Beginning in 1971, the Soviet police repeatedly arrested Yosef Begun for his involvement in teaching Hebrew, his connections with other Jewish dissidents, and his application to emigrate to Israel. Thanks to American pressure, he was released from his final imprisonment at the beginning of 1988 and since then has lived in Israel. In an interview with David Samuels, he tells how he was first drawn to the underground Jewish revival in the USSR, a process that began when he met an older man who offered to teach him Hebrew:

[H]e asked me, would you like to learn Hebrew? Hebrew—I asked him—what is “Hebrew”? He said to me it is the language of the Bible. I asked him, “What is the Bible?” He told me. Then he explained that Hebrew is the language of the state of Israel. . . . He had been a student at the Volozhin yeshiva before the Russian Revolution. He lived in a small, inexpensive flat, but he was a very educated man. He told me that he had met [the Zionist leader Vladimir] Jabotinsky.

Nobody knew [about the Hebrew lessons]. I studied with him in a very secret way.

Sometime after Begun enrolled in his clandestine Hebrew tutorials, he befriended a Jewish coworker; the two would often ride home on the bus together:

[W]e would talk about many different things, but not about Jewish subjects. . . . Talking about Jewish subjects was [taboo], and even dangerous. I was afraid, and everyone was afraid, to talk about such subjects.

[H]is hobby was Esperanto. . . . And he was very often invited to join a group he belonged to of people who were interested in Esperanto. . . . And every time I would say, “You know, I am very busy.” But [once] he saw in my pocket a small Hebrew textbook that my teacher gave me. . . . Then [my friend] began to talk with me in Hebrew. And of course it happened that his Esperanto group was actually a Zionist group.

So of course I came with him to his group of Esperanto Zionists. And from this moment I became a Zionist, and I met people who lived by their hope to go to Israel.

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.