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.

For more than a year, the Iran-backed Houthis have been launching drones and missiles at ships traversing the Red Sea, as well as at Israeli territory, in support of Hamas. This development has drastically curtailed shipping through the Suez Canal and the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, driving up trade prices. This week, the Trump administration began an extensive bombing campaign against the Houthis in an effort to reopen that crucial waterway. Burcu Ozcelik highlights another benefit of this action:

The administration has a broader geopolitical agenda—one that includes countering China’s economic leverage, particularly Beijing’s reliance on Iranian oil. By targeting the Houthis, the United States is not only safeguarding vital shipping lanes but also exerting pressure on the Iran-China energy nexus, a key component of Beijing’s strategic posture in the region.

China was the primary destination for up to 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports in 2024, underscoring the deepening economic ties between Beijing and Tehran despite U.S. sanctions. By helping fill Iranian coffers, China aids Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in financing proxies like the Houthis. Since October of last year, notable U.S. Treasury announcements have revealed covert links between China and the Houthis.

Striking the Houthis could trigger broader repercussions—not least by disrupting the flow of Iranian oil to China. While difficult to confirm, it is conceivable and has been reported, that the Houthis may have received financial or other forms of compensation from China (such as Chinese-made military components) in exchange for allowing freedom of passage for China-affiliated vessels in the Red Sea.