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.

Information about a supposedly near-finalized hostage deal continued to trickle out yesterday. While it’s entirely possible that by the time you read this a deal will be much more certain, it is every bit as likely that it will have fallen through by then. More likely still, we will learn that there are indefinite and unspecified delays. Then there are the details: even in the best of scenarios, not all the hostages will be returned at once, and Israel will have to make painful concessions in exchange, including the release of hundreds of hardened terrorists and the withdrawal from key parts of the Gaza Strip.

Unusually—if entirely appropriately—the president-elect’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, has participated in the talks alongside members of President Biden’s team. Philip Klein examines the incoming Trump administration’s role in the process:

President-elect Trump has repeatedly warned that there would be “all hell to pay” if hostages were not returned from Gaza by the time he takes office. While he has never laid out exactly what the specific consequences for Hamas would be, there are some ominous signs that Israel is being pressured into paying a tremendous price.

There is obviously more here than we know. It’s possible that with the pressure from the Trump team came reassurances that Israel would have more latitude to reenter Gaza as necessary to go after Hamas than it would have enjoyed under Biden. . . . That said, all appearances are that Israel has been forced into making more concessions because Trump was concerned that he’d be embarrassed if January 20 came around with no hostages released.

While Donald Trump’s threats are a welcome rhetorical shift, part of the problem may be their vagueness. After all, it’s unlikely the U.S. would use military force to unleash hell in Gaza, or could accomplish much in doing so that the IDF can’t. More useful would be direct threats against countries like Qatar and Turkey that host Hamas, and threats to the persons and bank accounts of the Hamas officials living in those counties. Witkoff instead praised the Qatari prime minister for “doing God’s work” in the negotiations.”