Pondering the nature of Jewish identity in today’s world, and the respective challenges faced by Jews in Israel and the Diaspora, Yehudah Mirsky looks to the writings of Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935), founder of Israel’s chief rabbinate:

In a justly famous set of reflections written around 1912 or 1913, Kook points to three distinct dimensions of Jewish identity: nation, universal ethics, and the sacred. In pre-modern Jewish life, these all clustered together and reinforced each other. In modern times they split apart, each becoming the property of a specific party—in Kook’s day, respectively, Zionists, socialists, and the Orthodox. These “camps” [did not merely represent] different ways of addressing problems practically, they were vehicles of identity, of articulating and living different visions of Jewishness. But the one thing that they shared—to me, still the indispensable prerequisite to being part of the Jewish conversation today—was a passionate commitment to Jewish physical and cultural survival, each by its own lights.

For Kook, the true meaning of the “sacred” is the ultimate unity of all three: Jewish peoplehood at once particular and universal and thus enacting God’s [nature as a being that is both] universal and particular, [both] transcendent and immanent. . . .

In our day, Jewishness simultaneously affirms the global and the local, the universal and the particular, while lodging a permanent protest against the idea that any one particular identity, and any one—even universalist—ideology is the one-size-fits-all God-like answer to the human condition in all its diversity.

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.