Few people did more than Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner to introduce the raucous Jewish humor of the borscht belt to the American mainstream; although the resorts and hotels where they began their careers are long gone, the two—at ages ninety-three and ninety-seven, respectively—have not lost their comic verve. Hadley Freeman describes an interview with the pair, who have been fast friends since the days when they began performing their 2,000-Year-Old Man routine together:

The 2,000-Year-Old Man is the revered comedy sketch Reiner and Brooks [created] in the 1950s, in which Reiner—always playing the straight man—would interview Brooks, the titular old man, about his life. Despite coming from the same time and place as Jesus, the 2,000-Year-Old Man talked an awful lot like a Jewish guy from 1950s Brooklyn: “I have over 42,000 children and not one of them ever visits me!” was a typical kvetch from Brooks. When Reiner asked what the plague was like, Brooks improvised back, “Too many rats, not enough cats.”

Brooks and Reiner were both born in New York, second-generation Jewish immigrants. America was made by immigrants, but it was these children of immigrants who helped to define Jewish-American comedy, with its mix of joyful silliness and whaddaya-gonna-do shrugs.

“I think Jews were naturally funny because they were low on the totem pole, so they made fun of the people higher on the pole,” says Reiner.

They met working on Sid Caesar’s TV variety show, Your Show of Shows. Other writers who worked for Caesar included Neil Simon and, later, Woody Allen, both of whom also played no small part in the [shaping] of Jewish-American comedy.

While conventional wisdom in the Western press believes that the war with Hamas has left Jerusalem more isolated and scuttled chances of expanding the Abraham Accords, Gabriel Scheinmann points to a very different reality. He begins with Iran’s massive drone and missile attack on Israel last month, and the coalition that helped defend against it:

America’s Arab allies had, in various ways, provided intelligence and allowed U.S. and Israeli planes to operate in their airspace. Jordan, which has been vociferously attacking Israel’s conduct in Gaza for months, even publicly acknowledged that it shot down incoming Iranian projectiles. When the chips were down, the Arab coalition held and made clear where they stood in the broader Iranian war on Israel.

The successful batting away of the Iranian air assault also engendered awe in Israel’s air-defense capabilities, which have performed marvelously throughout the war. . . . Israel’s response to the Iranian night of missiles should give further courage to Saudi Arabia to codify its alignment. Israel . . . telegraphed clearly to Tehran that it could hit precise targets without its aircraft being endangered and that the threshold of a direct Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear or other sites had been breached.

The entire episode demonstrated that Israel can both hit Iranian sites and defend against an Iranian response. At a time when the United States is focused on de-escalation and restraint, Riyadh could see quite clearly that only Israel has both the capability and the will to deal with the Iranian threat.

It is impossible to know whether the renewed U.S.-Saudi-Israel negotiations will lead to a normalization deal in the immediate months ahead. . . . Regardless of the status of this deal, [however], or how difficult the war in Gaza may appear, America’s Arab allies have now become Israel’s.