Several years ago, Theodor Dunkelgrün had his first phone conversation with an elderly woman with whom he had been corresponding in the course of his scholarly pursuits. “Her Dutch,” Dunkelgrün recalls, “sounded as if it had been frozen in time, . . . a prewar Jewish Dutch vernacular in which I recognized the language of the elders of the decimated community into which I was born.” He tells her story:

Els Salomon-Prins Bendheim, who died this past January in her 100th year, happened upon a spectacular library, a collection of more than 6,000 manuscripts, printed editions, and ephemera, when she first visited Jerusalem in 1949 at the age of twenty-six. The library was the life’s work of the Dutch scholar Eliezer Liepman Philip Prins (Arnhem, 1835–Frankfurt, 1915). Els Salomon-Prins Bendheim was his granddaughter.

With time, she discovered, the library had become an archive of sorts. The margins teemed with manuscript annotations and tucked between the pages she found letters from some of the most prominent rabbis and scholars of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The encounter with his books lit a double flame of love and learning within her, and she devoted the rest of her life to safeguarding her grandfather’s memory by editing his correspondence and his marginalia, in Hebrew and in Dutch.

[S]he gave me copies of the three books (two in Hebrew, one in Dutch) that she had devoted to her grandfather. . . . Together, those books painted a portrait of a remarkable figure—a learned independent scholar, book collector, contributor to Jewish scholarly journals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as well as to the Dutch Jewish press. From his home in Arnhem, he had set out to connect with the leading Jewish figures of his time. . . . It was through his membership of this modern republic of rabbinic letters that Prins had made his greatest contributions to Jewish scholarship, as a connector and go-between with unsurpassed knowledge about the worlds of Jewish scholarship and Jewish books.

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.