In As Close to Us as Breathing, Elizabeth Poliner covers such familiar ground as love, the Jewish family, and community. But, notes Adam Kirsch, this “unusually perceptive” work also addresses a subject almost entirely absent from American Jewish fiction:

Early in As Close to Us as Breathing, . . . there is a remarkable scene of a group of men praying at a Conservative synagogue’s morning minyan. For eight pages, Poliner follows Mort Leibritsky, a department-store owner in Middletown, Connecticut, as he makes his way through the order of the service. . . . It is not that anything very imposing or grand happens. On the contrary, we see Mort striving for a feeling of transcendence, but then falling back into the internal monologue of memories and anxieties that makes up most of daily life.

The scene is remarkable, rather, because it is so very rare for American Jewish novelists to write about prayer. Of all the genres of American Jewish fiction—the nostalgic and the dysfunctional, the satiric and the elegiac—few have much interest in the prayers that are supposed to define Jewish life and practice. Perhaps that is because prayer gets right to the heart of the contradictions of our Jewish identity, exposing the gap between God as He is imagined in the ancient liturgy and the way most American Jews think about God today. Or perhaps it is because prayer is simply too routine, a duty rather than an encounter. . . .

Spirituality is difficult terrain for American Jewish fiction; family is where the action is. And so it proves for Mort, who says the words of the prayer but is mainly thinking about his father and his son.

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.