Yesterday, the Senate confirmed Ketanji Brown Jackson as a Supreme Court justice. Nat Lewin, whose firm briefly employed Brown Jackson, notes that there is little in her record that speaks to her approach to issues of particular importance to Jews. But two rulings give reason to be sanguine:

As a counter to the notorious Israel-baiting J Street, a pro-Zionist group called Z Street was formed in Pennsylvania in 2009. Its application for tax-exempt status under Section 501(c)(3) of the Tax Code was delayed by the IRS under a policy that prescribed more exacting review for organizations “connected with Israel.” Z Street filed a lawsuit in a Pennsylvania federal court claiming that this “special policy” was unconstitutional. On the IRS’s motion, the case was transferred to the District of Columbia, and it was randomly assigned to Judge Jackson.

The Obama Justice Department strenuously contested Z Street’s legal claim, and it argued that the lawsuit should be dismissed. In May 2014, Judge Jackson ruled in a detailed opinion that Z Street’s lawsuit should continue.

Her sympathy for claims of religious liberty may have been disclosed in a case that came to then-District Judge Jackson in 2017. A lawsuit was initiated by a U.S. Postal Service employee named Howard Tyson, who claimed that his supervisor allowed other employees to play music while they worked but denied a promotion to Tyson because he played Christian gospel music over the supervisor’s objection to “religious music.” Judge Jackson refused to dismiss the case, saying that this was “a plausible claim for religious discrimination.” . . . Jackson’s initial ruling . . . demonstrated judicial receptivity for a somewhat tenuous claim of religious freedom.

These are thin reeds on which to make any prediction of what Justice Jackson will do. But it is all we have.

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.