In fall 2021, Oliver Ferber—then a sixteen-year-old and a stand-out athlete at a pluralistic Jewish day school in suburban Maryland—made one of the most difficult decisions of his young life. Like one of the two protagonists of the 1981 film Chariots of Fire, Ferber decided to sit out a championship race being held on Shabbat. Sam Borden tells his story:

Oliver Ferber stood still. In front of him, everyone was moving: his classmates, his running partners, his teammates—they were all striding and sprinting and pushing themselves through the biggest race of the year on this Saturday morning in November 2021. On any other day, Oliver thought, I’d be among them—maybe even in front of them. On this day, though, he only watched.

It wasn’t about the running, really. It wasn’t about sports at all. It was about faith and conviction and belief. It was about the weight that comes with confronting one of the hardest questions a person can face: What do you do when everyone you trust is telling you to do one thing, but you’re pretty sure you’re supposed to do the exact opposite?

During the early days of the pandemic, Oliver found himself gravitating more and more toward his Judaism. He began praying more. He began connecting with other Jews who were more observant through youth groups. He began taking a stricter approach to the holiness of Shabbat.

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.