During the most recent Republican presidential debate, Ann Coulter sent an obscene tweet about Jews. P. J. O’Rourke takes her comment personally:

[F]irst, my contempt is moral. Anti-Semitism is evil. . . . For the sake of argument, let us stipulate that you are not . . . an anti-Semite. . . . Being so stipulated, you are damn rude. One does not say, “f—ing Jews.” One does not say “f—ing blacks” or “f—ing Latinos” or even “f—ing relentlessly self-promoting Presbyterian white women from New Canaan.” . . .

[But also], Ann, it really is personal. . . . When I was growing up, Toledo was a factory town, a magnet for the immigrants you deplore (both foreign and from Kentucky). . . . The Jewish kids were the only kids who considered it cool to be smart. And so did their parents.

I was raised in a house without smart. My mother may once have had a life of the mind. . . . But being widowed, raising kids, marrying a drunk second husband, and having cancer distracted her.

One night at the dinner table, when I was about thirteen, my stepfather called me a skinny little smart-ass show-off for asking what Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was about. Of course I was showing off. What it’s about is self-evident. I was smugly savoring the fact that I was the only person in the family who knew the title and author (if nothing else) of such a tome.

But I bet the conversation wouldn’t have gone that way at my friend Barry Cantor’s house. There would have been a discussion. Perhaps with a tactful elision of how it was all the Christians’ fault. Or at least somebody would have looked up Gibbon in the World Book Encyclopedia. The Cantors owned the complete set.

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.