Released in 1942, and set in German-occupied Poland, To Be or Not to Be tells the story of a troupe of actors who use their theatrical talents to foil a Nazi attempt to unravel the Polish resistance. The film’s director, Ernst Lubitsch, was himself a German-born Jew actively involved in raising money to help his coreligionists fleeing Europe to resettle in the U.S. Although the plight of Polish Jewry is secondary to the movie’s plot, it is, according to Thomas Doherty, the subject of one of its most powerful scenes:

Title notwithstanding, the best-remembered soliloquy in the film is not from Hamlet but from The Merchant of Venice. In a plot machination too convoluted to recap, the perennially second-billed Felix Bressart [playing a bit-player from the troupe named Greenberg]—a Jewish character actor and Lubitsch stock-company regular—is given his moment in the spotlight, reciting the anguished monologue from the role he was born to play, Shylock. “Have we not eyes? Have we not hands, organs, senses, dimensions, attachments, passions?” he asks the Nazis, who are mesmerized despite themselves. (The post-Holocaust spectator will be especially spooked by the accusation: “If you poison us, do we not die?”)

Spoken against a backdrop of Nazi uniforms, helmets, and swastikas, Bressart’s performance is transfixing. He seems to know already that wartime Hollywood cinema will never produce a more eloquent plea for religious tolerance than the one written in the 1590s.

Curiously, though, Bressart does not speak the trigger word that in Shakespeare launches the litany of rhetorical questions, [beginning with] “Hath not a Jew eyes?” Still radioactive, the word Jew was seldom heard on the Hollywood screen, even in war-minded scenarios where the topic of anti-Semitism was front and center. In The Mortal Storm (1940), for example, the Jewish professor murdered by the Nazis is never named as such—only called a “non-Aryan” with the letter “J” printed on his concentration-camp uniform. . . .

Fortunately, elsewhere in To Be or Not to Be the Jewish elements are hardly hidden between the lines. Is Hitler “by any chance interested in Mr. Maslowski’s delicatessen?” teases the narrator in the opening vignette. “That’s impossible—he’s a vegetarian!”

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.