So immense is the impact of the Torah commentary of Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac, better known by the Hebrew acronym Rashi (1040-1105), that nearly every Jew who received a traditional education over the past several centuries has encountered it as child, and nearly every subsequent rabbinic Torah commentary uses it as a point of departure. It is also the subject of numerous supercommentaries, as well as works of systematic criticism. In a recent book, Eric Lawee presents the first complete academic study of the work itself, how it achieved its canonical status, and its overall reception in the Middle Ages. David Berger writes in his review:

[T]he book concludes with an explanation of Rashi’s victory over his most distinguished rival: Abraham Ibn Ezra (ca. 1092-1164) and Moses Naḥmanides (1194-1270)—and for that matter, the Maimonidean approach to the Bible. [Certainly], it is self-evident that Ibn Ezra’s commentary and Maimonidean interpretation could not have achieved the sweeping popularity of Rashi’s work, and to a slightly lesser degree the same is true of Nahmanides, whose work is almost certainly the most widely studied of the three rivals to Rashi.

Nevertheless, Lawee’s formulation is more than worth recording. All three of Rashi’s rivals, he says, separated Scripture into esoteric and exoteric layers, with the former inaccessible to all but a small elite. In Rashi’s case, both layers of Scriptural meaning, p’shat [the plain meaning] and midrash [the exegetical readings of the early rabbis], were exoteric and accessible in principle—and for the most part in reality—to the widest audience. I cannot improve on Lawee’s summary statement, and so I simply reproduce it. “Not that [Rashi’s] commentary was a simple text. Scores of supercommentaries, many by leading rabbis, could hardly have come to grace it if it were so. But, as Raymond Aron said of Karl Marx, his teaching lent itself to ‘simplification for the simple and to subtlety for the subtle.’ So it was with the commentary, and that, plus its protean and self-replenishing character was, and remains, a part of its greatness.”

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.