Set in New York in the late 1950s, The Idiom and the Oddity (2017) tells the story of a young man who decides to revolt against his parents’ drift away from Jewish tradition and observance, leaves his family home in suburban Long Island for the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn where he grew up, and eventually finds himself studying in a rabbinical seminary in upstate New York. While the novel was written under the pseudonym Sam Benito, Henry Abramson recognizes the author as a certain prominent ḥaredi rabbi, and the story as highly autobiographical. Abramson does not reveal the author’s identity, but argues that the work is a rich, if imperfect, coming-of-age tale:

[T]here’s certainly no salacious or otherwise inappropriate content in the 300-page novel, but even a superficial reading alludes to youthful experimentation with activities that, in the ḥaredi world, range from the merely frowned upon to forbidden outright. . . . The [author] describes his quasi-heretical youth, from attenuated adherence to kashrut to a non-Jewish girlfriend who lives in, of all places, the Long Island community of Babylon.

Readers with an appreciation of yeshiva culture (and baseball culture) will appreciate this work, but the author clearly assumes that his readers also possess a basic working knowledge of the great canon of Western literature and philosophy. . . . The sheer breadth of his reading is sometimes a liability. I often found myself groaning at the excessive puns-per-page ratio, many of which involved several languages. [Take, for instance], this Steinbeck-inspired Yiddishism: when a character named Roth defuses a tense moment with an ear-splitting belch, the incident is referred to as “the greps of Roth” (greps being Yiddish for burp).

The book is an homage to Joyce above all: the trajectory of the plot borrows happily from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the style from Ulysses (the main character is even named Bloom), and even Joyce’s most enigmatic work gets a nod when an Irish character departs the story, leaving “Finnegan’s wake” in the aftermath.

Unfortunately, in contemporary yeshiva culture, fiction is strictly forbidden as bitul zman, “wasted time,” and the medium that might best express [its author’s] vision is off-limits under his own name.

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.