In The People and the Book: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature, Adam Kirsch presents a kind of introductory course on Jewish thought, ranging from Pirkei Avot to Moses Maimonides to Benedict Spinoza to Theodor Herzl. Allan Arkush, who writes that the book “constitutes a deeply serious meditation on the meaning of Jewish existence,” takes up its author’s unusual analysis of Jerusalem, a defense of Judaism written by the 18th-century German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn:

Mendelssohn had to explain how he could denounce religious coercion while at the same time maintaining his adherence to a religion that, in Kirsch’s words, “was based on the idea of compulsion through law.”

Unlike a very large number of Mendelssohn scholars, Kirsch sees that the bulk of Jerusalem leaves this problem unaddressed and that it is only at the end of the book that Mendelssohn answers . . . by explaining that the demise of the Jewish polity has transformed Jewish law, as Kirsch puts it, “from a communal rule for all Jews into a voluntary commitment of each Jew.” Kirsch then raises doubts about this contention, not in terms of its philosophical or theological adequacy, but with regard to its practical ramifications:

Once the decision to obey Jewish law is left up to every individual, it is inevitable that some—maybe most—Jews will decide that the burden is too great, that there is no way and no need to go on living under two sets of laws. And, in fact, that is just what happened with Mendelssohn’s own family. All of his grandchildren were baptized Christians, including the composer Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, who created masterpieces of church music.

Kirsch is not recalling this family history in order to disparage Mendelssohn’s ideology, as have so many other writers over the past two centuries. He is not even calling into question Mendelssohn’s affirmation of voluntarism. He is just pointing out that there are trade-offs, even for good things like liberty.

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.