The great Hebrew poets and novelists of the 19th and 20th century, who revived Hebrew literature and paved the way for Zionism, for the most part began their literary careers in yeshivas, surreptitiously reading the works of Friedrich Schiller and Dmitri Pisarev—which they hid inside their large volumes of the Talmud. Thus the rejection of tradition became one of the main themes of this new literary genre. Yet who else but yeshiva students had sufficient knowledge of the sacred tongue to use it to craft new works? Shai Secunda reviews a new book about this generation of writers:

In The Yeshiva and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature, a short monograph with a bold thesis, Marina Zilbergerts [argues that], despite the complex transformations that Hebrew literature and its writers endured in the later 19th and early 20th centuries, there was a kind of alchemical conservation of energy at work. Of course, the redeployment of a sacred, scholastic language to forge a politically charged, sometimes sensuous, and frequently transgressive literature was revolutionary. Yet, Zilbergerts insists, despite the secular shift in the themes and tenor of the new Hebrew literature, “this revolution originated in the world of tradition”: the rabbinic ideal of pure intellectual devotion to even the most obscure traditional texts was secularized into a radical commitment to writing pristine prose in a largely inaccessible language.

The Yeshiva and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature is a blessedly jargon-free book. . . . Despite the historical twists and turns that her argument must take, Zilbergerts’s thesis retains a powerful simplicity. Modern Hebrew writing emerged in Eastern Europe as an enduring, modern literature in part due to the persistent traditionalist commitments of its first writers.

Yeshiva life, and Jewish life more generally, was an imaginatively rich existence, with an abundance of fictions—mainly of the legal sort—and a preference for prooftext over prosaic existence. (The famous Yiddish—and Hebrew—writer Mendele Mokher Seforim once satirized this by telling the story of shtetl mavens who, upon being introduced to a juicy exotic fruit, resorted to scripture to confirm its existence.) Even when budding Hebrew writers abandoned rabbinic learning and engaged in newfound secular pursuits, they continued to read texts voraciously and to spin new, beguiling webs in an updated version of rabbinic Hebrew. In this way we get Micha Yosef Berdichevsky’s indelible image of a formerly pious yeshiva boy holding a midnight study vigil, only now it is a secular Hebrew book over which he pores.

Last week, the Lebanese parliament chose Joseph Aoun to be the country’s next president, filling a position that has been vacant since 2022. Aoun, currently commander of the military—and reportedly supported by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia—edged out Suleiman Frangiyeh, Hizballah’s preferred candidate. But while Aoun’s victory is a step in the right direction, David Daoud sounds a cautionary note:

Lebanon’s president lacks the constitutional authority to order Hizballah’s disarmament, and Aoun was elected as another “consensus president” with Hizballah’s votes. They wouldn’t vote for a man who would set in motion a process leading to their disarmament.

Habib Malik agrees that hoping for too much to come out of the election could constitute “daydreaming,” but he nonetheless believes the Lebanese have a chance to win their country back from Hizballah and, ultimately, make peace with Israel:

Lebanon’s 2019 economic collapse and the 2020 massive explosion at the Beirut Port were perpetrated by the ruling mafia, protected ever since by Hizballah. [But] Lebanon’s anti-Iran/Hizballah communities constitute a reliable partner for both the U.S. and Israel. The Lebanese are desperate to be rid of Iranian influence in order to pursue regional peace and prosperity with their neighbors. Suddenly, a unique opportunity for peace breaking out between Israel and Lebanon could be upon us, particularly given President Trump’s recent reelection with a landslide mandate. It was under Trump’s first term that the Abraham Accords came into being and so under his second term they could certainly be expanded.

As matters stand, Lebanon has very few major contentious issues with Israel. The precisely targeted and methodical nature of Israel’s war in Lebanon against Hizballah and what has unfolded in Syria make this outcome a far more attainable goal.