The US and Iran Are Shooting Again

The US and Iran traded strikes for the first time in a month. American forces hit two Revolutionary Guard rocket launchers in the Strait of Hormuz Sunday afternoon; Iran was spotted rigging sea mines. Iran retaliated that night with missiles at two US bases in Jordan. Jordanian defenses intercepted eight; no serious damage reported. ¹

Volodymyr Zelenskyy gave Natan Sharansky one of Ukraine's top honors. The Soviet refusenik turned Israeli politician received the Order of Merit Aug. 25 in Kyiv for chairing the Babyn Yar Holocaust memorial, which has restored the names of thousands of the 33,000 Jews murdered there in 1941. "We are fighting the same axis of evil," Sharansky said of Ukraine and Israel's wars. ²

Seven people were detained in Jerusalem's Old City over the weekend for harassing religious sites that aren't their own. Police footage shows three men kicking over a Muslim gravestone; four others were caught spitting at the entrance to the Armenian Patriarchate compound. All seven were released under restrictive conditions, part of what police called an ongoing pattern of harassment in the neighborhood. ³

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich wants to cut Israel's gas tax as prices hit a record. Gas is set to reach an all-time high of 8.25 shekels a liter in September, driven partly by the same Hormuz tensions in today's lead story. Smotrich's proposed cut would soften that, but election law bars this kind of voter giveaway within 90 days of a vote, and Israel votes Oct. 27. The attorney general killed an identical move in 2022. ⁴

A new book traces American childhood back to Jewish toymakers who mostly never had one themselves. Sociologist Michael Kimmel's Playmakers follows the immigrant families behind Mattel's Barbie, Ideal's teddy bear, Mr. Potato Head, and Hasbro's G.I. Joe, plus the comic artists (Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Jerry Siegel) who invented Superman and Spider-Man. Per the New York Public Library, 42 of its 100 most important children's books were written by first-generation Jews. Kimmel started digging after learning his own great-great-uncle co-founded Ideal. "They created the childhood that they themselves never had," he told JTA. ⁵

Today's 18 Elul on the Hebrew calendar, Chai Elul: the birthday of both Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, who founded Chassidism, born in 1698, and Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, who founded Chabad, born in 1745, exactly 47 years later on the same Hebrew date. This week's parsha is Nitzavim-Vayeilech. ⁶⁷⁸