Last week, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced the discovery of part of a rare bronze oil lamp from the 1st or 2nd century CE in the City of David—believed to have been buried under a building to bring good luck. Raoul Wootliff describes what happened next:

According to Jerusalem’s City of David archeological site, after the announcement of the find, the Hungarian archaeologist Gabor Lassanyi reached out to say that he may be in possession of the other half, which was uncovered during a 2012 excavation in Budapest.

“In an excavation we conducted at Aquincum (modern-day Budapest), we found a remarkably rare object: at the bottom of the building, we discovered a bronze half-lamp depicting the right half of a face shaped like a Roman theater mask,” Lassanyi wrote to Ari Levy, the head of the Jerusalem excavation.

The lamp found in Jerusalem is of the left-hand side of a face, while the Budapest lamp is of the right-hand side. Upon an initial examination of the two lamps, Lassanyi and Levy found that the two halves had exactly the same dimensions. Additionally, the lamp in Hungary has a connecting slot that is depressed, while the lamp discovered in Israel has a protruding ridge, indicating they could connect together.

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.