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“Emma,” a young Jewish woman who we met in 2019, didn’t belong to a synagogue. She didn’t have a Jewish partner. She didn’t observe Jewish rituals regularly. On most surveys about religion, she would not seem very engaged with Judaism.

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Six months ago, the war against Iran began with a display of Israeli military and intelligence prowess so spectacular that rapid political change seemed within reach. Israeli strikes decimated much of Iran’s leadership, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, senior officials and military commanders, while demonstrating extraordinary intelligence penetration and an ability to strike at the heart of a regime that had spent decades protecting itself.

For supporters of regime change in Iran, myself included, the possibilities seemed extraordinary. I wrongly assumed the military campaign formed one part of a broader strategy, with the CIA and perhaps Mossad working inside Iran to prepare senior military officers, dissident elements of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or other power centers to move once the regime was suddenly leaderless. A coup seemed plausible, and the opening attack appeared capable of acting as the trigger.

That optimism proved misplaced. Six months later, the Islamic Republic survives under an even more hardline leadership, the United States has paid heavily for the conflict, Israel’s standing has plummeted dangerously as a result, and the world has endured an energy crisis. Western interceptor stockpiles have been disturbingly depleted as Iran has demonstrated how relatively inexpensive missiles and drones can impose enormously expensive defensive requirements on its enemies.

In addition to the failure to organize regime change, there was – incredibly – no American plan for dealing with Tehran’s predictable move to block the Strait of Hormuz, through which about one-fifth of the world’s crude oil and liquified natural gas flows.

That is particularly difficult to explain because the danger was both obvious and apparently understood inside the administration. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard warned President Donald Trump before the war that killing Khamenei would probably produce more obstinate leaders, that Tehran would move to close the Hormuz and destabilize global energy markets, attack American forces and partners across the region, and redouble nuclear weapons efforts.

The most plausible explanation for Trump’s decision to proceed is the confidence of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others that Iran’s historic weakness had created an opportunity for rapid regime collapse. Iran certainly was weak, but weakness and imminent collapse are very different things in a country without real elections or term limits and a willingness to kill as many of its own people as necessary.

The military math has meanwhile grown increasingly unfavorable. The United States and Israel are using sophisticated interceptors costing enormous sums against Iranian missiles and drones that can be produced far more cheaply. Months of fighting have placed pressure on Iron Dome, Patriot and other interceptor inventories at a moment when such weapons, if the war resumes, may be required all over the Middle East and even beyond. Iran has discovered an asymmetric advantage in forcing wealthy adversaries to spend vastly more on defense than Tehran spends on attacks.

It also discovered that the Americans had not rounded up a posse: America’s allies, who were not consulted in any of this, were clearly not on its side. Though they certainly hate the Islamic Republic, one could be forgiven for suspecting they hated Trump – who a month before the attack on Iran threatened NATO ally Denmark over Greenland – even more.

By June, the strategic balance was reflected in diplomacy. Trump had entered the war speaking about eliminating the Iranian nuclear threat and clearing the way for Iranians to overthrow their oppressors, yet the memorandum of understanding reached with Tehran represented a retreat from any such ambitions, containing none of the transformational conditions that might have justified the costs of the war.

Iran made no meaningful commitment concerning its ballistic missile program or its calamitous support for Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and militias in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. The agreement offered no protection for Iranians confronting a regime that had massacred tens of thousands of protesters. Instead it envisioned massive sanctions relief, unfreezing of assets, the removal of the American blockade and hundreds of billions of dollars for Iranian reconstruction and economic development; all this inevitably would have strengthened the same regime whose survival the war was expected to jeopardize.

Such were the shameful wages of hubris and poor planning, and it reflected Trump’s panic at the energy crisis unfolding as midterm elections approached. The Islamic Republic had every reason to view the June agreement as a victory – and yet, amazingly, it then overplayed its hand.

Rather than pocketing a strategic reprieve, Iran’s rulers continued asserting the right to control passage through the Strait of Hormuz and charge vessels fees and tolls. Accepting such an arrangement would create a dangerous precedent extending far beyond Iran, effectively granting a belligerent power a tollbooth over one of the world’s essential maritime arteries and inviting similar behavior around other strategic chokepoints. It would upend global maritime trade, and devastate America’s credibility as the chief protector of freedom on the seas.

The MOU’s negotiating period has now expired, and Washington this week shifted toward a strategy better suited to Iran’s actual vulnerabilities. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has unveiled what the administration calls an “economic D-Day,” beginning with sanctions against roughly 60 Iran-linked individuals, companies and vessels and threatening secondary sanctions against foreign entities that continue doing business with Tehran.

This was, of course, greeted with considerable skepticism, which the Trump administration has earned in spades. But in fact, combined with a determined blockade, the approach has the potential to accomplish what the original expectation of rapid regime collapse could not.

