Born in Paris to an Armenian family, Charles Aznavour became known as the Frank Sinatra of France for his success as a singer and songwriter. A museum about his life and legacy is set to open in Yerevan on March 22, the centenary of his birth. Having spent his childhood in Paris’s Jewish quarter, Aznavour knew some Yiddish and had a longstanding feeling of kinship with the Jewish people. Larry Luxner writes:

His haunting French rendition of “La Yiddishe Mama” is legendary, as is his spirited performance of “Havah Nagilah” in a duet with the Algerian Jewish singer Enrico Macias. In 1967, he recorded the song “Yerushalayim” as a tribute to Israel’s Six-Day War victory.

Aznavour died in October 2018 at the age of ninety-four. During his nearly 80-year career, he recorded over 1,400 songs in seven languages, sold around 200 million records and appeared in more than 90 films. . . . In 1998, Aznavour was voted Time magazine’s entertainer of the 20th century.

Upon completion, one room of the future museum will contain the nearly 300 prizes Aznavour received from around the world during his lifetime. That includes the Raoul Wallenberg Award, presented to Aznavour in 2017 by Israel’s then-president, Reuven Rivlin, in Jerusalem, in recognition of his family’s efforts to protect Jews and others in Paris during World War II.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].