The 1975 film Hester Street was based on a short 1896 novel by the great Yiddish writer and editor Abraham Cahan. Its title character, a Jewish immigrant who takes the name Jake out of his desire to assimilate, grows increasingly estranged from his wife Gitl in the old country, even as he struggles to raise the money to bring her to America. Michael Weingrad writes:

The brilliance and pathos of Yekl lies to a great extent in its complex and honest depiction of acculturation. Cahan denies neither the gain nor the loss entailed in his protagonist’s still incipient Americanization. Most strikingly, Cahan makes the great marker of this cultural and psychic passage, not Jake’s or Gitl’s arrival at Ellis Island but, rather, their divorce. The divorce ends the novelette, signaling the liberation from old world ties and obligations.

Weingrad then comments on the very different thrust of the film, the work of the director Joan Micklin Silver:

Cahan was writing for an American readership that could be expected to find immigrant Jews off-puttingly, even frighteningly alien. In Yekl, he steers the American reader from an outsider’s aversion to an understanding of, and sympathy for, the characters, doing so by using different registers of language and alterations of tone and perspective. Micklin Silver enables her audience to bridge a similar sympathetic gulf—though, in her case, the gulf is not between Gentile America and immigrant New York, but rather between the 1970s American present and an obscure or sentimentalized past of ethnic and immigrant roots.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.