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The safety question: Jewish existential dilemmas in Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s hilarious ‘Long Island Compromise’
Long Island Compromise
Taffy Brodesser-Akner
(Random House)
Of the three middle-aged Fletcher siblings whose perspectives are told in Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s extremely funny-yet-serious second novel—which was published on July 9, 2024—it pains me to admit that I am a Nathan. Nathan’s the worrier, ramped up to 11 for art’s sake, but I see where Nathan’s coming from. You never know if an old tree that’s been there for hundreds of years might fall on you, is the sort of thought Nathan expresses in Long Island Compromise. That I can relate to. I have wondered about trees. Whereas his kid brother, nicknamed Beamer, stoned out of his mind on drugs some of which I’d never heard of, behaves in ways so irresponsible it’s almost painful (in a good way, as in, the writing is impressive) to read about them.
Nathan and Beamer are a yin to a yang, or more like two sides of a black-and-white cookie. Beamer is a man overflowing with what the biological determinists would call testosterone: no risk untaken, no woman unavailable to him. All id. Nathan’s a little weenie—a Nathan’s—afraid of his own shadow.
There is also a sister, Jenny. She’s the scholar, the rebel, the nose job rejecter. (Rhinoplasty was evidently de rigueur in wealthy Jewish circles on 1998 Long Island; my memory of 1998 Manhattan is that they were viewed among otherwise similar Jews—snobbishly—as very Long Island, so it tracks.) She seems like the sort of person who’d extract herself from a narrow, cossetted suburban upbringing and do great things, but she flounders because… well, because of a family curse.
Carl Fletcher, their mega-rich factory-owner father, was briefly kidnapped for ransom when Beamer and Nathan were young, and just before Jenny was born. This seems like a spoiler but is how the book opens. The siblings’ curse is an impossible-to-disentangle mix of growing up with their traumatized father never reckoning with his experience, and the trust funds making it so that they never need to work. That financial necessity is the mother of getting your act together, to borrow and botch an adage, is, superficially, the point of the book. But there’s far more to it.
***
Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a New York Times journalist, known for her celebrity profiles, though the piece of hers I think about the most is an essay on The Rules, the 1990s dating guide advising women to pretend not to be into men so as to seduce those men. I remember enjoying her 2019 novel, Fleishman is in Trouble, but not to this extent. I don’t remember basically hurling it at everyone being like, read this immediately.
Long Island Compromise picks up on some of the same themes as Fleishman, including marital woes and the resentments the merely upper middle class can feel towards the rich. It’s the story of the Fletchers, a massively wealthy Reform Jewish family living in something like Great Neck that isn’t Great Neck, told from the perspective of an omniscient narrator who grew up with the Fletchers, but without their means. The narrator has a distinct voice and doesn’t shy away from an editorializing comment or fact-check, but only brings in a first-person I near the end, just the once. All the reader knows of the storyteller is that this is someone with a scoop on the Fletchers. It’s fiction, but with real-life inspiration: the 1974 kidnapping of Long Island, NY steel factory owner Jack Teich; Brodesser-Akner knows the family, and she wrote about the story as a form of advance promotion for this novel.
I wrote about the real-life 1974 kidnapping of Jack Teich — the one that inspired my new novel, Long Island Compromise — and the way that trauma holds on. It changes, and, if you’re lucky, it morphs. But in my experience, it never really goes away. https://t.co/B4GcjJ7YWL
— Taffy Brodesser-Akner (@taffyakner) July 7, 2024
There’s a nostalgia to the book, with its quaintly pre-2020 preoccupations. Daughter Jenny introduced as uninterested in shopping and primping, in what seems like a hint of a gender-topics plotline to come. She is instead a garden-variety (albeit depression-prone) straight woman, vacillating between the draw of the nice boy next door and that of the charismatic cad. And there’s a plot arc around the fact that what the Fletchers got rich producing—polystyrene, known as Styrofoam—now has a terrible environmental reputation. I kept expecting Jenny—a lefty labour organizer—to take a Greta Thunberg turn and denounce her family specifically for making Earth-destroying microplastics, but environmentalism is at most an afterthought.
There are some brief nods to contemporary culture wars, with #MeToo alluded to as on the horizon, and in the painful scene where Beamer thinks he’s written a brilliant script but finds himself facing a sensitivity reader of sorts who alerts him to the problematicness and cultural appropriation and such. Beamer pivots to deciding that he will write about oppression in an #OwnVoices manner, because everyone agrees that Jews are oppressed, right? Poor Beamer, never did stand a chance.
***
The number of times I thought, this, this is the funniest line in the book, is substantial. We learn, of a secondary character who has spent the previous section berating Jenny for being rich and hiding this fact about herself, “Andrew left New Haven soon after he was fired and went to work at his father’s hedge fund.” Any other writer would have said something about how it turned out Andrew was a hypocritical (not to mention antisemitic) rich kid himself, but Brodesser-Akner just drops this detail with utmost elegance. Boom, Andrew interlude over.
We learn that the town of Middle Rock had been called Duty Head, but that it lost that name “immediately when the mayor went to cut the ribbon and that new train station and heard someone say the name Duty Head aloud.” There are passages about families having, or not having, microwaves that would alone be reason to read this book.
Being a woman myself, I cannot speak to whether Brodesser-Akner has cracked the supposedly uncrackable code and entered the minds of male characters, a la Adelle Waldman with The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. She gets details about the menfolk right from what I’ve observed, particularly the stuff where Beamer (who, recall, puts anything and everything into his own body) is quietly judging his wife for getting work done on her face. He thought she was so much prettier before, when they first met! So like a man to forget that, cosmetic interventions or not, women’s faces shift away from conventional ideals as we age.
And the novel’s title, and what it refers to, suggests we no longer need to sit around wondering who will be the next Philip Roth.
***
To speak of the Jewishness of the novel is expected, certainly in this venue. And here I realize the thing to do is to enumerate the references to Reform temple and to Orthodoxy, to the rabbi character, to Hadassah, to the Holocaust, to Israel Bonds, to the way that, much like trauma, the propensity to give out sports-team-themed yarmulkes crosses generations. Bar mitzvah scenes serve the function that a wedding will on a Midsomer Murders. Intermarriage, dybbuks, eating bacon, not eating bacon, it’s all in there.
There are also Jewish in-jokes, at least I think there are. Is the Fletcher patriarch “Zelig” because of the 1983 Woody Allen movie of the same name? (Would have to be, given the role of impersonation in Zelig Fletcher’s origin story.) Does Jenny, in a bout of listlessness, consider “marine biologist” as a career possibility in reference to George Costanza’s fake career? (A stretch, but I like it.)
But it’s impossible to read the book and not see it as being about the hostages. Yes, even though it is not, objectively, about that, because it couldn’t be.
As a strictly chronological matter, Brodesser-Akner started writing Long Island Compromise well before Oct. 7, 2023. But books are published into the worlds that exist when they appear, and it is now all but inevitable that a book about how you can think you’re safe—specifically, that you, as a Jew, as a Jewish family, have found safety—and then all of a sudden someone sneaks up at you and the next thing you know, you’re kidnapped and tortured. Kidnapped and tortured by someone who sees your comfort as at their expense. (Carl’s kidnappers claim to be working on behalf of Palestinian liberation, but this turns out to be part of what is effectively gibberish. The enemy is within, is all I’ll say.)
There’s a passage in the book (more than one, but it’s one in particular coming to mind) about the precariousness of it all, about how the Holocaust and associated horrors and desperation are always lurking. No, the individual Oct. 7 abductees were not Styrofoam gazillionaires, but they were Israelis or others present in Israel who thought they were secure in Israel, who couldn’t have known what was coming for them, and indeed who’d have seemed paranoid if they’d anticipated anything of the kind. And no, being held hostage for over a year is not the same as being locked up for ransom for a week, but the thematic question of the impact on an individual and those close to them resonates.
How are others not seeing this? According to The Forward reporter Mira Fox, “Even their trauma isn’t particularly Jewish; anyone could be kidnapped.” A sentiment I’d have agreed with on Oct. 6, 2023.
Must Jews be defined by trauma? Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s sharp new novel offers a surprising answerhttps://t.co/yJ8XfO2b68
— TheForwardFeed (@TheForwardFeed) July 8, 2024
Last summer, in his review for the leftist publication Jewish Currents, critic Mitchell Abidor argues that the book “struggles to say anything of substance about being a Jew in America today.” Did he and I read the same book? The safety question—are Jews safe, do Jews feel safe—is central to the postwar Jewish experience and so much more so of late.
In a review of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s new novel, Long Island Compromise, Mitchell Abidor argues that the book ultimately reproduces the nullity at the heart of contemporary American Jewish life.https://t.co/WU6LbXfHpj
— Jewish Currents (@JewishCurrents) August 2, 2024
Brodesser-Akner’s own main non-fiction interventions in this area are from the before-times—a 2015 Tablet essay about antisemitism and accusations of “Jewish privilege”; a 2021 New York Times review of Joshua Cohen’s novel The Netanyahus with insightful personal-political digressions—but you know what? That’s fine. Maybe some moments elude the essay, and are best processed through novels, even ones not directly written about them to begin with.
The CJN’s opinion editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at pbovy@thecjn.ca, not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai. For more opinions about Jewish culture wars, subscribe to the free Bonjour Chai newsletter on Substack.
The post The safety question: Jewish existential dilemmas in Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s hilarious ‘Long Island Compromise’ appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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Under US Pressure, Syria and Israel Inch Toward Security Deal
Members of Israeli security forces stand at the ceasefire line between the Golan Heights and Syria, July 16, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
Under US pressure, Syria is accelerating talks with Israel for a security pact that Damascus hopes will reverse Israel‘s recent seizures of its land but that would fall far short of a full peace treaty, sources briefed on the talks said.
Washington is pushing for enough progress to be made by the time world leaders gather in New York for the UN General Assembly at the end of this month to allow President Donald Trump to announce a breakthrough, four of the sources told Reuters.
Even a modest agreement would be a feat, the sources said, pointing to Israel‘s tough stance during months of talks and Syria‘s weakened position after sectarian bloodshed in its south inflamed calls for partition.
Reuters spoke to nine sources familiar with the discussions and with Israel‘s operations in southern Syria, including Syrian military and political officials, two intelligence sources, and an Israeli official.
They said Syria‘s proposal aims to secure the withdrawal of Israeli troops from territory seized in recent months, to reinstate a demilitarized buffer zone agreed in a 1974 truce, and to halt Israeli air strikes and ground incursions into Syria.
The sources said talks had not addressed the status of the Golan Heights, which Israel seized in a 1967 war. A Syrian source familiar with Damascus’s position said it would be left “for the future.”
The two countries have technically been at war since the creation of Israel in 1948, despite periodic armistices. Syria does not recognize the state of Israel.
After months of encroaching into the demilitarized zone, Israel abandoned the 1974 truce on Dec. 8, the day a rebel offensive ousted Syria‘s then-president Bashar al-Assad. It struck Syrian military assets and sent troops to within 20 kilometers (12 miles) of Damascus.
Israel has shown reluctance during the closed-door talks to relinquish those gains, the sources said.
“The US is pressuring Syria to accelerate a security deal – this is personal for Trump,” said an Israeli security source, who said the US leader wanted to present himself as the architect of a major success in Middle Eastern diplomacy.
But, the source said, “Israel is not offering much.”
The offices of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, who has been leading the negotiations, did not respond to Reuters questions.
A State Department official said Washington “continues to support any efforts that will bring lasting stability and peace between Israel, Syria, and its neighbors.” The official did not answer questions on whether the US wanted to announce a breakthrough during the General Assembly.
TRUST DEFICIT AT TALKS
Israel has voiced hostility to Syria‘s Islamist-led government, pointing to President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s former jihadist links, and has lobbied Washington to keep the country weak and decentralized.
But the US has encouraged talks – keen to expand the countries that signed peace deals with Israel under the Abraham Accords during Trump’s first administration.
Exploratory contacts began in Abu Dhabi following Sharaa’s April visit to the Emirates, which have ties with Israel. The two sides then met in the Azerbaijani capital Baku in July.
Days later, discussions were plunged into disarray when Syrian troops deployed to the southwestern Sweida region to quell sectarian violence between Bedouin and Druze militias. Israel said the deployment violated its enforcement of a “demilitarized zone” and bombed the defense ministry in Damascus. Sharaa accused it of seeking pretexts to interfere in Syria‘s south.
A US-brokered ceasefire ended the violence and, a month later, bilateral negotiations resumed in Paris – marking the first time Syria publicly acknowledged holding direct talks with its longtime foe.
However, the atmosphere in the room was tense, with a lack of trust between the two sides, according to two Syrian sources and a Western diplomat.
Negotiators are following a phased process modeled on deals Israel reached with Egypt that paved the way for a landmark normalization of relations in 1980. That involved the return to Egypt of the Sinai peninsula, seized by Israel in the 1967 war.
Six sources briefed on the talks said Israel would be unwilling even in the longterm to return the Golan, which Trump unilaterally recognized as Israeli in his first term.
Instead, Israel floated a proposal to the US special envoy for Syria, Thomas Barrack, that it could withdraw from southern Syria in return for Sharaa relinquishing the Golan, the Israeli official said.
“Our feelers via the Americans suggest this is a non-starter,” the official said. Netanyahu’s office, Dermer’s office, and the US State Department did not respond to questions on the swap proposal.
A Syrian official told Reuters that Sharaa understood that “any compromise on the Golan would mean the end of his rule” and had told Barrack the security pact must be anchored in the 1974 lines.
While Sharaa is willing to accelerate talks with Israel to please Washington, he remains wary, according to a Western intelligence officer, the Israeli official, and Syrian source.
He has told Barrack that conditions are not yet ripe for a broad peace agreement. “The basic elements of trust are simply not there,” said the Syrian official.
A senior US administration official told Reuters that Trump was clear when he met Sharaa in May in Riyadh that “he expected Syria to work towards peace and normalization with Israel and its neighbors.”
“The administration has actively supported this position since then,” the official said. “The president wants peace throughout the Middle East.”
NARROW PATH FOR SHARAA
Realities on the ground have limited the Syrian leader’s options.
On the one hand, Israel‘s incursions and support for the Druze have hardened Syrian public opinion against any deal, a factor weighing on Sharaa, officials say.
On the other, Israel‘s land grabs in Syria pose a threat to Damascus, making a de-escalatory pact all the more important for Sharaa.
A Syrian military officer based near the border with Israel, who asked not to be identified, said Syrian army patrols in the south avoid confronting Israeli troops, who regularly raid villages and go door-to-door collecting household data and searching for arms.
In response to Reuters questions, the Israeli military said its operations had discovered “numerous weapons,” thwarted smuggling attempts, and apprehended “dozens of suspects involved in advancing terrorist activity.”
The Israeli military was operating in southern Syria to protect Israel and its citizens, the statement said. Israel has threatened air strikes on any significant Syrian military or intelligence presence near the border without its consent.
Israel uses its new post at Mount Hermon, which it seized after Assad’s fall, to surveil the region. Defense Minister Israel Katz said last month Israel would not cede the location.
Israel‘s military has imposed buffer zones in some neighboring countries following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas, in which some 1,200 people were killed.
“As in northern Gaza and southern Lebanon, Israel is now enforcing a wider demilitarized zone in southern Syria,” Syrian security analyst Wael Alwan said.
DRUZE DEVELOPMENTS BOLSTERED ISRAEL
Israel‘s position has been strengthened by developments in Sweida, where Syrian forces stand accused of execution-style killings of Druze civilians. Druze leaders are calling for independence and a humanitarian corridor from Golan to Sweida – a challenge to Sharaa’s vow to centralize control of Syrian territory.
Two senior Druze figures, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter, said that since the Sweida fighting, Israel was helping unify splintered Druze factions and had delivered military supplies including guns and ammunition to them.
The two Druze commanders and a Western intelligence source said that Israel was also paying salaries for many of the roughly 3,000 Druze militia fighters.
Reuters was not able to independently confirm the munitions supplies nor the payments. The offices of Netanyahu and Dermer did not respond to Reuters questions on support for the Druze militia.
Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shibani dismissed the possibility of a humanitarian corridor at the Paris talks, saying it would infringe on Syria‘s sovereignty, according to a Syrian official familiar with the discussions.
Both sides agreed that stability in Syria‘s south was key to preventing a resurgence of covert agents linked to Iran, Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, or Palestinian terrorist groups – common enemies of Israel and Syria‘s new leaders. Israel agreed to allow interior ministry forces to deploy checkpoints in Sweida.
“Both parties are probing areas of common ground,” said the Syrian official.
Sharaa is keen not to provoke his southern neighbor, aware of how much damage its military can inflict, one close aide said on condition of anonymity: “Avoiding confrontation is central to his plan to rebuild and govern.”
Erdem Ozan, a former Turkish diplomat and expert on Syria, said Sharaa could accelerate talks to secure economic aid and reconstruction support from investors, Gulf benefactors, and Washington.
“Sharaa’s focus on economic delivery could push him toward pragmatic concessions, but he’ll need to balance this with maintaining legitimacy among his supporters,” Ozan said.
Concessions could include handing greater autonomy to regional groups, including the Kurds and Druze, Ozan said, as well as demilitarization near Syria‘s borders with Israel and Jordan.
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Qatar, US Near Defense Deal After Israeli Strike in Doha
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio listens as he speaks to media at Ben Gurion International Airport, as he departs Tel Aviv for Qatar following an official visit, near Lod, Israel, Sept. 16, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Nathan Howard/Pool
Qatar and the United States are on the verge of finalizing an enhanced defense cooperation agreement, top US diplomat Marco Rubio said on Tuesday, after Israel’s attack on Hamas political leaders in Doha last week drew widespread condemnation.
“We have a close partnership with the Qataris. In fact, we have an enhanced defense cooperation agreement, which we’ve been working on, we’re on the verge of finalizing,” Rubio said while departing Tel Aviv for Doha.
Rubio met with Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani and discussed defense cooperation, Qatari foreign ministry spokesperson Majed Al Ansari said.
“This [Israeli] attack, of course, expedites the need for a renewed strategic defence agreement between us and the United States. It’s not something new per se, but certainly expedited,” Al Ansari said in a briefing after Rubio’s visit.
QATAR HOSTS BIGGEST US BASE IN THE MIDDLE EAST
The attack in Doha was especially sensitive as Qatar is a close US ally and home to the biggest US military base in the Middle East. Qatar has been hosting and mediating ceasefire talks – alongside Egypt – since the Gaza war started nearly two years ago.
When asked about the mediation efforts in light of the Doha attack, Al Ansari said: “Our focus right now is protecting our sovereignty and we will not look into other issues until this one is resolved.”
The Amiri Diwan, or Emir’s Office, said in a later statement that the emir discussed with Rubio the future of joint diplomatic efforts to reach a ceasefire in Gaza and release Israeli hostages held in the enclave, as well as Palestinian prisoners.
The two also discussed the repercussions of the Israeli attack in Doha, the Emir’s Office added.
TRUMP ‘UNHAPPY’ WITH ISRAELI STRIKE
US President Donald Trump said during a visit to Doha in May that Washington would protect Qatar if it ever came under attack. He said he was not informed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in advance about Israel’s attack.
Trump said he was unhappy with Israel’s strike, which he described as a unilateral action that did not advance US or Israeli interests.
He sought to assure the Qataris that such attacks would not happen again during a meeting with the Qatari prime minister in New York on Friday.
Rubio called for Qatar to continue its role as a mediator between Israel and Hamas to reach a ceasefire in the Gaza war, saying there was “a very short window of time in which a deal could happen.”
“If any country in the world can help mediate it, Qatar is the one. They’re the ones that can do it,” Rubio said while departing Tel Aviv for Doha.
Qatar called the Israeli attack “cowardly and treacherous,” but said it wouldn’t deter it from its role as a mediator, alongside Egypt and the United States.
Netanyahu threatened to attack Hamas leaders “wherever they are” during a press conference with Rubio on Monday, as the heads of Arab and Islamic states held a summit to back Qatar after Israel’s attack last week in the Gulf state.
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Israeli Military Targets Iran-Backed Houthis, Striking Yemen’s Red Sea Port of Hodeidah
Illustrative: Smoke billows following an Israeli air strike in Sanaa, Yemen, Sept. 10, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
Israel said it struck a military infrastructure site in its latest attack on Yemen’s Houthi terrorists at the Red Sea port of Hodeidah on Tuesday.
The Houthis, Islamist rebels backed by Iran who control the most populous parts of Yemen, have attacked vessels in the Red Sea in what they describe as solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.
Tuesday’s attack came hours after the Israeli military issued an evacuation order for the port and a few weeks after a major Israeli attack that killed Houthi officials in August.
Al Masirah TV, a station affiliated with the Houthis, said that 12 Israeli strikes targeted the port‘s docks.
Two sources at the port told Reuters the strikes targeted three docks restored after previous Israeli hits. Residents in the area told Reuters the attack lasted about 10 minutes.
“The Houthi terrorist organization will continue to suffer blows and will pay painful prices for any attempt to attack the State of Israel,” Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a post on X following the attack.
The Houthis have also in the past fired missiles towards Israel, most of which have been intercepted.
Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree said on Telegram that the group’s air defenses had been able to force Israeli warplanes away but provided no proof.
The Israeli military‘s statement gave no details of the strike beyond saying they hit infrastructure.
“The Hodeidah Port is used by the Houthi terrorist regime for the transfer of weapons supplied by the Iranian regime, in order to execute attacks against the State of Israel and its allies,” it said.