A Turkish bill that would clear men of statutory rape provided they marry the victim is on the receiving end of criticism from opposition groups that are accusing the government of legitimizing child sexual assault.
The bill received preliminary backing in the parliament Thursday and is due for a second round of voting after a debate next week. Proposed by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), the bill would clear those convicted of assault only if they had sex without “force, threat, or any other restriction on consent” and if they marry the victim.
Violence against women is on the rise in Turkey with nearly 40 percent of cases of sexual and physical abuse reported. Murder of women has also increased by 1,400 percent from 2003 to 2010. The legal age of consent in the country is 18 years but child marriage is widespread.
According to the BBC, the government has said the aim of the bill “is not to excuse rape but to rehabilitate those who may not have realized their sexual relations were unlawful – or to prevent girls who have sex under the age of 18 from feeling ostracized by their community.”
Critics, which include the opposition, celebrities, an association whose deputy chairman is Erdoğan’s daughter, are worried that the bill – which if passed is likely to quash nearly 3,000 convictions – would also legitimize child marriage in addition to overlooking child sexual assault.
“The AKP is pushing through a text which pardons those who marry the child that they raped,” Ozgur Ozel, a lawmaker belonging to the opposition Republican People’s Party reportedly said.
This illuminating book provides many new insights into Herbert Hoover’s political career. It examines his responses to the horrific pogroms in Poland immediately after World War I and to the Arab slaughter of Jews across Palestine in 1929. Most importantly, the book documents how Revisionist Zionists persuaded prominent Republicans, including former president Hoover, to join them in pressing for U.S. government action to rescue European Jews during the Holocaust. Hoover’s role administering European food relief sensitized him to Jews’ intense suffering after World War I, the result of savage anti-Semitic persecution and severe economic distress.
He enabled the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJJDC) to evade Polish government restrictions on Jewish organizations sending aid to Polish Jewry by having his own relief organization funnel AJJDC funds into Poland. Hoover’s Jewish aide Lewis Strauss praised him as “the only U.S. government official to effectively press Poland and its prime minister to act against the pogromists” (14). The authors also show that Hoover’s empathy for Polish Jews was limited by his fear that they were not sufficiently enthusiastic about Polish nationalism. Hoover maintained an isolationist stance during the 1929 Palestine pogroms, the first serious foreign policy crisis of his presidency.
He neither intervened to protect Palestinian Jewry nor pressured the British to do so. The authors note, however, that he at least “remained steadfast in his support for the upbuilding of Jewish Palestine” (58). In 1928, Hoover extolled the work of Zionist settlers in transforming Palestine, which, in his words, had remained “desolate and neglected for centuries” (48). As president, he sent statements of support to the Zionist Organization of America and to the American Palestine Committee, a Christian Zionist organization, when it was established. Notably, days before leaving the White House, Hoover instructed U.S. ambassador to Germany Frederick Sackett “to exert every influence on the Hitler regime” to stop the persecution of German Jewry (64).
Although hundreds of thousands of Americans had already staged massive street demonstrations and rallies to protest Nazi anti-Semitism, President Roosevelt told his ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, appointed in June 1933, that Nazi persecution of Jews was not a matter with which the U.S. government should be officially concerned. After Kristallnacht, ex-president Hoover moved away from his earlier support for immigration restriction and endorsed the Wagner-Rogers bill to admit 20,000 refugee children from Germany into the United States, above the annual quota for Germany. He lobbied members of the House Immigration Committee to support the bill, which President Roosevelt did not endorse.
Hoover’s most important contribution during his post-presidential career was the backing he gave the Revisionist Zionists in their campaign to persuade the U.S. government to initiate immediate measures to rescue as many European Jews as possible from annihilation and to mobilize the public in that effort. Leading this effort was Hillel Kook (Peter Bergson), head of the Bergson Group, and Eliahu Ben-Horin and Benzion Netanyahu, directing the New Zionist Organization of America. President Roosevelt’s lack of interest in rescuing Jews led the Revisionists to turn to prominent Republicans for assistance. Roosevelt’s indifference was dramatized at the Bermuda Conference in April 1943, ostensibly called to address refugee issues.
The Roosevelt administration made no effort to relax immigration quotas for countries whose Jews were being annihilated. It would not even use troop ships returning empty from Europe to transport Jewish refugees to the United States. Hoover was willing to challenge the Roosevelt administration publicly on the refugee issue. As the nation’s only living ex-president during World War II, his views drew attention. Hoover’s contribution to the rescue campaign included signing an appeal that the Bergson Group placed in newspapers denouncing the Bermuda Conference as a “cruel mockery” and calling for immediate action to rescue as many European Jews as possible from the “Nazi Death-Trap.” He served as honorary chairman of the Bergson Group’s Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People of Europe. The ex-president delivered one of the conference’s keynote addresses, in which he endorsed the Bergson Group’s drive to find temporary havens for Jewish refugees.
Amity Shlaes reviews two new books about the former president and argues that the New Deal was simply a more intense, less constitutional version of Hoover’s policies—and both failed to yield recovery.
Imagine a U.S. president who could personally stare down spear-wielding warriors seeking to penetrate an undermanned Western compound in a remote city. A president who could map the mineral resources of Russia and organize the feeding of whole states or even countries following a disaster. A president who could match John Quincy Adams in his familiarity with the streets of London, Alexander Hamilton in mastery of finance, Dwight Eisenhower in administrative experience and Ronald Reagan in keen appreciation of the evils of communism.
The U.S. did once elect such a president—Herbert Hoover. Voters chose him in a landslide in 1928, and when the Crash of 1929 hit, Main Street sighed with relief at its own good fortune. The Great Engineer, as Hoover was known, could be counted on to engineer them out of trouble.
Herbert Hoover in the White House
By Charles Rappleye
Simon & Schuster, 554 pages, $32.50
Yet when the crash came, the Great Engineer failed. Hoover did not reverse the crash or prevent the years of Depression that followed. By the end of his first and only term, public esteem for Hoover had plummeted so far that the incumbent could not take even his home state, California, in the 1932 election. Soon a caricature of the 31st president began to take hold: that of an unimaginative, credentialed elitist who had permitted a catastrophe so great that it would take four terms for a kind and collectivist president, Franklin Roosevelt, to counter him. The caricature has only hardened down the decades. In 1948, Arthur Schlesinger Sr. found voters ranking Hoover 20th out of 33 presidents. In a 2015 poll he appeared near the bottom, 38th out of 44.
Herbert Hoover: A Life
By Glen Jeansonne
New American Library, 455 pages, $28
Over the years a number of writers have sought to lift Hoover’s ranking and status, including George Nash in several volumes of biography; Kendrick Clements in “The Life of Herbert Hoover: Imperfect Visionary”; and Joan Hoff Wilson in “Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive.” Now two further revisionists are having a go. In “Herbert Hoover: A Life,” Glen Jeansonne portrays a president more centrist than extreme, a leader who might have succeeded in a second term. With “Herbert Hoover in the White House,” Charles Rappleye makes the case that though the Great Engineer represented “the embodiment of progress and competence,” his temperament and bad luck caused him to botch the job.
Any Hoover upgrade must start with his career, which rocketed skyward at a velocity warranting a Harvard Business School case study. The classic early adapter, Hoover while still in his teens placed a bet that studies in a little-known start-up college in “Polo Alta,” as one newspaper spelled it, might yield more than attendance at an established university. The knowledge Hoover garnered from his Stanford engineering professors helped to win him a position directing Australian mines. From Australia the youthful “doctor of sick mines” (he grew a beard and ’stache to look older) moved on to China, where he dug a harbor and surveyed and reorganized China’s mineral resources. It was in Tientsin that Hoover and his able wife, Lou, fended off an assault of rebellious warriors—the Boxers of the Boxer Rebellion.
Last year, China Central Television’s Bi Fujian was booted from the state broadcaster after a viral cellphone video caught him mocking Mao Zedong. The star anchor was promptly “condemned by critics online as a traitor and renegade,” write the authors of a new study of Mao’s legacy in modern China. Of course, the punishment for perceived slights against Mao was more draconian in the recent past—in 1989, three would-be protesters received 16 years, 20 years and life imprisonment, respectively, for throwing eggs at Mao’s portrait in Tiananmen Square. But China’s Communist leadership continues to punish any perceived “disrespect” directed toward the Chairman.
To us in the West it seems to defy logic that Mao could attract admiration at all today. The Great Helmsman was a brutal dictator who brought widespread persecution and economic calamity upon China. His nearly 30 years in power were disastrous, culminating in the mass starvation caused by the forced collectivization of the Great Leap Forward and in the deep-seated psychological trauma wrought by the Cultural Revolution, when ideological discipline was policed by the terror squads of the Red Guard.
China and the New Maoists
By Kerry Brown and Simone van Nieuwenhuizen
Zed, 190 pages, $20.95
In “China and the New Maoists,” Kerry Brown, a scholar at Chatham House in London, and Simone van Nieuwenhuizen, of the University of Sydney, don’t mince words. “As an economist, Mao was wholly ineffective,” they write, “sponsoring ludicrous programmes that chased after ideals like complete central state control of the economy and comprehensive plans that resulted in colossal inefficiency, the breakdown of the supplies of the most basic food and commodities, and entrenched poverty.” Even so, the authors observe, Mao has not lost his iconic status in China. The result is a kind of double-think in which past crimes are glossed over for the sake of national continuity. Since Mao’s death, they note, the Communist Party of China has officially claimed that Mao was right “70% of the time” and wrong “30% of the time.”
President Xi Jinping embodies the ambivalence of Mao’s legacy in China. In a 2013 speech titled “Carry on the Enduring Spirit of Mao Zedong Thought,” he exalted Mao’s political vision of a uniquely Chinese brand of socialism. But Mr. Xi’s attitude has not always seemed so forthright. His reformist father had been a fierce rival of party stalwart Deng Liqun, who forcefully pushed the notion that Mao, in the author’s words, had “created intellectual unity, a common framework and a grammar of politics, economics and geopolitics that suited the specific Chinese situation.” (It was even considered a surprise when Mr. Xi attended Deng’s funeral last year.) Mr. Xi’s father, like countless other Communist officials under Mao, was purged during the Cultural Revolution. But Mr. Xi has gradually centralized decision-making powers in his own hands in a way reminiscent of the Chairman himself.
Deng’s body of thought was formed in the wake of Mao’s own death. In the same way, the group of devotees who the authors characterize as “new Maoists” came of age after Tiananmen. They present Mao as a systematic thinker who unified the country in spite of the catastrophic mistakes he made. While “sacralization of Maoism reached its peak during the Cultural Revolution,” the authors write, supporters continue to exist in large numbers: “There were, and still are, firm believers from the highest political echelons right down to the grassroots level” doing battle with those more willing to repudiate Mao’s worst tendencies. A key for these followers is distinguishing Mao Zedong from Mao Zedong Thought—a distinction between “the man himself, at whose hands their nearest and dearest suffered,” and “the man as a source of a body of ideas, tactical wisdom and nationalist messages.” CONTINUE AT SITE
Richard H. Schwartz accuses his fellow Orthodox Jews of stealing Judaism—even as he attempts to hijack it for his own environmentalist creed.
A man who fell in love with progressive politics first and Orthodox Judaism second, Schwartz married the two in his mind and is now frustrated that the shidduch—or love match—won’t take hold in the larger community. The roughly 10 percent of Jews who are Orthodox are stubbornly conservative. Schwartz laments that, while an overwhelming 78 percent of all Jews went for Barack Obama in 2008, an almost identical percentage of Orthodox Jews voted for John McCain. Given that Schwartz praises Judaism for its heritage of non-conformity (starting with Abraham), he might have celebrated the Orthodox for going their own way. But no, Schwartz seeks 100 percent Jewish support for the current pieties of the left wing of the Democratic Party.
Although Schwartz admits that “Judaism does not recommend any one type of economic system,” that doesn’t stop him from essentially arguing that it does—socialism. He quotes the famous passage where the Prophet Samuel warns the Israelites against a king who will “take your daughters as perfumers and bakers; he will seize your choice fields, vineyards, and olive groves and give them to his courtiers.” Schwartz asks the reader to substitute “international corporations” for “kings.” CEOs are the “corporate kings,” he says. But why not substitute “government” for “king”? Surely, that’s nearer to the original meaning of the text. After all, a CEO can’t conscript you, tax you, or claim eminent domain over your property. These are the types of powers to which Samuel refers.
But the issue that transcends all others for Schwartz is climate change. In apocalyptic fervor, he is right up there with Al Gore and Bill McKibben: Climate change is “the most urgent, immediate problem facing the world today,” with virtually all climate scientists agreeing that “climate change poses an existential threat to life as we know it—and that humans are the cause and the potential solution.” Schwartz invokes Talmudic and Biblical teachings on how mankind should care for the Earth to support his contention that Jews must take a leading role in fighting climate change.
While his citations may cast Judaism in an admirable light, they have nothing to do with climate change, an issue that is far from settled. Schwartz states over and over that 97 percent of climate scientists agree that climate change “poses a major threat to humanity.” But that statistic has been thoroughly debunked. Expert opinion about the severity of climate change is far less uniform than it is typically portrayed.
Schwartz does not for a moment entertain the possibility that the global warming apocalypse (like all apocalyptic forecasts before it) may not materialize and, if it doesn’t, that his drastic efforts to fight it by making everyone a vegan and substituting expensive renewable energy for oil and gas would undercut his other political goals—above all, improving the lot of the poor worldwide.
To enlist Jews in the global warming crusade and other progressive causes, Schwartz enlists the concept of tikkun olam (literally “world repair”). Since the 1950s, this Hebrew phrase has been seized on by Jews who want to make radical ideas more palatable to other Jews.
“Judas” ( Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 305 pages, $25), the quietly provocative novel by Israeli writer Amos Oz, concerns a wayward university dropout named Shmuel Ash, who, in Jerusalem in 1959, takes a position as a companion to an elderly invalid. His job is to engage the old man in a few hours of lively debate each evening; in return he receives a monthly stipend and room and board in the house shared by the man and his widowed daughter-in-law, Atalia.
Two strains of history run together in the course of this arrangement. Shmuel is writing a book about “Jewish Views of Jesus.” His argument is that Judas Iscariot, “the hated archetype of all Jews,” was actually the first fervent Christian believer, and far from being a betrayal, his role in bringing about the crucifixion was an attempt to prove Jesus’s divinity.
Mr. Oz layers this interpretation upon the bloody birth of the Jewish state. Atalia’s husband—the old man’s son—was killed during the 1948 war of independence; her late father, furthermore, was a prominent Jewish voice opposed to the creation of Israel, arguing that it was better to try to share the territory with the Arabs than to drive them out. For this quixotic belief, he was deemed a traitor.
Young Shmuel, idealistic and vulnerable—built “like a walking question mark”—discusses these figures at engrossing length with the old man and Atalia, with whom he falls hopelessly in love. Inevitably, their talk about the past reflects upon the future of Zionism. Who should lead the movement, the book asks: realists like David Ben-Gurion (“a clearheaded, sharp-sighted man who understood a long time ago that the Arabs will never accept our presence here of their own free will”) or pacifist dreamers like Atalia’s father? Who are the true believers and who are the traitors?
Mr. Oz has generous sympathy for the overmatched dreamers, yet “Judas” sets down no fixed answers. Aided by Nicholas de Lange’s lucid translation from the Hebrew, it challenges you to think afresh about stories and histories whose interpretations can seem chiseled in stone. It is a novel that prompts questions and self-questioning. What else can one ask from a book?
Congratulations to President-elect Donald J. Trump.
Never having run for so much as city council, he tried his hand at politics and, in his very first campaign, scored Earth’s most powerful office. He did so by beating the amalgamated might of the Clinton and Obama machines — two of the most capable and accomplished political operations in U.S. history.
Trump did this while enduring the constant, scorching hostility of Hollywood, Broadway, and nearly the entire popular culture. He also survived a relentless headwind of scathing media coverage. Atop their brutal dispatches, some 430 “objective” journalists, the Center for Public Integrity reports, donated $381,814 (96.3 percent) to Clinton and $14,373 (3.6 percent) to Trump between January 1, 2015 and August 30, 2016.
Trump and his supporters were accused of hate, even as unhinged Leftists graffitied “Kill your local Trump supporter” in Boston, demolished with a pickaxe his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and subjected Republican party offices to vandalism and even arson.
Trump won, even though numerous Republican party elders, sitting officials, conservative activists, and center-Right intellectuals treated him with attitudes ranging from aloofness to the boundless, searing, ultimately baffling disgust of Never Trump. Party unity is usually a given for presidential nominees. Trump landed on top without it.
Trump also conquered on the cheap. He spent $270 million for his 59.8 million votes while Hillary poured $521 million into her 60 million ballots. That equals $4.51 per Trump vote versus $8.68 per Clinton ballot.
Agree or disagree with Trump, his relatively inexpensive defeat of these forces is a truly staggering accomplishment.
This stunned his supporters as much as anyone else.
When Fox News Channel declared at 2:40 a.m. that Trump secured Pennsylvania and, thus, the White House, hundreds of Young Republicans at Manhattan’s Turnmill Bar exploded with glee. They seemed as astonished as they were thrilled.
“I can’t believe this is happening!” one Trumpnik screamed with joy.
What’s Happened To The University?
By Frank Furedi
Routledge, 205 pages, $26.95
Rancorous trends such as microaggressions, safe spaces, trigger warnings and intellectual intolerance have taken hold at universities with breathtaking speed. Last year’s controversy over Halloween costumes at Yale led to the departure of two respected faculty members, and this year made the fall festival a flashpoint of conflict at campuses across the country. The recent explosion in the number of university administrators, coupled with an environment of perpetual suspicion—the University of Florida urges students to report on one another to its “Bias Education and Response Team”—drives students who need to resolve normal tensions in human interaction to instead seek intervention by mediators, diversity officers, student life deans or lawyers.
As Frank Furedi compellingly argues in this deeply perceptive and important book, these phenomena are not just harmless fads acted out by a few petulant students and their indulgent professors in an academic cocoon. Rather, they are both a symptom and a cause of malaise and strife in society at large. At stake is whether freedom of thought will long survive and whether individuals will have the temperament to resolve everyday social and workplace conflicts without bureaucratic intervention or litigation.
Mr. Furedi, an emeritus professor at England’s University of Kent, argues that the ethos prevailing at many universities on both sides of the Atlantic is the culmination of an infantilizing paternalism that has defined education and child-rearing in recent decades. It is a pedagogy that from the earliest ages values, above all else, self-esteem, maximum risk avoidance and continuous emotional validation and affirmation. (Check your child’s trophy case.) Helicopter parents and teachers act as though “fragility and vulnerability are the defining characteristics of personhood.”
The devastating result: Young people are raised into an “eternal dependency.” Parenting experts and educators insist that the views of all pupils must be unconditionally respected, never judged, regardless of their merit. They wield the unassailable power of a medical warning: Children, even young adults, simply can’t handle rejection of their ideas, or hearing ones that cause the slightest “discomfort,” lest they undergo “trauma.”
It is not surprising to Mr. Furedi that today’s undergraduates, having grown up in such an environment, should find any serious criticism, debate or unfamiliar idea to be “an unacceptable challenge to their personas.” He cites a legion of examples from across the Western world, but one Brown University student perhaps epitomizes the psyche: During a campus debate, she fled to a sanctioned “safe space” because “I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs.”
In November 2001, as the militiamen of the Northern Alliance were preparing to assault an Afghan city that remained under Taliban control, the militia’s commander, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, phoned an urgent request to the U.S. general in charge of the air campaign. Gen. Dostum explained to his American counterpart, Maj. Gen. David Deptula, that a Taliban leader in the city had just called him to boast that he had put his headquarters in Gen. Dostum’s own house. “You should bomb my house immediately,” Gen. Dostum said. “It’s the only house within miles with a swimming pool and tennis court.”
In a few minutes’ time, Gen. Deptula obtained overhead imagery of the house and ordered a B-1 bomber to drop two precision-guided bombs on it. But then the staff at U.S. Central Command intervened, putting the strike on hold until it could verify the target. Geospatial intelligence personnel faxed a satellite photo of the house to Uzbekistan, from which the photo was flown by helicopter into Afghanistan, where a Special Forces soldier carried it on horseback to Gen. Dostum. By then, of course, the Taliban leader had left. “If you want to bomb my house, go ahead,” Gen. Dostum informed Gen. Deptula. “But there is no one there anymore.”
This episode is one of many in James Kitfield’s “Twilight Warriors” that will be new to observers of America’s wars against Islamic extremism. Mr. Kitfield, a veteran national-security reporter whose earlier book, “Prodigal Soldiers” (1997), deftly narrated the U.S. military’s revitalization after Vietnam, here provides an enlightening tour of 21st-century counterterrorism—its successes and failures, its evolving technologies, and its ever-festering rivalries among national-security agencies. Along with voyaging through the Greater Middle East, he covers parts of Africa and Latin America, where U.S. agencies have combated terrorists and drug traffickers.
ENLARGE
Photo: wsj
Twilight Warriors
By James Kitfield
Basic, 405 pages, $27.99
Unlike many such accounts, “Twilight Warriors” does not dwell on Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama or their cabinet officials. Rather it focuses on the leaders at the next level down—those who prosecuted the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and other distant lands. Some of these individuals, like Gens. David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, are nearly household names, owing to their battlefield accomplishments. Two who are less familiar—Gen. Martin Dempsey and Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn—are presented more fully than before through Mr. Kitfield’s expansive interviews. Both are shown to be leaders who routinely overcame bureaucratic parochialism and hidebound thinking.
It’s refreshing, in a world rife with anti-Zionist propaganda, to read a book written by someone who actually thinks Israel was a good, indeed a grand idea. Daniel Gordis describes the Jews’ return to their homeland as “one of the great dramas” of human history—the story “of a homeless people that kept a dream alive for millennia, of a people’s redemption from the edge of the abyss, of a nation forging a future when none seemed possible.” From a collection of “vulnerable settlements,” Gordis describes how Israel grew into a flourishing country with the largest Jewish population in the world using a revived language that even the founder of Zionism believed could not be resuscitated.
Gordis ascribes the book‘s origin to the request of a friend of his, a leader of a major Jewish organization, that he recommend a serious but readable history of Israel that he could give to a group of lay leaders he was bringing over for a visit. When Gordis couldn’t find one that fit the bill, he decided it was time to fill the gap himself.
Gordis brought to the task a talent for deftly summarizing complex events—a skill he displayed in his last book, Menachem Begin: The Battle for Israel’s Soul. More important, Gordis has an ability to get to the core of issues and to discuss them in straightforward language that nevertheless conveys sophisticated analysis. Consider his treatment of the contradictions within Zionism. While it grew out of the millennia long Jewish yearning to return to Zion, modern Zionism was also a revolutionary effort to sever the connection to what came before. Gordis writes: “So desperate were the Jewish people to fashion a new kind of Jew that they even changed their names … it was time for a new Jewish worldview, a new Jewish physique, a new Jewish home, new Jewish names. It was time for a ‘new Jew,’ a Jewish people reborn.”
The story of modern Zionism cannot be understood without reference to ancient Jewish history, and Gordis manages to distill what needs to be told in a mere 15 pages. Gordis describes the Bible as ” a kind of ‘national diary,’” with the Land of Israel at the center of the story, its centrality maintained even when the Jews were repeatedly cast into exile.
One of the best features of this book is the way Gordis weaves into his narrative literature, music—even dance—that capture, and sometimes shape, the emotions of the people at a pivotal point. For example he quotes Chaim Bialik’s famous poem “In the City of Slaughter,” written after the poet’s visit to Kishinev following the pogrom there in 1903. Bialik attacks the Russian mob, but also the passivity of the Jewish men, whom he scathingly describes hiding behind casks as the Cossacks rape their women. The poem had a huge impact in underscoring not only the need for Jews to return to their land as a shelter from anti-Semitism but as a place to create a “new Jew.”
Gordis cites the enormously popular songs of Naomi Shemer: the first, Jerusalem of Gold, written just before the triumphant Six Day War, and the second, equally prescient, written just before the disastrous 1973 war, a version of the Beatles’ Let It Be. Just as Shemer had to add a stanza to Jerusalem of Gold to reflect the fact that the Old City was now in Israel’s hands, so she had to change the lyrics to the second song, “There is still a white sail on the horizon but beneath a heavy black cloud” and modify the chorus, “All that we long for, let it be.” To convey the country’s deep, ongoing sadness after the Yom Kippur War, Gordis offers the lyrics of a popular song written over 20 years later: “You promised peace; You promised spring at home and blossoms; You promised to keep your promises; You promised a dove.”
