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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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Iran and Terrorism: Empty Gestures or Genuine Change?
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi speaks during a meeting with foreign ambassadors in Tehran, Iran, July 12, 2025. Photo: Hamid Forootan/Iranian Foreign Ministry/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
In a world grappling with persistent threats of terrorism and financial crimes, the international community must not be swayed by superficial gestures.
While Tehran’s recent ratification of the Palermo Convention against transnational organized crime may seem like a step in the right direction on the surface, it is likely a calculated move designed to distract from the regime’s continued and unwavering support for global terrorism.
The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) reportedly plans to meet with Tehran’s bureaucrats to review whether the Islamic Republic of Iran has complied with its action plan to be removed from its blacklist.
However, the global financial watchdog must resist the temptation to remove Tehran from the list, because the Islamic Republic fundamentally remains committed to funding terrorism and engaging in illicit financing. To remove Tehran would be to ignore a mountain of evidence that supports this unequivocal fact.
In fact, removing Iran would endanger the integrity of the international financial system.
For years, the Islamic Republic has been a leading state sponsor of terrorism. No single treaty that Iran may ratify can disguise this fact.
The regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has a long and bloody history of plotting assassinations on American soil and overseas, targeting high-profile figures like President Donald Trump, journalists, dissidents, and ordinary citizens. This is not the conduct of a state genuinely committed to combating organized crime. It is the action of a rogue regime that uses terror as a primary tool of its foreign policy.
The recent move by Iran’s Expediency Discernment Council to ratify the United Nations’ Palermo Convention — after years of refusing to do so — is a classic example of Tehran’s diplomatic gamesmanship.
Tehran understands its presence on the FATF blacklist has crippled its economy, It is desperate for a reprieve. However, the regime has refused to ratify the most crucial of the FATF-required treaties: the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism (CFT).
By refusing to do so, Tehran is signaling its intention to continue funding terrorist proxies including Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Nor has Iran abandoned the facilitation network it has provided to Al-Qaeda. While Tehran may one day feel compelled to ratify the CFT for economic reasons, removing it from the blacklist should take place only if commensurate conduct changes on the terrorism front — and that change is sustained.
The international community has already witnessed the devastating consequences of Iran’s terror financing. The Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, was inspired, funded, and enabled by Tehran. The regime’s support for the Houthis in Yemen has destabilized the region and disrupted global trade, costing the United States and its allies billions of dollars. Tehran’s backing of Hezbollah in Lebanon threatens the security of Israel and the stability of the entire Middle East. Iran should not be welcomed back into the global financial fold until it changes its conduct, not merely purports to agree to an item on a technical checklist.
The FATF has a clear mandate: to protect the global financial system from money laundering and terrorist financing. To fulfill this mandate, it must hold Iran to the same standard as every other nation. This means insisting on full and unconditional compliance with all FATF requirements, including the ratification of the CFT and demonstrable adherence to its principles. There can be no exceptions, carve-outs, or special treatment for a regime that has blatantly and repeatedly violated international law and circumvented sanctions.
Tehran’s diplomatic overtures are nothing but a smokescreen. As long as the regime continues to fund terrorism, plot assassinations, and destabilize the Middle East, it must remain on the FATF blacklist. The security of the United States and its allies, and the integrity of the global financial system, depend on it. The message to Tehran must be clear: words are not enough. Its actions and malign conduct must change.
Saeed Ghasseminejad is a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). Toby Dershowitz is managing director at FDD Action, FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focused on national security and foreign policy. FDD Action is a non-partisan 501(c)(4) organization established to advocate for effective policies to promote US national security and defend free nations. Follow the authors on X @SGhasseminejad and @tobydersh.
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From Sacred to Strategic: Hamas Turns Civilian Infrastructure Into Targets
Palestinian Hamas terrorists stand guard on the day of the handover of hostages held in Gaza since the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack, as part of a ceasefire and a hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, Feb. 22, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hatem Khaled
Two weeks ago, the IDF revealed a chilling incident: Hamas operatives posed as World Central Kitchen aid workers, wearing yellow vests and using WCK-branded vehicles. WCK swiftly confirmed that the imposters had no affiliation — that this was terrorism hiding in humanitarian garb.
Then, earlier this week, Israel struck Nasser Hospital in Southern Gaza — not randomly, cruelly or without reason, but because Hamas was using the hospital to operate surveillance cameras to track IDF movements.
A tragic battlefield misstep occurred when tank fire was used to disable those cameras instead of drones, killing 6 Hamas terrorists who were either operating or near the targeted cameras, but also resulting in unintended civilian casualties. This outcome was tragic — but sadly predictable.
This is the logic of Hamas’ strategy: weaponize Gaza’s hospitals, schools, mosques, and aid centers, force civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, and then broadcast them as evidence of Israeli atrocity.
Hospitals: Protected — Until Abused
International Humanitarian Law (IHL) stands firm: during a war, hospitals may not be targeted — unless they are being used for military purposes. Hamas’ use of these sites as command or surveillance posts nullifies their protection.
Mosques and Schools: Sacred — Until Militarized
Houses of worship and schools are also granted special status under IHL. But that protection dissolves once they are used for military advantage — a tactic Hamas consistently employs, turning places of worship into weapons depots and schools into hideouts.
Humanitarian Aid: Safe — Until Exploited
Under IHL, even aid workers can become legitimate targets when Hamas impersonates them. The WCK incident not only endangered genuine aid efforts, but it also weaponized the trust people place in humanitarian organizations, and eroding that trust endangers aid workers everywhere in Gaza.
This Is Calculated — Not Casual
These are not random errors — they are deliberate Hamas strategies: embed fighters and military and tactical equipment in civilian infrastructure, provoke strikes, and unleash graphic narratives. The recent hospital strike and the WCK impersonation reflect this grim choreography.
