Born in London in 1939, Michael Moorcock is the author of some 100 books, most of them works of fantasy and science fiction, genres to which he was a leading contributor in the 1960s and 70s. He was also the son of a Jewish mother, and Jewish characters and themes play important roles in a few of his works. One of them is the Pyat Quartet, an attempt to reckon with the Holocaust and 20th-century totalitarianism, about which Michael Weingrad writes:

The quartet is not fantasy literature but, at around 2,000 pages, it is a historical fantasia as ambitious as any novelistic project of our time. Darkly brilliant, the first book in the series, Byzantium Endures, shuttles between Kiev, Odessa, and Saint Petersburg during the first two decades of our own twentieth century. This is the rail-crossed, blood-soaked landscape of some of the greatest works of modern Jewish literature. Yet to an extent more extreme than any character one encounters in the works of Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, I.J. Singer, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and others who seem (especially Babel) to haunt the novel, Moorcock’s protagonist is a self-hating Jew.

In fact, the phrase may not quite be applicable since it is not clear how much of a self Colonel Maxim Pyatnitsky really possesses. Though “Pyat” is utterly convinced that he is of noble Cossack stock, and despite the near-constant stream of anti-Semitic and racist jeremiads delivered by this profoundly unreliable narrator, it is clear to everyone he meets that he is a Jew.

While Weingrad finds some of this engaging, it ultimately crashes against Moorcock’s limited moral horizons and “pretension to political significance” in the second half of the series:

Moorcock seems to think that his depictions of Pyat’s orgies with Hitler and pages-long fulminations against the Jews tell us something about the real nature of the modern West. But Nazism wasn’t a form of sexual dysfunction, as Moorcock seems to propose, and Pyat isn’t symbolic of anything except his own sociopathy.

Indeed, Weingrad suggests these literary failures stem from a blinkered moral vision apparent in some of the author’s other writings:

It is not just that Moorcock is unable to credit Christianity as a coherent moral response to the “world’s pain,” viewing religious faith as sinister hypocrisy. It is also that he requires a conservative enemy—Tolkien and C.S. Lewis in fiction, Reagan and Thatcher in politics—upon which to project his own moral flaws and distract from his own philosophical incoherence.

Moorcock’s Jewish identity . . . is mainly concerned with the Holocaust, disdainful of religion, and (in his online musings) taken up with sniping at Israel accompanied by a disinterest in getting to know that country firsthand. In this regard, he is typical of many assimilated and left-leaning Jews in both England and America.

Yesterday, the beepers used by hundreds of Hizballah operatives were detonated. Noah Rothman puts this ingenious attack in the context of the overall war between Israel and the Iran-backed terrorist group:

[W]hile the disabling of an untold number of Hizballah operatives is remarkable, it’s also ominous. This week, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant told reporters that the hour is nearing when Israeli forces will have to confront Iran’s cat’s-paw in southern Lebanon directly, in order to return the tens of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes along Lebanon’s border under fire and have not yet been able to return. Today’s operation may be a prelude to the next phase of Israel’s defensive war, a dangerous one in which the IDF will face off against an enemy with tens of thousands of fighters and over 150,000 rockets and missiles trained on Israeli cities.

Seth Frantzman, meanwhile, focuses on the specific damage the pager bombings have likely done to Hizballah:

This will put the men in hospital for a period of time. Some of them can go back to serving Hizballah, but they will not have access to one of their hands. These will most likely be their dominant hand, meaning the hand they’d also use to hold the trigger of a rifle or push the button to launch a missile.

Hizballah has already lost around 450 fighters in its eleven-month confrontation with Israel. This is a significant loss for the group. While Hizballah can replace losses, it doesn’t have an endlessly deep [supply of recruits]. This is not only because it has to invest in training and security ahead of recruitment, but also because it draws its recruits from a narrow spectrum of Lebanese society.

The overall challenge for Hizballah is not just replacing wounded and dead fighters. The group will be challenged to . . . roll out some other way to communicate with its men. The use of pagers may seem archaic, but Hizballah apparently chose to use this system because it assumed the network could not be penetrated. . . . It will also now be concerned about the penetration of its operational security. When groups like Hizballah are in chaos, they are more vulnerable to making mistakes.