"Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute"

 The American delegation to the Iran War peace talks in Pakistan this weekend should take to heart the words of Congressman Samuel Sewall of Massachusetts in 1798 when he shouted out “millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute.” Those words were said in response to French Foreign Minister Talleyrand’s request for a bribe before negotiations would begin to end the quaisi-naval war with France in the so-called "XYZ Affair." 

The United States was only 24 years old and was standing up to the great power of France. We can do no less today with respect to Iran. Simply put, the delegation consisting of Vice President JD Vance, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff should put the Iranians on notice that no tribute will be paid by ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz.” Full stop. 

 

The delegation should also remember the first words of the Marine hymn, which begin with “from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli…”  Tripoli being the focus of the Barbary Pirate Wars of the early 1800’s. (See:https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-purim-war-part-4-cease-fire-fog.html) President Thomas Jefferson had no qualms about fighting the Barbary Pirates and certainly the Trump Administration should show the same fortitude in fighting the modern-day Iranian pirates.

The Purim War - Part 4, The Ceasefire Fog*

The rally in the stock and bond markets and the collapse in oil prices is signaling that the Purim War is all but over. That, indeed, may be true, but we are a long way from a final settlement and there is a nontrivial chance that fighting will resume.  In fact, both sides have already reported ceasefire violations. We will know more this weekend when the U.S. and Iranian negotiators meet in Pakistan.

In the meantime, ships aren’t traversing the Hormuz Strait, and it looks like Iran wants to set up a tollway. Should that happen, it would represent a severe challenge to “freedom of navigation” on an international waterway, a concept that the U.S. went to war three times in its history. (War on the Barbary Pirates, The War of 1812, and World War I) If Iran prevails on this issue, it could rightly claim, that despite its enormous tactical defeat, it won a significant strategic victory enabling it to hold the global oil market hostage.

Although President Trump has stated that Iran will give up its enriched uranium and end its nuclear program, this hasn’t been confirmed by word and deed by the Iranians. Remember that ending the Iran nuclear program was the primary goal of the war to begin with. We will learn much on this point in a few days.

 

As we previously noted Israel would take the opportunity to take care of its unfinished business in Lebanon. ( See: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-purim-war.html ) As we speak Israel is pounding Hezbollah in Lebanon and both the Iranians and the Pakistanis are saying Israel’s war in Lebanon are part of the overall cease fire. Both the U.S. and Israel believe that it is separate issue.

 

Thus, the way I see it, the war is far from over with the ultimate winner being determined by the Hormuz and nuclear issues.

 

*- See: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2026/03/purim-war-part-3-end-game.html

My Review of Matti Friedman's "Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe"

 Parachuting into Statehood

While reading Matti Friedman’s wonderful new book, I was reminded of my trip to Prague where I visited the memorial for the dead Czech paratroopers who were gunned down in a Prague Church. (See: https://destinationwwii.com/operation-anthropoid-memorial/ee:) Their mission organized in 1942 by the British under the name Operation Anthropoid succeeded in assassinating Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher of Prague and an architect of the Holocaust. To me, this is Friedman’s best book and I reviewed several of his works before. (See for example: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2022/05/my-amazon-review-of-matti-friedmans-who.html )

 

Here we are told the story of another British mission to send newly trained paratroopers into occupied Europe in 1944. The British in cooperation with the Hagenah recruit 32 Jewish citizens of their Palestine Mandate, whose mission was to help downed pilots evade and escape from the Nazi’s. They were chosen because of their language skills and their knowledge of the countries they were to be dropped into. All of them recently escaped from Nazi Europe and now they are choosing to go back into the hell they left.

 

However, the Hagenah has a different mission. That mission is help organize Jewish resistance to the Nazi occupation and to also, if possible, to get them out of Europe. Indeed, the paratroopers are fighting for a state that does not yet exist. The mission has the high-level involvement of the leading figures in the Jewish state in waiting, including its first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion.

 

Of the 32 recruits most die or are captured. Friedman tells the stories of four of them. Haim Hermesh 24, known as the scythe, airdrops into Yugoslavia enroute to Hungary. He like all of them he flies from Cairo to Beri, Italy where he is then parachutes in. He survives. Enzo Sereni, the group leader and a father of three drops into northern Italy. Marta Reick 30, known as Haviva drops into Slovakia where she becomes and important figure in the resistance. Indeed, Freidman takes you into the forests and clearings where the paratroopers landed and their interaction with the local partisans. One thing I did not know, was that for a time the resistance actually controlled a small amount of territory before being overrun by the German army.

 

The most famous of the four was Hannah Senesh 22, the author of the lyrics to “Eli, Eli.” She is the daughter of a famous Hungarian playwright and leaves an extraordinary paper trail. She was captured in Budapest and was killed in prison a few months before the arrival of the Red Army. Her mother was in the same prison with her for awhile and is ultimately freed and ends up in Israel.

 

We also learn from Friedman that the Nazi’s had a good understanding of the operation. Both the Hagenah and the U.S. OSS availed themselves of the services of a double agent in Istanbul. A monumental intelligence failure that put the entire operation at risk.

 

Although from a strict tactical sense the mission of the paratroopers ended up as a failure, in a broader sense the mission succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its promoters. Their lives become the legends that gave inspiration to the new State of Israel.

 

In order to write the book Friedman researched the Hagenah archives loaded with musty boxes, found unpublished letters from relatives of the paratroopers, and discovered long out of print books. He also visited all of the drop zones of his four protagonists and followed the trail from there. It was a three-year effort, and it paid off in a hell of a good story.   

NATO: R.I.P., b.1949 - d. 2026?

NATO is dead, or in the process of dying. NATO was born when the United States stood alone militarily and economically as the West's  power while Europe was weak. Europe is no longer weak, but it certainly acts that way. If if it had the will, Europe would be capable of defending itself. Hence the founding predicate of NATO no longer holds.

The proximate cause of NATO's demise was President Trump's announcing his willingness to seize Greenland by force from NATO ally Denmark earlier this year, (See:Shulmaven: Donnie Does Davos* and Mayhem in Minneapolis ) his failure to consult on his war plans to attack Iran, and most important the the obstruction of NATO allies Spain, France and Italy to deny their respective airspaces to the U.S. Air Force's efforts to to attack Iran. Indeed they even denied access to the U.S. air bases in those countries. It is one thing for them to be passive, it is far another thing to actually obstruct the U.S. military. 

It is not as if NATO has no skin in the game in the Persian Gulf. Indeed their economies are suffering far more from the rise in the price of oil than the U.S. I don't know what, if anything, President Trump will say tonight on NATO, but the clock is ticking on its demise. Further it will require congressional approval for the United States to withdraw from NATO. Of course, the only winner in this will be Russia's Putin

My Review of Lloyd Blankfein's "Streetwise: Getting to and Through Goldman Sachs"

The Rise of Lloyd Blankfein*

This Jewish street kid from Queens salutes the Jewish street kid from Brooklyn. Lloyd Blankfein, with the help of Jacob Weisberg, describes his rise from the housing projects of Brooklyn to the commanding heights of Goldman Sachs. His father worked the night shift at the post office and his mother worked for a burglar alarm company, a growth industry in Brooklyn at the time. Although I am a decade older than Blankfein, I feel in some respects we led parallel lives. Obviously, his success was far greater than my own.

 

Blankfein grew up in a two-bedroom apartment with his parents, his sister, and his grandmother while I grew up in a one and half bedroom apartment in Queens with my parents, a brother, and a sister. To be sure my neighborhood was far nicer than his. That said, just like his, our living room furniture was covered in clear plastic so no one could mess it up. He married his wife Laura who was a scholarship student at the elite Fieldston School, while had a long-term relationship with Fieldston scholarship student.

 

While he was at Goldman Sachs, I was at Salomon Brothers and Lehman

Brothers. We both witnessed the great bull market in financial assets that began in 1982, the crash of 1987, the bond market collapse of 1994 that nearly brought both Goldman and Salomon to their knees, and we were both in our offices in lower Manhattan at the time of the 9/11 attacks. While I was semi-retired in 2008, we both were caught in the whirlwind of the 2008 financial crisis.

 

Where Blankfein stood out was his raw smarts. He skipped the 8^th grade and received a full ride scholarship to Harvard at age 16. From there he went on to Harvard Law School while I went on to Baruch College and UCLA. He started out in tax law, but he realized quickly that it was not for him and applied to several investment banking firms, including Goldman. Goldman, in its infinite wisdom, turned him down. However, Blankfein did find work at J. Aron, a commodity trader, which was acquired by Goldman. So here was Blankfein with a slew of outer-borough traders trying to integrate into the very toney Goldman Sachs investment banking environment. At the end of the day, it is not clear who had a greater influence over the other as Goldman Sachs soon become dominated by its trading activity.

 

Blankfein quickly became a star a Goldman. Here was a Jewish kid from Brooklyn negotiating a Sharia compliant investment structure for a Saudi prince. He later helped invent an institutional commodity fund that offered a yield by taking advantage of the implicit interest rates embedded in spot versus futures prices. Soon he was running all of Goldman’s FICC group (fixed income, currency, and commodities) that was generating three quarters of the firm’s profits.

 

Blankfein goes into the politics behind Goldman becoming a public company. Thus, in a way Blankfein offers us two books, one being his autobiography and the other being the recent history of Goldman Sachs, of which he becomes a leading player. He certainly succeeded at playing the game of thrones at Goldman to become its chairman in 2006. Along the way we meet Henry Paulson, Jon Corzine, Bob Rubin, Gary Cohn, and David Solomon among many Goldman luminaries.

 

Blankfein chairmanship arrives just in time for the Great Financial Crisis. Early on he realizes something is going awry in the markets. He orders all of his trader to set their positions “close to home,” and he became very strict about the firm’s daily mark-to-market culture. This prepared the firm for the ordeal to come, but with the whole neighborhood burning down, even the most fire-resistant houses are in danger. In an interesting vignette Blankfein describes how Goldman received $5 billion in financing from Warrant Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway. It was done very casually over the phone while Buffett was taking his grandson to a Dairy Queen.

