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“Another thing the Gentiles said about us was that we used the blood of murdered Christian children at the Passover festival,” the Russian Jewish immigrant Mary Antin wrote in The Atlantic in 1911. “Of course that was a wicked lie. It made me sick to think of such a thing.” Antin grew up in the Pale of Settlement, an area spanning from modern-day Russia through Ukraine and Poland where Jews were permitted to reside from 1791 to 1915 but deprived of citizenship. Antin’s vivid essay describes her childhood there before coming to America, including the vibrancy of Jewish life at the time as well as its tribulations under the brutal Russian empire.

According to Jewish tradition, during the evening Passover meal, or seder, children are called upon to ask four ceremonial questions about the holiday, prompting explanations from their elders about the festival’s observance. As Antin noted, this practice meant that as a small child, she knew more about Passover than the adult anti-Semites who assailed her co-religionists in ignorance. “When I asked the Four Questions, about the unleavened bread and the bitter herbs and the other things, and the family, reading from their books, answered me, did I not know all about Passover, and what was on the table, and why?” she observed. “It was wicked of the Gentiles to tell lies about us. The youngest child in the house knew how Passover was kept.”

A Jewish youth might have known in the early 1900s that Jews did not prepare their Passover food with Christian blood, but for centuries, this point has been far from obvious to others. The allegation of Jewish ritual murder of non-Jewish children, often linked to Passover, is known as the “blood libel,” and it originated in medieval Europe in the 12th century. Initially condemned by church authorities, the charge gained legitimacy in 1475, after the murder of a toddler named Simon of Trent led to the torture and conviction of the city’s Jewish residents—some of whom were burnt at the stake—and the establishment of a Christian cult to venerate their alleged victim.

The Fordham University historian Magda Teter follows the spread of these deadly allegations, which exploded after the successful Trent prosecution, in her 2020 book, Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth. The work’s accompanying maps trace more than 100 such accusations, delineating them by criteria such as whether there were “legal proceedings” (73 yes, 30 no) or “Jews killed” (31 yes, 55 no, 13 unknown). In 1911, the same year that Antin was published in The Atlantic, a Jewish man named Menachem Mendel Beilis was accused of the murder and mutilation of a 13-year-old boy in Kyiv. Over more than two years, he was imprisoned and tried by the Russian government. Ultimately acquitted, he died in New York in 1934.

Dismissing all of this as ancient history would be comforting. But it’s not. In 2019, a far-right gunman stormed a synagogue in California on the last day of Passover, killing one congregant and injuring several others. The murderer left a manifesto: “You are not forgotten Simon of Trent,” he wrote, “the horror that you and countless children have endured at the hands of the Jews will never be forgiven.” In 2014, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer confronted the Hamas spokesman Osama Hamdan on air with archival footage of him declaring, “We all remember how the Jews used to slaughter Christians in order to mix their blood with their holy matzos,” the Passover flatbread. “This is not a figment of the imagination or something taken from a film; it is a fact acknowledged by their own books and historical evidence.” Hamdan said that his comments were misconstrued but did not recant them—“Will it hurt peace process?” a CNN show subsequently asked on Twitter—and 10 years later, he still holds his official role in Hamas. (That’s job security for you.) Today, you don’t have to look far to find updated Jewish-ritual-murder accusations on social media.

Actual Passover fare, of course, is far more prosaic. In 2010, The Atlantic published its own Passover menu. Disappointingly, none of the entrees included Christian blood. In 2011, Yoni Appelbaum unpacked the origins of Manischewitz, the sickly sweet wine popular on Passover, dubbing the beverage “the 11th plague.”

So much for the blood libel. But fear not. There’s one Passover conspiracy that might be true: that “Passover” may be a mistranslation, and not the real name of the holiday after all.

Fifty-six years ago this week, at the height of the Vietnam War, Columbia University students occupied half a dozen campus buildings and made two principal demands of the university: stop funding military research, and cancel plans to build a gym in a nearby Black neighborhood. After a week of futile negotiations, Columbia called in New York City police to clear the occupation.

The physical details of that crisis were much rougher than anything happening today. The students barricaded doors and ransacked President Grayson Kirk’s office. “Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up,” Mark Rudd, the student leader and future member of the terrorist Weather Underground, wrote in an open letter to Kirk, who resigned a few months later. The cops arrested more than 700 students and injured at least 100, while one of their own was permanently disabled by a student.

In other ways, the current crisis brings a strong sense of déjà vu: the chants, the teach-ins, the nonnegotiable demands, the self-conscious building of separate communities, the revolutionary costumes, the embrace of oppressed identities by elite students, the tactic of escalating to incite a reaction that mobilizes a critical mass of students. It’s as if campus-protest politics has been stuck in an era of prolonged stagnation since the late 1960s. Why can’t students imagine doing it some other way?

Perhaps because the structure of protest reflects the nature of universities. They make good targets because of their abiding vulnerability: They can’t deal with coercion, including nonviolent disobedience. Either they overreact, giving the protesters a new cause and more allies (this happened in 1968, and again last week at Columbia), or they yield, giving the protesters a victory and inviting the next round of disruption. This is why Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, no matter what she does, finds herself hammered from the right by Republican politicians and from the left by her own faculty and students, unable to move without losing more ground. Her detractors know that they have her trapped by their willingness to make coercive demands: Do what we say or else we’ll destroy you and your university. They aren’t interested in a debate.

[Michael Powell: The unreality of Columbia’s ‘liberated zone’]

A university isn’t a state—it can’t simply impose its rules with force. It’s a special kind of community whose legitimacy depends on mutual recognition in a spirit of reason, openness, and tolerance. At the heart of this spirit is free speech, which means more than just chanting, but free speech can’t thrive in an atmosphere of constant harassment. When one faction or another violates this spirit, the whole university is weakened as if stricken with an illness. The sociologist Daniel Bell, who tried and failed to mediate a peaceful end to the Columbia occupation, wrote afterward:

In a community one cannot regain authority simply by asserting it, or by using force to suppress dissidents. Authority in this case is like respect. One can only earn the authority—the loyalty of one’s students—by going in and arguing with them, by engaging in full debate and, when the merits of proposed change are recognized, taking the necessary steps quickly enough to be convincing.

The crackdown at Columbia in 1968 was so harsh that a backlash on the part of faculty and the public obliged the university to accept the students’ demands: a loss, then a win. The war in Vietnam ground on for years before it ended and history vindicated the protesters: another loss, another win. But the really important consequence of the 1968 revolt took decades to emerge. We’re seeing it now on Columbia’s quad and the campuses of elite universities around the country. The most lasting victory of the ’68ers was an intellectual one. The idea underlying their protests wasn’t just to stop the war or end injustice in America. Its aim was the university itself—the liberal university of the postwar years, which no longer exists.

That university claimed a special role in democratic society. A few weeks after the 1968 takeover, the Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter gave the commencement address to a wounded institution. “A university is a community, but it is a community of a special kind,” Hofstadter said—“a community devoted to inquiry. It exists so that its members may inquire into truths of all sorts. Its presence marks our commitment to the idea that somewhere in society there must be an organization in which anything can be studied or questioned—not merely safe and established things but difficult and inflammatory things, the most troublesome questions of politics and war, of sex and morals, of property and national loyalty.” This mission rendered the community fragile, dependent on the self-restraint of its members.

The lofty claims of the liberal university exposed it to charges of all kinds of hypocrisy, not least its entanglement with the American war machine. The Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who became a guru to the New Left, coined the phrase repressive tolerance for the veil that hid liberal society’s mechanisms of violence and injustice. In this scheme, no institution, including the university, remained neutral, and radical students embraced their status as an oppressed group.

[Charles Sykes: The new rules of political journalism]

At Stanford (where my father was an administrator in the late ’60s, and where students took over a campus building the week after the Columbia revolt), white students compared themselves to Black American slaves. To them, the university was not a community dedicated to independent inquiry but a nexus of competing interest groups where power, not ideas, ruled. They rejected the very possibility of a disinterested pursuit of truth. In an imaginary dialogue between a student and a professor, a member of the Stanford chapter of Students for a Democratic Society wrote: “Rights and privacy and these kinds of freedom are irrelevant—you old guys got to get it through your heads that to fight the whole corrupt System POWER is the only answer.”

