-Bolshevism suggested a complete identity between Communism and the alleged Jewish world conspiracy that was a staple of anti-Semitic fantasy. In A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, Paul Hanebrink provides a history of this idea, whose roots lie deep in the 19th century, and which led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Jews even before the founding of the Nazi party. The myth, however, grew out of two undeniable realities: the overrepresentation of Jews in the ranks of the Soviet Communist party and other revolutionary movements, and the horrors of Soviet Communism. In his review, Gary Saul Morson takes Hanebrink to task for glossing over these realities:

[S]o far as I know, none of the Jewish Communists was acting as a Jew. One reason this fact is so important is that the idea of Judeo-Bolshevism rested upon the lie propounded in the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion—the most widely circulated anti-Semitic tract in history—that world leaders are actually fronts for the hidden elders and knowingly act to ensure their domination of the world. Since Bolsheviks themselves proclaimed their aim was world revolution, all that was needed was to describe the Bolsheviks as working for the elders.

That is entirely false, and not only because there were no such elders. Bolshevik Jews—not just Leon Trotsky and the Comintern leader Grigory Zinoviev—did not consider themselves to be acting as Jews or for the Jews. The Hungarian Communist leader Mátyás Rákosi, one of the “little Stalins” ruling Eastern Europe after World War II, was, although Jewish, given to anti-Semitic remarks. . . . The Judeo-Bolshevik myth notwithstanding, it was precisely by repudiating their Jewishness that these Jews became Communists. . . .

Central to Hanebrink’s argument, [however], is his rejection of . . . any characterization of Soviet and Nazi horrors as comparable. . . .

And yet, notes Morson, some Jews themselves were among the first to acknowledge the similarities between the two evil regimes:

The Soviet Jewish novelist and journalist Vasily Grossman is usually considered the first person to describe the Holocaust, which he witnessed taking place in Nazi-occupied Soviet territory. With no illusions about Nazism, he, too, equated the two regimes in his famous novels Forever Flowing and Life and Fate. What particularly appalled him was the Soviet collectivization of agriculture, which took the lives of at least 10 million people, half of whom died in a deliberate campaign of forced starvation. . . . The first paragraph of The Harvest of Sorrow, Robert Conquest’s 400-page classic account of this “war in the countryside,” explains: “We may perhaps put this in perspective . . . by saying that in the actions here recorded, about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book.”

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.