In its latest episode, Saturday Night Live featured a joke based on the presumption that Israel denies medical care to its non-Jewish citizens. Another series—Nurses, also on NBC—recently aired an episode featuring an injured ḥasidic teenager and his father. Not only do the writers misrepresent Orthodox Judaism as hostile to medicine, they perpetuate the old anti-Semitic stereotype that Jews are possessed, as the Roman historian Tacitus put it, by “a hatred of humanity in general.” Allison Josephs writes:

Israel, [the ḥasidic teenager], is told by the doctor that he’ll need a bone graft to heal fully. Israel doesn’t understand what this means, so the doctor explains that he’ll have to have part of a dead person’s bone surgically inserted into his leg.

Cue the horror! Israel and his father are distraught at the notion that he’ll have a dead person’s body part in his body and a “goyim” part to boot! But even worse than that—it could be an “Arab” body part or a “lady” body part. Or as the nurse reminds them, “an Arab lady” body part. There is no prohibition, [of course, even in the most stringent interpretations of halakhah], on getting a dead body part surgically inserted into one’s body. In fact, Jewish law [strongly encourages the use] of medicine to recover from illnesses. Nor is there a prohibition on getting a non-Jewish body part inserted, even if it belonged to a woman or an Arab.

[T]he idea that such a surgery would be problematic in general or problematic because of where the bone came from . . . is a vicious lie that endangers men who walk around with curled sidelocks and black hats.

As an aside, another theme of the episode, involving other characters, was kidney donations. If the writers ever bothered to learn about Orthodox Jews, they might discover that they and specifically ḥasidic Jews, are off the charts when it comes to donating kidneys to strangers—15 percent of all altruistic donors in the U.S. are Orthodox Jews, even though they make up only 0.3 percent of the population.

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.