Paul Goldberg’s novel The Dissident is set in Moscow in the 1970s and tells the story of two Jews who fall in love while participating in that decade’s dissident movement. It’s also a murder mystery. While it is “at times a charming and lyrical work, capable of transporting readers into a Moscow winter or into the giddiness of falling in love,” Nadia Kalman observes, “its intentions point in a different and more didactic direction.” Complete with detailed footnotes, the book does much to impress on the reader that it aims to convey something of Soviet Jewish history, rather than simply spin a good tale. And in this regard, Kalman believes it fails:

Shortly before the book’s conclusion, we meet a couple of unpleasant Jewish dissidents, a sort of reverse-mirror image of [the main characters], Viktor and Oksana. Vladimir Lensky and his wife, Olga Lenskaya, are religiously observant and rule-bound, petty minded and prejudiced. They’re rude to Oksana, and they don’t get [Mikhail] Bulgakov’s classic novel The Master and Margarita. They also turn out to be axe murderers.

When Lensky is found out, we learn that he was under orders from the Mossad to prevent Jewish involvement in human rights groups: “No more Jewish blood on goyish altars.” In contrast, all those characters who are broadly tolerant of religions and sexualities (in a way that is hard to believe even of most dissidents of that era) and focused on universal human rights turn out to be entirely innocent.

This tendency to draw moral distinctions between characters based on their ideologies goes some way toward explaining what otherwise seems like a mysterious novelistic vendetta against the so-called Leningrad group, real-life Jewish dissidents with little connection to the novel’s events. Members of the group focused their protests on a distinctly Jewish goal, that of making aliyah, rather than on the broader goal of human rights, and perhaps this is part of the reason why the novel keeps hauling them in for tongue-lashings.

In [short], this novel seems to be saying something like this: anti-Semitic persecutions usually don’t go too badly for us Jews, so instead of being narrowly, even selfishly, focused on our own safety and freedom, we should widen our gaze and devote our energies to more universal matters.

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.