Iran has spent decades developing sophisticated methods for evading sanctions through disguised tankers, ship-to-ship transfers, shell companies, yuan transactions and an elaborate shadow economy. China purchases the overwhelming majority of the oil Iran manages to export and provides Tehran with both buyers and financial channels outside the conventional dollar system. Those mechanisms can help Iran disguise and monetize a barrel that reaches the international market, while they cannot create a physical route for the next barrel through a blockade.

And that is the main issue: the oil Iran is currently selling, which is its key export, is mostly what had been stashed before the war outside the blockade zone, on the high seas and elsewhere. It should run out in six months or less. The world just needs patience (though it would also help for the United States and NATO to make up and project a united front).

Iran’s resilience has been remarkable, but its economic position was precarious even before the war. The country entered the conflict suffering chronic electricity shortages, deteriorating infrastructure, a severe water crisis after years of drought and groundwater depletion, punishing inflation and a currency that had already lost most of its value in recent years. It was economic desperation that helped fuel the unrest that the regime answered with mass killing in January. It is very likely that this fury will explode again, stronger still.

The conflict has been transformed into a contest of endurance. Iran is betting that Western political patience will expire before its economic oxygen does, because democratic governments feel higher energy prices, business pressure and voter anger immediately, while authoritarian governments can impose extraordinary suffering on their populations.

The West possesses a countervailing advantage of overwhelming economic scale. Iran’s economy is tiny beside the combined economic power of the United States, Europe and their allies, while China’s economic relationships with America and Europe dwarf its commerce with Tehran. Sustained pressure can therefore force governments and companies to decide how much economic risk they are prepared to assume on behalf of a weakened Islamic Republic.

The first six months of the Iran War offer a harsh lesson about the limits of military power against a ruthless rival with asymmetric levers. But six months after a war built around the expectation of rapid collapse, the outcome depends on patience. The United States is now fighting the right war: Iran’s regime is a global rogue, and sometimes superpowers must use power, whether military or economic. Moreover, time is on its side, if it will bide it.

There is just one small problem: Trump, a man with almost no credibility, needs to credibly explain to the American people why it’s worth the pain.

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On a recent Thursday in his experimental kosher kitchen, Noah Clickstein was brining, roasting and assembling local seasonal fruits and vegetables on plates for his diners – not uncommon tasks for the head chef at Lehrhaus, a Jewish tavern and house of learning in Somerville, Massachusetts.

But one of the vegetables made what Clickstein was doing unprecedented — at least in recent centuries.

Lehrhaus is the first North American restaurant to serve the qishut (key-shoot) — an oblong, light-green fuzzy melon that resembles a cucumber and hasn’t been on Jewish dinner plates since biblical times. Clickstein has found a variety of ways to pair the melon with local produce to highlight its versatility and flavor profile.

“We love telling stories, and we love introducing new things to people,” Clickstein told The Forward. “We hope people can learn something while being here, even if it’s just eating the food.”

Thousands of years ago, Jews stewarded qishuim, a fruit that thrived in the arid regions of Egypt, Italy and Israel. The fruit’s numerous mentions across the Torah and Talmud point to how popular the produce was for Jews at the time. But as exile and assimilation transformed Jewish life in the diaspora, the rooted connection between Jews and the qishuim withered, leaving other communities in those lands to cultivate the plant.

That changed in 2021 when the Jewish Seed Project — a research initiative of the Jewish Farmer Network — sought to connect Jews in the diaspora to the ancient plant.

Cross-pollinating contemporary descendants of the qishuim in gardens across the United States and Canada, a handful of growers have inched the plant closer to its biblical description, restoring a once-lost relationship with the fruit.

Planting a seed

The Jewish Seed Project began as a collaboration. Prolific seed keeper K Greene, who runs a seed company in New York’s Hudson Valley, had long been unraveling the story of seeds, making a career of researching and preserving plants from Black and indigenous communities. But he had yet to explore seeds that connected him to his own Jewish heritage.

He approached the Jewish Farmer Network with the idea of cultivating a Jewish cucumber, or qishut.

“As a perennially displaced and shunted-from-here-to-there people, the stories of seeds that are connected to our story” have been lost, said Shani Mink, the executive director of Jewish Farmer Network, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the agrarian roots of Jewish tradition.

In modern Hebrew, the word qishuim is used to describe a Middle Eastern variety of zucchini known in Arabic as a kusa squash. However, this variety only arrived in the region a few hundred years ago, ruling it out as the qishuim mentioned in 2,000- and 3,000-year-old biblical texts.

To piece together the puzzle of qishuim, Mink called on long-time peer, Noah Weinberg, a Jewish farmer and Torah scholar who founded Gann Farm in Newton, Massachusetts.

Weinberg turned to the National Library in Jerusalem and an ethnobotanist to uncover the vegetable’s biblical lineage and mysterious disappearance from Jewish life.

