Located not far from the capital city of Baku in the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, the town of Qirmizi has somewhere between two and three thousand residents—all of whom are Jews. Once there were more such towns in Transcaucasia, populated by the Mountain Jews, who have distinct traditions and their own language, known as Judeo-Tat or Juhuru, that is closely related to Persian but draws heavily on Hebrew. Yoav Keren describes his recent visit there:

Three bridges separate Qirmizi [from the nearby Gentile town] Quba. One of them, which is closed to vehicles, is known as “the love bridge.” . . . This is where single Jewish men and women come to meet a match. “Girls walk the bridge with their mothers,” [our tour guide] explains, “while the guys look on from the banks. If a guy sees a girl he likes, his parents will approach her parents and ask for her hand.” . . . Around the corner from the bridge is the city’s wedding venue—a pillared hall that houses weddings, bar mitzvahs, and circumcisions. There’s a huge photo of the Western Wall inside. . . .

Azerbaijan is a Shiite Muslim country, and Azeris also make up 25 percent of the population of nearby Iran. But the people [of Azerbaijan] love Israel, and not only because it buys their oil and sells them weapons (including the Iron Dome missile-defense systems, which are lined up along the Azeri border with Armenia). The local Jews are respected and treated with tolerance. In central Baku, Jews wearing kippot walk around undisturbed—not something you would see in Paris or other European cities nowadays.

During Soviet times, there were eleven synagogues in Qirmizi, but they weren’t in use—Communism was the only religion. . . . Today there are only two synagogues left in in the town, but they are both active.

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.