Debuting in 2013, the Israeli television serial Shtisel, most of whose cast is secular, focuses on the internal dynamics of a ḥaredi family. It has proved surprisingly popular even with the Ultra-Orthodox themselves—despite the fact that their rabbis generally discourage or forbid television. Liel Leibovitz writes:

[I]t is clear that Shtisel heralds a new era in the fraught relationship between secular and ḥaredi Israelis. While the two groups maintain their traditional mutual animosity—the secular seeing the Ḥaredim as parasitic bums who live off taxpayer money while refusing to work or serve in the army, the Ḥaredim seeing the secular as heathens who have abandoned Judaism’s core tenets—Shtisel, it is now clear, has served as a bridge between these two feuding camps in two important ways. First, it has given many secular Israelis their first glimpse into ḥaredi life, portraying the otherwise foreign men in black hats and long black coats and women in head-coverings and ankle-length skirts as facing just the same familial and emotional tribulations as everyone else.

More importantly, perhaps, it has given Ḥaredim a prime-time lens through which to glance at themselves, not in the tightly controlled way typical of the community itself, where imperfections are frequently concealed and virtue portrayed as effortless and absolute, but in an intricate, sensitive, and candid manner, unafraid to take on even thorny topics like the difficulty some people have in finding a [mate] and the suffering of those who fail to couple early and well.

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.