A long, intricate, but essentially unbroken line connects that rejection of the liberal university in 1968 to the orthodoxy on elite campuses today. The students of the ’68 revolt became professors—the German activist Rudi Dutschke called this strategy the “long march through the institutions”—bringing their revisionist thinking back to the universities they’d tried to upend. One leader of the Columbia takeover returned to chair the School of the Arts film program. “The ideas of one generation become the instincts of the next,” D. H. Lawrence wrote. Ideas born in the ’60s, subsequently refined and complicated by critical theory, postcolonial studies, and identity politics, are now so pervasive and unquestioned that they’ve become the instincts of students who are occupying their campuses today. Group identity assigns your place in a hierarchy of oppression. Between oppressor and oppressed, no room exists for complexity or ambiguity. Universal values such as free speech and individual equality only privilege the powerful. Words are violence. There’s nothing to debate.

The post-liberal university is defined by a combination of moneymaking and activism. Perhaps the biggest difference between 1968 and 2024 is that the ideas of a radical vanguard are now the instincts of entire universities—administrators, faculty, students. They’re enshrined in reading lists and codes of conduct and ubiquitous clichés. Last week an editorial in the Daily Spectator, the Columbia student newspaper, highlighted the irony of a university frantically trying to extricate itself from the implications of its own dogmas: “Why is the same university that capitalizes on the legacy of Edward Said and enshrines The Wretched of the Earth into its Core Curriculum so scared to speak about decolonization in practice?”

A Columbia student, writing to one of his professors in a letter that the student shared with me, explained the dynamic so sharply that it’s worth quoting him at length:

I think [the protests] do speak to a certain failing on Columbia’s part, but it’s a failing that’s much more widespread and further upstream. That is, I think universities have essentially stopped minding the store, stopped engaging in any kind of debate or even conversation with the ideologies which have slowly crept in to every bit of university life, without enough people of good conscience brave enough to question all the orthodoxies. So if you come to Columbia believing in “decolonization” or what have you, it’s genuinely not clear to me that you will ever have to reflect on this belief. And after all this, one day the university wakes up to these protests, panics under scrutiny, and calls the cops on students who are practicing exactly what they’ve been taught to do from the second they walked through those gates as freshmen.

The muscle of independent thinking and open debate, the ability to earn authority that Daniel Bell described as essential to a university’s survival, has long since atrophied. So when, after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Jewish students found themselves subjected to the kind of hostile atmosphere that, if directed at any other minority group, would have brought down high-level rebukes, online cancellations, and maybe administrative punishments, they fell back on the obvious defense available under the new orthodoxy. They said that they felt “unsafe.” They accused pro-Palestinian students of anti-Semitism—sometimes fairly, sometimes not. They asked for protections that other groups already enjoyed. Who could blame them? They were doing what their leaders and teachers had instructed them was the right, the only, way to respond to a hurt.

[Adam Serwer: The Republicans who want American carnage]

And when the shrewd and unscrupulous Representative Elise Stefanik demanded of the presidents of Harvard and Penn whether calls for genocide violated their universities’ code of conduct, they had no good way to answer. If they said yes, they would have faced the obvious comeback: “Why has no one been punished?” So they said that it depended on the “context,” which was technically correct but sounded so hopelessly legalistic that it led to the loss of their jobs. The response also made nonsense of their careers as censors of unpopular speech. Shafik, of Columbia, having watched her colleagues’ debacle, told the congresswoman what she wanted to hear, then backed it up by calling the cops onto campus—only to find herself denounced on all sides, including by Senator Tom Cotton, who demanded that President Joe Biden deploy the United States military to Columbia, and by her own faculty senate, which threatened a vote of censure.

The right always knows how to exploit the excesses of the left. It happened in 1968, when the campus takeovers and the street battles between anti-war activists and cops at the Democratic convention in Chicago helped elect Richard Nixon. Republican politicians are already exploiting the chaos on campuses. This summer, the Democrats will gather again in Chicago, and the activists are promising a big show. Donald Trump will be watching.

Elite universities are caught in a trap of their own making, one that has been a long time coming. They’ve trained pro-Palestinian students to believe that, on the oppressor-oppressed axis, Jews are white and therefore dominant, not “marginalized,” while Israel is a settler-colonialist state and therefore illegitimate. They’ve trained pro-Israel students to believe that unwelcome and even offensive speech makes them so unsafe that they should stay away from campus. What the universities haven’t done is train their students to talk with one another.

Jewish worshippers gathered at Jerusalem's Western Wall for the traditional priestly blessing, a ceremony conducted twice a year during Passover and Sukkot.