Last summer, David Roskies went to Tel Aviv to teach a course on Yiddish modernism, an experience he describes with infectious enthusiasm in this essay, published in August. If you think the phrase “teaching Yiddish modernism in Tel Aviv” contains three things that don’t go together—think again. (You can learn more about some of the writers discussed here in Ruth Wisse’s podcast series The Stories Jews Tell.)

[W]hy did our poets, prose writers, playwrights, and critics, joined by painters, sculptors, and graphic designers, choose to go this difficult route via Yiddish? . . . Fresh from the political arena themselves, the three budding intellectuals in Vilna who launched Di literarishe monatsshriftn (“The Literary Monthly”) in 1908 set out to mobilize those still-vital forces within the Jewish nation and unify them behind a Yiddish high culture that transcended political divisions. “For art! For young beautiful Yiddish! And for the eternal language of the prophets!” proclaimed the poets and artists who in 1919 bonded together in Lodz to publish the first Yiddish expressionist journal, Yung Yiddish.

Three years later, the peripatetic poet Uri Zvi Greenberg seized upon expressionism as the voice of a new humanity. “We proclaim the millionfold head-and-heart individualism,” cried the inaugural issue of Albatross, “the heroic Man of Wounds”—a secular Jesus—“who stands in all his glory, as large as the earth, all eyes and ears and lips, with his 365 veins pumping into the life stream deeper, deeper.”

Yesterday I saw an unconfirmed report that the Biden administration has offered Israel a massive arms deal in exchange for a promise not to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. Even if the report is incorrect, there is plenty of other evidence that the White House has been trying to dissuade Jerusalem from mounting such an attack. The thinking behind this pressure is hard to fathom, as there is little Israel could do that would better serve American interests in the Middle East than putting some distance between the ayatollahs and nuclear weapons. Aaron MacLean explains why this is so, in the context of a broader discussion of strategic priorities in the Middle East and elsewhere:

If the Iran issue were satisfactorily adjusted in the direction of the American interest, the question of Israel’s security would become more manageable overnight. If a network of American partners enjoyed security against state predation, the proactive suppression of militarily less serious threats like Islamic State would be more easily organized—and indeed, such partners would be less vulnerable to the manipulation of powers external to the region.

[The Biden administration’s] commitment to escalation avoidance has had the odd effect of making the security situation in the region look a great deal as it would if America had actually withdrawn [from the Middle East].

Alternatively, we could project competence by effectively backing our Middle East partners in their competitions against their enemies, who are also our enemies, by ensuring a favorable overall balance of power in the region by means of our partnership network, and by preventing Iran from achieving nuclear status—even if it courts escalation with Iran in the shorter run.