Born in 1766 in what is now the Czech Republic, Aaron Chorin studied as a teenager in the Prague yeshiva under Ezekiel Landau, the foremost European rabbinic scholar of the day, Chorin went on to become one of the very first to propose a program of reforming halakhah. David B. Green writes:

In 1798, Chorin published his first rabbinic pamphlet, . . . in which he controversially argued—as had his teacher Rabbi Landau—that the sturgeon has scales and is therefore kosher. This was a provocative claim, and it elicited unpleasant reactions from other rabbis, particularly Moravia’s chief rabbi, Mordecai Banet, who had already ruled that the fish was treyf. . . .

In 1803, Chorin published a book . . . in which he argued that learned rabbis can adapt Jewish law to current conditions. He also began delineating the customs and commandments that he believed could be dispensed with, which over time came to include not only kapparot, the pre-Yom Kippur custom of [slaughtering] a chicken as a sign of penance, but also more substantive laws like the restrictions on travel and writing on the Sabbath. [He also advocated] shortening shivah, the seven-day period of mourning following the death of a close relative. . . .

Aron Chorin was a fighter, and he seems to have taken satisfaction in provoking his colleagues with his unorthodox rulings. Thus it was . . . that he became the first rabbi to give his endorsement to the changes introduced by the German Reform movement, many of them related to the synagogue service, such as the saying of certain prayers in the vernacular, and the use of an organ on the Sabbath.

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.