The Folly of Ignoring Dictators

Visiting the family archives of an English marquess, George Weigel came across the diary of the statesman Robert “Bobbety” Cranborne, who had served in the cabinet under Stanley Baldwin. The diary included notes on a 1935 dinner in Berlin attended by the future prime minister Anthony Eden, Adolf Hitler, and several high-ranking Nazis. Weigel paraphrases Cranborne’s conclusions about this “dinner party from Hell.”

There would be no stopping Hitler by any means other than armed force. The Führer had made himself a de-facto dictator by the Enabling Act of 1933. Nine months before the Eden-Cranborne mission [to Berlin] he had announced Germany’s remilitarization, including the reintroduction of conscription and the creation of a German air force. In all of this, he was following the plan he had described in detail in his turgid screed, Mein Kampf. Until early 1939, however, much of the civilized world refused to see what Lord Cranborne saw and refused to believe that Hitler meant what he wrote. Rather, the civilized world averted its eyes from what it should have recognized as the unmistakable threat posed by a re-arming Germany, which had taken on much of the world in 1914–1918 and almost won.

Looking through Bobbety Cranborne’s diary, it was impossible not to think of those today who still refuse to take Vladimir Putin at his word when he claims that Ukraine is a non-nation, or who defend his brutal war against Ukraine as a response to legitimate Russian security concerns, or who somehow believe that a “barking” NATO provoked Putin to do what he had signaled for decades that he intended to do: namely, reverse history’s verdict in the cold war. Such blindness is not only a matter of historical amnesia or unrealistic foreign-policy “realism.” It is also a moral and spiritual failing—the moral failure to recognize evil for what it is, and the spiritual failure to summon the wit and will to oppose it before it destroys whatever stands in its path.

Read more at First Things

More about: Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Putin

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society