The Yiddish word schlemiel, meaning a bumbler or ne’er-do-well, is one of many that made their way into English dictionaries and can be found in newspapers and magazines without explanation. But long before Thomas Pynchon used the word in the opening of his novel V, Adelbert von Chamisso, a Christian, had introduced the word to a non-Jewish audience, as C.D. Rose writes:

Peter Schlemihl, by Adelbert von Chamisso, was first published in Germany in 1813. The titular Peter is indeed a hapless lad, tempted into making a bargain with a strange “man in gray . . . who looks like a bit of thread blown from a tailor’s needle.” He offers Peter endless gold in exchange for—what? Merely his shadow.

Of course, it doesn’t work out well. Peter soon finds that despite his bottomless wealth, without a shadow he is shunned from all kinds of society, polite and otherwise.

Chamisso acknowledges no source for his protagonist’s name, and while it certainly is Yiddish (though more commonly spelled schlemiel), its origins are debated—some claim it’s from the Hebrew term shelo mo’il, meaning “useless,” and others that it’s derived from the name Shelumiel, an Israelite chieftain [mentioned in the book of Numbers]. One thing is clear: the word hardly appears in print until the year Chamisso published his book. Thereafter it became extremely common, almost certainly spread by the novel’s success.

Chamisso was born in France in 1781, yet his family, threatened by the Revolution, was soon after forced to flee. They eventually settled in Berlin, where the young Adelbert grew up among an artistic set. He later joined the Prussian army and found himself going to war against his native France. He was taken prisoner and remained in France, working his way into Madame de Staël’s literary circle. He spent much of his life like this, neither here nor there, without a real home or nation. . . . In the second part of the novel, Peter travels the world with the help of magical seven-league boots, much as Chamisso later joined a Russian scientific expedition, circumnavigating the globe. Peter never finds a home, as he has no shadow. While the Yiddish schlemiel is irredeemably unlucky, pursued by misfortune yet also responsible for his own chumpishness, Chamisso’s Schlemihl is a permanent exile.

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.