This Sunday will mark the 100th birthday of the Jewish analyst and intellectual Milton Himmelfarb, who died in 2006. Perhaps best known for his famous quip, following the 1968 presidential election, that “Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans,” and for his dire and prescient warnings about declining American Jewish birthrates, Himmelfarb also devoted much energy to Bible scholarship—ancient, medieval, and modern. His daughter, the classicist Martha Himmelfarb, examines his relationship with Jewish tradition in her reflection on his life and legacy:

For my father, taking Jewish interests seriously meant taking Jewish tradition seriously, but his relationship to the tradition was idiosyncratically modern. His funeral took place in the Orthodox synagogue in White Plains that had been an important part of his life for more than 30 years. But, as my brother Edward pointed out in his eulogy, he had become a regular there only after resigning membership in a nearby Conservative synagogue that refused to count women in a minyan. In my father’s view, the Orthodox had a right to remain traditional on this point; Conservative Jews did not.

Edward also described what was for a number of years my father’s favorite Shabbat-afternoon activity: ever interested in metrics, he would sit in a comfortable chair with the Mikra’ot g’dolot—a Bible with traditional [rabbinic] commentaries—opened to the next week’s Torah portion and an electronic calculator so that he could check the gematria (the numerical values of words based on preassigned values for each Hebrew letter) in the commentary of Rabbi Jacob ben Asher (ca. 1269-1343). He was interested to discover the large number of instances in which the numerical value of the letters didn’t precisely add up to the theologically significant number that the commentator claimed they did. He concluded that there must have been an implicit understanding that a small deviation from the desired sum was acceptable. . . .

[When it came to broader religious issues], my father argued that rabbis and Jewish communal officials were focusing on the wrong [problems]. Instead of fighting a losing battle against intermarriage (which was still under 33 percent by 1970, very low by today’s standards), they should have encouraged American Jews to have larger families; he calculated that an average family size of 2.5 or 3 would have meant a growth in Jewish population despite the losses incurred through intermarriage. He never mentioned his seven children in making his argument. . .

One obvious way to address intermarriage, my father wrote—as was often the case, taking issue with the “general wisdom” of the day—would be to encourage conversion, to “get over” an aversion to proselytizing that reflects not ancient Jewish tradition but the medieval Christian prohibition of conversion to Judaism. The most likely candidates for conversion, he continued, would be the future spouses of Jews; it would hardly count as proselytizing to encourage them to become Jewish. But surely people who find the Jewish tradition rich and meaningful should not begrudge it to others. So why restrict Jewish outreach to those future spouses?

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.