In his book Two Roads Home: Hitler, Stalin, and the Miraculous Survival of My Family, Daniel Finkelstein tells the story of how both his mother’s and father’s family survived the vicissitudes of World War II as European Jews. Among them is Finkelstein’s maternal grandfather, a German-Jewish scholar born in Potsdam in 1885 named Alfred Wiener. Allan Arkush writes in his review:

After his service in the German army during World War I, which included a stint as a newspaper editor with the forces stationed in Palestine, Wiener found himself in a defeated country, in which he was much more attuned than others to the vulnerability of German Jews. This was, to be sure, a period of intensified anti-Semitism, aggravated by the infamous and spurious charge that Germany had lost the war because “the Jews stabbed it in the back.” Hitler, still just a rabble-rouser, and his ilk were making a lot of noise. There was the violent suppression of left-wing rebellions, in which Jewish revolutionaries like Rosa Luxemburg and Gustav Landauer were brutally murdered.

Still, there were very few who felt, like Wiener, that German Jews were on the brink of experiencing the kind of violence that had plagued their fellow Jews in the Russian empire for decades. In 1919, Wiener published a pamphlet titled Prelude to Pogroms?

Wiener’s efforts to document rising anti-Semitism would give rise to an important institution known as the Wiener Library. Meanwhile, Wiener also wrote about Zionism, which he opposed firmly—for a time. By the 1950s, Arkush writes,

Wiener no longer believed, as he once had, in the fusion of Germanness and Jewishness, nor did he continue to oppose Zionism. “After the war,” his grandson notes, “he embraced wholeheartedly the idea of a Jewish state in Israel.”

How did Qatar, an American ally, become the nerve center of the leading Palestinian jihadist organization? Natalie Ecanow explains.

When Jordan expelled Hamas in 1999, Qatar offered sanctuary to the group, which had already become notorious for using suicide-bombing attacks over the previous decade. . . . Hamas chose to relocate to Syria. However, that arrangement lasted for only a decade. With the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, the terror group found its way back to Qatar.

In 2003, Hamas leaders reportedly convened in Qatar after the IDF attempted to eliminate Hamas’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, following a Hamas suicide bombing in Jerusalem that killed seven people, including two American citizens. This episode led to one of the first efforts by Qatar to advocate for its terror proxy.

Thirteen years and five wars between Hamas and Israel later, Qatar’s support for Hamas has not waned. . . . To this day, Qatari officials maintain that the office came at the “request from Washington to establish indirect lines of communication with Hamas.” However, an Obama White House official asserted that there was never any request from Washington. . . . Inexplicably, the United States government continues to rely on Qatar to negotiate for the release of the hostages held by Hamas, even as the regime hosts the terror group’s political elite.

A reckoning is needed between our two countries. Congressional hearings, legislation, executive orders, and other measures to regulate relations between our countries are long overdue.