“Never before,” writes Adam D. Mendelsohn in his new book, Jewish Soldiers in the Civil War: The Union Army, “had Jews joined a mass volunteer army—itself a relatively new historical phenomenon—in such numbers and with such enthusiasm.” Stuart Halpern writes in his review that this “comprehensive and nuanced” work explains much “that is confusing, unknown, or simply untrue about the role Jews played in the Civil War.” It also provides some fascinating vignettes, for instance:

In 1895, Simon Wolf—a prominent Washington, DC, lawyer who had met President Lincoln, was appointed to a government position by President Grant, and befriended every subsequent president through Wilson—published a 550-page book called The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen. . . . Wolf ’s volume, which was more miscellany than unified book, was compiled in response to a letter to the North American Review magazine by a veteran who said that he could not “remember meeting one Jew in uniform, or hearing of any Jewish soldier,” and to many others, like the prominent anti-Semitic historian Goldwin Smith, who denied the patriotism of American Jews (or indeed the Jews of any country) in the North American Review and elsewhere.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].