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:

Last Friday, the Israeli defense minister Benny Gantz announced the designation of six Palestinian organizations as terrorist groups due to their deep entanglements with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which has been committing murderous attacks since 1968. Both the EU and several European states have provided funds to the recently proscribed organizations. A decade ago, pro-Israel activists even supplied the European Union with information, for a long time ignored, about the links between these groups and the PFLP. Members of one group—the Union of Agricultural Work Committees—murdered the seventeen-year-old Rina Shnerb in 2019. Jonathan Tobin writes: