In the two decades before World War II, American Jews occasionally returned to their or their parents’ Polish cities and shtetls, and sometimes they recorded what they saw on film. From this footage, the Hungarian cinematographer Peter Forgács has created a video installation, Letters to Afar, now on display at the Museum of the City of New York. Spliced together, set to music, and “variously doubled, frozen, mirrored, slowed down, or staggered,” the result plays on nine different screens. J. Hoberman reviews the exhibit and reflects on its unusual medium:

Letters to Afar, which was co-commissioned by the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, is also, in some ways, a belated successor to the Jewish Museum’s influential 1976 exhibit Image before My Eyes, a show that drew on YIVO’s vast collection of prewar Polish photographs. The effect, however, is different. A photograph is a memento mori; photographic motion pictures are something else. Life is not frozen but animated. The technique immerses viewers in a rich and paradoxical experience—a teeming emptiness, a pensive hubbub. Bombarded by light, one is surrounded by a multitude of phantoms massing in shtetl marketplaces, gathering in rural cemeteries, parading on Warsaw boulevards, peering out of Lodz slums, playing in open fields, and otherwise observing what the film-artist Ken Jacobs [called] the “vivacious doings of persons long dead.”

If there is to be peace, Palestinians will have to unlearn the hatred of Israel they have imbibed during nearly two decades of Hamas rule. This will be a difficult task, but Cole Aronson argues, drawing on the experiences of World War II, that Israel has already gotten off to a strong start:

The population’s compliance can . . . be won by a new regime that satisfies its immediate material needs, even if that new regime is sponsored by a government until recently at war with the population’s former regime. Axis civilians were made needy through bombing. Peaceful compliance with the Allies became a good alternative to supporting violent resistance to the Allies.

Israel’s current campaign makes a moderate Gaza more likely, not less. Destroying Hamas not only deprives Islamists of the ability to rule—it proves the futility of armed resistance to Israel, a condition for peace. The destruction of buildings not only deprives Hamas of its hideouts. It also gives ordinary Palestinians strong reasons to shun groups planning to replicate Hamas’s behavior.