While today most Hanukkah menorahs are made to accommodate wax candles, in ancient times the holiday was marked by lighting an oil lamp, like the menorah of the Jerusalem Temple itself. And even modern-day oil menorahs are rarely made from clay, as was once commonplace. The discovery of such a lamp—although not one designed for Hanukkah—last week thus seems fortuitous. The Times of Israel reports:

A group of children recently found a 2,000-year-old oil lamp at Kibbutz Parod in the northern Galilee region of the country, shedding light on the ancient Jewish community that lived in the area, the Israel Antiquities Authority said in a statement Monday. The 4th-grade students—Alon Cohen, Liam Atias, and Rotem Levnat—from the kibbutz’s Nof Hagalil School, made the discovery as they were out for a walk about ten days ago.

The trio said they noticed something poking out of the ground, and at first they thought it was just an unusual stone. However, after carefully pulling it out they realized it was a complete oil lamp made of clay. The students took the lamp to their parents, who informed the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), which was able to confirm the age of the object, the statement said.

The director of education at the IAA, Einat Ambar-Armon, said the area of Parod in ancient times was a large Jewish village. “The lamp that was revealed is a typical lamp for the Jewish settlement in the early Roman period,” Ambar-Armon said. “For the most part, the lamps of this type are without decoration, in contrast to the Roman lamps of the same period. This is a special discovery. It is quite rare to find just a whole lamp like this.”

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.