The Israeli chief rabbinate has backed down from its effort to force Shlomo Riskin—a popular Modern Orthodox rabbi—into retirement as retaliation for his dissenting views on certain key issues. Elli Fischer argues that the most desirable outcome would be for Riskin and his congregants to reject the chief rabbinate altogether:

Part of the larger religion-state issue in Israel is that most citizens, even those calling for the “abolition” of the chief rabbinate, have a hard time envisioning what life would look like without it. The centralization of religious services in Israel was a key part of David Ben-Gurion’s particular brand of statism and his desire to replace community consciousness with state consciousness. Though this state consciousness . . . has begun to fail, Israelis have not yet relearned how to build religious communities. They have become dependent on the state to allocate land and funds for synagogues, . . . to fund and staff burial societies, and to dictate what foods are and are not kosher. Abolishing the chief rabbinate would create a vacuum of instability, temporarily at least. It is hard to predict the long-term ramifications of such instability. . . .

The chief rabbinate and the Ministry of Religious Services are obviously well-funded, but they draw their real authority from the people. If people stopped caring whether the chief rabbinate thinks they are Jewish or married, or whether it deems a particular product kosher, it would become a paper tiger.

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.