Upon his arrival in Auschwitz in 1942, the Nazis assigned Zalmen Gradowski to the Sonderkommando (special force), whose task was to direct fellow prisoners to the gas chambers and then to remove and dispose of their corpses. Gradowski kept a Yiddish-language diary, which he carefully hid and which has recently been published in English translation. In her review, Dara Horn compares Gradowski to Shimon bar Kokhba, who led a failed revolt against the Roman occupation of Judea in 135 CE:

Gradowski was both a talented writer and a heroic warrior, whose name should be as well known in Jewish history as Bar Kokhba’s—not least because he and Bar Kokhba were equally doomed. Gradowski was born around 1909 to a religious family in the town of Suwalki in the region known to Jews as Lita or Lithuania; as a young adult, he was politically active in the Revisionist wing of the Zionist movement named for Bar Kokhba’s last stand, Betar. By 1942, he and his wife, Sonja, and most of their large extended families were deported to Auschwitz, where all but Gradowski were gassed and burned on arrival.

This living nightmare ended for him on October 7, 1944, in a revolt he helped organize that lasted one day. Using gunpowder smuggled in tiny amounts over many months by Jewish female prisoners working in the camp’s munitions factory, he and his fellow rebels blew up Crematorium 4, killed three guards, and facilitated the escape of several hundred people. Within hours, Nazi officers recaptured most of the escapees and murdered more than four hundred Sonderkommandos and other prisoners. Gradowski was murdered in the revolt, as he fully anticipated.

Like much of Yiddish literature, Gradowski’s long incantatory introduction is laced with deliberate ironic echoes of biblical and other traditional texts, because that is the discourse in which the overwhelming majority of murdered Jews thought, spoke, and wrote. The fact that many non-Jewish readers will likely find this style alienating is itself revealing, because its off-putting nature for English readers isn’t just about references that might go over a reader’s head. This style is a literary enactment of the deepest element of Jewish life, one that anti-Semites cannot bear: responsibility for both past and future.

Like the classical Jewish texts upon which he drew, Gradowski’s writing openly demands his readers’ participation. He does not allow his readers to be passive observers; he fully implicates them in whatever happens next. This prophetic call to responsibility is precisely the call that the anti-Semitic world has rejected—then and, in endless unspoken ways, now.

If Iran succeeds in obtaining nuclear weapons, the war in Gaza, let alone the protests on college campuses, will seem like a minor complication. Jonathan Schachter fears that this danger could be much more imminent than decisionmakers in Jerusalem and Washington believe. In his view, Israel seems to be repeating the mistake that allowed it to be taken by surprise on Simchat Torah of 2023 and Yom Kippur of 1973: putting too much faith in an intelligence concept that could be wrong.

Israel and the United States apparently believe that despite Iran’s well-documented progress in developing capabilities necessary for producing and delivering nuclear weapons, as well as its extensive and ongoing record of violating its international nuclear obligations, there is no acute crisis because building a bomb would take time, would be observable, and could be stopped by force. Taken together, these assumptions and their moderating impact on Israeli and American policy form a new Iran concept reminiscent of its 1973 namesake and of the systemic failures that preceded the October 7 massacre.

Meanwhile, most of the restrictions put in place by the 2015 nuclear deal will expire by the end of next year, rendering the question of Iran’s adherence moot. And the forces that could be taking action aren’t:

The European Union regularly issues boilerplate press releases asserting its members’ “grave concern.” American decisionmakers and spokespeople have created the unmistakable impression that their reservations about the use of force are stronger than their commitment to use force to prevent an Iranian atomic bomb. At the same time, the U.S. refuses to enforce its own sanctions comprehensively: Iranian oil exports (especially to China) and foreign-currency reserves have ballooned since January 2021, when the Biden administration took office.

Israel’s response has also been sluggish and ambiguous. Despite its oft-stated policy of never allowing a nuclear Iran, Israel’s words and deeds have sent mixed messages to allies and adversaries—perhaps inadvertently reinforcing the prevailing sense in Washington and elsewhere that Iran’s nuclear efforts do not present an exigent crisis.