Two recent books—An Unpromising Land by Gur Alroey and Babel in Zion by Liora Halperin—explore the experiences of rank-and-file Jewish immigrants to Ottoman and British Palestine as opposed to the passionate pioneers and ideologues who have dominated most historians’ attention. In his review, Allan Arkush deems the first book poorly argued but finds much of interest in the second, which documents how Hebrew succeeded in taking hold among the East European-born masses:

When Yiddish movies first hit the market, . . . the Zionist educator Yosef Luria tried to discourage theater managers from showing them. . . . On September 27, 1920, members of the Battalion of the Defenders of the Hebrew Language protested the screening of Mayne Yiddishe Mame at the Mograbi Theater in Tel Aviv. When they failed to prevent it, they infiltrated the theater, then booed and hurled foul-smelling objects at the screen when the talking began. [But] it was easier to keep Yiddish off the screens than off the streets, which were often crowded with peddlers hawking alte zakhn [used goods] and street food in their native tongue. . . .

More threatening to Hebrew than the languages of the countries from which the Jewish immigrants had come was the language of the colonial power governing Palestine: English. It was an uphill struggle to get the British administration to live up to its promise to treat Hebrew as one of the official languages of Palestine. . . .

Halperin does not suggest that people’s recourse for one reason or another to languages other than Hebrew was a defection from Zionism. It would be wrong, she says, to imagine a “rhetorical divide between pro-Hebrew Zionist Jews and apathetic, foreign-language-using non-Zionist 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.