In 1994, the sixteen-year-old Ari Halberstam was killed when Rashid Baz opened fire with two handguns at a van carrying Ari and several other ḥasidic boys near the Brooklyn Bridge. Baz was convicted the same year on charges of murder and attempted murder, but the FBI declined to pursue the case, initially classifying it as “road rage”—despite the fact that Baz was in possession of anti-Semitic literature and despite significant evidence that he was influenced by the anti-Semitic sermons at the mosque he attended regularly. But Devorah Halberstam, Ari’s mother, devoted herself to investigating the details, eventually convincing the FBI to reclassify the incident as terrorism.

Jacob Siegel describes Halberstam’s unusual career, and her renewed relevance:

Few people took Halberstam seriously until September 11, 2001. . . . She became New York’s eccentric, homegrown expert on the intersection of criminal justice and counterterrorism. Local and state police called on her to teach classes; the FBI invited her to speak. . . . After the recent attacks in Jersey City, it was Devorah Halberstam whom New York City’s Mayor Bill de Blasio called to stand by his side at a press conference, perhaps to shore up his sagging credibility.

For years, even before the distraction of his ill-fated presidential campaign, de Blasio did little to address or arrest the rise in anti-Semitic incidents in the city. . . . When the mayor finally decided—or felt forced—to focus on anti-Semitism, he initially blamed white supremacists for hate crimes in New York City. . . . Gradually, de Blasio has been led by events toward a more expansive view of the problem, [while continuing to insist that] the rise in anti-Semitism, “is directly related to the permission that’s being given to hate speech in the last three years and that obviously connects to the election of Donald Trump.”

In New York, where she lives and where the spike in regular street attacks against Jews has taken place, Halberstam does not see the problem in terms of ideological enemies but looks instead to things closer to home: new proposals to change the laws around cash bail, parole for older inmates, and other initiatives risk “going from one extreme to the other,” Halberstam said.

In Brooklyn, Halberstam believes that the problem can be located “at the point where the NYPD’s hate-crimes task force has an event and passes it on to [the Brooklyn district attorney Eric] Gonzalez’s hate-crimes office.” Gonzalez . . . has a penchant for plea deals on hate-crime cases including those related to felony charges, according to Halberstam. [The hate-crime designation, she argues, must be] “meaningful,” [which] “doesn’t mean let the guy out the door so he can go back home and tell his buddies, ‘Nothing happens.’”

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.