In 1953, Henry Saltzman graduated from Brooklyn College and took a job teaching secular studies at a ḥasidic elementary school in Brooklyn. Although a Jew from a Yiddish-speaking home, Saltzman was far less pious, and far more Americanized, than his pupils, who belonged to the Satmar branch of Ḥasidism, known for its religious zeal. Saltzman tells the story of this experience in an autobiographical novel, titled Oy! Oy! Oy!: The Teacher Is a Goy. Fred Siegel writes in his review:

Saltzman struggles to educate his class of ten-year-old boys in the ways of the wider culture. He bypasses the dull curriculum he’s been given in hopes that his innovative lessons about vocabulary, geography, and current events will tempt his students to learn about and even appreciate America, their land of refuge. But it’s a delicate dance, and he repeatedly stumbles on ḥasidic sensibilities. First, he looks different. Saltzman wears standard clothing for men of his time in New York: no peyot, no yarmulke, no tsitsit. “He took pride in displaying, by means of a bare head, his freedom from their inhibitions and rules.”

It’s no surprise, then, that one of his future students shouts out defiantly after his job interview: “‘Oy Oy Oy the titchur is a goy.’ . . . There it was. The ugly word meaning Gentile out in the open again, as it had been all through his childhood. Only this time, he was the object of its scorn.”

Yet despite these early missteps, Saltzman’s knowledge of Yiddish makes him the perfect teacher and interlocutor. Deftly fielding the boys’ occasional insults, both intended and unintended, he gradually draws them into a love of secular learning. The class is a ragtag group that includes Holocaust survivors, refugees from displaced-persons (DP) camps, and neglected sons from enormous families. He discovers that the boys, with their limited, Yiddish-accented English, are fascinated by new words. . . .

Amid an epidemic of anti-American wokeness, Henry Saltzman’s thinly fictionalized memoir of mid-20th-century Americanization comes as a welcome respite.

Considering the current state of Israel-Arab relations, Ghaith al-Omari writes

First and foremost, no ceasefire will be possible without the release of Israeli hostages and commitments to disarm Hamas and remove it from power. The final say on these matters rests with Hamas commanders on the ground in Gaza, who have been largely impervious to foreign pressure so far. At minimum, however, the United States should insist that Qatari and Egyptian mediators push Hamas’s external leadership to accept these conditions publicly, which could increase pressure on the group’s Gaza leadership.

Washington should also demand a clear, public position from key Arab states regarding disarmament. The Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas endorsed this position in a June letter to Saudi Arabia and France, giving Arab states Palestinian cover for endorsing it themselves.

Some Arab states have already indicated a willingness to play a significant role, but they will have little incentive to commit resources and personnel to Gaza unless Israel (1) provides guarantees that it will not occupy the Strip indefinitely, and (2) removes its veto on a PA role in Gaza’s future, even if only symbolic at first. Arab officials are also seeking assurances that any role they play in Gaza will be in the context of a wider effort to reach a two-state solution.

On the other hand, Washington must remain mindful that current conditions between Israel and the Palestinians are not remotely conducive to . . . implementing a two-state solution.