The events of the past year, noted Eric Cohen in his speech to the Jewish Leadership Conference last week, have given the Jews ample reason to indulge their well-known penchant for worrying. Surveying some of these causes for concern, he reflected on the best way to respond:

Around the world—from the Poway synagogue shooting, to the Holocaust-haunted streets of Berlin, to the Orthodox neighborhoods of Borough Park—the number of physical assaults on Jews, simply for being Jews, is on the rise. To the mad white supremacist, the Jew is vermin. To the radical “woke” activist, the Jew is a fascist. And to the Islamic fundamentalist, the Jew is an infidel.

Yet stand up to them all we will.

Around the world—even in America—a campaign has begun to treat the rituals, rites, and beliefs of traditional Jews as backward and bigoted. Bans on kosher food. Bans on circumcision. Efforts to shut down Jewish schools for focusing too much on the transmission of Jewish identity. Efforts to ostracize traditional Jews who do not acquiesce in progressive dogmas about gender and marriage.

Amid these many concerns, we also face the slow but steady withering of Jewish identity here at home. The tragic reality is that too many Jews in America have only a fading attachment to the miracle and majesty, the wisdom and weight, the rites and responsibilities, of being a Jew. In the end, we cannot control the perverted ideologies of our enemies. But the transmission of Jewish civilization falls solely upon us: committed Jews, awed by the Jewish past, sober about the Jewish present, and hopeful about the Jewish future.

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.