Built during renovations of Jerusalem in the 1st century BCE, the ancient wall that constitutes Judaism’s holiest site was not part of the Temple itself, but of a structure surrounding the Temple Mount. Nadav Shragai explores its history as a place where Jews gather to pray, beginning with the massive earthquake that struck Jerusalem in 1546:

The severe quake tore down a row of old structures built and propped up by the Western Wall. . . . The clearing of the ruins slightly expanded the limited area of about 488 meters where Jews had prayed since approximately the year 1000. Suddenly, after years of covering many parts of the Western Wall with Muslim construction—mostly Mamluk [i.e., dating to the 13th century]—a narrow and empty plaza was created at the foot of the wall, the closest of the Temple Mount walls to the presumed site of the Holy of Holies. The Jews hurried to make use of this area for their prayers. This area later became known as the “alley of the Western Wall,” and after the Six-Day War turned into the “Western Wall Plaza,” which Israel prepared as a large open area for Jewish prayers in 1967.

Although, as Shragai notes, there is scant evidence of prayer in front of the wall before the second millennium, earlier sources attest to the site’s special sanctity:

The proximity of the Western Wall to the presumed place of the Holy of Holies has for many generations given tangible expression to the concept of a “Divine Presence [sh’khinah] in the west,” which appears in many Jewish sources. . . . For example, Midrash Tanḥuma, [a rabbinic compilation dating to somewhere between the 6th and 8th centuries CE, states]: “The Divine Presence never moved from the Western Wall of the Temple.”

There is a dispute among the commentators as to which Western Wall these midrashim and other sources, which were written about 1,500 years ago, referred to. To the western wall of the Temple? Or to the western (retaining) wall of the Temple Mount? But there is no dispute that after the destruction of the Second Temple, . . . when the site of the western wall of the Temple itself disappeared, the Jewish people consecrated the retaining wall of the Temple Mount compound. Contrary to [what some today would claim], the Jewish people have had an intimate connection to the Western Wall and held prayers [there] for many centuries before the earthquake.

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.