Historians customarily count ten waves of Jewish immigration (aliyot) to the land of Israel, beginning with the first in the 1880s and ending with the tenth following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Amotz Asa-El claims that we may now be witnessing the eleventh, made up of West European Jews fleeing anti-Semitism, and describes this cohort’s defining features:

The unfolding French immigration is different from all [the previous aliyot]. Unlike the German immigration of the 1930s, it is happening despite, rather than because of, the country of origin’s government and elite. . . . Yet like the German immigration, and unlike the immigrations from the Middle East, Ethiopia, and post-World War II Europe, French Jews are arriving with some capital [and include] many professionals and entrepreneurs who are ready to join the middle class and in some cases, the upper class. . . .

[In addition], unlike the so-called Russian immigration and the German one before it, the French immigrants are mostly traditional. This will have political repercussions, as they can on the whole be expected to feel more at home on the Israeli Right. Then again, before it makes a political impact, this immigration will have to number at least 100,000—a figure which for now remains distant, even if it might be reached by the end of the decade.

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.