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John Irving always felt like an outsider — is that all he thinks there is to Jewishness?
By John Irving
Simon & Schuster, 432 pages, $30
In The Cider House Rules, John Irving opens with a urological concern.
The nurses in the boys’ division of the St. Cloud Orphanage spend their new arrivals’ early days “checking that their little penises were healing from their obligatory circumcisions.”
Decades later, in Queen Esther, a muddled sequel of sorts, about a New England family and their ill-at-ease scion’s ambivalent Jewish identity, Irving considers the procedure as a sign of the covenant.
Esther Nacht, an orphan from that same institution — self-described as “a Viennese-born Jew who grew up in an orphanage in Maine, her mother murdered by anti-semites in Portland!” — becomes uniquely invested in what to do with the foreskin of her soon-to-be-born son.
It’s not her decision alone to make. Esther is only the surrogate mother, carrying the boy for Honor Winslow, the New Hampshire girl whose parents took Esther from the orphanage in the 1920s to be her au pair. Honor and Esther agree on one matter: The boy, Jimmy — who will be circumcised but will not have a bris — won’t be brought up Jewish, “for his own sake.”
Esther, for her part, has no choice. Her mother insisted she know about her Jewishness, and by dint of her murder at the hands of unclearly-motivated antisemites, unwittingly entrusted that education to the clueless Dr. Larch and his staff at St. Cloud. Irving, whose preoccupation with circumcision may betray him as a closet intactivist, seems to have a narrow and at times troubling idea of what it means to live Jewishly.
While Irving’s body of work is decidedly goyische, Jews have appeared sporadically. A mother in A Prayer for Owen Meany cries antisemitism over the title character’s rudeness (he didn’t know she was Jewish). Billy Abbott, in 2012’s In One Person, sides with Shylock while reading Merchant of Venice.
Irving makes no bones about being on the side of the oppressed — even vengeful — Jew. As he said in a 2024 interview with The Times of Israel, “I’m not Jewish, but I’ve always been pro-Israel, and I’ve always been pro-Jewish.” This novel, if coming from a left flank, with a stridently pro-choice and anti-religion cast of characters, may be his version of Project Esther.
The author’s identification is embodied here by Esther’s biological son Jimmy Winslow. Through his adoptive family he’s a faculty brat at Penacook Academy in New Hampshire, Irving’s latest stand-in for Phillips Exeter, where his stepfather was a teacher, and where he nursed a certain alienation.
“I always felt that I didn’t belong there; I always felt like a foreigner,” Irving told The Times, and so he connected with Jewish wrestling teammates. Throughout the book Jimmy is stuck with an unshakable “belief in his intrinsic foreignness.” (He later becomes an author who writes a novel called The Doctor’s Rules, about the orphanage at St. Cloud, which seems rather familiar.)
That Irving is not Jewish isn’t a problem, given Jimmy isn’t really either, beyond the fact of his biological parents, the tall, elusive Esther and a petite wrestler (always with the wrestling, and the nebulous paternity) named Moshe Kleinberg — aka “Moses Little Mountain.” Like Irving, he’s an “ally,” sticking up for a teammate named Jonah Feldstein (incidentally the given name of Superbad star Jonah Hill) roughed up by antisemitic toughs named Marcel and Marceau (ironically the stage name of a Jewish mime).
For the purposes of this plot, which mostly follows Jimmy, Jewishness is but a mark of difference, and a distinction without much of one. Except for fear.
“It’s too late for you to be Jewish — you didn’t grow up afraid,” Esther tells Jimmy, in one of her laconic letters.
Esther, with no real Jewish education, nonetheless had a Jewish calling, first going to Vienna in the lead-up to World War II, where she served as a courier to exiled Austrian Jews in Czechoslovakia. She later makes aliyah (Irving helpfully translates this and other Hebrew terms to English) and appears to work for the Haganah and later Mossad in some unknown capacity. Esther’s Jewish journey is one her adoptive family doesn’t feel comfortable tackling, and Irving doesn’t either, so we mostly hear the details in passing via the mailbox.
The book is both wildly preoccupied by Jewishness and antisemitism and completely uncomfortable with illustrating how either functions beyond some rote, inelegantly conveyed history lessons on Mandatory Palestine. It even recuses itself by disappearing Esther as she pursues her goal to be the best Jew possible, which makes you wonder why any of the Jewish meshugas is even there in the first place.
When, in the final stretch, the plot places an adult Jimmy in Jerusalem amid the Lebanese Civil War two characters, who seem sympathetic at first, collapse his empathy toward Palestinians by affirming the ugliest slander imaginable: The Arab population wants to wipe out all Jews, and indoctrinate their children to think the same.
“This is what Esther was protecting him from,” Jimmy concludes, “the eternal conflict, the everlasting hatred.”
To Irving, the Jewish condition is being hated, and not much else. It’s a relief when he drops this theme, for about half the novel, to recount a zany sex plot in Vienna (it always waits for Irving’s characters) where Jimmy befriends a German Shepherd named “Hard Rain” (for the Dylan song), and plots to “knock up” the lesbian partner of his roommate to dodge the draft in Vietnam.
Somewhere inside here is a reflection of the predicament of the biblical Queen Esther, whose tale provides an epigraph (“For we are sold, I and my people, to be destroyed, to be slain, and to perish”).
Like Jimmy, Esther had a Jewishness she had to suppress in order to function as a secret advocate for her people. Only Jimmy is told to ignore his heritage — not just the Jewish parts, but the Mayflower pedigree of his adoptive family. That this may come as a loss is dutifully acknowledged, but a bit beside the point.
With regard to Esther herself, Irving’s read of the Megillah is misguided, opting to see her namesake as “wreaking vengeance on Haman.” The Winslows call her an “Old Testament girl,” and Irving seems to think most of that book boils down to “kill-or-be-killed” talion law.
Many critiques I can level at the novel are already voiced within it.
At various points the book points to Esther’s “vagueness” saying it’s as if she “lived in the background, like peripheral characters in a novel” Later Jimmy states there is “something more mythical than actual about Esther. Like a literary character,” with the mysterious loss of her arm seeming more “symbolic than real.” Pretty much. Pointing this out doesn’t make up for her deficiencies as a character. The fact that her name means “hidden” is hardly an excuse for obscuring nearly everything about her.
Where the Book of Esther is lean, cogent and contains nothing extraneous, Queen Esther is flabby and unfocused. Jimmy’s grandfather, Thomas, an English teacher with a love for Victorian fiction, insists “real life isn’t plotted like a novel.” This novel isn’t either.
But Thomas, a Boston Brahmin just out of place in smalltown New Hampshire, also offers some sage words when it comes to Esther. Whenever the family’s concerned for her undefined escapades in Europe or the new State of Israel, he reminds them “Jewish business is her business, not ours.”
If only Irving was canny enough to keep out of it too.
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Israeli-Arab influencer behind ‘Nas Daily’: Anti-Zionism is antisemitism
(JTA) — DENVER – Israeli-Arab social media entrepreneur Nuseir Yassin, of the viral vlog “Nas Daily,” said he believes “anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism” and stressed his commitment to overturning “misguided hate” against Jews, at a conference devoted to the subject this week.
Yassin, 34, was speaking with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on the sidelines of the conference, hosted by the David Merage Foundation for Confronting Antisemitism. A self-described “village boy” from the Lower Galilee town of Arraba in Israel, he achieved massive success through viral short-form videos that attracted viewers from all over the world. Today he boasts more than 68 million followers across numerous social networks.
Yassin is a Muslim of Palestinian origin, although he said he is not religious. Asked why it was important for a non-Jewish person to participate in a conference about combatting antisemitism, Yassin equated this battle to fighting for his family, noting that “the success of Israel and the Jewish people is also my success as an Israeli citizen.”
“I’m not a fan of the Israeli government, and I’m not here to defend it, just like I’m not a fan of many governments,” Yassin noted, but he asserted that the reaction to the government “is absolutely fueled by antisemitism.”
“I do believe anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism,” he added.
He said he views Zionism as “the most vanilla thing in the world – a group of people wanting a place to live,” and has therefore concluded that Israel’s detractors “just really don’t like Jews.”
Yassin, who first broke through in 2016, has become increasingly outspoken in recent years about his combined Israeli and Palestinian identity. During the conference, he recalled that he grew up labeling himself Arab-Israeli. After the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, he started listing Israeli first and Palestinian second.
“I could not relate to the extremism that I saw, and I wanted to distance myself from it without erasing my identity connected to it,” Yassin said. “I’m not just Israeli because I think it removes a little bit of spice, but I’m also not just Palestinian anymore.”
“A lot of Israeli culture is inside me,” he continued. “I never agree with people. I’m always disagreeable. That’s Israeli. I speak up.”
Yassin noted that he was “the first guy to go study in the United States out of my entire lineage,” graduating from Harvard University in 2014 with a degree in economics and a minor in computer science. Despite having grown up in Israel, Yassin said that Harvard was the place where he made his first Jewish friend.
After working as a software developer for Venmo in New York, Yassin left his job in 2016 to travel and document his journeys. Ultimately, he launched a Facebook page called Nas Daily – using the word for “people” in Arabic – where he posted one-minute videos for 1,000 days, telling the stories of communities around the world.
What was once a personal brand has since expanded into the parent Nas Company, which offers platforms for solo entrepreneurs to build and monetize their online businesses.
Yassin earned an honorary degree from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 2025 in recognition of his advocacy work for Israeli and Palestinian coexistence. This past August, he also joined the advisory board for the Genesis Prize Foundation, which each year celebrates inspiring Jewish individuals for their achievements.
“I do not relate to hundreds of men on the street shouting ‘Allahu Akbar,’” Yassin told JTA, adding that there needed to be more women and fewer religious fanatics participating in the Israeli-Palestinian conversation.
Yassin argued that he’s “not a weird Arab for saying this” and that “the entire country of the UAE says the same thing,” referring to one of the Gulf countries that signed onto the Abraham Accords normalizing relations with Israel. He also challenged “Free Palestine” activists to envision a concrete future for Palestinians rather than fixating on Israel’s transgressions.
“We should all be ‘Free Palestine’ – but from what?” Yassin asked. “We disagree on the solution, not on the problem. We don’t want suffering. Nobody wants suffering.”
“I’m a free-Palestine-from-Hamas guy,” he continued. “Just free Palestine,” he said, ”is not an answer. I’m free-Palestine-from-extremism.”
Yassin affirmed that there is room for criticism of Israel’s government, noting, for example, that he would like to see an Israeli-Arab presence in the government.
But he marveled at the notion that an alien visiting Earth would likely guess that the most hated country in the United Nations is North Korea, when in fact “It’s not – It’s Israel.”
That struck him as absurd because “the Israel-Palestine conflict is not a big deal when you compare it to everything else that’s happening on planet Earth. The only thing that makes it a big deal is that we, as Palestinians, have the perfect enemy.”
That enemy, he continued, is “the most hated type of enemy, which is the Jews.”
As part of his appearance at the conference, Yassin presented a recap of a fellowship he launched this past spring in partnership with the David Merage Foundation to help 50 content creators – 25 Jewish and 25 Muslim – produce meaningful material.
Participants received $1,000 and spent a month learning from the Nas Daily team about viral and impactful storytelling during the fellowship, named for Yassin’s first Jewish friend, Zaki Djemal, who recently died of a sudden heart attack.
To Laura Merage, the Iranian-born Jewish co-founder of the foundation, Yassin was a natural partner for this bridge-building effort. Given his social media following and “infectious personality,” Merage said she felt “that’s what we need more of in the world.”
At the conference on Tuesday, Yassin announced two winners of the fellowship’s influencer competition: recent McGill University graduate Raihaana Adira, a Canadian Muslim, and Grace, a Jewish-American digital content creator who preferred to use only her first name for privacy reasons. Grace tells stories about unique public figures, such as the first Arab “Miss Israel.” Adira, meanwhile, began posting about antisemitism and Muslim-Jewish relations after witnessing anti-Zionist protests at McGill.
“When I see a Jewish person being attacked on campus or online, it feels like I’m watching someone from my own community hurt,” Adira told JTA, noting that she started posting because no one believed her when she talked about incidents on campus.
“I wanted the protests and the graffiti on the walls that said ‘Death to the IDF’ to be seen,” she continued. “I am a Canadian, I am a Muslim, and when people at school on the streets say, ‘Death to Canada, We are Hamas, Hamas is heroic’ – that is not me.”
Adira said she received many death threats when she first started posting. While acknowledging how difficult that was, she also emphasized an influx of support that has helped “drown out the hate.”
Yassin offered a similar perspective, noting that at the beginning of his career, he “used to amplify the blowback and talk a lot about it,” referring to the criticisms he’d receive for promoting coexistence and calling out antisemitism. But after realizing that this deterred others from speaking out, he deemed the threats insignificant, calling them “the smallest price to pay for the largest outcome you can possibly imagine.”
During his travels around the world, Yassin said he has witnessed how flawed people’s perceptions of Jews can be and that he feels “a responsibility to set the record straight.” He also noted that he is dating a Jewish woman, author and influencer Aija Mayrock, whom he is marrying next year and with whom he expects to have children.
“They’re going to be Jewish, so that’s my family – literally, my family,” Yassin said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Four Seats or No Seats? Why Israel’s Final Polls Disagree Over Amcha Yisrael
Conflicting projections for Ofer Winter’s party illustrate the uncertainty of measuring public support near an electoral threshold.
A Channel 12 poll gives Ofer Winter’s Amcha Yisrael four parliamentary seats.
An i24NEWS survey reaches the same seat total.
Other final polls find that the party does not qualify for representation.
How can surveys conducted close to the same election produce such different results?
The answer lies partly in the difference between measuring a vote share and converting it into parliamentary seats.
A Statistical Boundary
Israel’s electoral threshold is 3.25 percent.
For a party receiving substantially more than that percentage, modest sampling fluctuations may change its expected number of seats without calling its parliamentary presence into question.
For a party whose support lies near 3.25 percent, the same type of fluctuation may change its projected representation from several seats to zero.
This does not necessarily mean the polls are measuring completely different political realities.
They may be producing estimates close to the same threshold but on opposite sides of it.
Sample Size Is Only One Factor
The i24NEWS survey conducted on October 22 included 5,124 adult respondents and reported a sampling error of plus or minus 1.4 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.
That is a substantial sample by conventional political polling standards.
But a larger sample does not eliminate every source of uncertainty.
Different pollsters may employ different recruitment methods, weighting systems and procedures for estimating turnout.
They may also differ in how they handle respondents who are undecided or reluctant to state their preferences.
These choices can matter particularly for smaller parties.
The Problem of Turnout
Opinion polls generally estimate voting preferences before actual voting takes place.
Election results reflect the ballots cast by people who participate.
Differences between intended and actual turnout can affect parties in different ways.
Analysts must therefore consider not only how many respondents express support for a party, but also whether the poll’s turnout model accurately reflects the eventual electorate.
Without transparent, comparable information about the methods used by each polling organization, it is difficult to identify which methodological difference is responsible for a particular disagreement.
Reading the Final Surveys
The appropriate interpretation of Amcha Yisrael’s polling is neither that its parliamentary representation is guaranteed nor that exclusion is certain.
The available surveys demonstrate uncertainty around a legally decisive boundary.
The four-seat projections reported by Channel 12 and i24NEWS are meaningful observations.
So are the below-threshold findings published by Channel 13, Maariv and Zman Yisrael.
Each survey is a measurement of electoral intentions under a particular methodology, not a count of actual votes.
For readers following Israel’s election, this makes Amcha Yisrael an instructive case study in how polling uncertainty interacts with electoral law.
The final result will provide the definitive seat allocation. The polls explain why the outcome was difficult to measure in advance.
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As Trump betrays Ukraine, it’s beginning to feel a lot like Munich
In Munich on Sept. 30, 1938, the leaders of Britain and France signed an agreement with Adolf Hitler that caved to the Nazi leader’s demand that Germany be given a chunk of Czechoslovakia. Five months later, Hitler ordered the German military to forcibly take the remainder of the neighboring country.
On Oct. 9, 2026, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin struck a deal allowing Russia to sell diesel fuel to global markets, most importantly to the US. Then Trump waived a package of sanctions on Russia that had been passed by Congress. By replenishing Russia’s war coffers, it is likely more Ukrainians will die because of these twin gifts from America’s president to the warmongering Russian autocrat.
Why is Trump doing this? He seems to be hoping the diesel deal will help him avert disaster in the upcoming midterms. Or maybe there’s more to it than that. Perhaps Trump seriously thinks that this will get him the Nobel Peace Prize by ending the war in Ukraine through helping Putin win it. Perhaps it’s one more scheme to further enrich himself and his family. Or maybe Putin really does have something on Trump.
In any event, it feels like Munich all over again.
There are some remarkable parallels between Czechoslovakia’s predicament in 1938 and Ukraine’s nine decades later: separatists in two vulnerable Central European democracies were encouraged and supported by a neighboring authoritarian regime that sought to seize adjacent territory under the pretext of protecting a minority from oppression.
And at the center of both narratives is betrayal: of Czechoslovakia by Britain and France, and Ukraine by Trump.
In the spring and summer of 1938, Konrad Henlein, leader of the Nazi-allied Sudeten German Party in Czechoslovakia, held secret meetings with Hitler and other Nazi officials. They concocted a plan: Cause so much disorder in the Sudetenland that the Czech government would declare martial law, thus creating an excuse for German troops to march in to protect the ethnic German minority.
Tensions that had long existed along the Czech frontier erupted into gunfire and death in the Sudeten town of Habersbirk on the morning of Sept. 13, 1938. A mob of German separatists hung a swastika banner from a church tower, stormed the police station, kidnapped the wife of a cop, and engaged in gunfights with police officers that lasted hours. Four Czech police officers and four insurgents died. Outbreaks of violence, terror and torture raged along the border for days, backed by Freikorps paramilitary troops who crossed from Germany and by SA and SS men who took part in cross-border sabotage and armed attacks.
The uprising had the desired impact. Just 17 days later — on Sept. 30, 1938 — Britain, France, Italy and Nazi Germany signed the Munich Agreement, yielding to Hitler’s demand that the Sudetenland be ceded to him. After landing at an airport outside London, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waved a document in his hand and jubilantly proclaimed:
“The settlement of the Czechoslovak problem which has now been achieved is, in my view, only the prelude to a larger settlement in which all Europe may find peace.”
“I believe it is peace for our time,” Chamberlain said later that day.
But it didn’t take long for Hitler to show he could not be trusted. Hitler’s army marched into Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939. Germany’s invasion of Poland followed less than six months later, and by 1942 German forces controlled territory spanning from the Atlantic Ocean to deep inside the Soviet Union.
Ethnic Germans’ uprising in Czechoslovakia in 1938 found an echo nine decades later in Ukraine’s Donbas region, where unrest that began with pro-Russia protests in 2014 evolved into the war Russia has been waging on its neighbor for nearly five years.
In the spring of 2014, paramilitary units led by Russian intelligence officers stormed government office buildings in several towns and cities in Donbas, seizing weapons and clashing with police. In a scene reminiscent of the Habersbirk siege of 1938, on April 14, 2014, pro-Russian militants seized the police station in Horlivka, beat up the police chief, and murdered a member of the city council, whose body was found in a river. Similar clashes occurred throughout Donbas.
Two Kremlin-backed pseudo-states soon emerged: the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic. Russia funneled tanks, artillery, air defense systems and fighters into Donbas, fueling a war between separatists and Ukrainian forces that dragged on for years.
Like Hitler in the Sudetenland, Russia’s de facto occupation of Donbas was not enough for Vladimir Putin. His eyes were on all of Ukraine, and he spent years manufacturing pretexts for the full-scale invasion that began on Feb. 24, 2022.
Trump has been buttering up Putin for more than a decade, starting with his 2015 campaign for president, when he effusively praised the ruthless Russian autocrat’s leadership style. Putin is a “strong leader,” is “far more respected than our president,” meaning the immensely popular Barack Obama, and was someone he “would get along with very well,” Trump said back then.
Trump’s admiration for Putin took on ominous tones after becoming president. During a press conference after the two leaders’ 2018 Helsinki summit, Trump questioned intelligence findings on Russian election interference and said he believed Putin’s denial. “I don’t see any reason it would be Russia,” Trump told reporters, with the Russian strongman standing at his side.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, during Biden’s presidency, Trump called it “a pretty smart move,” praised Putin as a “genius,” and also said it wouldn’t have happened if Trump was still president, remarks that were amplified by Russian state media.
During Trump’s second term, his buddy-buddy relationship with Putin has turned into a virtual strategic alliance, as the American president repeatedly makes moves and statements that seem designed to please the Russian autocrat. There are Trump’s threats to abandon NATO, his humiliation of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky during a February 2025 meeting inside the Oval Office, and most recently Trump’s demand that Ukraine cease its drone attacks on Russian oil refineries, his call for Zelensky’s ouster, and envoy Steve Witkoff thanking Putin for being a “humanitarian.”
Putin has proposed a summit between himself, Trump, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping to discuss ending the war in Ukraine. It’s notable that Ukraine has not been invited. This is also what happened in Munich nine decades ago, when Czech delegates were excluded from the room, and others decided Czechoslovakia’s fate.
Last October, aboard Air Force One, Trump told reporters the Donbas region should be “cut up,” leaving most of it in Russian hands.
“Let it be cut the way it is,” he said. “They can negotiate something later on down the line.”
It seems the fate Trump envisions for Ukraine is similar to the one Hitler envisioned for Czechoslovakia. It would be naïve to think that Putin’s expansionist ambitions would stop there.
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