Yesterday I mentioned in passing the Holocaust poetry of Chava Rosenfarb; today, I turn your attention to that of Paul Celan—who approached similar themes and experiences in very different ways. Born in 1920 into a German-speaking Jewish family in a part of Romania that is now in Ukraine, Celan spent the war years in the forced-labor camps; his parents were murdered. He settled in Paris after the war, wrote poetry in German, translated literature from a variety of languages, and drowned himself at the age of forty-nine. Neil Arditi reviews two new translations of his work, and examines his poem “Psalm.”

Celan knew what it was to sing “above, O above/ the thorn.” . . . “Psalm” draws not only on the image of God forming man out of clay in Genesis but also, most crucially, on Psalm 103:15: “As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.” To the beauty and brevity of that flourishing, Celan adds an uncanny vulnerability: body and soul exposed, proffered like the reproductive organ of a flower to a godforsaken sky.

If there is to be peace, Palestinians will have to unlearn the hatred of Israel they have imbibed during nearly two decades of Hamas rule. This will be a difficult task, but Cole Aronson argues, drawing on the experiences of World War II, that Israel has already gotten off to a strong start:

The population’s compliance can . . . be won by a new regime that satisfies its immediate material needs, even if that new regime is sponsored by a government until recently at war with the population’s former regime. Axis civilians were made needy through bombing. Peaceful compliance with the Allies became a good alternative to supporting violent resistance to the Allies.

Israel’s current campaign makes a moderate Gaza more likely, not less. Destroying Hamas not only deprives Islamists of the ability to rule—it proves the futility of armed resistance to Israel, a condition for peace. The destruction of buildings not only deprives Hamas of its hideouts. It also gives ordinary Palestinians strong reasons to shun groups planning to replicate Hamas’s behavior.