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:

During the recent round of fighting between Israel and Hamas, a few left-wing members of Congress not only condemned the Jewish state, but repeated libelous claims about “attacks” on al-Aqsa mosque. Worse still, their rhetoric seemed to imply, in classic anti-Semitic fashion, that Israel is not just a particularly problematic country, but one somehow at the root of all the world’s other problems. Seth Mandel writes: