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.

For the past 36 hours, I’ve been reading and listening to analyses of the terms and implications of the recent hostage deal. More will appear in the coming days, and I’ll try to put the best of them in this newsletter. But today I want to share a comment made on Tuesday by the Palestinian analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. While he and I would probably disagree on numerous points about the current conflict, this analysis is spot on, and goes entirely against most arguments made by those who consider themselves pro-Palestinian, and certainly those chanting for a cease-fire at all costs:

When a cease-fire in Gaza is announced, Hamas’s fascists will do everything they can to frame this as the ultimate victory; they will wear their military uniforms, emerge from their tunnels, stop hiding in schools and displacement centers, and very quickly reassert their control over the coastal enclave. They’ll even get a few Gazans to celebrate and dance for them.

This, I should note, is exactly what has happened. Alkhatib continues:

The reality is that the Islamist terrorism of Hamas, masquerading as “resistance,” has achieved nothing for the Palestinian people except for billions of dollars in wasted resources and tens of thousands of needless deaths, with Gaza in ruins after twenty years following the withdrawal of settlements in 2005. . . . Hamas’s propaganda machine, run by Qatari state media, Al Jazeera Arabic, will work overtime to help the terror group turn a catastrophic disaster into a victory akin to the battles of Stalingrad and Leningrad.

Hamas will also start punishing anyone who criticized or worked against it, and preparing for its next attack. Perhaps Palestinians would have been better off if, instead of granting them a temporary reprieve, the IDF kept fighting until Hamas was utterly defeated.