Emuna Agnon Yaron, who died last week, was the daughter of the Nobel-prize-winning Israeli author S. Y. Agnon and the guardian of his legacy. Jeffrey Saks describes her role in the posthumous publication of many of her father’s works:

[Yaron] was . . . one of the most important figures in 20th-century Hebrew letters. Before his death in 1970, Agnon he appointed Emuna as his literary executor, and began sharing his vision for both finishing uncompleted projects and collecting and anthologizing stories that had not yet appeared in book form. Most pressing to the octogenarian author, who had been slowed by a stroke in his final year, was crafting an ending for the long novel which had vexed him for decades. Shirah is set in and around the Hebrew University of the 1930s, and while chapters had been serialized on and off since 1948, he struggled to bring it to a close. When the novel appeared a year after his death it caused a sensation, as Israel’s academic and literary elite debated its interpretation, and gossiped about which actual figures Agnon had in mind behind each fictional character.

But Shirah was controversial for another reason: literary scholars . . .criticized Emuna for undertaking the work on her own, preferring to see Agnon’s unfinished legacy placed in the hands of ivory-tower academics. While Emuna was aided by a close circle of experts, she weathered the critique and forged on, ultimately publishing fourteen posthumous volumes—novels, short stories, correspondences, and anthologies of rabbinic literature and ḥasidic tales. In short, she was responsible for bringing more of her father’s writing to the public than he himself succeeded in doing.

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.