It has hardly been remarked upon that Ron Klain, the current White House chief of staff, is Jewish. Among his predecessors in the position were Rahm Emanuel, whose father was an Irgun veteran, and Jack Lew, an Orthodox Jew. But it was the late Ken Duberstein, as Tevi Troy writes, who paved the way:

Ken Duberstein, the first Jewish White House chief of staff in history, has died at seventy-seven. He served the Reagan administration ably and well, and went on to have a long private-sector career serving as a wise man of Washington.

A Brooklyn native, Duberstein went to Franklin & Marshall College before moving to Washington, DC, where he interned for the New York Republican senator Jacob Javits and earned a master’s degree from American University. He wrote his thesis on ethnic voting patterns in his native Brooklyn.

As chief of staff, Duberstein developed a very strong working relationship with Colin Powell, then the national-security adviser. Duberstein later recalled that he and Powell “ran the U.S. government for two years. A black [man] who was raised on the streets of the South Bronx and a Brooklyn Jew were in these positions for the most conservative Republican president of the 20th century.” He and Powell remained close long after the administration ended.

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.