To Americans, the idea that religious traditionalists should gravitate toward political conservatism seems a natural one, but in Israel such an alignment is a rather more recent phenomenon—and many who would consider themselves both religious and “of the right” would not necessarily choose the term “conservative.” In a recent book, Rabbi Chaim Navon attempts to articulate a Jewish rationale for religious conservatism. Yitzchak Blau writes in his review:

Makim Shorashim lays out much of cultural conservatism’s central themes. (An English title might be something like “Striking Roots: A Jewish Critique of Postmodern Deconstruction”—but there’s a clever double entendre: l’hakot shoresh means to take root, but here . . . Navon examines the consequences of uprooting a tradition.)

Navon includes many classic critiques of modern liberalism. Liberals value the individual and the state but forget about the importance of intervening institutions, such as the family, the congregation, and the neighborhood, that pass on values and make life livable. In fact, they protect against governmental tyranny; it is no accident that the Soviets tried to undermine all these other allegiances.

Navon laments the loss [among the Orthodox] of a desire to mirror the religious behavior of one’s grandparents and attributes this to an absence of religious self-confidence that brings grandchildren back to the books instead of relying on family and community. Interestingly, he critiques both liberals trying to change religious practice significantly and conservatives searching for greater stringency. Each group remains uncomfortable with the natural continuity of family customs. For Navon, there is nothing less authentic than searching for authenticity.

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.