In Poland, local Gentiles’ collaboration with the Third Reich in the persecution of the Jews remains a highly sensitive subject as it disturbs a narrative—itself grounded in undeniable realities—of Poles’ terrible oppression by the Nazi and Soviet regimes during World War II. The desire to suppress the former story to promote the latter—particularly pronounced on the Polish political right, which has been in power for several years running—has once again led to controversy, as Ben Cohen writes:

[The] facts have been stretched and twisted by the government and its supporters to determine that Poland underwent the very same Holocaust that was inflicted upon the Jews. And since 2018, any historian who asserts “publicly” that “the Polish Nation or the Republic of Poland is responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich” can become the subject of a civil lawsuit.

Two prominent Polish historians were subject to just such a lawsuit, which resulted in a judge ruling on Tuesday that they apologize for “tarnishing the memory” of a Polish villager in their recent book—while exempting them from a fine. But Cohen notes “an even more sinister development.”

[O]n Wednesday of last week, the editor of the website Jewish.pl—an indispensable source of news and features about Jewish life in Poland—was called in for questioning by police in her hometown to answer for an article she wrote last year about the Holocaust. An anonymous complaint to the public prosecutor against the journalist . . . accused her of violating Article 133 of the Polish constitution in her piece. That article states: “Whoever publicly insults the Nation or the Republic of Poland shall be subject to the penalty of deprivation of liberty for up to three years.”

We may be coming to a point where further discussion and debate with the Polish authorities becomes fruitless, and that will pose an uncomfortable challenge to the custodians of Holocaust memory. Poland was the epicenter of the Holocaust, and it’s impossible to imagine the process of memorialization without it—the land where the Germans [built] mass extermination camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka, and where Jewish resistance fighters in 1943 staged a historic armed uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto.

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.