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 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.