Hello, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. This is your Tuesday foreign policy edition and I’m Julia Ioffe.

Happy Passover! I celebrated the first seder last night with my parents and sister, a very close family friend (a Muslim), and my partner (an Episcopalian). During the seder, I invoked a lot of what I heard during my recent chat with Deborah Lipstadt, President Joe Biden’s special envoy for combating global antisemitism, which I’m sharing with you today. In light of what’s happening on college campuses all over the country, and the debates that have flared up again since the October 7 Hamas attack and Israel’s retaliation, I felt that sharing this conversation with Lipstadt, herself a professor and academic, would resonate on this first day of Passover, whether or not you celebrate, whether or not you are even Jewish.

But first…

• Some notes on Columbia: I do want to say a couple words about the events at Columbia University and beyond—in part because this was one of the first things my father asked me about last night. My short answer: It is painfully complicated. My slightly longer answer consists of...