A Double Standard with Deadly Consequences
When US or UK forces faced civilian casualties in Mosul or Aleppo, the world understood the moral complexity caused by ISIS embedding itself among civilians and fighting in civilian clothes.
But when Israel confronts Hamas — whose tunnel networks under hospitals and all other civilian infrastructure in Gaza rival entire urban subway systems — the narrative is nearly monolithic: Israel is the villain.
This is the double standard defined in the IHRA working definition of antisemitism.
No Safe Haven for Gaza Civilians
Hamas’ cynical human shield strategy and its use of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure as cover is enhanced as a tactical tool by the actions of Gaza’s Arab neighbors.
In Syria and Ukraine, civilians fled across borders to safety in Jordan, Poland, Turkey.
In fact, in every war in modern history, civilians have left combat zones to go to neighboring non-hostile countries.
But after October 7, Egypt and Jordan closed their borders, citing political fears. That leaves Gaza civilians trapped — forced to rely on limited “humanitarian zones” Israel sets up — zones Hamas routinely targets and even tries to stop Gazans from entering.
The result: Israel is held to an impossible standard: avoid civilian casualties even when terrorists hide themselves and their military and tactical infrastructure next to, among, and beneath them, while Gaza’s Arab neighbors are held to no standard of refuge for their fellow Arabs whatsoever.
Casualty Figures — Propaganda Masquerading as Data
To make matters worse, most media outlets parrot casualty numbers from Hamas’ so-called “Health Ministry.”
The Gaza Health Ministry’s numbers lump together civilians, combatants, natural deaths, and even those killed by Hamas’ own misfired rockets. For years before October 7th, between 5,000 and 7,000 people in Gaza died from natural causes. Meanwhile, at least 15% to 25% of Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s rockets fall short, killing Gazans.
And Hamas routinely kills Gazans it decides are “collaborators” with Israel. All these deaths — along with the death of Hamas fighters — are aggregated in Hamas’s “death tolls” for the October 7th war it started.
Yet the narrative advanced by major media outlets and on social media paint every death as of a civilian killed by Israel. This is propaganda masquerading as data.
Conclusion: Accountability, Not Convenient Narratives
Hamas will continue to weaponize its own civilians — and civilian spaces — if excuses remain for its behavior. Only when the global dialogue refuses to blame Israel for the foreseeable results of Hamas’ human-shield warfare can moral clarity return.
The responsibility lies — with Hamas, not Israel — to stop turning Gaza’s hospitals, schools, and civilian infrastructure generally into strategic targets. Let’s call this what it is: terrorism hiding behind civilian facades. Until the world stops tolerating and even rewarding Hamas’ cynical human shield tactics, they will continue.
Micha Danzig is a current attorney, former IDF soldier & NYPD police officer. He currently writes for numerous publications on matters related to Israel, antisemitism & Jewish identity & is the immediate past President of StandWithUs in San Diego and a national board member of Herut.
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What Is the Future for Russian-Speaking Jews in America?
Morris Abram (left), chairman of National Conference on Soviet Jewry, with Ed Koch, former Mayor of New York City, and Natan Sharansky, former Prisoner of Conscience. Photo: Center for Jewish History via Flickr.
The Russian-speaking Jewish community (RSJ) has traveled a long road to America.
From pogroms and World Wars to Soviet repression, our families fled in search of freedom and opportunity. New immigration to the US has slowed, and today, the future of the community rests with the children of those who arrived decades ago. What will their identity look like?
To find out, the American Russian-Speaking Jews Alliance (ARSJA) surveyed RSJ parents and received over 250 responses summarized in a new report.
The findings show a community deeply committed to raising Jewish children — even if traditional religious observance is not at the center.
Although 54 percent of the respondents do not keep kosher and only 3 percent attend synagogue daily, 89 percent of parents expect their children will have a “Very strong” or “Somewhat strong” Jewish identity.
Community life seems to be more popular than ritual. More than half of those surveyed attend RSJ gatherings or Israel-related events, and 67 percent go to synagogue on the High Holidays.
Shaul Kelner, professor of Jewish Studies and Sociology at Vanderbilt University, reminded us that, “American Jews are a diverse population, and there is no one-size-fits-all approach. It’s important that organizations like ARSJA are working to identify and respond to the specific needs of the Russian-speaking Jewish community.”
The “Russian-speaking” part of the identity is more complicated.
Most parents (58 percent) want their children to speak Russian mainly to communicate with grandparents.
Grandparents (75 percent) and parents (70 percent) are the people children use Russian with most often.
Yet only 60 percent of parents believe their children will maintain a strong RSJ identity. For some, the label recalls a painful past. One respondent said that they “see [their] Russian-speaking identity as really more of being raised in the former USSR, a totalitarian regime, the type of which we hope our children will never experience.”
Still, the community is finding new expressions of identity. Judi Garrett, COO at Jewish Relief Network Ukraine, points out that RSJs have played an active role in fundraising efforts. She noted that American-born RSJs organized campaigns that raised significant support for humanitarian aid in Ukraine. Philanthropy may become one of the ways that the next generation expresses who they are.
Parents also voiced deeper concerns. When asked what they worried about most regarding their children’s Jewish identity, the most common answers were antisemitism and assimilation. These anxieties echo across the wider American Jewish community and underscore how forces outside the family shape identity.
The survey does not provide simple answers. It does, however, spark an important conversation. For RSJs in America, the challenge is not only how to preserve their heritage, but how to pass down a Jewish identity rooted in belonging, pride, and purpose.
Mariella Favel leads data analysis at ARSJA, as well as research into how various communal and national organizations are influencing civic discourse.