Last Thursday the celebrated pop musician Meir Barnai died at the age of fifty-five. Banai, a member of what might be termed the royal family of Israeli rock, never became religiously observant, as did his brother Evyatar and cousin Ehud (also highly successful recording artists). But like them he was at the forefront of a movement among secular Israelis to rediscover the Jewish religion, as Daniel Gordis writes:

Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik, David Ben-Gurion, Shimon Peres, Eliezer Ben-Yehudah and dozens of others of the giants of early Zionism were raised in Orthodox homes and—to one degree or another—abandoned the rigors of that way of life. They sought sanctity not in the synagogue but in their ancestral homeland. They replaced prayer with labor. They ached not for ritual purity, but for the dirt of the land of Israel and the messiness of state-building. Early Zionism was, in many ways, a rebellion against Judaism. . . .

Somewhere along the line, though, Israelis’ infatuation with secularism began to crack, and their anger at the religion of their great-grandparents began to give way to curiosity. . . . [B]y the late 1970s, and with increased energy thereafter, younger generations of Israelis . . . wanted to be part of the conversation that had been Judaism for centuries. . . . Meir [Banai] was . . . swept along by the interest in religion and issued albums like Sh’ma Koli [whose name was taken from party of the Yom Kippur liturgy] that included songs like “L’kha Eli” (“To You, My God”), the words for which were composed by the medieval Jewish sage, Abraham ibn Ezra.. . . .

Banai’s life and work was a reminder that it is never too late to ask ourselves what the Jewish state is all about. There are many ways to answer that question, of course, but the move from the secularism of Israel’s early generations to the heartbreak of 1973 to the religious inquisitiveness of recent decades suggests that more than anything, Israel is the place where Jews have come to reimagine what Jewish peoplehood might mean when it resides in its ancestral homeland and is coupled to sovereignty.

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.