Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick are both members of a generation of Jewish writers who displayed remarkable literary ability and did much to shape the American cultural scene. Thus one can’t but be fascinated by Ozick’s assessment of Roth, which appears just a few weeks before the sixth anniversary of his death. Although both Ozick and Roth filled their novels with unmistakably Jewish characters, Ozick openly advocated an embrace of Jewish particularism—what she described as blowing through the “narrow end of the shofar”—while Roth always chafed at being labeled a Jewish writer.

Ozick notes a 2014 interview in which Roth, confronted with that label, insisted that his “family has been here 120 years, or for more than half of America’s existence. They arrived during the second term of President Grover Cleveland, only seventeen years after the end of Reconstruction.” “What,” asks Ozick, “might Henry Adams say to that? Or Gore Vidal?” She adds:

In Roth’s assemblage of family members, fictional and otherwise, his foreign-born grandmother is curiously, and notably, mostly absent. “She spoke Yiddish, I spoke English,” he once remarked, as if this explained her irrelevance. Was this insatiable student of history unaware of, or simply indifferent to, her experiences, the political and economic circumstances that compelled her immigration, the enduring civilization that she personified, the modernist Yiddish literary culture that was proliferating all around him in scores of vibrant publications in midcentury New York? Was he altogether inattentive to the presence of I.B. Singer, especially after Bellow’s groundbreaking translation of “Gimpel the Fool,” which introduced Yiddish as a Nobel-worthy facet of American literature?

Speculation about the private, intimate, hidden apprehensions of Roth-the-Fearless may be illicit, but what are we to make of his dismissal of the generation whose flight from some Russian or Polish or Ukrainian pinpoint village had catapulted him into the pinpoint Weequahic section of Newark, New Jersey? Was it the purported proximity of Grover Cleveland, or the near-at-hand Yiddish-speaking grandmother, who had made him the American he was? Had Roth lived only a few years more, he might have discovered a vulnerability that, like the [fictional] Roth family under President Lindbergh [in his 2004 The Plot Against America], he might have been unprepared to anticipate.

Yesterday I saw an unconfirmed report that the Biden administration has offered Israel a massive arms deal in exchange for a promise not to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. Even if the report is incorrect, there is plenty of other evidence that the White House has been trying to dissuade Jerusalem from mounting such an attack. The thinking behind this pressure is hard to fathom, as there is little Israel could do that would better serve American interests in the Middle East than putting some distance between the ayatollahs and nuclear weapons. Aaron MacLean explains why this is so, in the context of a broader discussion of strategic priorities in the Middle East and elsewhere:

If the Iran issue were satisfactorily adjusted in the direction of the American interest, the question of Israel’s security would become more manageable overnight. If a network of American partners enjoyed security against state predation, the proactive suppression of militarily less serious threats like Islamic State would be more easily organized—and indeed, such partners would be less vulnerable to the manipulation of powers external to the region.

[The Biden administration’s] commitment to escalation avoidance has had the odd effect of making the security situation in the region look a great deal as it would if America had actually withdrawn [from the Middle East].

Alternatively, we could project competence by effectively backing our Middle East partners in their competitions against their enemies, who are also our enemies, by ensuring a favorable overall balance of power in the region by means of our partnership network, and by preventing Iran from achieving nuclear status—even if it courts escalation with Iran in the shorter run.