Upon first reading Steve Kogan’s memoir Winter Vigil, the critic Hillel Halkin was, in his own telling, “swept away,” and “overwhelmed by the book’s mass of detail, the memories, anecdotes, and sketches that crowd its pages like the parts of a Curtiss Jenny [model airplane] scattered on a worktable.” Indeed, Halkin adds, he “hadn’t read any contemporary writing as good in a long time.” And it got better upon rereading:

On a second reading, I began the work of assemblage. On a third, the brilliantly coherent structure of it all, the perfect fit of all the parts, came fully into view.

Halkin and Kogan (who died in 2015) had been friendly, if never very close, and shared similar experiences: born to Jewish families in New York in the late 1930s, attending selective Manhattan public high schools, studying English literature at Columbia, and immersion in the civil-rights movement and counterculture of the 1960s—complete with Kerouacian travels. But of course they shared something else as well:

I knew Kogan was Jewish, of course. His family name was enough to tell me that. But how Jewish he was I had no idea until reading Winter Vigil, even though he and his daughter Sonya had been my family’s overnight guests in Israel in 1982. To tell the truth, I don’t remember that visit very well.

I can’t state for a fact that Kogan didn’t talk to me during this visit about his childhood, his Yiddish-speaking parents, his father’s years as a ḥaluts [Zionist pioneer] in Palestine and knowledge of Hebrew, or his father’s relatives Riva and Solomon who lived in Hadera, a twenty-minute drive from our home, and whose old-time Israeli ethos of simple living and pride in their and their country’s accomplishments made a deep impression on him. To the best of my memory, though, I first learned of these things from Winter Vigil.

When I think of it, it wasn’t just Kogan. Today I’m amazed by how many boys I knew in high school and college had Jewish sides I wasn’t aware of until I found out about them long afterward, often inadvertently. . . . [W]hen, in middle age, [my and Kogan’s mutual friend] Micky Solomon became a ba’al t’shuvah, a newly observant Jew committed to a life of Jewish ritual and study, it was a total surprise for me. I had no idea where it came from.

And who of my friends knew how Jewish I was? I must have surprised them by moving to Israel as much as Micky surprised me. It wasn’t that we were embarrassed by our Jewishness or went out of our way to hide it. We just didn’t know what to do with it or where to put it. It had no obvious relation to the Americans we were or wanted to be or to that “all-embracing and positive vision of America,” as Kogan puts it, that “flowed from the spirit of Whitman’s poetry.”

On Tuesday, a Hizballah drone attack injured three people in northern Israel. The next day, another attack, targeting an IDF base, injured eighteen people, six of them seriously, in Arab al-Amshe, also in the north. This second attack involved the simultaneous use of drones carrying explosives and guided antitank missiles. In both cases, the defensive systems that performed so successfully last weekend failed to stop the drones and missiles. Ron Ben-Yishai has a straightforward explanation as to why: the Lebanon-backed terrorist group is getting better at evading Israel defenses. He explains the three basis systems used to pilot these unmanned aircraft, and their practical effects:

These systems allow drones to act similarly to fighter jets, using “dead zones”—areas not visible to radar or other optical detection—to approach targets. They fly low initially, then ascend just before crashing and detonating on the target. The terrain of southern Lebanon is particularly conducive to such attacks.

But this requires skills that the terror group has honed over months of fighting against Israel. The latest attacks involved a large drone capable of carrying over 50 kg (110 lbs.) of explosives. The terrorists have likely analyzed Israel’s alert and interception systems, recognizing that shooting down their drones requires early detection to allow sufficient time for launching interceptors.

The IDF tries to detect any incoming drones on its radar, as it had done prior to the war. Despite Hizballah’s learning curve, the IDF’s technological edge offers an advantage. However, the military must recognize that any measure it takes is quickly observed and analyzed, and even the most effective defenses can be incomplete. The terrain near the Lebanon-Israel border continues to pose a challenge, necessitating technological solutions and significant financial investment.