Born in 1874 (or thereabouts), Emma Messing grew up in Indianapolis, where her father was the rabbi of a prominent Reform synagogue and a highly regarded figure in Jewish and Gentile circles. Messing, whose doings were noted in the society pages from her youth onward, started performing vaudeville with her sister at age thirty-one, had a romance with the colorful non-Jewish real-estate developer who built Miami Beach, and pursued a brief career as an actress in New York. In 1921—having realized that she would not achieve Broadway stardom—she got herself a job with the State Department as an aide at the embassy in Berlin. Mark Lasswell writes:

With Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, Messing was reassigned to the U.S. legation in Stockholm. As the war in Europe widened, she resigned her position and in December 1940, at age sixty-seven, she returned to America and set out to tell anyone who would listen about Hitler and the Nazi threat. . . .

At an Indianapolis auditorium in March 1941, an overflow crowd turned out to hear Messing’s speech about what she had seen in Germany. She gave the talk again a few nights later, at the World War Memorial Shrine, for those who couldn’t get in. A long article in the Indianapolis Star about the first night quoted extensively from the speech. Messing described Hitler’s rise in the 1920s, his demonization of Jews, his vilification of all religion so he could “substitute the worship of this anti-Christ, this pagan Hitler.” She noted that “he spoke the language of the masses. He spoke to the people who were ready to believe anything.”

She talked about the creeping terror of life in Germany after Hitler came to power, and about meeting concentration-camp prisoners who had miraculously gained release by promising to leave the country or through the intercession of an influential friend. The camps, she said, were “hell holes of mental and physical tortures, where hundreds of thousands have been incarcerated, not criminals, but men of the highest intellect and standing. These splendid men have been and are subjected to unheard of cruelties by the worst sadists of the modern world.”

Messing later wrote that a few days before the speech, “I was approached by several women who asked me not to ‘exaggerate the atrocities because the newspapers had been doing this right along.’ My answer was, if you multiply what you have been reading a hundred times you will still not have the whole truth.”

While conventional wisdom in the Western press believes that the war with Hamas has left Jerusalem more isolated and scuttled chances of expanding the Abraham Accords, Gabriel Scheinmann points to a very different reality. He begins with Iran’s massive drone and missile attack on Israel last month, and the coalition that helped defend against it:

America’s Arab allies had, in various ways, provided intelligence and allowed U.S. and Israeli planes to operate in their airspace. Jordan, which has been vociferously attacking Israel’s conduct in Gaza for months, even publicly acknowledged that it shot down incoming Iranian projectiles. When the chips were down, the Arab coalition held and made clear where they stood in the broader Iranian war on Israel.

The successful batting away of the Iranian air assault also engendered awe in Israel’s air-defense capabilities, which have performed marvelously throughout the war. . . . Israel’s response to the Iranian night of missiles should give further courage to Saudi Arabia to codify its alignment. Israel . . . telegraphed clearly to Tehran that it could hit precise targets without its aircraft being endangered and that the threshold of a direct Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear or other sites had been breached.

The entire episode demonstrated that Israel can both hit Iranian sites and defend against an Iranian response. At a time when the United States is focused on de-escalation and restraint, Riyadh could see quite clearly that only Israel has both the capability and the will to deal with the Iranian threat.

It is impossible to know whether the renewed U.S.-Saudi-Israel negotiations will lead to a normalization deal in the immediate months ahead. . . . Regardless of the status of this deal, [however], or how difficult the war in Gaza may appear, America’s Arab allies have now become Israel’s.