Harry Golden (né Chaim Goldhirsch) grew up on New York’s Lower East Side and spent three years in prison for swindling investors. Not long after his release, he moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, where he took on a new name, a new persona, and a new career as a journalist and anti-segregation activist. Edward Kosner writes:

Golden played the maverick—the refugee New Yorker transplanted in the cornpone South, polemic journalist, son of a Hebrew scholar [but] married to a Roman Catholic, champion of the oppressed, union man, cigar-chomping, bourbon-slugging pal of intellectuals and politicians. Actually, he was a Kennedy-era liberal, more committed to civil rights than the Kennedy administration but in sync with Democratic cold-war foreign policy. Indeed, Golden’s prime—the years from the publication of his best-selling Only in America in 1958 to the election of Richard Nixon a decade later—coincides with the postwar Democratic ascendancy that died in the jungles of Vietnam. . . .

Starting in 1944, Golden filled the plain columns of the Carolina Israelite with short essays, editorials, and reminiscences of growing up poor in a pious family on the Lower East Side. Over the years, he repurposed the stuff into a series of books, beginning with Only in America, which stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year and made him enough money to pay off many of his old debts. More than a dozen other books followed, including an autobiography and studies of Jewish peddlers and the case of Leo Frank, the Jewish factory manager who was accused of murdering a young woman and lynched by a white mob in Marietta, Georgia in 1915. He wrote for important magazines, too, including Life, Esquire, the Nation, and Commentary. All that exposure led to lucrative work on the side as a lecturer and frequent appearances on the Tonight Show couch, with Jack Paar and then Johnny Carson.

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.