Henry Ford II took over the automotive company of his grandfather and namesake company in 1945, but he did not inherit his grandfather’s vicious anti-Semitism. While the elder Ford notoriously used his wealth and influence to disseminate anti-Jewish propaganda, and collaborated with Nazi Germany, the younger Ford explicitly rejected those attitudes and was an enthusiastic supporter of the Jewish state. Zack Rothbart writes:

Shortly after Israeli independence, Hank the Deuce, [as Ford II was informally known], oversaw a trade deal that would see a major shipment of automotive parts to help alleviate the young state’s transportation crisis. The next year, he personally presented Israel’s first president with a Ford Lincoln Cosmopolitan. . . . A $50,000 contribution from Ford in 1950 made him the top donor to the United Jewish Appeal’s first ever Christian Committee Campaign for Israel.

Around the time of the Six-Day War in 1967, Hank the Deuce nonchalantly gave his good friend, the Jewish businessman and philanthropist Max Fisher, a warm personal note with a $100,000 check inside for the Israel Emergency Fund.

Not long after, he fulfilled his promise to have a Ford assembly plant in Israel and maintain business dealings with the Jewish state, refusing to give in to boycott threats despite extensive and lucrative interests across the Arab world. The Arab boycott took effect and cars began rolling out of the plant in Nazareth, at which point he reportedly said, “Nobody’s gonna tell me what to do.”

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.