In September, The Lehman Trilogy, an Italian play that had its English-language debut in Britain in 2018 to much acclaim, is reopening. The drama is a fictionalized telling of the story of the Lehman family, beginning with their arrival in the U.S. from Germany in the 19th century and culminating in the collapse during the 2008 financial crisis of the bank they founded. Dave Rich comments:

The play presents itself as a morality tale about global finance, a story of financial trickery that left countless ordinary people impoverished or homeless. It is also saturated with Jewishness. We are told within the opening lines that Henry Lehman, the eldest of the three brothers, is “a circumcised Jew.” The brothers repeatedly cry Barukh Hashem (“Blessed is God”) as they build their fortune. . . . It is gratuitous and overwhelming: not just a passing mention of Jewishness here or there to make the point that the Lehmans were Jewish, but as in-your-face as it is possible to be. In other words, this is not only a play about bankers who are Jews, but a play about Jews who are bankers.

And what does it tell us about these Jews? Mainly that they love money and will do anything to get more of it. Every stereotype of the greedy, self-absorbed, materialistic Jewish financier is present. . . . Emanuel Lehman is so cheap he reuses the same bunch of flowers every time he asks a girl to marry him “so he would not have to re-buy them,” but so brash that he eventually woos his bride by declaring “I’m one of the richest Jews in New York.”

This ought to ring alarm bells for anyone with even a passing knowledge of anti-Semitic stereotypes, but it seems as if the idea that Jews love money and power is—to use an appropriate phrase—priced in.

In an early scene, the Lehmans, after lighting Hanukkah candles, find out that their neighbors’ crops are on fire and of course say, “Barukh Hashem!” because they see a financial opportunity. And then there is the depiction of the 1929 Wall Street crash and the suicides it supposedly precipitated:

Strikingly, unlike all the other bankers shown in the play up to that point, these victims of the system the Lehmans supposedly built do not appear to be Jewish. Rather than having names like Emanuel and Mayer, they are called Teddy, Vernon, Jimmy, Don, and Fred. They are still bankers, but honorable and sympathetic ones, and not Jewish; . . . it has to be non-Jews who are the unsuspecting victims of Jewish malpractice. Jews making money while non-Jews die is about as anti-Semitic as it gets.

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.