Reviewing the first volume of Zachary Leader’s new biography of Saul Bellow, Ruth Wisse discusses the novelist’s debt to earlier Jewish writers and the political implications of his fiction:

In fact, one of the prototypes for [the title character of The Adventures of Augie March] may have come to Bellow early on when his father read the Yiddish works of Sholem Aleichem aloud to his family. Often likened to Huckleberry Finn, Augie may be more similar to [a Sholem Aleichem character:] Motl Peysi, the Cantor’s Son. When Motl’s father dies in the opening chapter, the boy exults, “I am lucky, I’m an orphan!” and describes how adults who would otherwise have punished his mischief protect and nurture him now that he is fatherless. Similarly, fatherless Augie is adopted by a succession of guides and guardians who engender in him none of the guilt that oppresses Bellow’s filial protagonists. Motl’s adventures circa 1906 take him from Europe to America, while Augie’s take him in the opposite direction, into postwar Europe. And yet Augie confronts the devastation of his people without any apparent Jewish awareness. Bellow released his hero from both familial and Jewish duty. . . .

In the years that followed [the publication of Herzog in 1964], Bellow’s critics condemned him for his insistence on civilization, which offended those whom his “reactionary” and “bourgeois” civilization allegedly oppressed. His anti-radical wit enraged the radicals. The pipsqueaks of forlornness objected to his easy optimism. Already the appearance of this biography, which ends with Herzog, is being used in some quarters as an excuse for reviving attacks on the fearlessly confrontational Bellow of Mr. Sammler’s Planet, published in 1970.

This proves, if proof is needed, how much Saul Bellow matters to our democratic society, which ignores its own fragility when it is not fortified by reminders of what individual freedom requires. Bellow believed that the novel was best equipped to deliver those reminders, and that he was destined to write them.

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.