The celebrated writer Herman Wouk died on Friday, just ten days before his 104th birthday. Between 1947 and 2012 he wrote sixteen novels, in addition to plays and non-fiction books; his last work, a memoir, appeared in 2015. A devout and learned Jew, Wouk often dealt in his books with the themes of Judaism, the American Jewish experience, and the state of Israel. In a 2010 piece from Jewish Ideas Daily, Margot Lurie revisits one of his most popular novels, Marjorie Morningstar, derided at the time of its publication for its flat writing and middlebrow qualities:

Born Marjorie Morgenstern in 1916 (a year after the birth of her creator), our heroine appears to us first as an undergraduate at Hunter College in New York, dreaming of becoming an actress and striving to rid herself of every mitzvah and mannerism that constituted her identity. She Anglicizes her Semitic surname, dabbles in sex, and engages in the years-long pursuit of a dilettantish stage director—all without success. In the end, never having seen her stage name on a marquee, she settles for settling down with a steady husband, children, and a return to religious observance. . . .

The book is conservative, it is said, not just because the Bronx striver ends up as Mrs. Milton Schwartz of the suburbs but because Wouk is intent on showing that having been Noel Airman’s girl in Greenwich Village wasn’t really so great to begin with. As lobster is a let-down, so is sex, so is liberation. . . .

True, but not the whole truth. Wouk asserts that Marjorie’s best joys reside in tame, kosher amusements: watching a sunset, dancing, reading scripts. But it’s as if he can’t bear to prove the point. If forbidden food and forbidden sex and trashy theater are rigged and unfair and no damn fun, why does his heroine keep coming back for more and more of them? By choosing Morality over Marjorie while indulging Marjorie over Morality, Wouk creates a character, call her a puritanical sybarite, much more intriguing than he may have intended.

And there’s something else. Marjorie is not the only striver in the book—her ambitions are set against a backdrop of aspiring immigrant life. (Among its other faults, the 1958 movie adaptation of the novel dispenses with all of this.) Marjorie’s orphaned father became, at fifteen, “a fleck of foam on the great wave of immigration from Eastern Europe,” working himself up in the millinery business. At Marjorie’s age, her mother was a Yiddish-speaking immigrant in a Brooklyn sweatshop. Her Falstaffian uncle worked as a night watchman and a dish washer. “But a nickel, Modgerie, a nickel I alvays had, to buy you a Hershey bar ven I came to this house.”

In This Is My God, [his reflection on Judaism], Wouk writes that “even the enemies of the Jews have long recognized the stability of the Jewish family.” Marjorie’s parents fought hard for that stability, and were able to give their children better educations and material provisions than they had enjoyed: good, safe, assimilated, working-class lives that became middle-class lives. Marjorie’s children in turn will have led upper-middle-class lives. Much can be said about what was gained and what was lost along the way, for the boys and the girls alike; but by whose perspective is this a tragedy?

So spare a thought for plucky, unlucky Marjorie.

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.