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.”

Yesterday I saw an unconfirmed report that the Biden administration has offered Israel a massive arms deal in exchange for a promise not to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. Even if the report is incorrect, there is plenty of other evidence that the White House has been trying to dissuade Jerusalem from mounting such an attack. The thinking behind this pressure is hard to fathom, as there is little Israel could do that would better serve American interests in the Middle East than putting some distance between the ayatollahs and nuclear weapons. Aaron MacLean explains why this is so, in the context of a broader discussion of strategic priorities in the Middle East and elsewhere:

If the Iran issue were satisfactorily adjusted in the direction of the American interest, the question of Israel’s security would become more manageable overnight. If a network of American partners enjoyed security against state predation, the proactive suppression of militarily less serious threats like Islamic State would be more easily organized—and indeed, such partners would be less vulnerable to the manipulation of powers external to the region.

[The Biden administration’s] commitment to escalation avoidance has had the odd effect of making the security situation in the region look a great deal as it would if America had actually withdrawn [from the Middle East].

Alternatively, we could project competence by effectively backing our Middle East partners in their competitions against their enemies, who are also our enemies, by ensuring a favorable overall balance of power in the region by means of our partnership network, and by preventing Iran from achieving nuclear status—even if it courts escalation with Iran in the shorter run.