During World War II, Romania of its own accorded murdered tens of thousands of Jews, more than any other country save the Third Reich itself, with which it was allied. The new Romanian film “I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians” tells the story of Mariana, who is producing a pageant about her country’s celebrated defeat of Soviet forces in the 1941 battle of Odessa. Dara Horn writes in her review:

The municipal government funding her pageant is hoping for a display of nationalist glory. . . . But Mariana has something different in mind. She wants to reenact another aspect of the Odessa victory: the murder of some 20,000 of Odessa’s Jews, which was in fact only two days out of a years-long, Romanian-led campaign of mass murder. She is convinced that if today’s Romanians knew what their countrymen did, the country could move beyond mindless patriotism to a mature and vibrant future. To no one’s surprise but hers, that isn’t in the cards. As the film makes clear, Holocaust minimization in post-Communist Romania is a bit like the Pledge of Allegiance, an entry-level credo that no one questions.

The film, writes Horn, is darkly funny and deeply disturbing, satirizing Mariana’s naïveté, the townspeople’s anti-Semitism, and the government officials’ attempts to sabotage her production, along with the absurdity of making a pageant about the Holocaust in the first place. While finding all of this effective, Horn also comments on “the dark void” that the film leaves unmentioned:

When the movie mentioned the city of Cernauti, I realized with a jolt that this was Tshernovits—the city known for the lauded Tshernovits Conference of 1908, where the great Yiddish writer Y.L. Peretz and many others declared Yiddish a national Jewish language, deserving of institutional support. . . . As I watched the film, names like these kept seeping in unacknowledged, because no one in the film had the knowledge to do so.

Here was Satu Mare—a hick town to Romanians, but known on my planet as the birthplace of the Satmar Ḥasidim, who in their enclaves today maintain Yiddish as a living language even as it has died out nearly everywhere else. There was Focsani—another nowhereseville from the Romanian viewpoint but cemented in my memory as the hometown of the paradigm-setting scholar Solomon Schechter. It was also the host city for the world’s first Zionist congress in 1881 (sixteen years before Herzl’s in Basel).

For Mariana, the truth is nothing more than murder, a dark pit of sadism and slaughter at the heart of her own country’s identity. For most people who see this film, that will be disturbing enough. But I also shuddered at the profound emptiness at its core. . . . As noble as Mariana genuinely is, she and the frightening crowd at her pageant have one thing in common. They are all only interested in dead Jews.

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.