Last Thursday marked the 143rd birthday of the Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, who killed himself in 1942, facing the complete collapse of the world he knew. Jay Nordlinger writes:

Zweig grew up in a “golden age of security,” as he terms it. This sense of security was imparted to widening circles of people, not just the comfortably off or advantageously born. Even the Jews, such as Zweig and his family, felt secure. . . . Vienna was a great, open, liberal city. The “genius of Vienna,” writes Zweig, was that “it harmonized all national and linguistic opposites in itself.” Nowhere, he says, “was it easier to be a European.” That was then.

Zweig saw most of that security collapse with World War I and the disintegration of the tolerant and multiethnic Hapsburg empire. Yet he understood well that this security was for the most part illusory to begin with, “a castle in the air,” as he put it—a theme that occurs again and again beneath the surface of his fiction. And it’s worth noting that some of his contemporaries saw through the illusion in real time, among them Theodor Herzl, a fellow Viennese Jew Zweig admired very much, who had embraced Zionism before the younger writer had published his first book.

As bad as things were in the wake of World War I, Zweig, unlike Herzl, lived to see them get much worse. Nordlinger continues:

“More and more clearly,” writes Zweig, “I began to detect a certain insecurity in people’s behavior as they started to waver. Your own small personal experiences of life are always more persuasive than anything else.” Yes. One day, on the street in Salzburg, Zweig noticed something telltale.

An old friend of his avoided greeting him. The next day, to make up for it, the friend called on Zweig at home. The truth was plain: it was becoming dangerous to be friendly in public with Jews—even world-famous ones. Zweig went into exile, in England.

To some Jews today, this might sound more than a little familiar.

In a recent article, the New York Times Magazine asserts that Benjamin Netanyahu “prolonged the war in Gaza to stay in power.” Niranjan Shankar takes the argument apart piece by piece, showing that for all its careful research, it fails to back up its basic claims. For instance: the article implies that Netanyahu torpedoed a three-point cease-fire proposal supported by the Biden administration in the spring of last year:

First of all, it’s crucial to note that Biden’s supposed “three-point plan” announced in May 2024 was originally an Israeli proposal. Of course, there was some back-and-forth and disagreement over how the Biden administration presented this initially, as Biden failed to emphasize that according to the three-point framework, a permanent cease-fire was conditional on Hamas releasing all of the hostages and stepping down. Regardless, the piece fails to mention that it was Hamas in June 2024 that rejected this framework!

It wasn’t until July 2024 that Hamas made its major concession—dropping its demand that Israel commit up front to a full end to the war, as opposed to doing so at a later stage of cease-fire/negotiations. Even then, U.S. negotiators admitted that both sides were still far from agreeing on a deal.

Even when the Times raises more credible criticisms of Israel—like when it brings up the IDF’s strategy of conducting raids rather than holding territory in the first stage of the war—it offers them in what seems like bad faith:

[W]ould the New York Times prefer that Israel instead started with a massive ground campaign with a “clear-hold-build” strategy from the get-go? Of course, if Israel had done this, there would have been endless criticism, especially under the Biden administration. But when Israel instead tried the “raid-and-clear” strategy, it gets blamed for deliberately dragging the war on.