In northern Azerbaijan, not far from the Russian border, lies the town of Krasnaya Sloboda, whose residents are almost exclusively “Mountain Jews”—indigenous Caucasian Jews who speak their own language, related to Persian. Thanks to the presence of a Chabad-Lubavitch emissary from Israel, the community has experienced a religious revival, but its numbers are dwindling as younger people move to Russia in search of economic opportunity. Lee Gancman writes:

The town itself was founded as a haven for Jews in 1742 by Fatelli Khan, the Muslim emir of the [adjacent] town of Quba, located in a relatively flat area just south of the modern-day border with the Russian province of Dagestan. While the rugged and remote area to the north had served as a haven for Jews for centuries, a period of unrest beginning in the 18th century saw local Sunnis turn on their Jewish counterparts and send them fleeing.

“At the time there was much persecution of Mountain Jews, and one Jewish town was burned down,” explains Alexander Murinson, a faculty member at Bahçeşehir International University and expert on Caucasian Jewish communities. . . .

While for a time in the mid-20th century the town was considered by some to be the largest all-Jewish settlement outside the land of Israel, numbers have since dwindled from an estimated peak of 18,000 to . . . around 1,000 permanent residents.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”