“There are no words,” was the comment Dara Horn heard most often in response to the recent slaughter in Pittsburgh. But, she writes, that’s not quite accurate:

[T]here are words for this, entire books full of words: the books the murdered people were reading at the hour of their deaths. News reports described these victims as praying, but Jewish prayer is not primarily personal or spontaneous. It is communal reading. Public recitations of ancient words, scripts compiled centuries ago and nearly identical in every synagogue in the world. A lot of those words are about exactly this. . . .

When Ruth Mallinger [of Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life congregation] was ninety-seven, she and ten other Jews were murdered in their synagogue. There are words for this, too, a Hebrew phrase for 2,500 years’ worth of people murdered for being Jews: kiddush hashem, death in sanctification of God’s name.

[But], in the old stories, those outside the community rarely helped or cared; our ancestors’ consolation came only from one another and from God. But in this horrific week, perhaps our old words might mean something new, [as evidenced by the response of] Americans of every background who inspire more optimism than Jewish history allows. . . . As George Washington vowed in his 1790 letter to a Rhode Island synagogue, America shall be a place where “every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.” Those words aren’t his. They’re from the Hebrew prophet Micah, on the shelves of every synagogue in the world.

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.