Reviewing a new volume of selected works by the American poet and short-story writer Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966), Adam Kirsch notes his preoccupation with Jewish sons and their fathers (a preoccupation shared, according to Kirsch, by the contemporary writer Adam Ehrlich Sachs). He writes:

When [his friend and admirer John] Berryman says [in a poem] that Schwartz wrote about “harms and the child,” he is punning on the opening words of the Aeneid, “Of arms and a man I sing.” But it is also a fair summary of Schwartz’s great theme, which is the great theme of early American Jewish literature: the weight of the past, the way the traumas and dysfunctions of the parents are transmitted to the children. For Schwartz, who was an acolyte of both Marx and Freud, this burden was at the same time historical—a product of the long Jewish past, and the recent disruptive emigration to America—and psychological—a product of the guilt and resentment the child feels toward his mother and father.

The two lenses are superimposed in one of Schwartz’s best poems, “The Ballad of the Children of the Czar,” in which he compared himself at two years old, in 1916, with the Romanov princes, who can’t imagine that soon they will be executed. Both the world-historical princes and the insignificant Brooklyn Jewish boy, Schwartz suggests, are doomed by the same forces. . . .

Jewishness, for Schwartz as for more famous contemporaries like Bernard Malamud, is a kind of intensification of the human condition, a way of experiencing more acutely the themes of modern life—alienation, guilt, loneliness, moral striving. Schwartz’s “resignation” from the cult of [the anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi] Ezra Pound—who was, at that time, the idol of all young avant-garde intellectuals—was part of his insistence that English literature had to make room for Jewishness as a subject and a voice. In this sense, Schwartz was a trailblazer for the golden age of American Jewish literature in the 1950s and 1960s—a promised land that, like Moses, he was not permitted to enter.

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.