Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick are both members of a generation of Jewish writers who displayed remarkable literary ability and did much to shape the American cultural scene. Thus one can’t but be fascinated by Ozick’s assessment of Roth, which appears just a few weeks before the sixth anniversary of his death. Although both Ozick and Roth filled their novels with unmistakably Jewish characters, Ozick openly advocated an embrace of Jewish particularism—what she described as blowing through the “narrow end of the shofar”—while Roth always chafed at being labeled a Jewish writer.

Ozick notes a 2014 interview in which Roth, confronted with that label, insisted that his “family has been here 120 years, or for more than half of America’s existence. They arrived during the second term of President Grover Cleveland, only seventeen years after the end of Reconstruction.” “What,” asks Ozick, “might Henry Adams say to that? Or Gore Vidal?” She adds:

In Roth’s assemblage of family members, fictional and otherwise, his foreign-born grandmother is curiously, and notably, mostly absent. “She spoke Yiddish, I spoke English,” he once remarked, as if this explained her irrelevance. Was this insatiable student of history unaware of, or simply indifferent to, her experiences, the political and economic circumstances that compelled her immigration, the enduring civilization that she personified, the modernist Yiddish literary culture that was proliferating all around him in scores of vibrant publications in midcentury New York? Was he altogether inattentive to the presence of I.B. Singer, especially after Bellow’s groundbreaking translation of “Gimpel the Fool,” which introduced Yiddish as a Nobel-worthy facet of American literature?

Speculation about the private, intimate, hidden apprehensions of Roth-the-Fearless may be illicit, but what are we to make of his dismissal of the generation whose flight from some Russian or Polish or Ukrainian pinpoint village had catapulted him into the pinpoint Weequahic section of Newark, New Jersey? Was it the purported proximity of Grover Cleveland, or the near-at-hand Yiddish-speaking grandmother, who had made him the American he was? Had Roth lived only a few years more, he might have discovered a vulnerability that, like the [fictional] Roth family under President Lindbergh [in his 2004 The Plot Against America], he might have been unprepared to anticipate.

While the current Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, has never been friendly to Hamas, his government has objected strenuously to the Israeli campaign in the southernmost part of the Gaza Strip. Haisam Hassanein explains why:

Cairo has long been playing a double game, holding Hamas terrorists near while simultaneously trying to appear helpful to the United States and Israel. Israel taking control of Rafah threatens Egypt’s ability to exploit the chaos in Gaza, both to generate profits for regime insiders and so Cairo can pose as an indispensable mediator and preserve access to U.S. money and arms.

Egyptian security officials have looked the other way while Hamas and other Palestinian militants dug tunnels on the Egyptian-Gaza border. That gave Cairo the ability to use the situation in Gaza as a tool for regional influence and to ensure Egypt’s role in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict would not be eclipsed by regional competitors such as Qatar and Turkey.

Some elements close to the Sisi regime have benefited from Hamas control over Gaza and the Rafah crossing. Media reports indicate an Egyptian company run by one of Sisi’s close allies is making hundreds of millions of dollars by taxing Gazans fleeing the current conflict.

Moreover, writes Judith Miller, the Gaza war has been a godsend to the entire Egyptian economy, which was in dire straits last fall. Since October 7, the International Monetary Fund has given the country a much-needed injection of cash, since the U.S. and other Western countries believe it is a necessary intermediary and stabilizing force. Cairo therefore sees the continuation of the war, rather than an Israeli victory, as most desirable. Hassanein concludes:

Adding to its financial incentive, the Sisi regime views the Rafah crossing as a crucial card in preserving Cairo’s regional standing. Holding it increases Egypt’s relevance to countries that want to send aid to the Palestinians and ensures Washington stays quiet about Egypt’s gross human-rights violations so it can maintain a stable flow of U.S. assistance and weaponry. . . . No serious effort to turn the page on Hamas will yield the desired results without cutting this umbilical cord between the Sisi regime and Hamas.