While the majority of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories and novels take place in Warsaw, Manhattan, or the various shtetls surrounding Lublin, his personal archive has been preserved for posterity in Austin at the University of Texas. Robert King—Mississippi-born Gentile, linguistics professor, Yiddish expert, and sometime Mosaic contributor—tells the story of how he befriended the writer, and, after his death, raised the funds for the University of Texas to acquire the collection:

The [university’s] College of Liberal Arts was swimming in money back in 1979, and for several years after that. Edwin Gale and his wife, Becky, of Beaumont, Texas, created the amply endowed Gale Chair of Jewish Studies, and under its aegis, together with the chairholder Seth Wolitz, I indulged my caprices by inviting to campus people whose work I had admired, most of them Jewish: Raul Hilberg, Howard Sachar, Lucy Dawidowicz, Irving Howe, and Norman Podhoretz, among others.

When word came around that Isaac Bashevis Singer might be available for a lecture, we began negotiations with his assistant, then Dvorah Menashe, now Dvorah Telushkin. . . . Finally, all was worked out. I didn’t usually drive out to the airport to greet our lecture guests, but I wasn’t about to pass up the chance to meet one of my heroes on arrival. He was lively, inquisitive, energized by the unfamiliar light of an Austin spring.

Later, the two shared a cup of tea despite Dvorah’s remonstrances:

He told me of the woman with whom he had had a son. She had saved herself from the Holocaust by finding refuge in the Soviet Union. Singer told me, as if he were describing a person with two heads, “She was a real Communist.” And on it went. Sensing a political affinity, he told me, looking over his shoulder though no one was eavesdropping, that he liked Reagan, as I did—though I hadn’t told him so.

And he told me about his discomfort with literary critics, especially, he said, the Yiddish ones. “All they ever say to me is ‘ober ikh hub tsi akh a taan.’” (“But I have an objection.”) . . . What impressed him most about me, I think, was that I had served in the military: “So you can shoot a gun?” he asked admiringly. I finally got him to go back to his room, fearing admonition from Dvorah if I was caught “bothering” him.

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.