In the past few weeks, Steven Goldstein, the executive director of the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, has been appearing on television news shows to accuse the Trump administration of willfully ignoring anti-Semitism and, most recently, of Holocaust denial. Goldstein’s title creates the impression that he is an authority on anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, but nothing in his background implies any such thing. Even the claim on the center’s website that Otto Frank (Anne’s father) participated in its founding is doubtful. Emma Green writes:

The Jewish world is full of organizations that advocate against anti-Semitism and discrimination, including groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee. Unlike the Anne Frank Center, these organizations have years of experience, dozens of offices, and sizeable grassroots support. They also have clear frameworks for defining and combating anti-Semitism. . . . The Anne Frank Center has reliably been willing to criticize the Trump administration in more aggressive and hyperbolic terms than any of these well-established groups, and media outlets have credulously rewarded it with extensive coverage.

The center . . . recently got a new board chair, a private-wealth manager named Peter Rapaport, and he brought on Goldstein, who has a background in political organizing. It shuttered its small museum and disbanded its board of advisers composed of Holocaust experts. All of the staffers who were working there when Goldstein arrived have left. . . .

Rapaport said [in an interview that] teaching about the Holocaust is “a valuable thing, but that’s not what we do. . . . We teach about the thing that we think will prevent future Holocausts. . . . It isn’t our focus to be pro-Jewish or to be just a Holocaust-education [organization]. We want to use the knowledge of the Holocaust and go further.” . . .

In other words, this is a tiny organization in the process of reinventing itself. The Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect and Understanding may not be a Holocaust organization, a Jewish organization, or one founded by Anne Frank’s father. It may not have leaders with a scholarly background, a mass membership, or institutional standing among Jewish groups and Holocaust museums. But because it talks a big game and wields the name of Anne Frank, the media have awarded it authority it never earned.

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.