Robert Nathan (1894-1985), an American Sephardi Jew whose ancestors had first come to America before the Revolution, was a prolific author of fiction, most of it with supernatural themes. Although little remembered today, his work was very successful in the first half of the 20th century. In 1935, he wrote Road of Ages, which imagines a massive caravan of Jews—having been expelled from Europe, Palestine, and everywhere else—making their way to a safe haven promised them in Mongolia. Michael Weingrad writes:

The caravan includes atheists and believers, radicals and capitalists, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, aesthetes and laborers, hasidic rebbes and German concertmasters. . . . Thus, one of the running themes in Nathan’s episodic little novel is the extent of Jewish differences, the other is the process of cooperation and even fusion.

Two years earlier, Nathan had written an essay for Scribner’s titled “On Being a Jew.” There, Nathan explains that, lacking a normative Jewish religious faith, he has little sense of himself as a Jew by religion or as an active part of the organized Jewish community. He has found himself the object of hatred and prejudice in the Christian world, but also mistrusted by “the good bourgeois Jews themselves, because I was a poet, an artist, a bohemian, and a bad business risk.” Tepidly, he writes that the answer to the question of whether he is proud to be a Jew is “both yes, and no. . . . I am a Jew, I was born a Jew. Very well, let me neither deny it nor boast of it, but simply and gently accept it.”

David, the poet-character in Road of Ages, has some of this standoffishness—but sheds it. At first he identifies most strongly with the non-Jewish Amanda, who accompanies the caravan because she is married to a Jew, but says that she can never feel that this is her people. Yet in the course of the novel David finds himself caught up in the life of the caravan; sharing their sorrows and striving, he “no longer felt alone among the Jews.”

Yesterday, the beepers used by hundreds of Hizballah operatives were detonated. Noah Rothman puts this ingenious attack in the context of the overall war between Israel and the Iran-backed terrorist group:

[W]hile the disabling of an untold number of Hizballah operatives is remarkable, it’s also ominous. This week, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant told reporters that the hour is nearing when Israeli forces will have to confront Iran’s cat’s-paw in southern Lebanon directly, in order to return the tens of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes along Lebanon’s border under fire and have not yet been able to return. Today’s operation may be a prelude to the next phase of Israel’s defensive war, a dangerous one in which the IDF will face off against an enemy with tens of thousands of fighters and over 150,000 rockets and missiles trained on Israeli cities.

Seth Frantzman, meanwhile, focuses on the specific damage the pager bombings have likely done to Hizballah:

This will put the men in hospital for a period of time. Some of them can go back to serving Hizballah, but they will not have access to one of their hands. These will most likely be their dominant hand, meaning the hand they’d also use to hold the trigger of a rifle or push the button to launch a missile.

Hizballah has already lost around 450 fighters in its eleven-month confrontation with Israel. This is a significant loss for the group. While Hizballah can replace losses, it doesn’t have an endlessly deep [supply of recruits]. This is not only because it has to invest in training and security ahead of recruitment, but also because it draws its recruits from a narrow spectrum of Lebanese society.

The overall challenge for Hizballah is not just replacing wounded and dead fighters. The group will be challenged to . . . roll out some other way to communicate with its men. The use of pagers may seem archaic, but Hizballah apparently chose to use this system because it assumed the network could not be penetrated. . . . It will also now be concerned about the penetration of its operational security. When groups like Hizballah are in chaos, they are more vulnerable to making mistakes.