In a profile of the novelist, critic, and essayist Cynthia Ozick, who has just published a new volume entitled Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays, Giles Harvey comments on her Jewish commitments:

Jewishness, her work also insists, depends upon the principle of havdalah, or distinction-making. Jew and Gentile, God and man, or . . . God and idol: these are categories that should not be muddled. The same goes for literature, and for the judgment of literature. According to Ozick, literature is different from all other human activities, and its singularity consists in its recognizing and honoring human difference. Its purpose, she has said, is “to light up the least grain of being, to show how it is concretely individual, particularized from any other.”

Ozick the channeler of the literary past may seem remote from our present literary debates, dominated as they are by issues of representation, but her work offers a liberating model of engagement with identity. Her commitment to Judaism sharpens her powers of discrimination and inoculates her against the dubious allure of the universal. In a marvelously indignant essay on Anne Frank, she protests the diarist’s assimilation by mainstream culture, the way in which she has been “infantilized, Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized; falsified, kitschified and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied.” Sapped of quiddity, she has become “an all-American girl.”

Yesterday, the Iranian foreign minister flew to Geneva to meet with European diplomats. President Trump, meanwhile, indicated that cease-fire negotiations might soon begin with Iran, which would presumably involve Tehran agreeing to make concessions regarding its nuclear program, while Washington pressures Israel to halt its military activities. According to Israeli media, Iran already began putting out feelers to the U.S. earlier this week. Aviram Bellaishe considers the purpose of these overtures:

The regime’s request to return to negotiations stems from the principle of deception and delay that has guided it for decades. Iran wants to extricate itself from a situation of total destruction of its nuclear facilities. It understands that to save the nuclear program, it must stop at a point that would allow it to return to it in the shortest possible time. So long as the negotiation process leads to halting strikes on its military capabilities and preventing the destruction of the nuclear program, and enables the transfer of enriched uranium to a safe location, it can simultaneously create the two tracks in which it specializes—a false facade of negotiations alongside a hidden nuclear race.