Seven years ago, Hadassah Silberstein-Shemtov, herself a Ḥasid, established the Batsheva Learning Center to teach ḥaredi women Talmud. Rachel Frommer explains why this institution is so unusual, and what it has accomplished so far:

These ultra-Orthodox women are seeking to overhaul the average ḥaredi girl’s education, with its steady diet of biblical subjects, but very little study, if any, of Gemara or Mishna, the two [texts] that constitute the Talmud. Unlike the boys’ yeshiva system, which is founded on intimate study of Talmud, female ḥaredi education entirely excludes it.

These women believe their communities are in desperate need of not one or two learned women every other generation, but legions of them, who can teach girls Talmud starting from elementary school. They feel this educational overhaul is crucial to imbue ḥaredi girls with a true, deep understanding of their own Judaism. Without personal knowledge of Gemara and Mishna, the texts shaping every moment of an Orthodox Jewish life, they believe quotidian rituals and practices are done by rote, but without appreciation for their origins, development, and purpose.

They see a discordant reality where the writings forming the ancient roots of rabbinic Judaism are foreign lands to the women living by their strictures. They watch from outside as the learners of Talmud are inducted into a masculine fellowship of study with their contemporaries and the rabbinic figures animated in the Talmud’s pages. Communities are cloven in two, with men ingrained with a near-reflexive comprehension of the famed talmudic language and analytic method and women ignorant of the fundamental texts upon which their lives depend.

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.