They found the first clues in the Torah, in Numbers 11:5-6: “We remember the fish that we ate in Egypt free of charge, the cucumbers, the watermelons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. But now, our bodies are dried out, for there is nothing at all; we have nothing but manna to look at.”

“The children of Israel are in the desert, and they’re having a common experience that many of us have, which is ‘I miss the food from home,’” Weinberg told the Forward. “For them it was a bunch of alliums — leeks, onions and garlic — and it was the qishuim and watermelons. So clearly this was a staple crop that people loved and was important to them in Egypt. “

From throughout the Torah and Talmud, Weinberg collected instructions for growing, harvesting and eating the fruit.

Talmudic discourse detailed an oblong vegetable with a fuzzy exterior that grew on a vine. Pale green in color, it is best picked on the early side, before it swells and develops a bitter taste. When eaten raw, qishuim taste quite similar to a cucumber: crisp and aqueous, though with an added tinge of melon sweetness.

Weinberg even uncovered mentions of the Shomer Qisu’im (watchman of the qishuim), a person whose sole job it was to ensure the plant’s proper ripening.

Harvesting an ancient cucumber

With a textual grounding established, the Jewish Seed Project began collaborating with farmers across North America to grow “diaspora gardens,” plots where research growers would cross-pollinate contemporary qishuim seed descendants from Italy, Egypt, Israel, West Bank and Gaza in the hopes of reaching back in time through their DNA to reconnect with the crop their ancestors once sowed.

The first few years of the project yielded fruits that were quite bitter, lacked the vegetable’s signature fuzzy exterior, or failed to meet other core traits.

In 2023, after a few years of selection and cultivation, the organization released a diasporic seed mix for individuals not associated with the project to steward themselves.

Now, in its sixth year, the Jewish Seed Project is honing in on taste, with many of its growers beginning to share the fruit both with and beyond their local Jewish community.

At a Rosh Chodesh Shabbaton in Alliance, Ohio, research grower Celeste Tannenbaum offered a brief lesson about the qishut’s history and brought 18 varieties of the ancient cucumber for participants to taste and help her select which plants to reseed next year.

“The more mature ones tasted like melon and were kind of sweet,” Batya Reed, 29 told the Forward, “But I actually liked the cucumber-flavored ones more.” Reed said she tasted one so bitter that Tannenbaum announced she would not plant it again.

Edda Mendes, 29 said the plant gave them “more context for my place in the world.”

“It’s hard not to feel alienated from so much of the world, in this country, in this time period,” they said. “So I’ve been increasingly digging into local history and ecology.”

In Colorado, where the plant is grown at a farm attached to the Boulder JCC, qishuim has become one of the many produce items shared with the city’s food pantries and nutrition programs.

“We donate it, and we tell our sites to think of it as a cucumber,” Becca Gan Levy, the Boulder JCC’s Farm and Sustainability Director, told the Forward.

‘The perfect vegetable’

Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, the fruit has made its way into a commercial kitchen.

Clickstein has had the chance to experiment with the unusual vegetable each year since Lehrhaus opened in 2023.

The first year, Clickstein simply pickled the fruit. The following year, because the fruit had a dense texture similar to a squash, he sautéed it and added it to a quinoa salad layered with thinly sliced radish and roasted peppers.

This year he’s created the biggest selection to date, in what has been dubbed “Qishut-fest.” The spread features a qishut shirazi salad with tomato and red onion, blistered shishito peppers and qishuim plated on a bed of shipka pepper labneh, a savory tart filled with qishut, sautéed Swiss chard, and goat cheese spread, and of course, the time-honored vinegar-brined pickle.

“It was cool to get to see how this plant has changed,” Clickstein said.

Already, the salad and blistered pepper medley have sold out, with plans to continue serving the pickle and tart versions of the vegetable well into late October, or for as long as supplies last.

Just as its stewards have come to understand the plant more — its optimal maturity and growing conditions to ensure a pleasant flavor — so too has Clickstein come to acquaint himself and his customers with the vegetable’s versatile flavor profile.

“I really like this year’s crop and the direction it is going: meaning less bitter and more knowledge from the farmers on how to pick it correctly,” Clickstein told the Forward. He plans to lean further into cooked preparations of the crop and explore more ways to roast and sauté the vegetable to further unlock the qishut’s melon-like flavor notes.

“This was the perfect vegetable,” Clickstein said. “We serve it raw, pickled, roasted, and baked. Having tasted it these last few years, we really got to see the versatility and flavor of it, knowing it can be delicious raw as well as baked.”

Qishuim traditionally grow from April to November. As its season reaches its end, The Jewish Seed Project is already looking ahead to 2027. Using the data from the 11 participating research growers, the project will select which seeds will be grown again.

“Eventually we hope that through cross-pollination and selection for certain traits we will stabilize a variety of revived qishuim,” Mink said, “cobbled together from the genetic material stewarded by our neighbors and others over millennia.”

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