In the 1979 film The Frisco Kid, Gene Wilder and Harrison Ford star as, respectively, a greenhorn Polish rabbi and an American bank robber who together make their way from Philadelphia to San Francisco. The musicologist and composer Velvel Pasternak relates his brief stint as the movie’s wardrobe consultant, tasked with obtaining some ḥasidic garments, including a tall hat trimmed with beaver pelts known in Yiddish as a biber-hitl:

Last week, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), an influential academic organization, announced that Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi of San Francisco State University would receive one of its annual awards, citing her “courage, persistence, political foresight, and concern for human rights . . . in her scholarship, teaching, [and] public advocacy” as well as her efforts to “advance the agenda for social change in Palestine, the United States, and internationally.” Those efforts, notes Jonathan Marks, include supporting the exclusion of the Jewish campus group Hillel from a university-wide event, and lambasting the school’s president for apologizing for that exclusion: