In 1956, Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, Un di velt hot geshvign (“And the World Was Silent”) was published in Yiddish. At the time, he was earning his living as a journalist, writing regularly for the Forward, America’s leading Yiddish newspaper. He traveled to California in 1957 and wrote an article for the paper about his visit to Disneyland. The next year his memoir would be published in French form as La Nuit, and two years later it would appear in English as Night, earning him worldwide fame.

Herewith, his reflections on the magic kingdom, then newly opened, in English:

I don’t know if Heaven is real. But I do know that there is a paradise on earth for children. I know, because I visited it myself. I just came back from it; I just strolled through its gates; I just left the magic kingdom called “Disneyland.”

It took a bit more than a year to build it. To be precise—a year and a day. When you consider the amount of work that was done in this short time, you might start to believe that God actually could have created the world in six days, . . . true, He didn’t have any help, but He is God after all!

Speaking of God: it’s not clear to me if we should thank Him for creating the world and humanity. What is clear to me is that all children who visit Walt Disney’s paradise will show Disney eternal gratitude for building Disneyland.

Robert Clark explains why the resumption of hostilities is both just and necessary:

These latest Israeli strikes come after weeks of consistent Palestinian provocation; they have repeatedly broken the terms of the cease-fire which they claimed they were so desperate for. There have been numerous [unsuccessful] bus bombings near Tel Aviv and Palestinian-instigated clashes in the West Bank. Fifty-nine Israeli hostages are still held in captivity.

In fact, Hamas and their Palestinian supporters . . . have always known that they can sit back, parade dead Israeli hostages live on social media, and receive hundreds of their own convicted terrorists and murderers back in return. They believed they could get away with the October 7 pogrom.

One hopes Hamas’s leaders will get the message. Meanwhile, many inside and outside Israel seem to believe that, by resuming the fighting, Jerusalem has given up on rescuing the remaining hostages. But, writes Ron Ben-Yishai, this assertion misunderstands the goals of the present campaign. “Experience within the IDF and Israeli intelligence,” Ben-Yishai writes, “has shown that such pressure is the most effective way to push Hamas toward flexibility.” He outlines two other aims:

The second objective was to signal to Hamas that Israel is not only targeting its military wing—the terror army that was the focus of previous phases of the war up until the last cease-fire—but also its governance structure. This was demonstrated by the targeted elimination of five senior officials from Hamas’s political and civilian administration. . . . The strikes also served as a message to mediators, particularly Egypt, that Israel opposes Hamas remaining in any governing or military capacity in post-war Gaza.

The third objective was to create intense military pressure, coordinated with the U.S., on all remaining elements of the Shiite “axis of resistance,” including Yemen’s Houthis, Hamas, and Iran.