Celia Dropkin (1887-1955) was one of a number of women, mostly living in New York City, who began writing Yiddish poems for publication in the 1920s, when Yiddish literary circles were still very much male-dominated. Analyzing a poem in which the speaker describes being humiliated and morally crushed by the accusations of an unnamed tormentor, Ruth Wisse writes:

The woman in the poem does not say what, if anything, she has done to earn her accuser’s mistrust. Although she is the poem’s subject, its tone is determined by the person who has turned her into its object. . . . The phrase that kept reverberating in my head was the one . . . that serves as the poem’s title, in koyt fun dayn fardakht. You soak me . . . not simply in dirt, which would have been shmutz, but in koyt, in the filth, of your fardakht, the Germanic term for suspicion or distrust. The grating and guttural sounds of those two nouns . . . have the power to turn the woman into an odious, hideous creature. . . .

As I say, the poem got under my skin but I could not say why. None of my complicated experiences in love or antagonism had ever made me feel ossified, as the woman is here. . . .

One day during a trip to Israel in 1994 a Hamas suicide bomber detonated a bus in Tel Aviv killing 22 people and wounding 50 others. A paper I was reading published a copy of the Hamas covenant and I read through the preamble’s determination to obliterate Israel. . . Unbidden, the words leapt to mind: “Vos ikh zog un, / alts toyvlstu in koyt fun dayn fardakht” (Everything I say and do / you soak in the filth of your suspicion.)

I rehearsed the poem again and yes, there was just what I was feeling. Your pathology turns me into an ugly and malicious creature, glued to the floor, immobile, unable to exact revenge. It was suddenly clear to me why the woman in the poem could not act on her fury. It wasn’t because she was a masochist and enjoyed rebuff. She cannot strike back because she wants to be accepted by the very person who will not grant her love.

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.