In Jonathan Levi’s Septimania, the protagonist, Malory, discovers himself to be descended from the rulers of a short-lived 8th-century Jewish kingdom in southwestern France. (Septimania was in fact a medieval principality with a significant Jewish population.) The author, writes Michael Weingrad, “whips history, mathematics, politics, music, theater, and religion into his soufflé,” not to mention a 17th-century parallel plotline involving Isaac Newton and, above all, the story of Malory’s love for the beautiful Luiza. In his review, Weingrad concludes that the book, while succeeding as a love story, fails to live up to its own ambitions:

Septimania . . . gestures throughout at real-world history, politics, and ideas, and here the book is mushy. The problem is not just the occasional over-prettiness, though at least some of the magic on offer in Levi’s novel is the glamor of a certain kind of wealth and cultural capital. . . . The real issue is that, while Septimania presents itself as a novel of ideas, it’s really a novel of just one. As Malory learns, the book’s big themes, from Newtonian physics to Islamist jihad, are in the end all just fragmentary gropings after the One True Answer revealed at the book’s conclusion: Love. “Newton was looking, as Malory was looking,” writes Levi, “as perhaps the rocks, planets, the stars, the oranges on the branches of the trees of the Giardino degli Aranci were looking—they were all looking for sympathy. For sympathy. For love.”

Now maybe the oranges in Rome are looking for love, and maybe they’re not, but there is a difference between aesthetics and history, and Septimania lyrically blurs the two rather than tracing the true edge between them. One also notices the absence of any mention of Israel, curious in a Mediterranean-spanning novel that is so concerned with Jewish kingdoms, history, and searches for home. . . . In Septimania . . . the king of the Jews jets from England to Italy to New York, but does not bother with the most intricate, enchanting, and, yes, cosmopolitan Jewish kingdom that includes the cities of present-day Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

But that is to push the novel where it does not want to go.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”