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On Friday, President Donald Trump delivered an unusual speech at the Justice Department. Between fulminating against his political adversaries and long digressions about the late basketball coach Bob Knight, Trump declared, “We’re restoring fair, equal, and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law.”

Then his administration spent the weekend proving otherwise.

People who believe the press is overhyping the danger to rule of law posed by the current administration have pointed out that although administration officials have repeatedly attacked the judicial system, the White House has not actually defied a judge.

But that may not be the case anymore, or for much longer. On Saturday in Washington, D.C., Judge James Boasberg issued a temporary restraining order barring the federal government from deporting Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador, which it was seeking to do using a 1798 law that bypasses much due process by declaring an enemy invasion. Nonetheless, hundreds of Venezuelans alleged by the administration to be connected with the gang Tren de Aragua landed in El Salvador, where authoritarian President Nayib Bukele has agreed to take them. Separately, a federal judge in Massachusetts is demanding to know why Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese doctor at Brown University’s medical school, was deported despite a valid visa and a court order temporarily blocking her removal.

The White House insists that it did not actually defy Boasberg’s judicial order, but its arguments are very hard to take at face value. “The Administration did not ‘refuse to comply’ with a court order,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “The order, which had no lawful basis, was issued after terrorist [Tren de Aragua] aliens had already been removed from U.S. territory.” She’s trying to have it both ways—the order is unlawful, but also we didn’t ignore it. “The written order and the Administration’s actions do not conflict,” Leavitt said.

Although Boasberg’s written order did not specify, the judge told attorneys during the Saturday hearing that “any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States.” Politico reports that the plane left during a break in the hearing, as though the government was angling to get out just ahead of any mandate. During a briefing today, Leavitt also questioned whether the verbal order held the same weight as a written order, which is a matter of settled law. During a hearing early this evening, Boasberg seemed incredulous at the Justice Department’s arguments, calling one a “heck of a stretch.”

In the Boston case, a Customs and Border Protection official said in a sworn declaration that the agency had not received formal notification of the judge’s order when it deported Alawieh. CBP said in a statement yesterday that “arriving aliens bear the burden of establishing admissibility to the United States.”

The statements of Trump administration officials elsewhere make it even harder to take their actions as anything other than attempting to defy judges. Salvadoran President Bukele posted a screenshot of a New York Post story about the judge’s order on X with the commentary, “Oopsie … Too late” and a laughing-crying emoji. Chief Bureaucrat Elon Musk replied with the same emoji, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio shared Bukele’s post from his own account. “Border czar” Tom Homan appeared on Fox News this morning and said, “We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care what the left thinks. We’re coming.”

These actions should be terrifying no matter who is involved. The fact that Tren de Aragua is indeed a vicious gang doesn’t nullify the law—the administration’s claim that the U.S. is contending with a wartime invasion is ridiculous on its face. Even more important is whether the White House decided to snub a ruling by a federal judge. Nor do customs officials’ claims in court filings that they found “sympathetic photos and videos” of Hezbollah leaders on Alawieh’s phone, or that she told them she had attended the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s funeral, mean the law doesn’t apply. For all we know, her actions may well justify her deportation. (Of course, we have little way of assessing any of these allegations clearly, because the administration has sidestepped the usual judicial proceedings in both cases. A lawyer for Alawieh’s family hasn’t commented on the allegations.) What matters is that the executive branch acted despite a judge’s order.

This is what we might call the Mahmoud Khalil test: No matter whether you think someone’s ideas or actions are deplorable, once the executive branch decides it doesn’t have to follow the law for one person, it has established that it doesn’t have to follow the law for anyone. After Khalil was arrested, Trump said that he was “the first arrest of many to come.” No one should have any illusion that the list will stop with alleged Tren de Aragua members. Throughout his career, Trump has tested boundaries and, if allowed to do so, pushed further. His actions at the start of this term show that he is more emboldened than ever, and traditionally institutionalist figures such as Rubio seem eager to abet him.

Watching Trump’s DOJ address, supposedly about law and order, offers some ideas of who else he might target while ignoring the law. So do his social-media accounts. This morning on Truth Social, Trump claimed that former President Joe Biden’s pardons of Liz Cheney and other members of the House January 6 Committee were not valid. “The ‘Pardons’ that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen,” Trump wrote. “In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!”

Trump wouldn’t bother with this if he didn’t hope to prosecute the people involved. Although Biden’s pardons were controversial because they were issued preemptively, the idea that an autopen, which allows the user to sign remotely, would invalidate them is concocted out of thin air. (Nor has Trump provided evidence that Biden did in fact use an autopen in these cases.) The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel wrote a justification for the practice in 2005, and presidents have been using them to sign legislation since 2011, without serious incident. The Supreme Court could conceivably rule in favor of Trump’s view—the justices have adopted other long-shot Trump claims—but it is hard to imagine, and would be a real departure.

When Trump speaks about law and order, he means it very narrowly. He believes in swift justice for his adversaries, with or without due process of the law; meanwhile, he believes his actions should not be constrained by law, the Constitution, or anything else that might cause him problems, and he has used pardons prolifically to excuse the actions of his friends and allies, whether Paul Manafort and Roger Stone or January 6 rioters. Plenty of presidents have been frustrated by the limitations of the law. Richard Nixon even claimed, years after leaving office, that any action by the president, as head of the executive branch, is de facto legal. But no president until now has so aggressively or so frequently acted as though he didn’t need to follow the law’s most basic precepts.

Back in November, my colleague Tom Nichols invoked the Peruvian politician Óscar Benavides. Though he’s little known in the United States, here are a few striking facts about him: He served as president twice, first coming to power not through a popular election but through appointment by an elected assembly. Some years later, he returned to the presidency as an unabashed authoritarian. (Hmm.) “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law,” goes a quote sometimes attributed to Benavides. It could be the motto of the Trump administration over the past four days.

Related:

The ultimate Trump story Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is a trial run.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Franklin Foer on Columbia University’s anti-Semitism problem The lesson Trump is learning the hard way How Republicans learned to love high prices

Today’s News

At least 42 people died after a powerful storm system hit central and southern U.S. states over the weekend, according to officials. The Energy Department, EPA, and NOAA started hiring back probationary employees after federal judges recently ruled that their firings were illegally carried out and ordered their reinstatement. Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are scheduled to speak on the phone tomorrow about a cease-fire with Ukraine. Trump said yesterday that he expects the conversation to include discussions about Ukraine’s power plants, and that there have already been talks about “dividing up” Ukrainian assets.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: “Buy, Borrow, Die”—this is how to be a billionaire and pay no taxes, Rogé Karma writes. The Wonder Reader: Finding love has never been easy, but this is a particularly tricky moment for romance, Isabel Fattal writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Jonelle Afurong / The Atlantic. Sources: Marsell Gorska Gautier / Getty; naumoid / Getty.

Sex Without Women

By Caitlin Flanagan

What a testament to man—how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties!—that he continued doing anything else after the advent of online porn. Plenty of women, of course, consume and enjoy or create and profit from porn—people of every sexual orientation and gender identity do. But the force that through the green fuse drives the flower (and the money) is heterosexual male desire for women. And here was porn so good, so varied, so ready to please, so instantly—insistently—available, that it led to a generation of men who think of porn not as a backup to having sex, but as an improvement on it. They prefer it.

Read the full article.

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Zack Wittman

Batter up. Why aren’t women allowed to play baseball? They’ve always loved America’s pastime—but it’s never loved them back, Kaitlyn Tiffany writes.

It’s as easy as … Riding an e-bike. Getting around on one might be a bit slower than in a car, but it’s also “transformed my family’s life,” Elizabeth Endicott writes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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White House say “we’ve never been closer to peace than at this moment”.

The Trump administration is upping threats against Tehran, saying it has full responsibility for the Houthis in Yemen.

Later this week, the Trump administration may impose travel restrictions on citizens from dozens of countries, supposedly because of security concerns. According to early reports, one of the countries on the “red” list, from which all travel would be banned, is Afghanistan. Sixty thousand exhaustively vetted Afghan visa applicants and refugees, who risked their lives alongside the Americans in their country as interpreters, drivers, soldiers, judges, and journalists, and who now face imprisonment, torture, and death at the hands of the Taliban, will have the golden doors to the United States shut in their face.  

