Iranian citizens, including children, form a human chain around a power plant in Tehran on April 7, 2026, as officials urge civilians to protect key infrastructure amid rising tensions with the US and Israel. Photo: Screenshot

Iranian authorities have urged children, teenagers, and civilians to gather around power plants and other sensitive sites to serve as human shields, in an apparent effort to raise the cost of potential US and Israeli strikes on Iran’s infrastructure.

The call came as US President Donald Trump’s deadline of Tuesday night for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and accept a ceasefire proposal rapidly approached.

Trump previously warned that if Iran refused to reopen the strait — a critical global shipping chokepoint linking the Persian Gulf to international waters, through which about one-fifth of the world’s oil flows — US strikes would destroy the country’s key infrastructure, including bridges and energy facilities including power plants.

“We have a plan according to which every bridge in Iran will be destroyed and every power plant will be bombed by midnight. It will happen within 4 hours if we want,” Trump said during a press conference on Monday.

Trump appeared to escalate his threats on Tuesday.

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social website.

“However,” he added, “now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.”

In response, Iranian officials issued stark warnings that, should the strikes on Iranian soil go ahead, Tehran would retaliate by targeting infrastructure and other civilian sites in Gulf states hosting US forces, risking a broader escalation across the region.

Even as negotiations remain formally underway, Iranian officials signaled little change in their stance, insisting that Washington’s demands and tone “have not changed” amid ongoing conflict.

“There are no negotiations with the US, which wants Iran to collapse under pressure. We will show flexibility after we see flexibility from the US,” an Iranian official told Reuters.

“Iran will not open [the Strait of Hormuz] in exchange for empty promises,” he continued.

With tensions now approaching a breaking point, Iranian government and military officials have publicly urged civilians to gather near key infrastructure sites to act as a deterrent against potential airstrikes.

During a televised speech on Monday, Alireza Rahimi, Iran’s deputy minister of youth affairs, urged citizens to join the “Iranian youth’s human chain for a bright tomorrow” by gathering around power plants to serve as human shields.

“I call on all youth, athletes, artists, university students, and professors to gather tomorrow, Tuesday, at 2 pm, and form a circle around our power plants, which are national assets and the nation’s capital,” Rahimi said. 

“Come regardless of political views, because these facilities belong to the Iranian youth and their future. Let the world see that targeting civilian infrastructure is a war crime,” he continued.

Old habits die hard.

In the Iran-Iraq War, this regime deployed children with plastic keys to heaven against Iraqi machine gun fire and to clear minefields. This is a regime which also deployed Iranian and Afghan children alongside the Basij to fight in the Syrian Civil War. https://t.co/vfR3iqZnG5

— Behnam Ben Taleblu بهنام بن طالب لو (@therealBehnamBT) April 7, 2026

In a separate televised message, Hossein Yekta, a commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), addressed parents directly and urged them to send their children to sensitive locations and checkpoints.

“Send the children to the checkpoints so they can become men,” he said.

The regime’s use of human shields appears to extend beyond minors, with reports indicating that political prisoners and dual nationals are also being positioned near sensitive sites as part of broader deterrence efforts.

Last month, the IRGC officially lowered the minimum age for war‑related roles to 12 as part of a campaign recruiting children to serve as “Homeland‑Defending Combatants for Iran,” assigning them to patrols, checkpoints, and logistics duties.

For years, Iran has drafted children under 18 into the Basij militia, with Human Rights Watch documenting boys as young as 14 years old killed in combat, revealing a brutal pattern of exploiting children on the battlefield.

The Four Questions from The Haggadah. Łódź, 1935. Source: Irvin Ungar

Before Passover, I took my son to Borough Park to buy a new Haggadah, part of a small annual ritual and one more way into an ancient story. The streets were busy, storefronts full, families preparing. Judaism there is not abstract. It is lived, visibly and confidently, woven into the rhythms of everyday life.

A few days earlier, we had been at the Jewish Museum on the Upper East Side, where he carefully decorated a matzah cover for the holiday. It was thoughtful, creative, and quiet. Another expression of Jewish life, shaped more by culture and reflection than by density and immersion.

Two experiences. Two expressions of Judaism. Both real, and both necessary.

My son is still young, but he has reached the age when everything is noticed and everything is questioned. That is part of what makes Passover so powerful. The Seder is not designed for passive listening. It is built around questions, anticipated and encouraged. The tradition does not fear inquiry; it depends on it. And it places the responsibility squarely on parents to respond.

That responsibility feels especially urgent now, because what Jewish children are not given early, they are often forced to confront later, and not always in its full or faithful form.

At a time when Jewish identity is increasingly contested in public life and often distorted in classrooms, many Jewish students arrive at college, and even in K–12 settings, without a basic understanding of their own history, traditions, or texts. They may have absorbed fragments – holidays, foods, cultural references – but lack the knowledge that allows them to situate themselves within a larger story. They know how to gesture toward identity, but not how to explain it, defend it, or live it with confidence.

I see this firsthand. In my own classes, many Jewish students are articulate and well-intentioned. They are comfortable analyzing power, language, and identity. But when asked basic questions about Jewish history, Zionism, or the origins of the modern Middle East, there is often a striking absence of knowledge. Not hostility. Not even indifference. Something more fragile: a lack of foundation.

This is not a failure of intelligence or curiosity. It is a failure of formation.

In the months since October 7, this gap has become difficult to ignore. Campuses have filled with slogans that many students can repeat but few can explain. Jewish students, in particular, are often left without the knowledge or confidence to respond.

This reflects a broader shift in education. In many cases, students are taught to critique identity before they have been given the knowledge needed to understand it. They learn to deconstruct before they learn to inherit. They are trained to interrogate narratives without first being grounded in them. The result is not critical thinking, but a kind of intellectual weightlessness, an uncertainty about what is theirs to defend, or even to value.

By the time Jewish students arrive on campus, these gaps are no longer theoretical. They shape how students understand their own identity and how they respond when it is challenged.

On many campuses, discussions of Israel and Jewish identity are flattened into slogans, repeated with confidence but stripped of historical context and moral complexity. Students encounter phrases, not arguments. Certainty, not understanding. And without a strong sense of their own inheritance, many Jewish students are left vulnerable to distortion or silence.

What is striking is not only the presence of these narratives, but the absence of a meaningful institutional response. Universities that pride themselves on rigor and inquiry often retreat into procedural neutrality or vague calls for dialogue, while leaving Jewish students without the intellectual tools to navigate what they are hearing. Leadership hesitates. Standards blur. And in that space, confusion hardens into conviction.

Which is why the work of formation cannot be outsourced.

Passover offers a model, not just as a ritual, but as a theory of education. It assumes that knowledge must be transmitted before it can be meaningfully questioned, and that identity must be formed before it can be defended.

The Haggadah does not present a single type of learner. It presents four children, each asking in a different way, each requiring a different response. The message is simple but demanding. Transmission must meet the child where they are. The burden is on the adult to ensure that the story is told, understood, and carried forward.

This is a serious vision of education. It assumes that identity is not automatic. It must be cultivated, explained, and renewed across generations.

And it assumes something else as well. Belonging precedes critique. Understanding must come before judgment.

A child who understands the story of the Exodus, who sees himself as part of it, is in a position to ask meaningful questions about it. A child who does not know the story at all is left with abstraction. The same is true more broadly. Without grounding, critique becomes unmoored from understanding.

This requires time, attention, and a willingness to take questions seriously, even when they are difficult. It requires parents to know something themselves, to explain, to contextualize, and sometimes simply to say: this is who we are, and this is why it matters.

Antisemitism today is often less explicit than ambient. It appears in slogans, selective history, distortions of Israel, and just as often in what is omitted. Jewish students encounter it not only in hostility, but in confusion, in half-truths presented without context. The danger is not only that they will hear falsehoods. It is that they will lack the grounding to recognize them and the confidence to challenge them.

That is why what happens at home matters so much.

The Seder is not just a ritual meal. It is an exercise in memory, identity, and transmission. It is where Jewish children learn not only what happened, but why it matters, and why it is theirs. It is where questions are welcomed, where stories are told, and where belonging is made real.

It is also where pride begins.

Children who understand their history, who have heard the story of their people told with clarity and care, are not easily disoriented. They are not dependent on others to explain who they are. They carry something with them, something durable, something that does not shift with the mood of the moment.

They will not be defensive. They will be grounded. And from that grounding comes a quiet but enduring pride.

If we do not teach our children who they are, others will, and not with care, clarity, or love. Passover reminds us that Jewish identity is not inherited automatically. It is transmitted: at the table, in the home, through questions, stories, rituals, and example.

In an age of confusion and institutional hesitation, that work is not optional. It is essential and sacred work, and it begins at our own tables.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Transcription
By Ben Lerner
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $25, 144 pages

As we scroll through the final portion of human history before it gets permanently revised by AI, Ben Lerner has written a lyrical novel of loss.

This three-part novel from the author of Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04, and the Pulitzer finalist The Topeka School, presents loss in many forms: loss of recognition which leads to a confusion of identities; loss of memory which prompts whole new stories; or just, in a banal but usefully metaphorical way, the loss of the unnamed protagonist’s iPhone when he drops it in the sink near the start of the first section, “Hotel Providence.” This tech misadventure means that he will have to use an old landline to dial up his daughter before her bedtime and to rely on his frail human memory to remember the final interview he has with Thomas, his mentor and father figure.

As in his previous autofictional trilogy, Lerner uses a narrator — a writer who, like Lerner, went to Brown University — who hovers between being him and not. A writing assignment has brought him back to his alma mater, but the visit to his professor is more than just a work project. The initial piece and, as it turns out, later pieces about the trip, will be labors of love — with all the agita that accompanies those. The absent digital transcript of his interview at Brown seems to be what gives this book its name as well as what marks him as brave or foolhardy in the eyes of his peers at a later colloquium about Thomas. But the existence of the book as a “transcription” also avows the possibilities of human creativity in the face of transmission losses.

Transcription begins on a train journey and, just to prove that it is about moving away from the here and now, its first words also imply the start of a dream state: “I was falling asleep on a train.” Through the narrator, Lerner tells us as clearly as he can, that he is writing (script) in transit — and investigating how it is to rewrite from a place that is not your own. As the narrator along with Max — Thomas’ son who becomes a second narrator — recount their travels into adulthood, the book’s journey into the unknown is haunted by Freud’s dictum “where id was, there ego shall be.” Caught between fatherhood and filiation, they navigate a world that seems equal parts Escher and Kafka.

The book comprises three sections, each named for a hotel — a place to stay while dislocated: “Hotel Providence,” “[Hotel Villa Real],” and “Hotel Arbez.” The first is set punningly in Providence, the second is set in a hotel referred to in square brackets as if interposed later by editors, and the final one sits half in France and half Switzerland. Indeed, Max is named for the wartime owner of the hotel, since “during the German occupation, the Nazi soldiers could enter the French side of the hotel, but not ascend to the upper rooms, where Max Arbez helped shelter Jews and members of the Resistance. A kind of impossible staircase.”

Hotel Providence, which is located near Brown, is a name to conjure with, and Lerner — a decorated poet as well as a Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur fellow — conjures with it briefly as he takes his narrator to the interview. On the way, every landmark has either changed or been infused by memory, every person he sees is overlaid by his imagination. Without his phone he feels hypersensitive to his surroundings — “my body was able to convert the strangeness of being screenless into a kind of supersensitivity” — but unlike augmented reality, his senses overlay meaning, not information.

As the narrator walks through Providence, the ghosts of his time frame his vision — “the older woman in the long down coat leaving the List Art Center as I passed became Caroline Sharpe, a professor who told our class, after someone complimented her necklace, that she kept a cyanide capsule in its opal locket for use in case of nuclear war.” Generational perception, shaped by how his daughter Eva views the world, also changes how he sees the streets around him. Plus, he has to actually deal with the real world in the shape of a woman who hails him by name. She “approached me with the confidence of someone sure she’d be recognized” but when she is not recognized, “she discerned my confusion and offered, mercifully, Chloe.”

Reminded by Chloe of their mutual friend Anisa, the protagonist drifts off into one of his more significant digressions, detailing the web of lies she spun, that took him further away from his college girlfriend after a split. That girlfriend, Mia, is now his wife and mother of his child, yet we never hear how the rupture was mended. In a slender volume of scarce novella length, the story of Anisa’s lies takes up valuable real estate and hits us before we get to the ostensibly major characters. The “botanical models made by glass artists” that he and Anisa see at the Natural History Museum at Harvard become the underlying metaphor for how art is created. Their story is the story upon which this story is written.

Transcription works by exploring the specific and allowing it to stand in for the general. For example, almost no one understands the magic of technology but the narrator’s parenthetical aside about a text to his dead iPhone “(I don’t understand where a message lingers, or for how long, when there isn’t a device to receive it.)” has almost spiritual connotations for a novelist who is also an award-winning poet. When he asks Chloe about Anisa, social media is able to complete the specific web of acquaintance but at the same time we remain deeply unconnected: “We’re not in touch, Chloe said, but I know from Instagram that she’s in Atlanta.”

Thomas, the mentor who left post-War Europe for Rhode Island, is described by his son, Max, as “kind of a cross between Wonka and Bergman.” Max, who is the main narrator of the third section “Hotel Arbez,” is only a year older than the narrator and the two were friendly for a while at college. Thomas confuses them with one another as, increasingly, we do as readers. Their lives, their young daughters, their relationship with Thomas, merge. Max recounts the difficulty of looking after a distant elderly parent, while bringing up a child. He feels the distance from family, as many of us did, most keenly over the pandemic. The scenes of phone calls and visits that take place during and after the COVID period are intensely moving: what is done and what is said, despite what cannot be said.

The narrator’s relationships with Anisa and Mia, the near twinning of Max and the narrator, the fraught, heavy, insecure filiation of Max, narrator, Rosa and the others at the colloquium with Thomas, all of these spill over one another in ways that are endlessly reflective.

Many have written about the difficulties of conveying meaning from one person to another, from one generation to another, from one language to another. Translation, for example, is often viewed with distrust — “translation is treason” as the saying goes — but for Lerner, transcription is a new way of thinking about how we write meaning down or across or over. The concept becomes a way of thinking about translation, transmission and also, in the sense of over-writing, palimpsests — pages written over previous writing. Transcription is a function that our machines and AI can produce, but it is also the word that we use for expressing our genetic inheritance: DNA code expresses its nature through transcription into RNA.

In our age of Zoom, where we meet through machines and delegate our next steps to transcriptions and AI, it makes sense for Lerner to probe the nature of those pregnant gaps between humans that we all too often assume are filled with facts and decisions.

In the second part “[Hotel Villa Real],” the narrator continues to think about the Anisa episode about which Chloe reminded him. He googles Andrés, the Spaniard that Mia had had a fling with decades ago, an episode embroidered and extended by Anisa at the time. As if to compare the nature of testimony, he is made aware by his friend Rosa, a curator at the host institution, that his colleagues felt that he had “falsified” Thomas’ “testament” in the paper he had given, confessing that he had not recorded the final interview. Rosa says they feel his account of the night is a “deepfake.” The narrator finds it inconceivable that he is not trusted, but revisiting that evening, especially in the wake of the Anisa episode, makes it feel somehow suspect.

There is a convenient transactional conceit that a transcription will be complete or accurate but it is a convention intended for business, not for life. Everyone knows that even if Zoom transcriptions were not filled with errors, inconsistencies and nonsense, they would be woefully inadequate records of how humans experience one another. What we hear can have transactional value but, without context of the whole gestalt — the smells, the sounds, the body language of the person that we are interviewing — to claim that a recorded and transcribed interview is more accurate than a curated memory by a trusted author is to mistake the idea of veracity itself.

The closing epitaph from an artisan about how to “become a glass modeler of skill” is just the final example of how the glass touchscreens that enclose our lives are the least interesting of the ways of understanding our existence. We have no “secret apparatus” to form our worlds, but we increase our abilities by honing them from parent to child, “the touch increases in every generation.”

For Lerner, the Jewishness of his writing is in what he cannot escape: whether that is noticing the fringe cultists of Neturei Karta holding Free Palestine signs at a protest in the background of his daughter‘s FaceTime as he talks to her from abroad, the quirk of Hotel Arbez that gave Jews safe harbor from the Nazis, or the murky European history of his mentor with his Holocaust survivor wife. But in the end, what is more Jewish than a book written to study how we write and how we transmit wisdom, knowledge, information, behavior, and mistakes from generation to generation.

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