As a whole, France was more eager than other European nations to hand over its Jews to the Nazis. Nonetheless, over 300,000 French Jews managed to survive World War II, mostly due to the heroic and often religiously-motivated actions of those willing to hide them. A new book retells the story of Chambon-sur-Lingon, a small mountain village whose residents went to extraordinary lengths to save Jews. Stefan Kanfer writes:

The [villagers] were led by an upright, zealous pastor, André Trocmé, whose moral stance was informed by the Old Testament, “with its many references to the rescue of the oppressed, the sharing of bread with the hungry, the taking in of the homeless into one’s house.” Accordingly, his followers mixed Jewish children among their own, supplying safe new surnames, furnishing Jewish adults with forged identity cards and guiding them to neutral Switzerland. Freedom was not free; the Gestapo raids netted some villagers, who were beaten and murdered. A local doctor who dared to express his disdain for the occupying army was shot. A young woman who had saved dozens of children was finally arrested and sent to Drancy. There she tried to comfort three orphaned Jews. All four were deported to Auschwitz. The little ones were sentenced to death. The young woman was not. But she refused to be separated from her charges and accompanied them to the gas chamber.

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.