Born into a middle-class, German-speaking Jewish family in what is now Latvia, Max Weinreich encountered anti-Semitism from the moment he left the ḥeder for a secular school, and reacted by gravitating toward Jewish culture. He would eventually become the world’s leading scholar of Yiddish, and of the history and cultural anthropology of Ashkenazi Jewry more broadly. In a biographical essay examining Weinreich’s remarkable career, David Roskies begins with his subject’s debut in the Yiddish literary world:

Weinreich published the first-ever translation of cantos from Homer’s Iliad into Yiddish hexameters, so stunning a feat that it earned him a shoutout from the rising star of Yiddish lyric poetry, Moyshe Kulbak. “In every nation,” Kulbak wrote in “The Yiddish Word,” his essay-manifesto of 1918, “translations of Homer are a measure not only of that nation’s spiritual maturity, but also of the artistic development of its language, capable of rendering a writer such as Homer.”

Weinreich would later spearhead efforts to standardize Yiddish spelling, participating in seemingly obscure debates that in fact turned on how one defines the very essence of Jewish culture:

The Vilna standard [developed by Weinreich and his companions] demanded that the etymological spelling of the Hebrew-Aramaic component of Yiddish, the most ancient stratum of the language, be preserved, for this is what all Jewish languages had in common. Soviet Jewish language planners thought otherwise. To achieve universal literacy while eviscerating rabbinic culture, dismantling ḥeder education, banning religious observance, and driving a permanent wedge between the Soviet working classes and “petit-bourgeois” nationalisms, the Soviet state apparatus mandated a naturalized system of spelling in which all Yiddish words were treated equally. By eliminating [the] “superfluous” letters . . . used only in Hebrew-Aramaic-origin words, followed by the abolition of the final, . . . any Yiddish text printed outside the Soviet Union was rendered indecipherable. Not just ritual purity lay in the details; the devil too.

Yet perhaps the work of Weinreich’s that remains most relevant today was the one that did not concern Yiddish at all, but “a second tier of loyal Nazis and enablers” not tried at Nuremberg, which included “scholars, thinkers, and researchers, some world-renowned.” Roskies continues:

They were the most insidious servants of evil, for scholarship in the service of the Nazis was a double betrayal. Besides aiding and abetting Hitler, Weinreich held them responsible for defiling, perverting, and destroying the very integrity of scholarship itself, the ideal of dispassionate visnshaft [academic study] that only yesterday had been the beacon of Jewish self-emancipation. Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes against the Jewish People (1946) appeared in Yiddish, then again as the first volume in the YIVO English Translation Series.

In it, Weinreich tracked the careers of such luminaries as Martin Heidegger and Hans Naumann, a criminal docket that was alphabetically searchable in the Index of Persons and Institutions. For Weinreich, as for Abraham Joshua Heschel, who read Hitler’s Professors in the Yiddish original, some of these German scholars had been mentors, thesis advisers, and trusted colleagues. So on the day when Weinreich completed the manuscript, March 15, 1946, he asked his personal secretary, Chana Gordon, for a cigarette, a pleasure he had denied himself all through the war. She watched Dr. Weinreich light up and take a few richly deserved puffs; then, without finishing, he put it out.

If Iran succeeds in obtaining nuclear weapons, the war in Gaza, let alone the protests on college campuses, will seem like a minor complication. Jonathan Schachter fears that this danger could be much more imminent than decisionmakers in Jerusalem and Washington believe. In his view, Israel seems to be repeating the mistake that allowed it to be taken by surprise on Simchat Torah of 2023 and Yom Kippur of 1973: putting too much faith in an intelligence concept that could be wrong.

Israel and the United States apparently believe that despite Iran’s well-documented progress in developing capabilities necessary for producing and delivering nuclear weapons, as well as its extensive and ongoing record of violating its international nuclear obligations, there is no acute crisis because building a bomb would take time, would be observable, and could be stopped by force. Taken together, these assumptions and their moderating impact on Israeli and American policy form a new Iran concept reminiscent of its 1973 namesake and of the systemic failures that preceded the October 7 massacre.

Meanwhile, most of the restrictions put in place by the 2015 nuclear deal will expire by the end of next year, rendering the question of Iran’s adherence moot. And the forces that could be taking action aren’t:

The European Union regularly issues boilerplate press releases asserting its members’ “grave concern.” American decisionmakers and spokespeople have created the unmistakable impression that their reservations about the use of force are stronger than their commitment to use force to prevent an Iranian atomic bomb. At the same time, the U.S. refuses to enforce its own sanctions comprehensively: Iranian oil exports (especially to China) and foreign-currency reserves have ballooned since January 2021, when the Biden administration took office.

Israel’s response has also been sluggish and ambiguous. Despite its oft-stated policy of never allowing a nuclear Iran, Israel’s words and deeds have sent mixed messages to allies and adversaries—perhaps inadvertently reinforcing the prevailing sense in Washington and elsewhere that Iran’s nuclear efforts do not present an exigent crisis.