By unanimous vote, New York City officials decided last week to remove a statue of Thomas Jefferson from the chamber where the city council meets. While the case against the third president as a slaveholder is well known, the statue’s removal, Samuel Goldman writes, is a repudiation of the Declaration of Independence that he authored. It is also an insult to Uriah P. Levy, the Jewish naval hero who in 1833 commissioned the sculpture of Jefferson of which this one is a replica:

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who served on the Supreme Court since 1993, died on Friday at the age of eighty-seven. Among much else, Ginsburg was one of the most prominent Jews in American public life. Herewith, her remarks at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in 2004 on the occasion of Yom Hashoah: