In discussions regarding Britain’s obligations to Ukrainian refugees, notes Jonathan Freedland, many commentators have invoked the Kindertransport, in which specially chartered trains brought thousands of Jews below the age of seventeen to England in the months prior to World War II. Freeland argues that appealing to the Kindertransport as a “noble tradition of looking after refugees,” as the conservative pundit Simon Heffer put it, is both self-serving and inaccurate:

It is quite true that between March 1938 and the outbreak of war in September 1939, some 9,000 Jews below the age of seventeen came to Britain on the specially chartered trains that would become known as the Kindertransport. But here’s the question asked by too few of those who like to invoke that episode as proof of British generosity: why exactly was it children who were admitted, given that it was Jews of all ages who faced the threat of lethal Nazi persecution in Europe?

The answer is not flattering. Special provision was made for those children because Britain refused to let in their parents—or indeed any adults. Consult The Final Solution, the magisterial history of the Holocaust by the late David Cesarani—and how we miss his calm, reasoned scholarship—and you soon learn that then-Home Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare waved aside demands that Britain extend a hand to Jews fleeing Nazism, telling the House of Commons that there was an “underlying current of suspicion and anxiety, rightly or wrongly, about alien immigration on any big scale. It is a fact that below the surface there is the making of a definite anti-Jewish movement.”

In other words, His Majesty’s government could not help Jews escape anti-Semitism in Germany because that might cause anti-Semitism in Britain. Jewish refugees would become the objects of hatred, not least from those who imagined refugees coming here and stealing their jobs. Best, then, to keep the Jews out.

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.