The death of the celebrated American Jewish writer Herman Wouk last month, at the age of one-hundred-three, led Jonathan Karp to reflect on Wouk’s second novel, City Boy: The Adventures of Herbie Bookbinder:

A small comic masterpiece that has been accurately described as an urban Jewish Tom Sawyer, City Boy is a classic of the young-adult genre avant la lettre. As with [Wouk’s better-known] Marjorie Morningstar, the fact that the action takes place in a thickly Jewish environment is both essential and inconsequential to the book’s enjoyment. Eleven-year-old Herbie is a universal type: diminutive, overweight, bookish, and unathletic, yet a true boy nonetheless, whose quest for the pretty red-headed fille fatale, Lucile Glass, drives him to acts of foolhardy bravery and reckless derring-do we would otherwise not expect from such an apprentice schlemiel. . . .

City Boy is a testament to Herman Wouk’s comic genius, his satiric wit, and his narrative aplomb. The story races to a suspenseful climax, too convoluted and improbable to summarize here but nevertheless entirely convincing and mesmerizing for the charmed reader. At the same time, the novel is not without its serious side. Young Herbie does triumph over adversity in the end—the scholar Bookbinder vanquishing his nemesis, the truculent Krieger—but this is [nothing like the 1984 film] Revenge of the Nerds.

The camp’s homespun handyman, Elmer Bean, in the midst of an extraordinary goodbye, . . . offers the hero only his mixed endorsement: “Herb—I dunno what to tell you, Herb. You might be a very big guy someday, an’ then again I dunno.” Herbie has employed deceit and theft to win the day—and the heart of his fair lady. Before the book’s end, he must at last confront the real ethical hurdles to his becoming a true mensch.

What it took to become a mensch remained one of the abiding themes of Herman Wouk’s fiction over the many decades after the publication of City Boy. It was certainly what he was thinking about when he wrote in his enduringly popular This Is My God that “the core of Judaism is right conduct to other people.” What has been labeled Wouk’s conservatism was more accurately an ethical commitment that rooted his fiction in a quest to transcend human foibles even as he took great relish in exposing them.

Concluded in 1979, the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty ended nearly 30 years of intermittent warfare, and proved one of the most enduring and beneficial products of Middle East diplomacy. But Egypt may not have been upholding its end of the bargain, write Jonathan Schanzer and Mariam Wahba:

Article III, subsection two of the peace agreement’s preamble explicitly requires both parties “to ensure that that acts or threats of belligerency, hostility, or violence do not originate from and are not committed from within its territory.” This clause also mandates both parties to hold accountable any perpetrators of such acts.

Recent Israeli operations along the Philadelphi Corridor, the narrow strip of land bordering Egypt and Gaza, have uncovered multiple tunnels and access points used by Hamas—some in plain sight of Egyptian guard towers. While it could be argued that Egypt has lacked the capacity to tackle this problem, it is equally plausible that it lacks the will. Either way, it’s a serious problem.

Was Egypt motivated by money, amidst a steep and protracted economic decline in recent years? Did Cairo get paid off by Hamas, or its wealthy patron, Qatar? Did the Iranians play a role? Was Egypt threatened with violence and unrest by the Sinai’s Bedouin Union of Tribes, who are the primary profiteers of smuggling, if it did not allow the tunnels to operate? Or did the Sisi regime take part in this operation because of an ideological hatred of Israel?