Apart from some who have spent their lives exclusively in ḥaredi communities, most American Jews have encountered Hebrew or Aramaic prayers transliterated into the Latin alphabet for the benefit of the English-speaking reader. Jenna Weissman Joselit traces the origins of this practice—an inversion of the much older and more widespread Jewish habit of rendering the vernacular in Hebrew characters—to a work published in 1908:

The Hebrew Hymnal for School and Home . . . was compiled and edited jointly by Mathilde Schechter and Lewis Isaacs, with a helping hand from Henrietta Szold. Widely advertised in the Anglo-Jewish press, the 67-page collection was touted as “just the book that has been wanted for some time. It is not too long, it confines itself to the best known Jewish hymns . . . and is clearly printed and moderate in price.”

Its “get-up,” as much as its selection of tunes, made the Hebrew Hymnal particularly attractive to the American Jewish public, “meet[ing] its approval.” For the very first time, or so it was proudly maintained, transliteration loomed large on the page, side by side with musical notations, Hebrew text, and an English translation. By making the melody and the lyrics accessible, explained its compilers, this volume “sounds the echo of joy and sorrow, in jubilation and wailing, in merry and plaintive, yes, heart-breaking tunes, [of] these Jewish folk-songs of the centuries gone by.”

Thanks to its newfound association with both song and Jewish tradition (all those “echoes”), transliteration now acquired a new lease on life. . . . Once heralded as a boon, it didn’t take long before transliteration migrated once again, this time from the hymnal to the siddur, where it was linked to those moments in the prayer service when the congregation—especially its female members, whose access to formal Hebrew training left a lot to be desired—sang out to God.

The linguistic equivalent of having your cake and eating it, too, transliteration made it possible for legions of American Jews to experience Hebrew without having to learn it. Of a piece with so much else that was characteristic of the American Jewish experience, this practice similarly celebrated—and prioritized—emotion at the expense of literacy, feeling Jewish at the expense of cultural immersion.

This week, there have been numerous unconfirmed reports about the fate of Esmail Qaani, who is the head of the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Benny Avni writes:

On Thursday, Sky News Arabic reported that Mr. Qaani was rushed to a hospital after suffering a heart attack. He became [the Quds Force] commander in 2020, after an American drone strike killed his predecessor, Qassem Suleimani. The unit oversees the Islamic Republic’s various Mideast proxies, as well as the exporting of the Iranian revolution to the region and beyond.

The Sky News report attempts to put to rest earlier claims that Mr. Qaani was killed at Beirut. It follows several reports asserting he has been arrested and interrogated at Tehran over suspicion that he, or a top lieutenant, leaked information to Israel. Five days ago, the Arabic-language al-Arabiya network reported that Mr. Qaani “is under surveillance and isolation, following the Israeli assassinations of prominent Iranian leaders.”

Iranians are desperately scrambling to plug possible leaks that gave Israel precise intelligence to conduct pinpoint strikes against Hizballah commanders. . . . “I find it hard to believe that Qaani was compromised,” an Iran watcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. Perhaps one or more of [Qaani’s] top aides have been recruited by Israel, he says, adding that “psychological warfare” could well be stoking the rumor mill.

If so, prominent Iranians seem to be exacerbating the internal turmoil by alleging that the country’s security apparatus has been infiltrated.