The Ford Foundation deserves a salute for moving quickly to gain the postponement – or even cancellation – of the conference on academic boycotts. The conference, organized by the American Association of University Professors, included a number of professors who were supporters of the movement for an academic boycott of Israeli Universities. The left-wing of the academic community bridles at the suggestion that the boycott movement is animated by anti-Semitism, and when concerns were first raised, the Ford Foundation tried to defend the parley, which was to take place on the shores of Lake Como in Italy. Then it turned out that among the materials conference organizers distributed to prospective participants was a paper by a Holocaust denier whose anti-Semitic purposes could not be disguised. So the head of the Ford Foundation, Susan Berresford, and the head of the Rockefeller Foundation and Nathan Cummings Foundation, other funders, put their feet down, and the parley was postponed, for good, one hopes.

This was an important moment for the Ford Foundation, which carries a special burden because it was established with the fortune begun by Henry Ford, a famous anti-Semite. The Ford family itself, under the leadership of Henry Ford II, jettisoned his grandfather’s animosity. Eventually, the foundation jettisoned Henry Ford II and took a left turn. It didn’t embrace Henry Ford I’s hatreds. But it did dole out support to myriad recipients whose conduct would have made the old man kvell. This came to a head with its funding of the effort to isolate Israel at the Durban Conference in 2001, a campaign that was exposed by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. That led Ms. Berresford to promise reform.

What the Lake Como caper illuminates for Ms. Berresford is something that many learned a long time ago – she is going to have to be constantly on her toes. It is a reminder that it’s not always easy. The purveyors of what some of us call political anti-Semitism are a shrewd lot, who seek cover in all sorts of stratagems and conferences and Middle East studies departments. The aim is to seek legitimacy for the poisonous ideas being spread, and one way to gain it is through funding by distinguished institutions – such as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations – and by attempts to bring the divestment movement to such faculties as Harvard, say, or Columbia. So when someone like Ms. Berresford stands up and gives notice, our instinct is to say, “Welcome to the fight.”