In his memoir of his Warsaw childhood, the Nobel Prize-winning writer Isaac Bashevis Singer describes his enthusiasm for a series of Yiddish-language mystery novels featuring Max Spitzkopf, a Sherlock Holmes-like detective. David Mazower, Elissa Sperling, and Michael Yashinsky describe these bestselling potboilers and their colorful author:

For all their crude plots and cardboard characters, it’s easy to see why these stories appealed. They are packed with incident, quickfire dialogue, and cliff-hanging chapter endings. As the breathless advertising copy on the back cover [of one] tells us: “Time and again, [Spitzkopf] has been in the greatest danger, but each time his razor-sharp mind has saved him!” The same blurb highlights another obvious selling-point: “MAX SPITZKOPF IS A JEW—and he has always taken every opportunity to stand up FOR JEWS. Whenever a Jew has faced some injustice and turned to Spitzkopf for help, he was never disappointed. And this makes Spitzkopf particularly interesting for the Jewish reading public.” (Emphasis in the original.)

These are not just detective stories but tales of Jewish ingenuity featuring an armed Jewish superhero. Spitzkopf rights the wrongs of a world rife with anti-Semitism using his extraordinary powers of deduction (though his revolver sometimes also comes in handy).

Fifteen Spitzkopf stories appeared in all. They were published anonymously, but it seems their authorship was an open secret from the beginning. Spitzkopf was the creation of Jonas Kreppel, a gifted and prolific writer who is only now beginning to receive proper scholarly attention.

Kreppel was born into a middle-class ḥasidic family in Drohobycz, Galicia, [now in Ukraine], in 1874. A brilliantly gifted talmudic prodigy, he was destined for the rabbinate but found his calling as a journalist, editor, civil servant, and public intellectual writing in Hebrew, Yiddish, German, and Polish. . . . Kreppel attended the Czernowitz Jewish language conference in 1908, was active in Zionist politics on behalf of the Orthodox Agudath Israel movement, and edited or published a series of Galician Jewish newspapers. . . . Kreppel also had a role as adviser to the Austrian foreign ministry, and at one point almost became Austrian consul in Palestine.

Kreppel was murdered at Buchenwald in 1940. A translated excerpt of one of the Spitzkopf stories can be found at the link below.

On Tuesday, a Hizballah drone attack injured three people in northern Israel. The next day, another attack, targeting an IDF base, injured eighteen people, six of them seriously, in Arab al-Amshe, also in the north. This second attack involved the simultaneous use of drones carrying explosives and guided antitank missiles. In both cases, the defensive systems that performed so successfully last weekend failed to stop the drones and missiles. Ron Ben-Yishai has a straightforward explanation as to why: the Lebanon-backed terrorist group is getting better at evading Israel defenses. He explains the three basis systems used to pilot these unmanned aircraft, and their practical effects:

These systems allow drones to act similarly to fighter jets, using “dead zones”—areas not visible to radar or other optical detection—to approach targets. They fly low initially, then ascend just before crashing and detonating on the target. The terrain of southern Lebanon is particularly conducive to such attacks.

But this requires skills that the terror group has honed over months of fighting against Israel. The latest attacks involved a large drone capable of carrying over 50 kg (110 lbs.) of explosives. The terrorists have likely analyzed Israel’s alert and interception systems, recognizing that shooting down their drones requires early detection to allow sufficient time for launching interceptors.

The IDF tries to detect any incoming drones on its radar, as it had done prior to the war. Despite Hizballah’s learning curve, the IDF’s technological edge offers an advantage. However, the military must recognize that any measure it takes is quickly observed and analyzed, and even the most effective defenses can be incomplete. The terrain near the Lebanon-Israel border continues to pose a challenge, necessitating technological solutions and significant financial investment.