The Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, was a movement centered in Berlin and informed by its European counterpart that criticized strict religious traditionalism and encouraged Jews to embrace secular education and play a greater role in the societies around them. At least, that’s the usual explanation. According to the historian Olga Litvak, it wasn’t any of those things. This Jewish version of Romanticism, Litvak argues, rejected Enlightenment confidence in progress and was characterized by a great deal of pessimism—and even conservatism. She explains her counterintuitive thesis with her characteristic persuasiveness in conversation with J.J. Kimche.

Among much else, Litvak and Kimche explore the Haskalah’s central project of creating modern Hebrew literature, a corpus that Hillel Halkin has explored in his seminal series of Mosaic essays.

While President Trump has begun his term with a flurry of executive orders, their implementation is another matter. David Wurmser surveys the bureaucratic hurdles facing new presidents, and sets forth what he thinks should be the most important concerns for the White House regarding the Middle East:

The cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas may be necessary in order to retrieve whatever live hostages Israel is able to repatriate. Retrieving those hostages has been an Israeli war aim from day one.

But it is a vital American interest . . . to allow Israel to restart the war in Gaza and complete the destruction of Hamas, and also to allow Israel to enforce unilaterally UN Security Council Resolutions 1701 and 1559, which are embedded in the Lebanon cease-fire. If Hamas emerges with a story of victory in any form, not only will Israel face another October 7 soon, and not only will anti-Semitism explode exponentially globally, but cities and towns all over the West will suffer from a newly energized and encouraged global jihadist effort.

After the last hostage Israel can hope to still retrieve has been liberated, Israel will have to finish the war in a way that results in an unambiguous, incontrovertible, complete victory.