As anyone familiar with Fiddler on the Roof knows, matchmakers once played a pivotal role in traditional Jewish life—even though, contrary to the musical, they were almost always men. Jenna Weissman Joselit explains how traditional matchmaking made its way to the U.S. and then fell into decline:

As modernity seized hold of the Jews, introducing them to new forms of social interaction and new ways of thinking about just about everything, including the prospect of intimacy and the meaning of love, Jewish marriage brokers lost their footing as well as their standing. Taken to task and vilified for having commercialized affairs of the heart, they symbolized the old, and increasingly outmoded, order.

Their power diminished, marriage brokers . . . increasingly became the butt of humor and sly derision. By the late-19th and early-20th centuries, the matchmaker was grist for the mill of contemporary Jewish writers, such as Abraham Cahan and Israel Zangwill, with a keen eye for the absurdities of daily life. . . .

Lampooned for their garrulousness and guile, Jewish marriage brokers made for good copy, and in some cases, for a good cry, too. In Cahan’s short story “A Providential Match,” published in English in 1895, the smooth promises of Feivele the matchmaker transform Robert, né Rouvke, from a “simple bokher [young bachelor] into a khoson [a groom],” from a rough-hewn immigrant into a swain. It didn’t take long, though—just a few pages of flowery text—before those promises come to nothing, leaving Robert brokenhearted and alone. . . .

In the years that followed, the Jewish marriage maven became more of a curiosity than a casualty of Americanization. By 1938, when a profile of Rubin’s Matrimonial Bureau appeared in the pages of the New Yorker, Rubin’s days seemed numbered. Written by Meyer Berger, the piece detailed the comings and goings of a “bearded Cupid” named Louis Rubin, . . . one of those people who were in, but not of, the times. “Call and see the World-Prominent MR. RUBIN,” bubbled his business cards and circulars where he [enthusiastically] described his clientele as “respectable business and professional high-class working people and nice, intelligent girls from rich business families, also widows and widowers.” To which [the author] Berger couldn’t resist noting: “It’s a bit breathless, . . . but it gets results.”

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.