It’s hard to find a figure more different from Rabbi Kook that the French philosopher Simon Weil, although both were inclined toward mysticism, committed to living according to their ideals, and, of course, Jews. Judith Thurman delves into her strange life, including her hostility toward the religion of her birth:

There was one mystery that Weil never thought worthy of attention: her callousness toward the Jewish people’s persecution. It is more incomprehensible considering her version of the Golden Rule: “The love of our neighbor . . . simply means being able to say to him, ‘What are you going through?’ It is a recognition that the sufferer exists . . . as a man exactly like us.”

Weil’s parents came from observant families on both sides. [Her father] was an agnostic who apparently harbored some distaste for his Orthodox upbringing. (He told Gustave Thibon “vaguely anti-Semitic” jokes.) But his pious mother often came to visit. [Simone’s mother] Selma, whose mother shared their home, had escaped from Russia as a toddler with her parents, fleeing the pogroms. Her father wrote poetry in Hebrew, though she herself, according to Simone’s niece, Sylvie, was “frightfully liberated.” The assimilated couple decided to spare their children any knowledge of their heritage until they were “mature” enough to process the bad news.

Weil shocked Thibon, he wrote, with an “anti-Semitism” he calls “violent. . . . She was fond of saying that Hitler hunted on the same ground as the Jews and only persecuted them to resuscitate under another name and to his own advantage their tribal god, terrestrial, cruel, and exclusive.” Judaism was “linked to a concept of race,” in her view, so it was not an “authentic” religion. Her biographer Thomas Nevin suggests that she saw being Jewish “as a condition or disease from which one might be relieved.”

All this has a strange familiarity to it: one can imagine Weil today denouncing Israel and its American Jewish supporters in a leftwing publication. To Weil’s credit, though, she soured on Communism very early, and denounced it as passionately as she did fascism.

Thurman, although far from uncritical of Weil, believes her to have been “prophetic about the evils of the present century,” which include “the cultural genocide of Indigenous communities,” or, as Weil put it, “White people have been destroying the past everywhere.” Another point of kinship with today’s left, I suppose.

Yesterday I saw an unconfirmed report that the Biden administration has offered Israel a massive arms deal in exchange for a promise not to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. Even if the report is incorrect, there is plenty of other evidence that the White House has been trying to dissuade Jerusalem from mounting such an attack. The thinking behind this pressure is hard to fathom, as there is little Israel could do that would better serve American interests in the Middle East than putting some distance between the ayatollahs and nuclear weapons. Aaron MacLean explains why this is so, in the context of a broader discussion of strategic priorities in the Middle East and elsewhere:

If the Iran issue were satisfactorily adjusted in the direction of the American interest, the question of Israel’s security would become more manageable overnight. If a network of American partners enjoyed security against state predation, the proactive suppression of militarily less serious threats like Islamic State would be more easily organized—and indeed, such partners would be less vulnerable to the manipulation of powers external to the region.

[The Biden administration’s] commitment to escalation avoidance has had the odd effect of making the security situation in the region look a great deal as it would if America had actually withdrawn [from the Middle East].

Alternatively, we could project competence by effectively backing our Middle East partners in their competitions against their enemies, who are also our enemies, by ensuring a favorable overall balance of power in the region by means of our partnership network, and by preventing Iran from achieving nuclear status—even if it courts escalation with Iran in the shorter run.