While primarily a historian of Victorian intellectual life, Gertrude Himmelfarb (1922-2019) was a prolific writer of impressive depth as well as breadth, writing on social and religious history, the ills of postmodernism, the European Enlightenment, the American critic Lionel Trilling, and—toward the end of her life—philo-Semitism and British perceptions of Jews in the modern era. The website Contemporary Thinkers has recently produced an online resource on her life and work, compiling a number of her own essays, biographical material, and encomia to her achievements. One of Himmelfarb’s articles for Mosaic can be read here, as well as essays on her life and work. In a summary of her intellectual contributions, Contemporary Thinkers sums up her work on Jewish topics:

[One] persistent theme in Himmelfarb’s writing was the situation of the Jews in modern Europe. Her historical work showed the deep roots of the more positive history of the Jews in Anglo- and Anglo-American societies than in the Continental European societies. While many Europeans in the 19th century persisted in regarding the Jews, long after their formal emancipation, as a nation within a nation, demanding that they forsake aspects of their identity in exchange for full acceptance, in England the “Jewish question” was far more prosaic, political, and less fraught. It was a question of citizenship—and no more.

The affinity of English-speaking peoples with the Jews is the topic of Himmelfarb’s The People of the Book: Philo-Semitism in England from Cromwell to Churchill (2011). This history of not just tolerance but positive feeling, itself one of the most important and most unusual links connecting Jews and the Jewish tradition with some of the greatest minds of Western culture, begins in England with the Puritans’ attraction to the “Hebrew spirit,” and the mid-17th-century return of Jews to the British Isles centuries after their expulsion. It continues in the writings and public statements of Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, born a Jew but baptized at the age of twelve. And it culminates, in the 20th century, in the Zionism of Lord Arthur Balfour and Winston Churchill.

Examining the effects of Iran’s decision to launch nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel on October 1, Benny Morris takes stock of the Jewish state’s strategic situation:

The massive Iranian attack has turned what began as a local war in and around the Gaza Strip and then expanded into a Hamas–Hizballah–Houthi–Israeli war [into] a regional war with wide and possibly calamitous international repercussions.

Before the Iranians launched their attack, Washington warned Tehran to desist (“don’t,” in President Biden’s phrase), and Israel itself had reportedly cautioned the Iranians secretly that such an attack would trigger a devastating Israeli counterstrike. But a much-humiliated Iran went ahead, nonetheless.

For Israel, the way forward seems to lie in an expansion of the war—in the north or south or both—until the country attains some sort of victory, or a diplomatic settlement is reached. A “victory” would mean forcing Hizballah to cease fire in exchange, say, for a cessation of the IDF bombing campaign and withdrawal to the international border, or forcing Iran, after suffering real pain from IDF attacks, to cease its attacks and rein in its proxies: Hizballah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

At the same time, writes Morris, a victory along such lines would still have its limits:

An IDF withdrawal from southern Lebanon and a cessation of Israeli air-force bombing would result in Hizballah’s resurgence and its re-investment of southern Lebanon down to the border. Neither the Americans nor the French nor the UN nor the Lebanese army—many of whose troops are Shiites who support Hizballah—would fight them.