Born in 1900 in what was then Austrian Poland, Deborah Vogel became a leading Yiddish poet between the world wars. She gave crucial encouragement to another Polish Jew—the writer and artist Bruno Schulz—when he was on the verge of giving up on his literary career, although she rejected his proposal of marriage. Vogel was murdered by the Nazis in 1942, along with her husband, mother, and baby son. Mersiha Bruncevic writes:

While her childhood was spent in a small-town milieu of the Galician provinces, the outbreak of World War I in her adolescence meant the family had to move. They relocated to Vienna where Vogel went to an Austrian school. Eventually, the family moved permanently to Lviv, [by then part of newly independent Poland]. But Vogel continued wandering, attending university in Cracow and traveling frequently to Paris, Berlin, and Stockholm, and establishing lasting correspondences with New York City’s vibrant community of Yiddish modernist artists and writers, contributing regularly with both poems and essays to the literary journals Inzikh and Bodn.

It is exceptional to come across a body of high-quality literary work fluently composed in several languages. Yet the sum of Vogel’s work, written in Polish, German, Hebrew, and Yiddish, shows exactly that. Her family was an intellectual, secular family and they spoke Polish at home. Both her mother and father were teachers of Hebrew, which was passed on to Vogel and she quickly became as proficient as her parents. Those educationally formative years spent in Vienna meant that she mastered the German language impeccably; her first poems were written in German. While her parents showed no interest in Yiddish for various reasons, it was when Vogel picked up Yiddish in her twenties that she found her truest tongue.

The unreal atmosphere and disproportion of her poetic universe was, at the time of publication, often interpreted as surrealism, a dominant artistic movement in the 1920s and 30s. Vogel refuted this, claiming that while seemingly unreal, her poems were not surreal. She compared them instead to the paintings of Marc Chagall, whom she had met in Paris. Her impressions of the painter and his work can be found in an essay called “Theme and Form in Chagall’s Work (an Aesthetic Critique).”

For some time, opponents of U.S support for Israel have been urging the White House to end the war in Gaza, or simply calling for a ceasefire. Douglas Feith and Lewis Libby consider what such a result would actually entail:

Ending the war immediately would allow Hamas to survive and retain military and governing power. Leaving it in the area containing the Sinai-Gaza smuggling routes would ensure that Hamas can rearm. This is why Hamas leaders now plead for a ceasefire. A ceasefire will provide some relief for Gazans today, but a prolonged ceasefire will preserve Hamas’s bloody oppression of Gaza and make future wars with Israel inevitable.

For most Gazans, even when there is no hot war, Hamas’s dictatorship is a nightmarish tyranny. Hamas rule features the torture and murder of regime opponents, official corruption, extremist indoctrination of children, and misery for the population in general. Hamas diverts foreign aid and other resources from proper uses; instead of improving life for the mass of the people, it uses the funds to fight against Palestinians and Israelis.

Moreover, a Hamas-affiliated website warned Gazans last month against cooperating with Israel in securing and delivering the truckloads of aid flowing into the Strip. It promised to deal with those who do with “an iron fist.” In other words, if Hamas remains in power, it will begin torturing, imprisoning, or murdering those it deems collaborators the moment the war ends. Thereafter, Hamas will begin planning its next attack on Israel:

Hamas’s goals are to overshadow the Palestinian Authority, win control of the West Bank, and establish Hamas leadership over the Palestinian revolution. Hamas’s ultimate aim is to spark a regional war to obliterate Israel and, as Hamas leaders steadfastly maintain, fulfill a Quranic vision of killing all Jews.

Hamas planned for corpses of Palestinian babies and mothers to serve as the mainspring of its October 7 war plan. Hamas calculated it could survive a war against a superior Israeli force and energize enemies of Israel around the world. The key to both aims was arranging for grievous Palestinian civilian losses. . . . That element of Hamas’s war plan is working impressively.