As someone who’s had an eye on French Jewry for years, out of personal and professional interest, I’m familiar with the phenomenon of the Israel-Palestine conflict ‘playing out’ in other lands. Things flare up in the Middle East and suddenly, on a different continent, there are street fights, antisemitic attacks, some much-publicized Jews supporting (or becoming) far-right politicians, maybe the occasional torture of a Jew in the wrong place at the wrong time. And it will all be kind of in reference to the Mideast conflict but also about a whole host of at most tangentially related domestic concerns. Like, tensions between Jews and Muslims (or white leftists) in France will be said to be about whichever intifada, but also about the Crémieux Decree; the dual legacies of the Holocaust and French colonialism; and whatever happens to be going on in France at the time.

And so it has seemed both familiar and bizarre to see the same happening in Canada, and more so in the United States, since Oct. 7. Canada, at least, you might say, is a bit more European, and more than a bit more French. But why do American college students and activists—including many who are neither Arab nor Muslim let alone specifically Palestinian—suddenly care so much about this conflict?

I had implicitly taken for granted that it’s because of the war, as if that alone explains it. As if there isn’t always a war, in the Middle East or elsewhere. What’s happening in Gaza is deeply upsetting whatever your interpretation of the underlying causes. But there is always devastating news, and not every just cause gets........

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