Born in 1954, Elliot Jager grew up on New York’s Lower East Side after it had already ceased to be a thriving Jewish immigrant neighborhood. Jager, who now resides in Jerusalem, considers this corner of Manhattan in its present form, and reminisces about its past:

Growing up, my Lower East Side was overwhelmingly populated by Puerto Ricans. The remnant Jewish community of roughly 20,000—many elderly and poor—was preyed upon by neighborhood louts. Raised Orthodox, I worshipped in the Sassover rebbe’s shtibl, or storefront synagogue, on Eighth Street between Avenues D and C. It was within easy walking distance of our apartment in the Jacob Riis Houses project, though a bit risky for a boy wearing a yarmulke. . . .

Now, well past middle age and from 6,000 miles away, I find myself captivated by David Simon’s television tour de force The Wire, set in contemporary Baltimore. In many ways, it’s led me to rethink how I ought to look back at my own New York City upbringing. True, I was fatherless and poor in a tough neighborhood; but I was blessed with an innately capable mother who taught me values, virtue, and empathy. My community, though moribund and imperfect, was nonetheless committed to mutual aid. Ritual and tradition offered a framework for life.

So while I can’t identify with hipsters hankering after tenement museums, potato knishes, and kosher-style delicatessen, this curmudgeon is not shedding any tears that my Lower East Side has been supplanted by something—apparently—kinder, gentler and, I pray, more humane.

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.