I’m sort-of sympathetic to Zohran Mamdani. Make that half-sympathetic, with occasional spikes. If Benjamin Netanyahu, Mamdani’s arch-enemy, wanted to visit my house in Tulsa, I would be tempted to say that I’ll be out of town. I just don’t want to sit at my own dining room table sharing freshly-baked challah with this particular Prime Minister.

German Jew-hatred was a florid abomination, manifesting in a garden of terrors. It was a evil mix of social exclusion and marking, economic pressure and, ultimately, annihilation. The program succeeded with a kind of brilliant ruthlessness. Two out of every three European Jews were murdered. In its scale and savagery, it was an unprecedented event. We should not imagine that the disaster was mitigated by the remnant that survived or its post-war achievements. Nothing could somehow offset the catastrophe.

For people who struggle with Benjamin Netanyahu, the last few days have confirmed many of our fears. Determined to hold on to the shreds of his power, he led his party to prostrate capitulation. Against the grain of the Israeli majority, he passed legislation on draft-dodging yeshiva students, promising that they will not be prosecuted. It’s actually a little more complicated than that. Yeshiva students are formally required to serve, but Netanyahu and Co. have managed to finagle a delay. Even for those who have been identified and charged, the State is now barred from active prosecution.

On the very same day at the end of June, two items appeared in my e-mail inbox. The first was a note from a Florida academic alerting me to the subject of an upcoming survey. Are you worried about a dearth of non-Orthodox rabbis? That was pretty much in line with my long-held observation that Conservativism and Reform—that is, mainstream Judaism—are caught in the jaws of catastrophic decline.

Every time I walk through a nursery, I drift in the direction of a plant called oleander. It turns out that I’m a sucker for everything about it. It grows nicely in the heat of Oklahoma, and it’s got meaty little leaves on upright stems. Even at the end of the spring-summer sales season, there are plenty of pots on the racks in the nurseries, and the blossoms are in my neighborhood on the color wheel. I feel that I could do them justice.

The president is once again off the rails, but when, truly, is that not the case? After an uneasy interval of relative quiet (in which he not-so-quietly dismantled additional agencies of the government, especially those connected to election security), he publicly projected still more of his madness. Last night was a set piece of paranoid imagining in which he claimed obsessively that he wuz robbed. Wary of antagonizing his chief handler, V. Putin, he pinned the blame on Chinese actors, along with nefarious, manipulative Democratic activists who somehow conspired to defeat him in 2020.

In case you’re just tuning in, our war with Iran is a godawful sh-t show. What began as an incoherent effort at regime change, disarmament, “de-nuclearization,” and half a dozen other unachievables has now devolved into a pathetic effort to open up the famed Strait of Hormuz and restore the world economy. That would be the same Strait of Hormuz that was a wide-open international waterway before Trump and Netanyahu’s excellent adventure.

Graham Platner is scheduled to get out of Dodge today. Not because he had to wait this long. In fact, he could have exited early last week by promptly submitting the necessary paperwork  and giving his successor time to campaign in Maine. What we learned, if anything, in the Biden/Harris catastrophe is that every day carries monumental importance. His exit couldn’t come a moment too soon.

John (Jack) Bouvier Kennedy Schlossberg recently concluded his campaign for Congress in New York’s 12th Congressional District. It ended badly, with a resounding thud. Bent on inheriting the seat from Jerry Nadler, he lost to a better man, Micah Lasher, in an effort that was widely and mercilessly criticized as sporadic, undisciplined, and generally shambolic. The candidate himself was harshly judged to be an entitled, self-indulgent nepo baby with spectacular hair, but without relevant experience, whose only claim on the hearts and minds of voters is that he is the grandson of President John F. Kennedy. The final results were beyond embarrassing, revealing that even a candidate with name recognition can be beaten to a hardly recognizable pulp.

Some American Jews are again in a tizzy. Democratic Socialists allied with Zohran Mamdani did very nicely, thank you, in the New York elections. We were in NYC at the time, watching the returns roll in, an electoral astonishment like Mamdani himself. You’d think that anything that called itself “socialism” would be dead on arrival, even in a cosmopolitan metropolis. But Zohran Mamdani has a gift for branding, and old standards of contamination do not apply.

I just got a letter from Kamala Harris. She doesn’t communicate personally with me, but I appear to be stuck on a campaign mailing list. Punishment for sins in a former life? A glitch in the basic structures of the universe? I know that I’m overreacting here, but when I feel scratched or irritated, it’s a straight shot to hyperbole.

Conversion to Judaism—conversion to anything—is a complicated business of opportunity and interruption. It used to be the case that candidates were discouraged by the gatekeepers. The idea was that you had to present yourself at the door at least three times to prove your sincerity. The supervising rabbi would turn you away to test your resolve and the seriousness of your intent. I’ve never met anyone to whom this occurred, but I’ll take the word of the traditional texts.

Some days—most days?—it’s all too much. There’s a financial issue that needs to be resolved and I don’t seem to be making any progress. A friend has been waiting for a call-back for a month. I’m paying a fortune for offsite storage because I can’t bring myself to part with my childhood train set. The train set is already six decades old. You’d think I could pull together a solution.

I’ve spent much of life thinking about food. Loving it. Hating it. Resenting its allure. Only now, deep in my adulthood, has the chatter about food been muted in my psyche. That’s purely a function of my GLP-1, which is gradually taking the roundness from my belly. I couldn’t possibly have controlled my appetite without it. For decades, I have been in thrall to what I eat. They say that when I moved to solid foods, the only thing I would eat was lamb chops. Since I have an authentic memory of those childhood meals, it must have gone on for a very long time.

I try to resist the temptation to shut down. It happened just recently at a dinner with friends where, inevitably, we started to talk about Israel. I said all the things that I usually say about the problematics of excessive force, about the long-term peril of reputational damage, about the optics of Netanyahu leading Trump by the nose. My friend nodded and said that I was being too harsh, and that the problem was really on the other side. Israel had tried its best for decades, but Palestinians had no interest in peace. Who would you talk to propose a solution?

One of our young grandchildren is on fire for her Jewishness. I use that term to mean the whole nine yards. If she could speak like an adult, she would describe her delight as a mix of experiences and visual inputs that go beyond the walls of a religious tradition.

There’s so much to like about the new Geffen Galleries in Los Angeles. LACMA (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) has confidently swung for the fences. The building is a leisurely stroll in the perennial sunlit summer of Los Angeles, an uncrowded domain that feels less urban than horticultural. Think of an arboretum of giant Sequoias. It has the swoop and dash of classic Googie-form California and the big picture windows that signal we are on the West Coast. The building articulates an infatuation with light, the natural kind that pours in from the sides. If nothing else, it is of its place.

When it comes to art museums, I’m a white box man: quiet surroundings, tranquil galleries, no self-conscious capital-A architecture to compete. What is a museum if it is not artwork-forward, which seems at odds with what it contains. Art and artifacts should look at home in its spaces, ensconced and supported by their built surroundings.

Timing is everything, especially in politics. While Bob Mueller spent a decade scratching out his report on Donald Trump, he should have packed up his grandchildren and taken everyone to Disneyland. That’s for all the good his judiciousness did us. Speaking as someone who hung on every utterance, I thought he would save us from the depredations of Trump I. Before he finished, he was already in the first stage of Alzheimer’s.

Like many people I know, I swear a lot at the television. Big, juicy curses that would have embarrassed my mother if she, herself, had not hurled big juicy curses. She detested autocrats as much as I do, and she had choice, ugly words for Donald Trump.