Perhaps no work so captures Philip Roth’s preoccupation with sexual perversion as his 1995 Sabbath’s Theater, whose protagonist is the aging, degenerate, and unsuccessful puppeteer Mickey Sabbath. The novel was recently adapted for the stage, with John Turturro playing the title role. Ari Hoffman writes in his review:

Sabbath’s spare staging shines the spotlight on Roth’s language, where it belongs. As its protagonist’s fortunes wane and despair builds, his rhetoric finds a kind of rigor-mortis excellence. . . . Sabbath [at one point delivers an] ode to the Jersey Shore from which he came, and to which he returns at the show’s end. He recalls, in lines among the most gorgeous Roth ever set down, the “sand and ocean, the tide, the stars, the mists, the gulls. The limitless sea, the Atlantic. You could touch your toes where America began. Endlessness. We grew up on it.” He treasures his brother’s dog tags—“A for blood type. H for Hebrew.”

Although Hoffman has much praise for both the original work and the staging, he also reminds us of “the judgment of Roth’s best critic, Ruth Wisse, who ventures that Sabbath’s Theater is a ‘very funny book, a desperate book’” but that the writer’s sense of “sex as our true source of satisfaction and solace bespeaks a pauper’s idea of human potential.”

For the past 36 hours, I’ve been reading and listening to analyses of the terms and implications of the recent hostage deal. More will appear in the coming days, and I’ll try to put the best of them in this newsletter. But today I want to share a comment made on Tuesday by the Palestinian analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. While he and I would probably disagree on numerous points about the current conflict, this analysis is spot on, and goes entirely against most arguments made by those who consider themselves pro-Palestinian, and certainly those chanting for a cease-fire at all costs:

When a cease-fire in Gaza is announced, Hamas’s fascists will do everything they can to frame this as the ultimate victory; they will wear their military uniforms, emerge from their tunnels, stop hiding in schools and displacement centers, and very quickly reassert their control over the coastal enclave. They’ll even get a few Gazans to celebrate and dance for them.

This, I should note, is exactly what has happened. Alkhatib continues:

The reality is that the Islamist terrorism of Hamas, masquerading as “resistance,” has achieved nothing for the Palestinian people except for billions of dollars in wasted resources and tens of thousands of needless deaths, with Gaza in ruins after twenty years following the withdrawal of settlements in 2005. . . . Hamas’s propaganda machine, run by Qatari state media, Al Jazeera Arabic, will work overtime to help the terror group turn a catastrophic disaster into a victory akin to the battles of Stalingrad and Leningrad.

Hamas will also start punishing anyone who criticized or worked against it, and preparing for its next attack. Perhaps Palestinians would have been better off if, instead of granting them a temporary reprieve, the IDF kept fighting until Hamas was utterly defeated.