This Passover, Mark Gottlieb brought with him to the seder the Passover Haggadah Graphic Novel, which presents the classic text in comic-book format. One particular illustration led him to new insights into the Haggadah’s invocation of the prophecy in Genesis 15, where God tells Abraham that his descendants will be slaves in foreign land. Thanks to this volume’s layout, Gottlieb came to appreciate the connection between the citation of this passage and the declaration that “it was not only one man who rose up to destroy us: in every single generation people rise up to destroy us—but the Holy One saves us from their hands.”

From March to May, a series of small-scale terrorist attacks claimed the lives of some twenty Israelis, and raised fears that jihadist murder would again become a fact of everyday life in the Jewish state. Hillel Frisch details how a swift campaign waged by the IDF and Shin Bet, employing deliberate and discriminate force, succeeded in restoring the peace: