The Volstead Act of 1919 forbade the manufacture and sale of alcohol, but carved out special exceptions for Jews and Catholics who use wine for sacramental purposes. As Alice Kassens writes, this provision had some unintended consequences:

Given that Jews conduct some ceremonies in the home, rabbis served as middlemen for their congregations, submitting a list of their congregations’ membership to Prohibition officials in exchange for permits for their members to purchase ten gallons of wine per year from authorized dealers. This workaround led, perhaps unsurprisingly, to a rapid expansion in Jewish congregations and the number of rabbis.

In some states, a person needed only ten signatures to a petition attesting that he was a rabbi in order to get a rabbinical license from the secretary of state. License in hand, the only obstacle to the wine permits was a list of congregation members. Fake rabbis took names from city directories, phone books, and other public listings to create congregations.

According to a Sept. 9, 1922 article in the San Francisco Examiner, . . . Irish, Swedish, Scottish, and Greek residents of San Francisco were getting monthly supplies of sacramental wine “under the names of Goldstein, Blumberg, Silverstein, Levinsky and other adopted Jewish cognomens.”

Banning booze did not halt its demand, and thus offered ample opportunity to intemperate spirits. . . . One former junk dealer from Denver made more than $100,000 in profits by selling wine under a permit issued by the government—nearly $1.5 million in 2019 dollars. Fake rabbis often sold permits to restaurants for $200 to $500 ($3,000 to $7,500 today) apiece.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”