What Being Jewish and Attending West Point Have in Common

Last week, Dara Horn addressed the eighteen Jewish cadets about to graduate from the United States Military Academy. Herewith, an excerpt from her speech:

Compared to your peers graduating from other colleges around the country, you have all spent the last four years being extremely focused and extremely devoted. And to say something less graduation-worthy, you’ve also spent these years being extremely uncomfortable, and extremely uncool. I can’t pretend to understand your experience, but I do know the profound value of being uncool and uncomfortable—and so does every Jew who has ever lived during the last 3,000 years.

Jews have spent the past 3,000 years not being like everyone else. Uncoolness is Judaism’s brand, going back to the ancient Near East, where everyone else was worshiping a Marvel Cinematic Universe of sexy deities, and the Jews were like the losers in the school cafeteria, praying to their bossy, unsexy invisible God. And over many centuries as a minority in places around the world, Jews have made the choice over and over again to remain uncomfortable: to distinguish themselves from their neighbors in any number of ways, to cling to those distinctions and, over the course of their lives, to learn and understand what those distinctions really mean. They made that choice even when they had easier options, and even when it meant risking their lives.

Major David Frommer, the chaplain who has guided so many of you in West Point’s Jewish community, pointed out to me that Judaism has many unexpected similarities with life at West Point. Both are governed by complex rules of daily living that determine the details of what you wear, what you eat, how you talk, how you cut your hair, and how you spend every hour of every day. But military life and Jewish life are also similar in a much more fundamental way. They are both based on the ideal of obligation—or what in Judaism we call commandment.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Jews in the military, Judaism, U.S. military

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF