In December, when Mosaic asked Cynthia Ozick to recommend some of the books she had recently read, she named, among others, David Kertzer’s The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, which tells the story of a six-year-old Bolognese Jew abducted and forcibly converted by papal authorities in 1858. Now, Ozick, in her most recent work of fiction, imagines seeing Mortara through the eyes of his great-nephew:

If you are unfortunate enough to bear a name trailing a history, as I am, you will understand why I have decided to change mine—though not quite yet. I must live with the original until I have squeezed out of it the last syllable of iniquity. A great sin was committed against this name, the name of an honest and peaceful family, and whether the choice of an American commonplace will serve as anodyne, I can hardly predict. It was in 1940 that my own fraction of these relations arrived here from Bologna to escape the racial laws. My widowed father, Isacco Giacobbe Mortara, had already been expelled from the university, where he taught philosophy. And it was in this same year, 1940, that my great-uncle, Pio Edgardo Mortara, died at age eighty-eight, after living out his last years in a monastery in Belgium. The incident that had made a small boy notorious was by then mainly forgotten, except by a handful of scholars, and was regularly attributed to mediaeval ignominy, as if modernity—railway, telegraph, photography—hadn’t at the time already permeated everywhere.

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.