At the center of Joshua Cohen’s new novel is an encounter between Benzion Netanyahu—the Jewish historian, personal secretary to Vladimir Jabotinsky, and father of the former prime minister—and a fictional American Jewish college professor named Ruben Blum. Ben Judah writes in his review:

The Netanyahus . . . was one of those highly irritating novels: so interesting I couldn’t stop reading it, without ever being sure I was actually enjoying it. As a kosher smorgasbord of ideas it is wonderful: a car journey to the Catskills worth of fun arguments. As a piece of fiction—until the very last, brilliant chapter—it didn’t do it for me. The problem isn’t Benzion: everything about him is fantastically conjured. The problem is Rube, his wife Edith, and the whole family of caricatures set up in opposition. This makes the novel mostly a drag.

I think these thinly drawn characters—the unassuming, uninsightful Rube Blum, next to the incredible, unforgettable, Benzion Netanyahu—takes us back to Cohen’s obsessions, and mine. We’re not really obsessed with Jews. We’re obsessed with dead Jews or we’re obsessed with Israelis. The way The Netanyahus seems to rush through its plot, ticking off what we are supposed to know about American Jews—father worked in the rag trade, tick, daughter wants a nose job, tick—to get to Benzion reflects something much deeper. Wherever the energy is in American Jewish letters right now, . . . it is about Israel. Wherever the crazes are—Fauda (the secret missions of the IDF) [or] Shtisel (the secret lives of ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem)—it is not about us as Americans, as Diaspora Jews, but them.

Roth. Malamud. Bellow. They were fascinated by Jews as Americans—it was a constant exploration for them—in a way that Rube feels like homework both for Cohen and for the reader, until we get to Ben-Zion and the good stuff. Maybe those novels of the immigrant experience can’t be written by [today’s American Jews]. We are bored of ourselves.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.