Founded in 2006, Moishe House is an organization that has established residences where young Jews can live together and host various Jewish activities (such as Shabbat dinner) for their peers living nearby. Less than a week after moving into one of these houses, Gabriel Katz learned that they have an important, if unwritten, rule: political conservatives are not welcome. The trouble began when he mentioned to a housemate’s boyfriend that he was working for a defense contractor:

The next evening, my roommates sat me down in our living room and demanded that I move out. They explained that when they agreed to accept me as a roommate, they did not know I was politically conservative. [One roommate], Michelle, said that she felt “unsafe” around me, and that she would not be able to take her birth control or bring her queer friends around me. My other roommate, Sarah, said that she did not think to ask about my political views because I was the first young conservative she had ever met.

Throughout the entire ordeal, I dealt with both regional and national Moishe House staff. They behaved throughout as though I had done something wrong. . . . They never acknowledged that my roommates were asking me to leave because they did not agree with my political views. Instead, they portrayed my roommates’ behavior as taking issue with the supposed animus I had towards gay people, Native Americans, and other minorities. (I have none.) This allowed them to label the whole ordeal as a “roommate dispute.”

Moishe House’s website states, “We embrace and encourage a variety of voices, backgrounds, and perspectives.” . . . . Moishe House’s Resident Handbook explicitly states that “Moishe Houses are intended to be spaces of community and comfort regardless of political affiliation.”

So long, that is, as that political affiliation isn’t a conservative one.

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.