Salo Wittmayer Baron was the first person to hold a chair in Jewish history at an American university and the author of numerous groundbreaking studies in the field. In an essay first published in 1989, he tells the story of his passion for collecting books, and how he assembled his enormous private library, most of which now resides at Stanford University:

As a child of four (in 1899) in Galicia I was introduced to the study of the Bible and its various interpreters. Less than two years later my father paraded me before relatives and friends as a student of the Talmud together with its commentaries. At the same time I excelled in mathematics and the game of chess. . . .

Soon thereafter the Russo-Japanese war (1904-1905) introduced me to the world of journalism. I began to devour every page on that subject in the Polish, German, and Hebrew newspapers and magazines that arrived at our home. For some reason, when I was about nine years old, I became an admirer of the British empire. For hours I would pore over a map, figuring out how many days it would take to travel by ship from London to Sydney, for example. . . .

But not until I was a teenager did I become a passionate buyer of books. Both of my parents had been book-lovers. My mother had a good general knowledge of Polish and German literature, which she cultivated throughout her life. She also spoke French fluently. With her aid I learned to buy books by mail, especially from major German booksellers. Since I received a small weekly allowance from my parents, I established at the age of fourteen or fifteen a regular exchange with one particular book dealer in Berlin, who sent me his catalogues; from them I would choose one or more items. Later he would choose one or two recently arrived titles that he knew would be of interest to me. He sent them directly to me with the understanding that I could return them, in case I found them less than desirable. In this way I assembled quite a collection of German and later also Hebrew books. This marked the beginning of my book-collecting mania.

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.