 

As we all know Wall Street gets bailed, but the senior executives become among the most vilified people in America. Blankfein is no exception and he was required to have permanent armed security for several years and was continually raked over the coals by Congress and the Financial Inquiry Commission. Here Blankfein’s humble roots and his sense of humor came into play when he sparred with such pseudo-populists as Bernie Sanders and Mayor DeBlasio.

 

What struck me was that Blankfein continually kept the entire Goldman team up to date conditions within the firm and the ongoing crisis. He did a series of voice mails for the Goldman community, many of which are published in the book. My sense is that my career would have benefitted me far more by working for him rather than Salomon’s John Gutfreund or Lehman’s Dick Fuld, both of whom I knew.

 

Blankfein gets very personal in his discussion concerning his bout with cancer while still heading Goldman Sachs. He was hospitalized for intense chemo treatment and when he was out, he held Putinesque meetings with his colleagues with him sitting at one end of a long table and the others at the far end. Simply put, his immune system was totally compromised.

 

Here I only scratched the surface of Blankfein’s remarkable life. He comes off as a very real person, and I wish I had a chance to know him and I wish Goldman was more proactive in hiring outer-borough kids.

 

*- With apologies to Abraham Cahan 

Purim War- Part 3, The End Game*

The end game in the Iran War has begun. By attacking Israel’s Dimona nuclear facility and the Temple Mount, the home of Islam’s Dome of the Rock holy site, Iran has demonstrated it has become desperate. To add an exclamation point to it, Iran fired off an intermediate range ballistics missile (IRBM) at the Diego Garcia airbase 4,000 kilometers away to prove it had a missile capable of reaching western Europe. Instead of scaring off Europe, it will bring NATO around to giving full support to our efforts to reopen the Persian Gulf to navigation.

 

The existence of the Iranian intermediate range missile represents a proof text of the existence of the imminence of the Iranian threat.  Simply put, Iran’s strategy is now to take down everything around it as the price of its regime collapsing. Make no mistake, Iran is being run by a death cult thereby making it less likely that the Mullahs would seek an offramp.

 

In response President Trump has threatened to destroy Iran’s electricity infrastructure if it fails to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by early tomorrow evening. The first round would likely be done with an electro-magnetic pulse weapon used in Venezuela that would not permanently destroy the facility. That along with the Saudi move to kick out the Iranian embassy indicates that by early next week the entire gulf will be ablaze with tit -for- tat Saudi/Iran attacks on each other. In this environment the Persian Gulf will be closed to all.

 

Needless to say, the oil and stock markets will reflect this turn of events with oil prices moving sharply higher and stocks sharply lower.  

 

·       See: Shulmaven: The Purim War and Shulmaven: The Purim War: Part 2 )

My Review of Sarah Hurwitz's "As a Jew: Reclaiming our Story....."

Be Strong and Stand Tall

Former senior speech writer to President Barack Obama and head speech writer to Michelle Obama, Sarah Hurwitz has written an important book on the need for American Jews to reclaim their proud identity and go beyond being a “social justice” Jew or a “cultural” Jew. Although Hurwitz was a Bat Mitzvah her experience with Judaism was of the pediatric variety. She didn’t really rediscover her Judaism until she was 36 when she walked into an Introduction to Judaism course. Thus, much of the book is autobiographical.

 

She tells us of her discovery of the very long text-line of Judaism going from the Tanakh, to the Talmud, to later rabbinical commentaries and on to the modern era. She didn’t realize the full depth of Judaism as a way of life and a way of thinking. She also has become learned in the history of antisemitism going back to the early Catholic Church relying on the work of James Carroll’s “Constantine’s Sword.” She goes on to discuss the antisemitism that originated in the Soviet Union and how the Soviet’s anti-Zionism was picked up by the Islamic world.

 

Hurwitz picks up on Dara Horn’s theme distinguishing between Purim antisemitism and Chanukah antisemitism. Purim antisemitism calls for the destruction of Jewry while Chanukah antisemitism is all about societal pressure for Jews to give up their identity. The latter is the antisemitism of the Left in America today.

 

In order to be cool in Left circles Jews have to be social justice warriors and denounce Zionism. I have seen many a letter to the editor signed by an anti-Zionist Jew starting with "as a Jew." She characterizes Jewish anti-Zionism as a luxury belief similar to those who live in gated communities calling to defund the police. Here she goes into the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict where she effectively rebuts much of the pro-Palestinian propaganda that has become mainstreamed in America today.  That said, Hurwitz is a self-professed ‘liberal Zionist” who supports the two-state solution.

 

Her solution is for Jews to lean in to be strong and stand tall against the wave of antisemitism we are now experiencing. We have to reclaim our proud story and to that we have to reclaim our story going back to the beginning.