To the delicate sensibilities of the early 21st-century, the treatment of race relations in Saul Bellow’s 1970 novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet is, to put it politely, “highly problematic.” One could say the same of Bellow’s literary treatment of women. And that’s not to mention the works of his younger contemporary, Philip Roth, a biography of whom itself caused a scandal in the literary world. Howard Jacobson reminisces about his first encounters with Bellow’s fiction (“Mr. Sammler’s Planet, it has to be said, was not an encouraging novel for a first-time visitor to New York”), and the fate of Bellow’s work in our censorious present:

At the time of Columbia University’s founding in 1784, notes Meir Soloviechik, the leader of the local synagogue, Gershom Mendes Seixas, was made a member of its board of regents. A Jewish student even gave a commencement address, composed by Seixas, in Hebrew. In the 20th century, Columbia attracted numerous Jews with the relaxation of quotas, and was the first secular university to create a chair in Jewish history. Barnard College, Columbia’s all-women’s school, was itself founded by a Jewish woman, and today has a large number of Orthodox Jewish students.