Located on West 47th Street in Manhattan—not far from Times Square—the Actors’ Temple still holds regular services, having been revived about a decade ago when it came close to shutting its doors. Its primary connection to the theater district today is that it rents its space for off-Broadway performances on weekdays, but it was once a magnet for celebrities, as Josefin Dolsten recounts:

The Three Stooges, the actors Shelley Winters and Aaron Chwatt (better known as Red Buttons), the baseball stars Sandy Koufax and Hank Greenberg, and the television host Ed Sullivan all prayed there. Sullivan, whose wife was Jewish [but he himself was not], also hosted the annual temple benefit at the Majestic Theater. Headshots of stars who frequented the synagogue hang on a wall.

The synagogue was founded in 1917 for a very different crowd: Orthodox shopkeepers who worked in Hell’s Kitchen, a neighborhood lined today with bars and restaurants catering to the pre-theater crowd but which at the time was rife with gangs.

In the 1920s, the synagogue, formerly known as Congregation Ezrath Israel, hired Bernard Birstein as its first rabbi. Birstein had his eyes on Broadway, which was home to many Jewish actors and actresses but few regular synagogue-goers. . . . One of Birstein’s first recruits was the popular Ukrainian-born entertainer Sophie Tucker, [famous for singing “My Yiddishe Mama”]. After Tucker, other stars started flowing in.

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.