In November 1964, the writer and broadcaster Studs Terkel recorded an interview for his radio show with Isaac Bashevis Singer, the main subject of which was the latter’s collection Short Friday and Other Stories, which had appeared the previous year. In the recording—recently made available online together with a complete transcript—Singer speaks frankly about his approach to literature and human nature. Terkel at one point states, “What you are, primarily, is a storyteller,” a characterization Singer accepts:

Singer: I think that literature suffers nowadays a lot from the fact that writers don’t pay much attention to the story. They think that it’s enough to describe a piece of life, so to say. . . . I don’t think so. I think a story is the most important thing for writing. You have to have something to tell. If a writer has nothing to tell, no matter how well he writes, he will never bring out anything which is really good.

People [today] are so much interested in psychology, and in psychoanalysis, and so on that they think that you just can describe a man. But this is not enough. Something must happen. . . . I would say that the rules of literature are the same as the rules of a newspaper—you cannot just publish something every day. . . . There must be a story behind every story.

Later in the interview, discussing the role of the demonic and the supernatural in his writing, Singer makes a point of stating that he considers himself “a kind of a mystic.”

Terkel: Would you mind, perhaps, expanding on this just a bit?

Singer: What I mean by this is that I feel that what we know about life and about ourselves is not everything. There are hidden powers which we don’t know and which we may never know. And I always feel these powers. For example, telepathy is such a power; we all have it although we don’t know why, and how it works, and we can never foresee when it will work. But it’s still there. The same thing is true about the dreams which come true, and so on and so on. I would say that there is some mystic in every human being, even in those who deny it.

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.