In Friday’s podcast, Jonathan Silver and Marc Novikoff discussed the direct correlation between the amount of money students pay in tuition and the intensity of anti-Israel protests. But one exception might be the City University of New York (CUNY), a network of schools with low tuition and a large working-class student body that has seen some especially ugly moments. This was evident in the spring of 2023, when the CUNY Law School commencement speaker called on her fellow graduates to join “the fight against capitalism, racism, imperialism, and Zionism around the world,” and condemned the American legal system as irredeemably evil. And it was evident earlier this month, when a mob gathered outside a kosher restaurant to harass Jewish fellow students and bang on the windows.

Emily Benedek describes these and other egregious scenes and what is more disturbing still: the pusillanimity of the university’s leaders and the government of New York City.

In [an] apparently PR-minded attempt to ward off lawsuits, Chancellor Felix Rodríguez made showy announcements of several campus efforts to fight hate, including a new Center for Inclusive Excellence and Belonging (CIEB), and a student-run social-media campaign called “Our CUNY: Hate Divides Us, Diversity Defines Us”—announcements that were conveniently made this summer, when school was out of session. This year, the New York City Council reportedly allocated $600,000—up $50,000 from last year—to CUNY for all the fancy portals, information gathering, training, and social messaging it has in mind to expand its “anti-hate initiatives”—a category that dilutes anti-Semitism in a pool of other “hatreds,” namely “Islamophobia.”

None of these flagrant expenditures is a substitute for what New York City should be doing, and isn’t. Ilya Bratman, a Hillel executive director and English professor, summed it up nicely to Benedek: “For whatever reasons, the police are not enforcing the law.”

But even that isn’t the most serious problem, Benedek continues, which is

that the basic job of educating children has been abandoned. “Academia has been lost,” [Bratman] said. “The essence of academia—open discourse, civil dialogue, and academic excellence—is gone. Academia used to be about growth, research, exploration, discovery, openness. Now it’s about boycotts. Today, the teachers believe their job is indoctrination.”

A faculty member in the physics department of another CUNY school who preferred to remain unnamed told me that students have stopped asking questions. “People don’t even know how to talk and think here. In some physics classes, we all notice that people don’t ask questions anymore. They don’t think about what they might want to know or say and ask questions. The intellectual level is very low.”

Yesterday, Israel’s Channel 12 reported that Israeli representatives have been involved in secret talks, brokered by the United Arab Emirates, with their Syrian counterparts about the potential establishment of diplomatic relations between their countries. Even more surprisingly, on Wednesday an Israeli reporter spoke with a senior official from Syria’s information ministry, Ali al-Rifai. The prospect of a member of the Syrian government, or even a private citizen, giving an on-the-record interview to an Israeli journalist was simply unthinkable under the old regime. What’s more, his message was that Damascus seeks peace with other countries in the region, Israel included.

These developments alone should make Israelis sanguine about Donald Trump’s overtures to Syria’s new rulers. Yet the interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa’s jihadist resumé, his connections with Turkey and Qatar, and brutal attacks on minorities by forces aligned with, or part of, his regime remain reasons for skepticism. While recognizing these concerns, Noah Rothman nonetheless makes the case for optimism:

The old Syrian regime was an incubator and exporter of terrorism, as well as an Iranian vassal state. The Assad regime trained, funded, and introduced terrorists into Iraq intent on killing American soldiers. It hosted Iranian terrorist proxies as well as the Russian military and its mercenary cutouts. It was contemptuous of U.S.-backed proscriptions on the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield, necessitating American military intervention—an unavoidable outcome, clearly, given Barack Obama’s desperate efforts to avoid it. It incubated Islamic State as a counterweight against the Western-oriented rebel groups vying to tear that regime down, going so far as to purchase its own oil from the nascent Islamist group.

The Assad regime was an enemy of the United States. The Sharaa regime could yet be a friend to America. . . . Insofar as geopolitics is a zero-sum game, taking Syria off the board for Russia and Iran and adding it to the collection of Western assets would be a triumph. At the very least, it’s worth a shot. Trump deserves credit for taking it.