A Great Jewish Historian’s Political Journey from Left to Right

Born in New York City in 1915, Lucy Dawidowicz (née Schildkret) grew up in the company of radical Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants and their children. From 1938 to 1939 she spent a year in the Polish city of Wilno (now Lithuanian Vilnius) studying under some of the foremost figures of secular Yiddish scholarship. After World War II, Dawidowicz became a leading historian of the Holocaust and of East European Jewry. She also migrated intellectually from socialism to New Deal liberalism and then to the political right, styling herself an “independent neoconservative.” Discussing her recent biography of Dawidowicz with John J. Miller, Nancy Sinkoff explains how her subject’s encounter with the breakdown of civil society and of social stability in prewar Eastern Europe—with dire consequences for the Jews—informed her political transformation. (Audio, 17 minutes.)


Read more at National Review

More about: American Jewry, East European Jewry, Lucy Dawidowicz, Neoconservatism

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF