Two recent books—An Unpromising Land by Gur Alroey and Babel in Zion by Liora Halperin—explore the experiences of rank-and-file Jewish immigrants to Ottoman and British Palestine as opposed to the passionate pioneers and ideologues who have dominated most historians’ attention. In his review, Allan Arkush deems the first book poorly argued but finds much of interest in the second, which documents how Hebrew succeeded in taking hold among the East European-born masses:

When Yiddish movies first hit the market, . . . the Zionist educator Yosef Luria tried to discourage theater managers from showing them. . . . On September 27, 1920, members of the Battalion of the Defenders of the Hebrew Language protested the screening of Mayne Yiddishe Mame at the Mograbi Theater in Tel Aviv. When they failed to prevent it, they infiltrated the theater, then booed and hurled foul-smelling objects at the screen when the talking began. [But] it was easier to keep Yiddish off the screens than off the streets, which were often crowded with peddlers hawking alte zakhn [used goods] and street food in their native tongue. . . .

More threatening to Hebrew than the languages of the countries from which the Jewish immigrants had come was the language of the colonial power governing Palestine: English. It was an uphill struggle to get the British administration to live up to its promise to treat Hebrew as one of the official languages of Palestine. . . .

Halperin does not suggest that people’s recourse for one reason or another to languages other than Hebrew was a defection from Zionism. It would be wrong, she says, to imagine a “rhetorical divide between pro-Hebrew Zionist Jews and apathetic, foreign-language-using non-Zionist Jews.”

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.