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.”

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.