The distinguished 20th-century poet Robert Lowell, despite his impeccable-seeming Boston Brahmin pedigree, liked to bring up the fact that he was “one-eighth Jewish.” As Stuart Schoffman details, Lowell in fact had one Jewish great-great grandfather on his father’s side and another on his mother’s side. More immediately, his literary career brought him into regular contact with the many Jews among the New York intellectuals. He once told another writer: “Most of my friends are Jewish, and the people I’ve learned the most from, and that I like best, in New York are Jewish.”

Reviewing two recent books about the Lowell—a scholarly biography and a memoir by an ex-lover—Schoffman explores the poet’s eccentric and contradictory relations with Jews and the Jewish people.

At age nineteen, [before World War II], Lowell had written the [notoriously anti-Semitic Ezra] Pound from Harvard, boldly requesting tutelage. . . . Pound, an infamous fascist, made anti-American broadcasts from Mussolini’s Italy, for which he was [later] locked up for treason. He [then] spent twelve years at St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital in Washington, DC, where Lowell visited him. But Pound’s Jewish-conspiracy theories were more than Lowell could bear. As he wrote to him in 1956, “I have no mind for your gospel, and don’t let us talk about the Jews.” . . .

Lowell was obsessed with the Holocaust. In 1953, living in Amsterdam, he wrote the poet Randall Jarrell, . . . that he had just read “twenty volumes of the Nuremberg trials,” as well as Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. But [he] was also drawn to tyrants, and morbidly fixated on Hitler. . . . [I]n the 1970s, he read Mein Kampf aloud to his third wife, Caroline Blackwood, telling her that Hitler was a better writer than Melville. In his manic phases, [Lowell, who suffered from serious mental illness for much of his life], sometimes believed he was Hitler, though at other times it was Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Homer’s Achilles, Dante, Shakespeare, Jesus Christ, or the “Jewish messiah.”

Sandra Hochman’s memoir reveals Lowell’s chilling capacity to lurch from Jew-lover to the opposite. At his request, she made him a seder. “He loved wearing a yarmulke I gave him,” [she writes].

In another episode Hochman relates, Lowell threw a cocktail party in which he became very drunk, started yelling about Hitler and Stalin until his guests slipped out, and then pushed her to the ground, placed his hands around her neck, and declared “I’m Hitler and you’re a Jew, and I’m going to kill you.” While finding the anecdote at least credible, Schoffman suggests that it reveals not so much latent anti-Semitism as something about “the treacherous interplay of anti-Semitism and its sneaky twin, philo-.”

For some time, opponents of U.S support for Israel have been urging the White House to end the war in Gaza, or simply calling for a ceasefire. Douglas Feith and Lewis Libby consider what such a result would actually entail:

Ending the war immediately would allow Hamas to survive and retain military and governing power. Leaving it in the area containing the Sinai-Gaza smuggling routes would ensure that Hamas can rearm. This is why Hamas leaders now plead for a ceasefire. A ceasefire will provide some relief for Gazans today, but a prolonged ceasefire will preserve Hamas’s bloody oppression of Gaza and make future wars with Israel inevitable.

For most Gazans, even when there is no hot war, Hamas’s dictatorship is a nightmarish tyranny. Hamas rule features the torture and murder of regime opponents, official corruption, extremist indoctrination of children, and misery for the population in general. Hamas diverts foreign aid and other resources from proper uses; instead of improving life for the mass of the people, it uses the funds to fight against Palestinians and Israelis.

Moreover, a Hamas-affiliated website warned Gazans last month against cooperating with Israel in securing and delivering the truckloads of aid flowing into the Strip. It promised to deal with those who do with “an iron fist.” In other words, if Hamas remains in power, it will begin torturing, imprisoning, or murdering those it deems collaborators the moment the war ends. Thereafter, Hamas will begin planning its next attack on Israel:

Hamas’s goals are to overshadow the Palestinian Authority, win control of the West Bank, and establish Hamas leadership over the Palestinian revolution. Hamas’s ultimate aim is to spark a regional war to obliterate Israel and, as Hamas leaders steadfastly maintain, fulfill a Quranic vision of killing all Jews.

Hamas planned for corpses of Palestinian babies and mothers to serve as the mainspring of its October 7 war plan. Hamas calculated it could survive a war against a superior Israeli force and energize enemies of Israel around the world. The key to both aims was arranging for grievous Palestinian civilian losses. . . . That element of Hamas’s war plan is working impressively.