The island nation of Singapore is already home to southeast Asia’s oldest synagogue. Now it also has a Jewish museum, dedicated to the history of local Jewry. Clement Yong writes:

Located on the first floor of the synagogue’s neighbor, the Jacob Ballas Center, [the museum] covers the community’s history from the first Jews’ arrival in Singapore soon after it became a British colony in the early 1800s up to March of this year, when a twenty-year-old man was detained for planning a knife attack at the Maghain Aboth Synagogue.

The narrative it tells pauses at several key Jewish figures in Singapore’s history. A panel is dedicated to David Marshall, who was chief minister of pre-independence Singapore from 1955 to 1956, and a room to Jacob Ballas, . . . chairman of the Malaysia and Singapore Stock Exchange from 1964 to 1967. Other notable names include the former Supreme Court judge Joseph Grimberg, pioneering surgeon Yahya Cohen, and Sir Manasseh Meyer, a prominent businessman.

There are write-ups about Jewish rites and festivals in the museum so those interested can be given a crash course in Jewish culture. . . . One interesting tradition cited is the pouring of water on the back of a person’s car as he departs for the airport for good luck. After a boy is circumcised, the mother and child must also be on the same floor of the house for 40 days, and the child taken out to cross seven bridges.

Law and Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam, who months before had stood in front of the synagogue in solidarity with the Jewish community after a planned attack on those leaving the synagogue was foiled, was guest of honor at the [museum’s] launch. “If you look at the roads [with names like] Frankel Estate, Meyer Road, . . . Jews have made a tremendous contribution,” . . .  he told reporters. . . . He also paid tribute to the seven Israeli advisers who came to train Singapore’s first soldiers.

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.