Last month, seven years after his election to Egypt’s presidency, the Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammad Morsi died during court proceedings in which he was being tried on spying for Hamas. Shortly after winning his country’s first democratic election, Morsi had attempted to undo the constitutional restrictions on his power, prompting demonstrations and eventually the coup that placed him in prison and his defense minister, Mohammad Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, in the presidency. Morsi had already been convicted of other crimes by the time of his death. Orit Perlov and Ofir Winter comment on what Morsi might have portended for Israel:

At the time of Columbia University’s founding in 1784, notes Meir Soloviechik, the leader of the local synagogue, Gershom Mendes Seixas, was made a member of its board of regents. A Jewish student even gave a commencement address, composed by Seixas, in Hebrew. In the 20th century, Columbia attracted numerous Jews with the relaxation of quotas, and was the first secular university to create a chair in Jewish history. Barnard College, Columbia’s all-women’s school, was itself founded by a Jewish woman, and today has a large number of Orthodox Jewish students.