Best known, perhaps, for her short-lived romance with Saul Bellow—who remained her friend and confidant for the remainder of his life—Bette Howland, who died in 2017 and is little remembered today, had a promising career as a writer of criticism and fiction. The recently published Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage collects a novella of the same name, some of her short stories, and a previously unpublished work. Calling Howland a “brilliant 20th-century Jewish American woman writer,” Rachel Shteir describes her career and oeuvre:

On paper, Howland seems deserving of . . . new attention. She wrote one memoir, two short-story collections, and criticism, mostly for Commentary magazine. Her books received good reviews and she was awarded both Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships. After the MacArthur, she mostly stopped writing fiction. . .

I am reluctant to paint Howland as a victim of her onetime lover—or the “patriarchy.” After the early passion waned, Bellow seems to have been devoted to his friend. . . . It also seems wrong to blame Bellow for the fact that after the breakup, while his exile from Chicago included Bellagio, hers included a remote island in Maine and a farm in Pennsylvania. He was ravished by the world; she lived like a monk. . . .

[Likewise], I don’t see any glimmer of [ravishment] in Howland’s work, which, as her son writes, is mostly about “the indescribable metaphysical bleakness of life in Chicago.” The best of Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage describes that city. My favorite story, “Blue in Chicago,” remains among the most accurate descriptions of Hyde Park’s siege mentality that I have read. “You always want to know how close these things come to you,” the narrator begins, describing the shooting of a graduate student. Howland’s cold evocation of that South Side neighborhood only serves to illuminate more brilliantly the sadness she feels when trapped with her sulky Jewish relatives at a wedding. She has nowhere to go.

In a recent episode of 60 Minutes, a former State Department official tells the interviewer that U.S. support for Israel following October 7 has “put a target on America’s back” in the Arab world “and beyond the Arab world.” The complaint is a familiar one: Middle Easterners hate the United States because of its closeness to the Jewish state. But this gets things exactly backward. Just look at the rhetoric of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its various Arab proxies: America is the “Great Satan” and Israel is but the “Little Satan.”

Why, then, does Iran see the U.S. as the world’s primary source of evil? The usual answer invokes the shah’s 1953 ouster of his prime minister, but the truth is that this wasn’t the subversion of democracy it’s usually made out to be, and the CIA’s role has been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, Ladan Boroumand points out,

the 1953 coup was welcomed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, [the architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution], and would not have succeeded without the active complicity of proponents of political Islam. And . . . the United States not only refrained from opposing the Islamic Revolution but inadvertently supported its emergence and empowered its agents. How then could . . . Ayatollah Khomeini’s virulent enmity toward the United States be explained or excused?

Khomeini’s animosity toward the shah and the United States traces back to 1963–64, when the shah initiated sweeping social reforms that included granting women the right to vote and to run for office and extending religious minorities’ political rights. These reforms prompted the pro-shah cleric of 1953 to become his vocal critic. It wasn’t the shah’s autocratic rule that incited Khomeini’s opposition, but rather the liberal nature of his autocratically implemented social reforms.

There is no need for particular interpretive skill to comprehend the substance of Khomeini’s message: as Satan, America embodies the temptation that seduces Iranian citizens into sin and falsehood. “Human rights” and “democracy” are America’s tools for luring sinful and deviant citizens into conspiring against the government of God established by the ayatollah.

Or, as George W. Bush put it, jihadists hate America because “they hate our freedoms.”