In much of Eastern Europe from the 16th century onward, Jews often obtained exclusive rights to distill and sell alcohol, and ran taverns where both Jewish and non-Jewish customers gathered. American Jews’ role in the trade of intoxicating beverages was less pronounced, but hardly negligible. Reviewing Marni Davis’s 2012 book Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition, Allan Arkush writes:

The story Davis tells of [those] Jews who made their fortunes in the alcohol business doesn’t heat up until the temperance movement begins to gain some traction in the second half of the 19th century. Jews then lined up mostly on the side of the “wets,” both because their own religion commanded the use of some alcohol and because they feared the Christianization of the public realm.

American Jews didn’t deny the dangers of alcohol abuse. They just recommended that other people drink moderately and “do as we Israelites do,” as Philadelphia’s Rabbi Marcus Jastrow put it in 1874, a decade before he began to publish his Dictionary of the Targumim, Talmud Babli, Talmud Yerushalmi, and Midrashic Literature, which remains quite helpful today even if his advice to Gentile drinkers may no longer be so.

Neither the stance taken by leading rabbis nor the growing presence of Jews in the alcohol industry provoked the advocates of temperance or the prohibitionists to retaliate. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union “consistently extended themselves to Jewish sisterhoods and avoided anti-Semitic rhetoric,” and the early leadership of the Anti-Saloon League “eschewed direct criticism of Jews.” Things changed, however, with the gradual infiltration of populist anti-Semitism into the prohibitionist movement, especially in the South.

Prohibitionists didn’t win the day, or rather the decade of the 1920s, by targeting them, but once they succeeded in having the National Prohibition Act passed, American Jews found themselves in a rather unique situation, one that may have inspired a Ku Klux Klan-affiliated rabble-rouser to declare that, “My fight right now is against the Homebrew and the Hebrew.”

Between the explosion of thousands of Hizballah pagers on September 17 and now, Iran’s geopolitical clout has shrunk dramatically: Hizballah, Iran’s most important striking force, has retreated to lick its wounds; Iranian influence in Syria has collapsed; Iran’s attempts to attack Israel via Gaza have proved self-defeating; its missile and drone arsenal have proved impotent; and its territorial defenses have proved useless in the face of Israeli airpower. Edward Luttwak considers what might happen next:

The myth of Iranian power was ironically propagated by the United States itself. Right at the start of his first term, in January 2009, Barack Obama was terrified that he would be maneuvered into fighting a war against Iran. . . . Obama started his tenure by apologizing for America’s erstwhile support for the shah. And beyond showing contrition for the past, the then-president also set a new rule, one that lasted all the way to October 2024: Iran may attack anyone, but none may attack Iran.

[Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s] variegated fighters, in light trucks and jeeps, could have been stopped by a few hundred well-trained soldiers. But neither Hizballah nor Iran’s own Revolutionary Guards could react. Hizballah no longer has any large units capable of crossing the border to fight rebels in Syria, as they had done so many times before. As for the Revolutionary Guards, they were commandeering civilian airliners to fly troops into Damascus airport to support Assad. But then Israel made clear that it would not allow Iran’s troops so close to its border, and Iran no longer had credible counter-threats.

Now Iran’s population is discovering that it has spent decades in poverty to pay for the massive build-up of the Revolutionary Guards and all their militias. And for what? They have elaborate bases and showy headquarters, but their expensive ballistic missiles can only be used against defenseless Arabs, not Israel with its Arrow interceptors. As for Hizballah, clearly it cannot even defend itself, let alone Iran’s remaining allies in the region. Perhaps, in short, the dictatorship will finally be challenged in the streets of Iran’s cities, at scale and in earnest.