Two Recent Novels about Undying Jewish Women Make Distinctive Statements about Human Purpose

The protagonist of Dara Horn’s Eternal Life is a Second Temple-era Jewish woman cursed with eternal life. Similarly, the protagonist of Sarah Perry’s Melmoth is a Jewish woman from the same time but, in her case, fated to wander the earth for eternity as punishment for witnessing Jesus’ resurrection and then denying she did so. Michael Weingrad notes a singular difference in how the two books address their shared central question of “why go on?”

Horn [considers]—and this is what makes her tale so distinctive—not the value of an individual life but the determination to be fruitful and multiply, to continue the Jewish story through our children and our children’s children. Horn shows that the will to enlarge a family is the deepest expression of faith not only in the divine but in the human, too. As contemporary demography suggests, when that faith weakens, birthrates fall. Human concern retreats to the shape and duration of the individual’s life. The import of Horn’s book for our moment, then, is not [her protagonist] Rachel’s longevity but her natality. . . .

[By contrast], Perry’s wraith-like wanderer is an eternal witness to human cruelty with none of the consolations of religious belief. The subjects of her visitations are bystanders, and sometimes worse, to the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, Christian religious persecution, violent misogyny, the deportation of illegal immigrants, and the criminalization of euthanasia. Call it progressive gothic.

Like Horn’s novel, Perry’s asks: why go on? But here the question means, why go on when humanity is so ugly? Why go on when each of us is so implicated in the injustices of the world? . . .

I couldn’t help being struck by the fact that not one of the half-dozen or so characters visited by Perry’s [protagonist] has children. Some are married, some elderly, but none, it seems, is a parent. Perry’s novel seems to warn of the despair that accrues from witnessing the world without a vantage point larger than the self. Horn’s is about a certain hopeful yearning for the world, a hope that in some sense is our children.

Read more at Jewish Review of Books

More about: Arts & Culture, Children, Dara Horn, Jewish literature

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF