In her recent book Postwar Stories: How Books Made Judaism American, Rachel Gordan examines a spate of publications—novels like Leon Uris’s Exodus, articles in Time magazine, apologetics like Rabbi Milton Steinberg’s Basic Judaism—that appeared in the 1940s and 50s and served to acquaint a large audience with the Jewish people. These were middlebrow works, very different from, say, the fiction of Saul Bellow or Philip Roth. Jesse Tisch writes in his review:

Running through Postwar Stories is a delicate thread of emotions. It can read like a map of Jewish anxieties: about representation; about Christian judgments; about the state of the Jewish soul; about Jewish weaknesses. As a scholar, Gordan writes ambidextrously, both coolly and warmly; she covers events but also inner lives—“Jewish desires and imaginations.”

And those inner lives are frequently dark and shame-ridden. A middlebrow writer laments “how discrimination mangled the insides of a person.” A fictional protagonist worries, “Maybe it takes hurt to understand hurt, I don’t know.” A Jewish author suffers “the great wound of my youth” when rejected by Phi Beta Kappa. A reviewer blames “years of pogroms, sufferings and tortures” for Jewish angst. It was the condition of diaspora, “which implanted to us an inferiority complex.” And on and on. To some degree, Jewish middlebrow was a response to these wounds.

She also conveys, more subtly, how events might have unfolded differently. . . . Back in 1923, a distinguished Hebraist, Israel Davidson, cautioned against offering “too many explanations” to Gentiles. “Friends do not need them,” he wrote, “and enemies would not believe them.” Two years later, Elliot E. Cohen, the future Commentary editor, made the same point: American Jews shouldn’t despise or defend themselves. “American Jewry must be made to see that a life of apology is a shameful apology for a life.”

In our times, when American Jews face rising hostility even as they are perceived favorably by most Americans, that’s a lesson worth remembering.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].