First published in 1951, Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family depicts the life of a bustling Jewish family—two parents and five children—living on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The book and its sequels were popular when they first appeared, and remain so today. Reviewing a new biography of Taylor, Rebecca Klempner writes:

When Sydney Taylor wrote the semiautobiographical All-of-a-Kind Family, it was the first mass-market children’s book to focus on Jewish characters and their lives. Her older peer Sadie Rose Weilerstein had published books with Jewish presses for Jewish audiences, but Taylor’s books also found many eager non-Jewish readers despite their casual Jewish references—“You’ll have to make up with her when Yom Kippur [Day of Atonement] comes,” Ella reminds her sister—and stories of sitting around the Sabbath table.

The Follett Publishing Company accepted Taylor’s very Jewish manuscript, with its all-American immigrant kids who relished their mother’s gefilte fish and spoke in Yiddish to the butcher, but they also had some suggestions. Taylor struggled to get her editor, Esther Meeks, to stop expecting Jewish customs to mimic Christian ones. To a woman used to the solemnity of church, for example, the raucous celebration of Purim or Simḥat Torah seemed impossible. Meeks also urged Taylor to add more non-Jewish characters to her books. So Taylor created the kind, elegant “library lady,” from whom the children check out their books every Friday afternoon, and Charlie, the peddler who hangs out at Papa’s junk shop down by the East River but “was different from the others, . . . handsome, blond, and blue-eyed, and a good deal younger than most of the peddlers.”

Meeks also encouraged Taylor to work in elements that made the Americanness of her characters indisputable, including a chapter about Independence Day in the first volume of the series. Moreover, Meeks insisted that Taylor play down Judaism in her press appearances. This queasiness about being “too Jewish” is, of course, part of the story of midcentury American popular culture, but the success of the All-of-a-Kind Family books is also part of the story of the postwar acceptance of Jews into the American mainstream.

With the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program damaged, and its regional influence diminished, the U.S. must now prevent it from recovering, and, if possible, weaken it further. Benjamin Baird argues that it can do both through economic means—if Congress does its part:

Legislation that codifies President Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” policies into law, places sanctions on Iran’s energy sales, and designates the regime’s proxy armies as foreign terrorist organizations will go a long way toward containing Iran’s regime and encouraging its downfall. . . . Congress has already introduced much of the legislation needed to bring the ayatollah to his knees, and committee chairmen need only hold markup hearings to advance these bills and send them to the House and Senate floors.

They should start with the HR 2614—the Maximum Support Act. What the Iranian people truly need to overcome the regime is protection from the state security apparatus.

Next, Congress must get to work dismantling Iran’s proxy army in Iraq. By sanctioning and designating a list of 29 Iran-backed Iraqi militias through the Florida representative Greg Steube’s Iranian Terror Prevention Act, the U.S. can shut down . . . groups like the Badr Organization and Kataib Hizballah, which are part of the Iranian-sponsored armed groups responsible for killing hundreds of American service members.

Those same militias are almost certainly responsible for a series of drone attacks on oilfields in Iraq over the past few days