Harry Golden (né Chaim Goldhirsch) grew up on New York’s Lower East Side and spent three years in prison for swindling investors. Not long after his release, he moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, where he took on a new name, a new persona, and a new career as a journalist and anti-segregation activist. Edward Kosner writes:

Golden played the maverick—the refugee New Yorker transplanted in the cornpone South, polemic journalist, son of a Hebrew scholar [but] married to a Roman Catholic, champion of the oppressed, union man, cigar-chomping, bourbon-slugging pal of intellectuals and politicians. Actually, he was a Kennedy-era liberal, more committed to civil rights than the Kennedy administration but in sync with Democratic cold-war foreign policy. Indeed, Golden’s prime—the years from the publication of his best-selling Only in America in 1958 to the election of Richard Nixon a decade later—coincides with the postwar Democratic ascendancy that died in the jungles of Vietnam. . . .

Starting in 1944, Golden filled the plain columns of the Carolina Israelite with short essays, editorials, and reminiscences of growing up poor in a pious family on the Lower East Side. Over the years, he repurposed the stuff into a series of books, beginning with Only in America, which stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year and made him enough money to pay off many of his old debts. More than a dozen other books followed, including an autobiography and studies of Jewish peddlers and the case of Leo Frank, the Jewish factory manager who was accused of murdering a young woman and lynched by a white mob in Marietta, Georgia in 1915. He wrote for important magazines, too, including Life, Esquire, the Nation, and Commentary. All that exposure led to lucrative work on the side as a lecturer and frequent appearances on the Tonight Show couch, with Jack Paar and then Johnny Carson.

Between the explosion of thousands of Hizballah pagers on September 17 and now, Iran’s geopolitical clout has shrunk dramatically: Hizballah, Iran’s most important striking force, has retreated to lick its wounds; Iranian influence in Syria has collapsed; Iran’s attempts to attack Israel via Gaza have proved self-defeating; its missile and drone arsenal have proved impotent; and its territorial defenses have proved useless in the face of Israeli airpower. Edward Luttwak considers what might happen next:

The myth of Iranian power was ironically propagated by the United States itself. Right at the start of his first term, in January 2009, Barack Obama was terrified that he would be maneuvered into fighting a war against Iran. . . . Obama started his tenure by apologizing for America’s erstwhile support for the shah. And beyond showing contrition for the past, the then-president also set a new rule, one that lasted all the way to October 2024: Iran may attack anyone, but none may attack Iran.

[Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s] variegated fighters, in light trucks and jeeps, could have been stopped by a few hundred well-trained soldiers. But neither Hizballah nor Iran’s own Revolutionary Guards could react. Hizballah no longer has any large units capable of crossing the border to fight rebels in Syria, as they had done so many times before. As for the Revolutionary Guards, they were commandeering civilian airliners to fly troops into Damascus airport to support Assad. But then Israel made clear that it would not allow Iran’s troops so close to its border, and Iran no longer had credible counter-threats.

Now Iran’s population is discovering that it has spent decades in poverty to pay for the massive build-up of the Revolutionary Guards and all their militias. And for what? They have elaborate bases and showy headquarters, but their expensive ballistic missiles can only be used against defenseless Arabs, not Israel with its Arrow interceptors. As for Hizballah, clearly it cannot even defend itself, let alone Iran’s remaining allies in the region. Perhaps, in short, the dictatorship will finally be challenged in the streets of Iran’s cities, at scale and in earnest.