At the center of Philip Roth’s 1997 novel American Pastoral is Seymour Levov, a Newark Jew whose blond hair, blue eyes, and athletic prowess earn him the nickname “Swede” among his admiring high school classmates. Swede’s happy and successful adulthood is torn asunder when his daughter Merry gets caught up in the campus radicalism of the 1960s and takes up terrorism. Revisiting the novel form the perspective of 2024, Irina Velitskaya understands it as

a wrenching and indelible portrait of the American Jewish experience of assimilation, with a bleakly pessimistic ending that illuminated the darker corners of the Jewish entrapment between the left-wing anti-colonialist and right-wing racist forces that now work together to tell Jews, in effect, When you are in Europe, go to Palestine. When you are in Palestine, go back to Europe. . . . If American Pastoral were set in 2024 instead of in the 1960s and 70s, Merry would almost certainly be participating in the Free Palestine movement.

Unlike her father, who accommodated everyone’s wishes and was agreeable to everyone’s desires, even at the cost of being severed from his Jewish roots, Merry has accommodated no one, and was agreeable to exactly none of society’s expectations for her. Raised in cosseted comfort, she actively sought out her struggle and battled her own sort of adversary.

And who is this evil adversary? It is not only anti-Semitism, though Swede has spent his life consciously or subconsciously hiding from that. . . . It is not the Holocaust that Swede avoided by being lucky enough to have been born in America. It is the one thing none of us can escape from, no matter how much we try to hide from it or strive to succeed despite it. It is the evil ineradicable from human dealings. It is history.

This, more than Judaism, more than the inscrutable human mind, was Roth’s great subject in American Pastoral—how the gears of history grind, and how all-American, cheerful, and successful strivers are, in turn, ground down.

Yesterday, the Iranian foreign minister flew to Geneva to meet with European diplomats. President Trump, meanwhile, indicated that cease-fire negotiations might soon begin with Iran, which would presumably involve Tehran agreeing to make concessions regarding its nuclear program, while Washington pressures Israel to halt its military activities. According to Israeli media, Iran already began putting out feelers to the U.S. earlier this week. Aviram Bellaishe considers the purpose of these overtures:

The regime’s request to return to negotiations stems from the principle of deception and delay that has guided it for decades. Iran wants to extricate itself from a situation of total destruction of its nuclear facilities. It understands that to save the nuclear program, it must stop at a point that would allow it to return to it in the shortest possible time. So long as the negotiation process leads to halting strikes on its military capabilities and preventing the destruction of the nuclear program, and enables the transfer of enriched uranium to a safe location, it can simultaneously create the two tracks in which it specializes—a false facade of negotiations alongside a hidden nuclear race.