Born to a relatively assimilated family in cosmopolitan Odessa, Vladimir Jabotinsky showed little interest in Jewish affairs when he set out to establish himself as a journalist and intellectual—writing a successful play for the Russian stage and producing influential pieces on literary criticism and current affairs. At some point around 1903, still in his twenties, Jabotinsky embraced Zionism, and went on to found the Revisionist movement, which is the forerunner of today’s Likud. A new work by Brian Horowitz explores the transitional period in this great Zionist leader’s life. Allan Arkush writes in his review:

The first verifiable trace of Zionism in Jabotinsky’s autobiography is an anti-anti-Zionist piece that he wrote in 1902, responding to a Jewish writer named Bickerman, who had ridiculed Zionism as utopian in a Russian-language journal. . . . Nevertheless, according to Horowitz, it was really the Kishinev pogrom, which broke out on April 19, [1903] and lasted three horrific days that was “the precipitating event” in Jabotinsky’s Zionist transformation. If he subsequently chose to obscure this fact, it was probably because he shied away from “acknowledging anti-Semitism as the stimulus for his Zionism.”

Horowitz has mined new material: . . . for example, Jabotinsky’s furious response to the prominent Russian liberal Pyotr Struve’s 1909 article, “Intelligentsia and the Face of the Nation,” which praised Jews who had integrated into Russian culture and who criticized those who did not. Jabotinsky, Horowitz tells us, did more than repudiate “Struve’s claims that the empire must have a Russian national character; he faulted the decent liberal Russians who ignored antisemitism,” and he did so in characteristically brutal bravura fashion.

Jabotinsky wasn’t always as single-mindedly concerned with Palestine as he later became, but he was never a pussycat. Horowitz’s portrait of him engaged in rough-and-tumble polemics on a long-gone intellectual battlefield is both entertaining and instructive.

In honor of Jabotinsky’s birthday tomorrow, Mosaic is offering a free copy of Hillel Halkin’s biography Jabotinsky, A Life to new subscribers. Take advantage of your offer here.

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.