Analyzing the 1970 film I Love My Wife, and its obviously Jewish leading man Elliot Gould, Michael Weingrad observes an “uncomfortable obfuscation of a certain kind of sociological Jewishness” found in other movies of the era:

In I Love My Wife, we see the protagonist early on as an adolescent being launched toward a lifetime of sexual compulsion by a neurotic mother who, for instance, pounds on the bathroom door to make sure he isn’t masturbating. (He is.) It’s all third-rate Portnoy’s Complaint, yet we then see the family at . . . church?

We can see plainly that they are Jews, like the director Mel Stuart; the screenwriter [Robert] Kaufman; Gould, married for a decade to Barbra Streisand; and, it goes without saying, the producers. . . . So why this bizarre pretense that Gould and family are Protestants?

The answer is that I Love My Wife is one of many movies from 1967 to 1972 that stumble awkwardly around the question of how to present overtly Jewish characters, especially men. With painful insecurity, and using the license of the counterculture to overcompensate with aggression and offense, these movies gave us a rogues’ gallery of often profoundly unlikeable characters—though a few are sympathetic anti-heroes.

Robert Clark explains why the resumption of hostilities is both just and necessary:

These latest Israeli strikes come after weeks of consistent Palestinian provocation; they have repeatedly broken the terms of the cease-fire which they claimed they were so desperate for. There have been numerous [unsuccessful] bus bombings near Tel Aviv and Palestinian-instigated clashes in the West Bank. Fifty-nine Israeli hostages are still held in captivity.

In fact, Hamas and their Palestinian supporters . . . have always known that they can sit back, parade dead Israeli hostages live on social media, and receive hundreds of their own convicted terrorists and murderers back in return. They believed they could get away with the October 7 pogrom.

One hopes Hamas’s leaders will get the message. Meanwhile, many inside and outside Israel seem to believe that, by resuming the fighting, Jerusalem has given up on rescuing the remaining hostages. But, writes Ron Ben-Yishai, this assertion misunderstands the goals of the present campaign. “Experience within the IDF and Israeli intelligence,” Ben-Yishai writes, “has shown that such pressure is the most effective way to push Hamas toward flexibility.” He outlines two other aims:

The second objective was to signal to Hamas that Israel is not only targeting its military wing—the terror army that was the focus of previous phases of the war up until the last cease-fire—but also its governance structure. This was demonstrated by the targeted elimination of five senior officials from Hamas’s political and civilian administration. . . . The strikes also served as a message to mediators, particularly Egypt, that Israel opposes Hamas remaining in any governing or military capacity in post-war Gaza.

The third objective was to create intense military pressure, coordinated with the U.S., on all remaining elements of the Shiite “axis of resistance,” including Yemen’s Houthis, Hamas, and Iran.