While the novelist Saul Bellow once referred to the phrase “Jewish writers in America”—often used to include himself, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth—as “a repulsive category,” he remained unwavering in his commitment to the Jewish people. Cynthia Ozick, reviewing a collection of Bellow’s letters, writes about why his work endures, and about his place as a Jewish writer:

[T]here was personal warmth and varying degrees of literary admiration for his confederates in the triumvirate he parodied as “Hart, Schaffner & Marx,” a quip that has survived the decades. What reluctantly united all three—Bellow, Roth, Malamud—was a concept imposed on them by the celebrity-sloganeering of the journalists: “American Jewish writers.” But the link was both superficial and specious: each invented his own mythos and imagined his own republic of letters. It was not the complexity of heritage Bellow was resisting in his tailor-made mockery, but its reduction to a narrowing palliative, nowadays fashionably termed “identity.” . . .

[W]hen, not yet out of their teens, Bellow and Isaac Rosenfeld dissolved the solemn ironies of T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” into a hilariously lampooning Yiddish ditty, it may have marked the signal moment when writers born Jewish and awakened into America would refuse to be refused by Western history.

Bellow’s capacity for what might (in quick march) be called Jewish intelligence summoned deeps far beyond where the journalists could follow: the literary talent that rose up, in puzzling if impressive flocks, out of what appeared to be a low immigrant culture. Bellow was distinctive in transcending—transgressing against—the archetype of the coarse and unlettered ghetto greenhorn. The greenhorns in their humble trades were aware that they were carriers of a moral civilization. (“You are too intelligent for this,” [the title character of Herzog] protests to his vaporously over-theorizing friend Shapiro. “Your father had rich blood. He peddled apples.”)

Though he had repeatedly declared himself, as an American, free to choose according to will or desire, Bellow also chose not to be disaffected. He was in possession of an inherited literacy that few novelists of Jewish background, writers of or close to his generation, could match, however sophisticated otherwise they might be. His range spanned an inclusive continuum . . . ; Western learning and literature had also to mean Jewish learning and literature. He was at home in biblical Hebrew, was initiated into the liturgy from early childhood, and read and spoke (always with relish) a supple Yiddish.

This week, there have been numerous unconfirmed reports about the fate of Esmail Qaani, who is the head of the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Benny Avni writes:

On Thursday, Sky News Arabic reported that Mr. Qaani was rushed to a hospital after suffering a heart attack. He became [the Quds Force] commander in 2020, after an American drone strike killed his predecessor, Qassem Suleimani. The unit oversees the Islamic Republic’s various Mideast proxies, as well as the exporting of the Iranian revolution to the region and beyond.

The Sky News report attempts to put to rest earlier claims that Mr. Qaani was killed at Beirut. It follows several reports asserting he has been arrested and interrogated at Tehran over suspicion that he, or a top lieutenant, leaked information to Israel. Five days ago, the Arabic-language al-Arabiya network reported that Mr. Qaani “is under surveillance and isolation, following the Israeli assassinations of prominent Iranian leaders.”

Iranians are desperately scrambling to plug possible leaks that gave Israel precise intelligence to conduct pinpoint strikes against Hizballah commanders. . . . “I find it hard to believe that Qaani was compromised,” an Iran watcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. Perhaps one or more of [Qaani’s] top aides have been recruited by Israel, he says, adding that “psychological warfare” could well be stoking the rumor mill.

If so, prominent Iranians seem to be exacerbating the internal turmoil by alleging that the country’s security apparatus has been infiltrated.