The state of Israel today has a thriving democracy, a resilient society, and a powerful military, yet, Michael Steinhardt observes, there is a “billion-dollar nonprofit industry telling us we need to ‘save’ Israel.” To the contrary, argues Steinhardt, it is American Jewry that needs saving, and should be looking to the Jewish state for help:

The fundamental issues plaguing non-Orthodox Jews, especially in North America—assimilation, disengagement from Jewish life, poor Jewish education—have not gone away. Synagogue attendance, already in long decline, took a beating during the pandemic and has not come close to recovering. And then there’s the increasing pressure of anti-Semitism on campuses, city streets, and in public institutions. Taken together, these constitute a well-documented existential threat to Diaspora Jewry that is far more immediate and profound than anything Israel faces today.

The most obvious thing we need can be summed up in two words: Jewish pride. . . . What I’ve learned from my many trips to Israel and my encounters with Israelis over more than half a century is this: . . . if Jewish pride is what we need, they’ve got it in spades.

Can we imagine an American Jewish community, say, twenty years from now, that has redirected that billion dollars a year to projects that build Jewish pride in the Diaspora through bilateral engagement with Israel, rather than trying to “support” Israel with our money?

In a world where just “being Jewish” feels increasingly precarious, knowing that you are part of a people with a thriving homeland steeped in Hebrew culture and language, confident and proud, that cares about your fate is an invaluable path to courage, engagement, and character.

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.