Last fall, the writer Philip Roth bequeathed some 4,000 books to the public library in his hometown of Newark, NJ, which figures prominently in over a dozen of his novels as well as in many of his short stories and essays. The city, once a prosperous center of manufacturing and commerce, now symbolizes urban blight and decline. Drawing on Newark’s actual history, Steven Malanga analyzes its role in Roth’s oeuvre.

The Jewish neighborhoods that Roth knew in the 1930s and 1940s . . . were peopled by the great wave of East European immigrants who arrived from the early 1880s through the mid-1920s—some two million Jews, largely from Russia and Galicia. Perhaps as many as 50,000 of those sojourners made their way to Newark. They lived initially in tenements . . . in the city’s old Third Ward. Among the residents: Roth’s paternal grandfather, who worked in the tanneries to put food on the table for seven kids. . . . [A]s the immigrants’ children assimilated, they gradually moved west, forming a lower-middle-class ethnic stronghold at Newark’s edge—some 58 streets of apartment buildings, small houses, and bustling shopping thoroughfares known as Weequahic, an Indian phrase meaning “head of the cove.” . . .

[T]o the immigrants of Newark and their descendants, those neighborhoods offered a safe harbor, a place where they could grow up surrounded by familiar faces and with shared mores, even as they began to assimilate. Roth commonly describes Weequahic and Newark as a haven or an enclave. In his 1988 nonfiction book, The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography, he writes: “Our lower-middle-class neighborhood of houses and shops . . . was as safe and peaceful a haven for me as his rural community would have been for an Indiana farm boy.”

Jews had even more of a stake in such enclaves than did other ethnic and religious groups. Italians, Irish, Germans, and other immigrants came to America largely seeking economic opportunity. Many maintained ties with their homelands; by some estimates, as many as 60 percent of immigrants from the Great Migration returned home. But most Jewish immigrants were fleeing persecution and political chaos in central Europe; they had no homeland or waiting families back in the Old World. His grandparents, Roth writes in The Facts, left Europe “because life was awful; so awful, in fact, so menacing, or impoverished or hopelessly obstructed, that it was best left forgotten.”

Roth acknowledges that act of forgetting as something that separated Newark’s Jews from many of its other immigrants. . . . This reality helps explain why assimilation was so important for the Jews of Newark, even as they struggled to retain an ethnic identity. Roth describes this tension in American Pastoral as “the contradiction in Jews who want to fit in and to stand out, who insist they are different and insist they are no different.”

The Mossad’s heist of a vast Iranian nuclear archive in 2018 provided abundant evidence that Tehran was not adhering to its commitments; it also provided an enormous amount of actionable intelligence. Two years later, Israel responded to international inspectors’ condemnation of the Islamic Republic’s violations by using this intelligence to launch a spectacular campaign of sabotage—a campaign that is the subject of Target Tehran, by Yonah Jeremy Bob and Ilan Evyatar. David Adesnik writes:

The question that remains open at the conclusion of Target Tehran is whether the Mossad’s tactical wizardry adds up to strategic success in the shadow war with Iran. The authors give a very respectful hearing to skeptics—such as the former Mossad director Tamir Pardo—who believe the country should have embraced the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. Bob and Evyatar reject that position, arguing that covert action has proven itself the best way to slow down the nuclear program. They acknowledge, however, that the clerical regime remains fully determined to reach the nuclear threshold. “The Mossad’s secret war, in other words, is not over. Indeed, it may never end,” they write.

Which brings us back to Joe Biden. The clerical regime was headed over a financial cliff when Biden took office, thanks to the reimposition of sanctions after Washington withdrew from the nuclear deal. The billions flowing into Iran on Biden’s watch have made it that much easier for the regime to rebuild whatever Mossad destroys in addition to weathering nationwide protests on behalf of women, life, and freedom. Until Washington and Jerusalem get on the same page—and stay there—Tehran’s nuclear ambitions will remain an affordable luxury for a dictatorship at war with its citizens.