Born in 1954, Elliot Jager grew up on New York’s Lower East Side after it had already ceased to be a thriving Jewish immigrant neighborhood. Jager, who now resides in Jerusalem, considers this corner of Manhattan in its present form, and reminisces about its past:

Growing up, my Lower East Side was overwhelmingly populated by Puerto Ricans. The remnant Jewish community of roughly 20,000—many elderly and poor—was preyed upon by neighborhood louts. Raised Orthodox, I worshipped in the Sassover rebbe’s shtibl, or storefront synagogue, on Eighth Street between Avenues D and C. It was within easy walking distance of our apartment in the Jacob Riis Houses project, though a bit risky for a boy wearing a yarmulke. . . .

Now, well past middle age and from 6,000 miles away, I find myself captivated by David Simon’s television tour de force The Wire, set in contemporary Baltimore. In many ways, it’s led me to rethink how I ought to look back at my own New York City upbringing. True, I was fatherless and poor in a tough neighborhood; but I was blessed with an innately capable mother who taught me values, virtue, and empathy. My community, though moribund and imperfect, was nonetheless committed to mutual aid. Ritual and tradition offered a framework for life.

So while I can’t identify with hipsters hankering after tenement museums, potato knishes, and kosher-style delicatessen, this curmudgeon is not shedding any tears that my Lower East Side has been supplanted by something—apparently—kinder, gentler and, I pray, more humane.

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].