Born in New York City in 1915, Lucy Dawidowicz (née Schildkret) grew up in the company of radical Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants and their children. From 1938 to 1939 she spent a year in the Polish city of Wilno (now Lithuanian Vilnius) studying under some of the foremost figures of secular Yiddish scholarship. After World War II, Dawidowicz became a leading historian of the Holocaust and of East European Jewry. She also migrated intellectually from socialism to New Deal liberalism and then to the political right, styling herself an “independent neoconservative.” Discussing her recent biography of Dawidowicz with John J. Miller, Nancy Sinkoff explains how her subject’s encounter with the breakdown of civil society and of social stability in prewar Eastern Europe—with dire consequences for the Jews—informed her political transformation. (Audio, 17 minutes.)

Commenting on the hearings of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday about anti-Semitism on college campuses, and the dismaying testimony of three university presidents, Jonah Goldberg writes:

If some retrograde poltroon called for lynching black people or, heck, if they simply used the wrong adjective to describe black people, the all-seeing panopticon would spot it and deploy whatever resources were required to deal with the problem. If the spark of intolerance flickered even for a moment and offended the transgendered, the Muslim, the neurodivergent, or whomever, the fire-suppression systems would rain down the retardant foams of justice and enlightenment. But calls for liquidating the Jews? Those reside outside the sensory spectrum of the system.

It’s ironic that the term colorblind is “problematic” for these institutions such that the monitoring systems will spot any hint of it, in or out of the classroom (or admissions!). But actual intolerance for Jews is lathered with a kind of stealth paint that renders the same systems Jew-blind.

I can understand the predicament. The receptors on the Islamophobia sensors have been set to 11 for so long, a constituency has built up around it. This constituency—which is multi-ethnic, non-denominational, and well entrenched among students, administrators, and faculty alike—sees Israel and the non-Israeli Jews who tolerate its existence as an affront to their worldview and Muslim “identity.” . . . Blaming the Jews for all manner of evils, including the shortcomings of the people who scapegoat Jews, is protected because, at minimum, it’s a “personal truth,” and for some just the plain truth. But taking offense at such things is evidence of a mulish inability to understand the “context.”

Shocking as all that is, Goldberg goes on to argue, the anti-Semitism is merely a “symptom” of the insidious ideology that has taken over much of the universities as well as an important segment of the hard left. And Jews make the easiest targets.