To conclude today’s newsletter with something a bit less weighty, I direct you to a highly positive review of Barbra Streisand’s recent memoir by Samantha Pickette:

Streisand is at her most real when she is talking about the project that marked her directorial debut. She read Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” just before the premiere of Funny Girl in 1968. It took her fifteen years to make it into a movie, and the three meaty chapters that tell her story are at the core of the memoir. Yentl was her most personal (and overtly Jewish) project, and she clearly regards it as her masterpiece.

The story of Yentl is, in many ways, the story of Streisand fighting against her detractors—studio executives who dismissed the script, cast, and subject matter as “too Jewish,” critics who questioned whether Streisand actually directed the film without help, loved ones who tried to convince her to move on from the project, and even Singer himself, who denounced Streisand’s feminist reinterpretation of the original source material. Ultimately, she not only asserted creative control but took ownership of her Jewishness, her femininity, and the power that came from celebrating both.

Streisand was not the only distinctively Jewish Jew who broke through in the 1960s, but she was the most spectacularly successful.

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.