Born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin to immigrant parents, Yacov Moshe Maza was descended from four generations of rabbis, and, along with his brothers, attended a distinguished yeshiva and received rabbinic ordination. But he had second thoughts about following in his ancestors’ footsteps and—taking the name Jackie Mason—launched a career as a stand-up comedian in the borscht-belt tradition. Mason died on Saturday at the age of ninety-three. As Thane Rosenbaum observes:

According to numerous critics, many of whom have positions at prestigious think tanks and publications, the normalization agreements the Jewish state reached with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain constituted an abandonment of the Palestinians. Peter Berkowitz argues that, to the contrary, the Abraham Accords can help to improve the lot of the Palestinians, and to reduce the intensity of their conflict with Israel: