A few months ago, when trailers and stills from Maestro—a film about the conductor, composer, and pianist Leonard Bernstein—first appeared, there was a minor controversy about the costume of the actor playing him: Bradley Cooper (a Gentile) had been equipped with a prominent and elongated prosthetic nose so as better to resemble Bernstein. Was this simply an attempt at verisimilitude, or a crass exploitation of the stereotype of the hooked-nose Jew?

From the vantage point of the end of 2023, the issue seems quaint. John Podhoretz, a writer anything but insensitive to anti-Semitism, ignores the nose completely in his review of Maestro. Bernstein—who was best known for his virtuoso conducting and for scoring musicals like West Side Story and films like On the Waterfront—was a child of Russian Jewish immigrants whose first composition was a setting for Psalm 148 (thought to be influenced by his childhood synagogue attendance) and who conducted a concert in Jerusalem just after the Six-Day War. Yet what strikes Podhoretz is that Bernstein represented an American Jewish high-water mark that has long since faded:

Bernstein was one of the key markers of the moment in time when America took unambiguous control of center stage in the West. He mixed popular culture, middlebrow culture, a now sadly anachronistic hip-Jew culture, glamor, riches, fame, trendy progressive politics, and (at a key moment when his star seemed to be dimming) out-of-the-closet gay culture in a resonant and enduring stew.

And Bernstein also demonstrated a particular kind of Jewish political stupidity, to use Irving Kristol’s phrase:

No one forced [Bernstein] to host “That Party at Lenny’s,” as Tom Wolfe originally called his deathless essay “Radical Chic,” when Bernstein and his glam wife Felicia brought New York society together with the Black Panthers in 1970. One of the Panthers answered a question from Bernstein by advocating Communist revolution: “If business won’t give us full employment,” he said, “then we must take the means of production and put them in the hands of the people.” Bernstein’s answer, as he sat comfortably in his Park Avenue duplex: “I dig, absolutely.”

That same year, Stokely Carmichael, the Panthers’ famous leader, told an interviewer that Adolf Hitler “was the greatest white man,” while the party’s newspaper complained about “Zionist exploitation” by “bandit merchants and greedy slum lords.”

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.