Soldier, statesman, and skilled bureaucratic infighter Colin Powell has died at 84.

Born in Harlem in 1937 and raised in the Bronx, Powell grew up in an ethnically diverse neighborhood that included Italians, Jews, and African-Americans. In his youth, he picked up enough Yiddish that in 1993, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he greeted Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir with the words, "Men kent reden Yiddish" (we can speak Yiddish). Shamir was fluent in the language but unprepared for the words coming from a gentile American military man. Powell took advantage, saying, again in Yiddish, "Don't you understand?"

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First-term mistakes are common for presidents. For some, those mistakes define their legacy, while others' errors cling to the historical record as a footnote. President Joe Biden and his advisers reportedly believe their Afghanistan mess will fade from public memory, but that is a gamble.

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President Biden's strange and somewhat disconnected performance in the wake of the disaster in Afghanistan has once again raised questions about his age. He is both the oldest president elected as well as the oldest person to serve as president. Even his partisans acknowledge—gingerly, to be sure—that he "has lost some speed off of his fastball," or some kind of similar circumlocution. But while Biden at 78 is indeed the oldest president, he is far from the first to face the age question.

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According to just-released FBI statistics, hate crimes in 2020 reached their highest level in 12 years. Of religion-based hate crimes, 57.5 percent of them were targeted at Jews, who only make up 2 percent of the U.S. population. These figures, along with disturbing attacks this summer on Jews by anti-Semitic thugs in New York, Florida, California, and other places, have rattled many American Jews. Though American Jews have long been comfortable in America, the sad history of world Jewry suggests that no home for the Jews can be considered permanent. Yet, as the countries that have expelled Jews or encouraged them to leave have learned, things usually got worse, not better, after Jewish populations departed.

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Will Donald Trump run for the White House again in 2024? The possibility looks likely to roil Washington over the next few years—complicating life for other Republican hopefuls and creating a confounding set of challenges for the GOP's political-operative class.

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