As the Taliban closed in on Kabul in the summer of 2021, then-Senator Marco Rubio co-authored a letter to President Joe Biden urging him to “ensure the safety and security of Afghans who have worked closely” with American intelligence agencies: “Abandoning these individuals” would be “a stain on our national conscience.” After the Afghan government fell and tens of thousands of Afghans rushed to the Kabul airport, trying desperately to be evacuated with the last American troops, Rubio excoriated Biden for leaving Afghan allies behind to be killed. Then-Representative Mike Waltz warned that “our local allies are being hunted down.” Kash Patel accused the Biden administration of “the stranding of US personnel and allies.” The Republican majority of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a damning report on the fall of Afghanistan, said that Biden’s “abandonment of our Afghan allies, who fought alongside the U.S. military against the Taliban—their brothers in arms—is a stain on [his] administration.”

As for then-ex-President Donald Trump, he was incredulous, telling Sean Hannity on Fox News: “We take the military out before we took our civilians out, and before we took the interpreters and others we want to try and help? But by the way, I’m America first. The Americans come out first. But we’re also going to help people that helped us.”

On Inauguration Day, President Trump signed executive orders pausing foreign aid and refugee processing. He turned off the flow of money to private agencies that helped Afghans start new lives in America and shut down the State Department office set up under Biden to oversee their resettlement. Since then, the number of Afghans able to enter the U.S. has dwindled to zero. The travel ban will make the halt official and permanent. All of the outrage at the Biden administration’s betrayal of our Afghan allies from the very Republicans who now command U.S. foreign policy will go down as sheer opportunism. The stain will be on them.

[David A. Graham: Biden’s ‘America First’ policy on Afghanistan]

“All these fucking people had a lot to say about what was going on in August 2021,” says Shawn Van Diver, a Navy veteran who leads AfghanEvac, a coalition of  organizations that help resettle Afghan allies in this country. Politically, Biden never recovered from the chaotic fall of Kabul and the terrible scenes at the airport, climaxing in the suicide bombing at Abbey Gate that killed 13 American service members and 170 Afghans. Biden deserved blame above all for failing to take seriously America’s obligation to vulnerable Afghans who had placed their trust in this country. But during the years following the debacle, AfghanEvac and other civil-society groups worked with the Biden administration to bring nearly 200,000 Afghans to America—a little-known fact that partly redeemed its failures. Now Trump is compounding Biden’s earlier sins, this time in cold blood.   

Van Diver and his colleagues are scrambling to persuade their contacts inside the administration to exempt Afghans from the coming travel ban. Many of his military friends are stunned that the president they voted for is betraying Afghans they had to leave behind. “I wonder if President Trump knows that Stephen Miller is ruining his relationship with veterans because of what we’re doing to our Afghan allies,” he told me. According to Van Diver, Rubio and Waltz—now the secretary of state and the national security adviser, respectively—are sympathetic to the veterans’ appeal; but Miller, the hard-line homeland-security adviser, will have the final say with Trump.

Forty-five thousand Afghans have completed the onerous steps to qualify for Special Immigrant Visas as former employees of the U.S. government in Afghanistan and are ready to travel. Fifteen thousand more Afghans, most in Pakistan, have reached the end of refugee processing as close affiliates of the American war effort. They’ve been waiting through years of referrals, applications, interviews, medical exams, and security vetting. Some of them have plane tickets. Another 147,000 Afghans are well along in qualifying for Special Immigrant Visas.“We did make a promise as a nation to these people that if they stood beside the U.S. mission and worked with us, that they would have a pathway to come build lives here,” a State Department official, who requested anonymity because of a policy against speaking to journalists, told me. “If we don’t keep the promises we make to our wartime allies, then our standing globally should be questioned by any other future potential allies we might have.” Afghans who finally reach the United States, the official continued, “are so incredibly grateful to have the opportunity to be in this country. They believe in the promise of this country.”

One young Afghan couple—I’ll call them Farhad and Saman, because using their real names would expose them to danger—are both veterans of the Afghan special forces, and they spent years serving and fighting alongside U.S. Army Rangers and other special operators. After the American departure, they were hunted by Talibs and took shelter in safe houses around the country, while family members were harassed, arrested, and tortured. In 2023, with the help of a small group of American supporters, the couple crossed the border into Pakistan and found lodgings in Islamabad, where they waited with their small children for their refugee applications to be processed. Last summer they were interviewed by the U.S. embassy and passed their medical exams; but security screening took so long that, by the time it was completed, their medical exams had expired. On January 2 of this year, they passed their second medical exams and were told by the International Organization of Migration that they would soon depart for the United States. “But on January 24, we realized unfortunately that Donald Trump is in office and everything is stopped,” Farhad told me by phone. “It was at the very last minute, the last stage. I didn’t expect that this would happen. It made a very bad impact on me and my family.”

[George Packer: The betrayal]

Recently, stepped-up Pakistani police patrols and raids made the couple flee Islamabad to another region. Their 3-year-old daughter and infant son don’t have visas, and Farhad’s and Saman’s visas expire on April 17, with no prospect of renewal. Fear of being stopped at a checkpoint keeps the family inside their small apartment almost all the time, while their daughter wonders when she’ll be able to start school. They ask neighbors to buy food for them at the bazaar. The Pakistani government has begun to issue warnings over loudspeakers at mosques that local people who rent property to Afghan refugees will face legal consequences. “I’m stressed that the U.S. government is not going to relocate us and will not help us to continue processing our case,” Farhad said. He has sent letters of inquiry to embassies of other countries, with no reply. “I’m worried that eventually somehow I’ll be deported to Afghanistan, and deportation means I’ll be caught by the Taliban and killed. My wife will not be excluded. She will face the same consequences. I’m overwhelmed sometimes when I think what will happen to my kids—they’ll be orphans. It’s too much for me to take in.”

When Republican leaders were shaming the Biden administration for abandoning this country’s Afghan allies, they sometimes used the military phrase brothers in arms. Now, as those same Republicans in the Trump administration are betraying the same Afghans all over again, Farhad used the phrase with me. “I fought like brothers in arms with the Americans in uniform for six years, shoulder to shoulder, everywhere,” he said. “If this travel ban happens, the question is, what about the six years of friendship and fighting together? What about helping your friends and allies? That’s the question I have.”

The Trump administration has sparked fury by deporting alleged “Venezuelan gang members” to El Salvador.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

The idea that millions of dead Americans are receiving Social Security checks is shocking, and bolsters the argument that the federal bureaucracy needs radical change to combat waste and fraud. There’s one big problem: No evidence exists that it’s true.

Despite being told by agency staff last month that this claim has no basis in fact, Elon Musk and President Donald Trump have continued to use the talking point as a pretext to attack America’s highest-spending government program. Musk seems to have gotten this idea from a list of Social Security recipients who did not have a death date attached to their record. Agency employees reportedly explained to Musk’s DOGE team in February that the list of impossibly ancient individuals they found were not necessarily receiving benefits (the lack of death dates was related to an outdated system).

And yet, in his speech to Congress last week, Trump stated: “Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members from people aged 100 to 109 years old.” He said the list includes “3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149,” among other 100-plus age ranges, and that “money is being paid to many of them, and we’re searching right now.” In an interview with Fox Business on Monday, Musk discussed the existence of “20 million people who are definitely dead, marked as alive” in the Social Security database. And DOGE has dispatched 10 employees to try to find evidence of the claims that dead Americans are receiving checks, according to documents filed in court on Wednesday.

Musk and Trump have long maintained that they do not plan to attack Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the major entitlement programs. But their repeated claims that rampant fraud exists within these entitlement systems undermine those assurances. In his Fox interview on Monday, Musk said, “Waste and fraud in entitlement spending—which is most of the federal spending, is entitlements—so that’s like the big one to eliminate. That’s the sort of half trillion, maybe $600, $700 billion a year.” Some observers interpreted this confusing sentence to mean that Musk wants to cut the entitlement programs themselves. But the Trump administration quickly downplayed Musk’s comments, insisting that the federal government will continue to protect such programs and suggesting that Musk had been talking about the need to eliminate fraud in the programs, not about axing them. “What kind of a person doesn’t support eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending?” the White House asked in a press release.

The White House’s question would be a lot easier to answer if Musk, who has called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme,” wasn’t wildly overestimating the amount of fraud in entitlement programs. Musk is claiming waste in these programs on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, but a 2024 Social Security Administration report found that the agency lost closer to $70 billion total in improper payments from 2015 to 2022, which accounts for about 1 percent of Social Security payments. Leland Dudek, a mid-level civil servant elevated to temporarily lead Social Security after being put on administrative leave for sharing information with DOGE, pushed back last week on the idea that the agency is overrun with fraud and that dead people older than 100 are getting payments, ProPublica reported after obtaining a recording of a closed-door meeting. DOGE’s false claim about dead people receiving benefits “got in front of us,” one of Dudek’s deputies reportedly said, but “it’s a victory that you’re not seeing more [misinformation], because they are being educated.” (Dudek did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.)

Some 7 million Americans rely on Social Security benefits for more than 90 percent of their income, and 54 million individuals and their dependents receive retirement payments from the agency. Even if Musk doesn’t eliminate the agency, his tinkering could still affect all of those Americans’ lives. On Wednesday, DOGE dialed back its plans to cut off much of Social Security’s phone services (a commonly used alternative to its online programs, particularly for elderly and disabled Americans), though it still plans to restrict recipients’ ability to change bank-deposit information over the phone.

In recent weeks, confusion has rippled through the Social Security workforce and the public; many people drop off forms in person, but office closures could disrupt that. According to ProPublica, several IT contracts have been cut or scaled back, and several employees reported that their tech systems are crashing every day. Thousands of jobs are being cut, including in regional field offices, and the entire Social Security staff has been offered buyouts (today is the deadline for workers to take them). Martin O’Malley, a former commissioner of the agency, has warned that the workforce reductions that DOGE is seeking at Social Security could trigger “system collapse and an interruption of benefits” within the next one to three months.

In going anywhere near Social Security—in saying the agency’s name in the same sentence as the word eliminate—Musk is venturing further than any presidential administration has in recent decades. Entitlement benefits are extremely popular, and cutting the programs has long been a nonstarter. When George W. Bush raised the idea of partially privatizing entitlements in 2005, the proposal died before it could make it to a vote in the House or Senate.

The DOGE plan to cut $1 trillion in spending while leaving entitlements, which make up the bulk of the federal budget, alone always seemed implausible. In the November Wall Street Journal op-ed announcing the DOGE initiative, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (who is no longer part of DOGE) wrote that those who say “we can’t meaningfully close the federal deficit without taking aim at entitlement programs” are deflecting “attention from the sheer magnitude of waste, fraud and abuse” that “DOGE aims to address.” But until there’s clear evidence that this “magnitude” of fraud exists within Social Security, such claims enable Musk to poke at what was previously untouchable.

Related:

DOGE’s fuzzy math Is DOGE losing steam?

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Democrats have a man problem. There was a second name on Rubio’s target list. The crimson face of Canadian anger The GOP’s fears about Musk are growing.

Today’s News

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said that Democrats will support a Republican-led short-term funding bill to help avoid a government shutdown. A federal judge ruled that probationary employees fired by 18 federal agencies must be temporarily rehired. Mark Carney was sworn in as Canada’s prime minister, succeeding Justin Trudeau as the Liberals’ leader.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: The Trump administration is embracing AI. “Work is being automated, people are losing their jobs, and it’s not at all clear that any of this will make the government more efficient,” Damon Beres writes. The Books Briefing: Half a decade on, we now have at least a small body of literary work that takes on COVID, Maya Chung writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by John Gall*

I’d Had Jobs Before, but None Like This

By Graydon Carter

I stayed with my aunt the first night and reported to the railroad’s headquarters at 7 o’clock the next morning with a duffel bag of my belongings: a few pairs of shorts, jeans, a jacket, a couple of shirts, a pair of Kodiak work boots, and some Richard Brautigan and Jack Kerouac books, acceptable reading matter for a pseudo-sophisticate of the time. The Symington Yard was one of the largest rail yards in the world. On some days, it held 7,000 boxcars. Half that many moved in and out on a single day. Like many other young men my age, I was slim, unmuscled, and soft. In the hall where they interviewed and inspected the candidates for line work, I blanched as I looked over a large poster that showed the outline of a male body and the prices the railroad paid if you lost a part of it. As I recall, legs brought you $750 apiece. Arms were $500. A foot brought a mere $250. In Canadian dollars.

Read the full article.

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The kind of thing dictators do Trump is unleashing a chaos economy. RFK Jr. has already broken his vaccine promise. The NIH’s grant terminations are “utter and complete chaos.” Netanyahu doesn’t want the truth to come out. Republicans tear down a Black Lives Matter mural.

Culture Break

Music Box Films

Watch. The film Eephus (in select theaters) is a “slow movie” in the best possible way, David Sims writes.

Read. Novels about women’s communities tend toward utopian coexistence or ruthless backbiting. The Unworthy does something more interesting, Hillary Kelly writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.

In the less than two months since Donald Trump took office, he has upended decades of foreign policy by targeting the country’s allies. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined last night to discuss the effects of his policies in the U.S. and across the globe.

Meanwhile, Congress averted a government shutdown on Friday evening, passing a bill that will fund the government through September. Although Chuck Schumer of New York rallied enough votes for the bill, some Democrats now say that the minority leader capitulated to Trump. Especially among House Democrats from districts that the president carried in the election, “they feel as though he kind of left them out to dry,” Laura Barrón-López said last night.

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Laura Barrón-López, a White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour; Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch; and David Sanger, a White House and national-security correspondent at The New York Times.

Watch the full episode here.

The Yiddish poet Chaim Grade survived World War II by fleeing his city, Vilna, now Vilnius, and wandering through the Soviet Union and its Central Asian republics. His wife and mother stayed behind and were murdered, probably in the Ponary forest outside Vilna, along with 75,000 others, mostly Jews. After the war, Grade moved to the United States and wrote some of the best novels in the Yiddish language, all woefully little known.

Before he left for America, however, he went back to Vilna, previously a center of Eastern European Jewish cultural, intellectual, and religious life—“the Jerusalem of Lithuania.” In his memoir, My Mother’s Sabbath Days, he describes what he found there. The impossibility of conveying in ordinary Yiddish the experience of walking through the empty streets of one’s eradicated civilization pushes Grade into a biblical register. His mother’s home is intact, he writes, but cobwebs bar his entry “like the angels with flaming swords who barred Adam and Eve from returning to Eden.”

Later, he goes to the Synagogue Courtyard. With its impressive library, ritual bath, and houses of worship great and small, it was the Lithuanian Jerusalem’s functional equivalent of the Holy Temple. Now the courtyard lies in ruins, and in his anguish, Grade’s voice takes on the proclamatory cadences of a prophet. Not just any prophet but, I think, Ezekiel, the subject of an early poem of his. Ezekiel did his prophesying from exile before and after the destruction of the First Temple in the Babylonian conquest of 586 B.C.E., another defining cataclysm in Jewish history. In Ezekiel’s most famous vision, he sees a valley full of dried bones and, channeling the words of God, raises the bones, creating an army of the resurrected. Grade wouldn’t have encountered bones—the Nazis ordered Ponary’s corpses to be dug up and burned during the war—but from under the heaps of stones come prayers, “all the prayers that Jews have uttered for hundreds of years.” He hears them without hearing them, because what screams, he says, is the silence.

[Chris Heath: A secret diary of mass murder]

Grade was born in 1910, came to the U.S. in 1948, and died in New York in 1982; he devoted the second half of his life to re-​creating the universe wiped out in the first half. He turned to prose, a form better suited than poetry to inventorying the psychological and material conditions of a complex and divided society, and he developed an almost Flaubertian passion for detail. His main subjects were poor Jews—he himself grew up in a dark cellar behind a smithy—and the hermetic world of Lithuanian Misnagdic rabbis and their yeshivas, which relatively few Yiddish writers of the time knew or wrote much about. Scholarly and strict about Jewish law, Misnagdic Jews looked down on the anti-intellectual, antinomian mysticism of Hasidic Jews. If your image of Old World Jewry comes from Grade’s contemporary Isaac Bashevis Singer, with his kabbalists, dybbuks, and elaborate rabbinic courts, swap in Lithuanian Talmudists conducting self-critique and doing pilpul—close textual analysis—in spartan houses of study.

Grade’s father was a maskil, an intellectual who adhered to the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, movement. But the general penury that followed World War I reduced him to working as a night watchman, and he died young, leaving Grade’s mother to support herself and Grade by selling fruit. She sent him to a yeshiva mostly because she could afford it, but also because she was devout. There he was trained in musar, a particularly rigorous—you might even say puritanical—strain of Misnagdic Judaism.

Grade studied rabbinics into his 20s, then turned secular and became a member of Young Vilna, a now-legendary group of leftist, modernist Yiddish writers. Although he never became a practicing Jew again, he didn’t turn against his teachers and their maximalist approach. On the contrary, Grade observes their fictional counterparts with a knowing, sometimes cynical, but always loving eye. He doesn’t ridicule them, at least not unduly, nor does he apologize on their behalf, and their single-minded pursuit of Torah can be inspiring.

Grade’s novels aren’t oracular, the way the section on postwar Vilna in his memoir was. But his ambition is still biblical. I don’t think the word overreaches. The Torah, thought to have been compiled over centuries in response to catastrophes and traumas, including that same Babylonian exile, is also a product of the impulse to preserve memories and knowledge all but lost in a calamity, lest the dispersed Jews forget who they’d been. Grade considered his undertaking a sort of holy assignment. “I’ve always found it strange that I have so little faith and yet believe, with complete faith, that Providence saved me and allowed me to live, in order to immortalize the great generation that I knew,” he wrote in a letter in 1977.

Another striking feature of Grade’s fiction is that it almost never acknowledges the imminent annihilation of the world it so meticulously reconstructs—as if by ignoring that obscene fact, he could annul it. “The mission of his prose after the war is to undo the Holocaust through literature, if you can imagine such a thing,” the historian David Fishman, a friend of Grade’s and lifelong champion of his work, said at a 2012 conference on the writer at the Yiddish Book Center.

The risk writers run when they set out to memorialize is that they’ll produce memorials, not literature. Grade didn’t do that. His novels jam almost too much life into their pages. That’s not a criticism, because the streets of prewar Jewish Eastern Europe also jostled and overflowed; Grade’s prose mimetically reproduces the way Jews thronged in their tight quarters. His major accomplishment, though, is at the level of the individual characters. They’re vortices of ambivalence, anxious and raw and at odds with themselves, hypercritical yet hypersensitive, repressed but not undersexed, subject to delusions of grandeur or abasement or both in turns. On the whole, they’re good people. They scheme and bicker and get on one another’s nerves, and yet they have deep family feeling, and few of his protagonists wholly free themselves from a yearning for contact with the divine. The dominant emotion in a Grade novel is tortured loyalty.

Sons and Daughters is Grade’s last novel, and the most recent of his fictional works to be translated and published. He wrote it in weekly installments that appeared in Yiddish newspapers, with intermittent interruptions, from 1965 to 1976. When he died a few years later, Grade had adapted some of the columns into the first volume of a novel, but hadn’t finished the second. Neither the first nor the uncompleted second volume saw the light of day until they were brought out this year as a single novel in an English translation by Rose Waldman.

Sons and Daughters unfolds during the early 1930s, primarily in shtetls in what was then Poland and is now mostly Lithuania and Belarus. It tells the stories of two families of rabbis that are fragmenting under the pressure of modernity. The rabbis, both of high repute, belong to different generations and display differing levels of stringency—the stricter is a grandfather; the other, his son-in-law, is more lenient but by no means lax. Both expect their own sons to become rabbis too, or at least Torah scholars, and their daughters to marry men of the same ilk. I can’t emphasize enough the intensity of the obligation felt by Jewish parents of the time to make sure that they vouchsafed a life of Torah to their children.

