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.

How did Qatar, an American ally, become the nerve center of the leading Palestinian jihadist organization? Natalie Ecanow explains.

When Jordan expelled Hamas in 1999, Qatar offered sanctuary to the group, which had already become notorious for using suicide-bombing attacks over the previous decade. . . . Hamas chose to relocate to Syria. However, that arrangement lasted for only a decade. With the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, the terror group found its way back to Qatar.

In 2003, Hamas leaders reportedly convened in Qatar after the IDF attempted to eliminate Hamas’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, following a Hamas suicide bombing in Jerusalem that killed seven people, including two American citizens. This episode led to one of the first efforts by Qatar to advocate for its terror proxy.

Thirteen years and five wars between Hamas and Israel later, Qatar’s support for Hamas has not waned. . . . To this day, Qatari officials maintain that the office came at the “request from Washington to establish indirect lines of communication with Hamas.” However, an Obama White House official asserted that there was never any request from Washington. . . . Inexplicably, the United States government continues to rely on Qatar to negotiate for the release of the hostages held by Hamas, even as the regime hosts the terror group’s political elite.

A reckoning is needed between our two countries. Congressional hearings, legislation, executive orders, and other measures to regulate relations between our countries are long overdue.