On the Jewish calendar, tomorrow marks the 50th anniversary of the death of the great Hebrew writer S.Y. Agnon, several of whose works are set in the Galician town he calls Shibush (in Hebrew, “mistake”): a stand-in for his hometown of Buczacz in what is now Ukraine. Jeffrey Saks considers the city’s role in Agnon’s posthumous book A City in Its Fullness—a cycle of stories set in Shibush—which, like most of Agnon’s work, was written in the Land of Israel:

In the rhetoric of Iran’s ayatollahs, the United States is the “Great Satan” while the Jewish state is the “Little Satan.” The Chinese Communist Party seems to have adopted a similar approach during the recent fighting between Israel and Hamas, writes Tuvia Gering: