Speaking on a public phone about synagogue business in 1979, Rabbi Harold Rabinowitz threw a Yiddish sentence into the conversation. As a result, he was approached by an old man who needed a speech translated from Yiddish to English in a hurry. Rabinowitz complied. The next day he received a call from the same man, who turned out to be Chaim Grade—one of the greatest Yiddish novelists of the post-World War II era. Thus began Rabinowitz’s career as Grade’s English translator. Barbara Finkelstein recounts his experiences with both the writer and his notoriously difficult wife, Inna Hecker Grade:

Rabinowitz’s most challenging interaction with the Grades came when Hecker put up a Christmas tree to honor her Christian father’s heritage. One day after the tree was up and trimmed, Hecker complimented Rabinowitz, attired in his habitual shirt, tie, and jacket, for dressing nicely on the day a reporter from the Yiddish Daily Forward was coming to interview her husband.

As if on cue, the front-door buzzer rang. Rabinowitz shot out of the Grades’ second-floor apartment and ran down the stairs. He got to street level in time to intercept the reporter. “I’m sorry,” he said he told her, “but Mr. Grade is not feeling well.” Rabinowitz maintains that Hecker intentionally scheduled the interview at Christmastime. “The wife of one of the world’s greatest Yiddish writers had an outright hostility to the Yiddish-speaking world,” he said. . . .

“Chaim Grade’s career would have been finished if the reporter wrote that Chaim, a former student of Avraham Yeshayah Karelitz—a prominent talmudic authority—had a Christmas tree in his apartment,” Rabinowitz said. “All well and good that Inna insisted on a tree, but it was career suicide for Chaim if his core readership knew about it.” Rabinowitz argues that Hecker had a perverse desire to undermine her husband’s reputation in the Yiddish-speaking world. “There’s no question about it,” he said. “She knew what she was doing.”

Yet Rabinowitz has only one word for the bond between Grade and Hecker. “Love,” he said. “It sounds crazy, but they were very loving to each other. I’ve often admired them.”

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.