Lessons in Jewish Politics from Three of the 20th Century’s Greatest Works of Jewish Fiction

Pick
June 12 2018
About Ruth

Ruth R. Wisse is professor emerita of Yiddish and comparative literatures at Harvard and a distinguished senior fellow at Tikvah. Her memoir Free as a Jew: a Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation, chapters of which appeared in Mosaic in somewhat different form, is out from Wicked Son Press.

In the period between the world wars, Isaac Babel wrote the cycle of stories Red Cavalry in the Soviet Union, S.Y. Agnon wrote the novel In the Heart of the Seas in Jerusalem, and Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote the novella Satan in Goray in Warsaw. Each book, influenced by its author’s experience of war, revolution, and—in Agnon’s case—immigration to Palestine, explores aspects of the Jewish condition. Ruth R. Wisse finds in these works much that is relevant to Jewish politics today. (Video, 35 minutes.)

Read more at Jewish Leadership Conference

More about: Arts & Culture, Isaac Babel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jewish literature, S. Y. Agnon

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