Predictably, the children have other ideas. One daughter, loving but stubborn, leaves for Vilna to study nursing. The youngest son, the darling of both families, upsets his father and grandfather by openly aspiring to join the halutzim, or Zionist pioneers; the pious Jews of the day abhorred Zionists because they had the audacity to try to found a state in the Holy Land without the intervention of the Messiah. Even worse, Zionists cast off religious strictures, dressing immodestly and eating treyf (nonkosher) food. The most treyf of the sons is not a Zionist, though. He goes to Switzerland for a doctorate in philosophy, marries a non-Jewish Swiss woman, and doesn’t circumcise their son. Whether his parents realize the extent of his apostasy isn’t clear. The way the family avoids talking about it, you might think that confronting it directly would kill them.

The theme of intergenerational conflict may sound familiar to anyone who is acquainted with Sholem Aleichem’s canonical “Tevye the Milkman” stories, or has seen Fiddler on the Roof, which is based on them—or, for that matter, has read Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, or even D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. The battle between parents and wayward children is the archetypal plot of modernization. But Grade has his own approach to it. Sholem Aleichem, the most important figure in the late-19th-century Yiddish renaissance, tells it from the father’s—Tevye’s—point of view. As Ruth Wisse points out in her study of Sholem Aleichem in The Modern Jewish Canon, all of his contemporaries writing on the same topic, in Yiddish or Hebrew or a non-Jewish language, more or less side with the rebels.

Grade doesn’t wholeheartedly endorse the values of either generation, though he is slightly more sympathetic to the parents. That makes sense: Nothing strengthens the case for tradition more than its destruction. The parents draw us into their earnest struggle to repress their horror at their children’s deviations from religious norms. The wife of the younger couple plays deaf and lets disturbing information slide by. Her husband, Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen, makes a valiant effort not to recriminate; he blames himself for his children’s choices. Would that he were a simple Jew in a poor village, Sholem Shachne thinks. Then he wouldn’t have spoiled his children.

His father-in-law, the more severe Rabbi Eli-Leizer Epstein, is not in the habit of second-guessing himself, and he will be harshly punished for his dogmatism by a deranged son. The son is his father’s fiendish double, an antic, self-loathing imp who, loudly proclaiming his adoration of Eli-Leizer, makes a mockery of him. This character may be Grade’s most magnificently grotesque creation, half demon, half schlemiel. His get-rich schemes end in disgrace; his marriage to a wealthy heiress bankrupts and breaks her. They move back to his hometown, ostensibly to run a store selling fancy china bequeathed to her by her father (which no one in the poor village wants, and which will soon be smashed to pieces), but really to stalk his father and demolish his reputation. Eli-Leizer comes to understand that his son’s aim is to hold up a hideously distorting mirror before him, “bringing him untold humiliation with the mimicking of his piety and his zealotry.”

Eventually parents and children start to soften toward each other, but because Grade didn’t finish the second volume, we don’t know for sure whether or how he would have resolved the tensions. In any case, as readers know even if the characters don’t, the Germans would occupy eastern Poland in a few short years, making all other concerns irrelevant. In the background, Grade tracks the whirlwind of history as it picks up speed. Jewish socialist youth groups parade through the marketplace and put on a tumbling show that highlights their muscular and shockingly exposed limbs (they wear shorts). More menacingly, anti-Semitic Polish-nationalist hooligans have mounting success enforcing a boycott against Jewish merchants in villages across the region. All of this really happened in the ’30s.

Toward the end of the book, Grade unites life and fiction in the character of a lapsed yeshiva bocher (student) named Khlavneh who has become a Yiddish poet. He is the fiancé of Sholem Shachne’s daughter, the one who went to Vilna to study nursing. Lest we fail to grasp that Khlavneh is a self-portrait, Grade drops hints. The daughter, for instance—an attractive, spirited woman, perhaps the most appealing figure in the novel—is named Bluma Rivtcha, a rhyming echo of Frumme-Liebe, the name of Grade’s murdered first wife, also a nurse and also the daughter of a rabbi.

Bluma Rivtcha brings Khlavneh home to meet the family. Over Shabbos dinner, the brother who moved to Switzerland and no longer observes Jewish laws ridicules him for writing poetry in “jargon”—that is, Yiddish, the bastard language of the uneducated Jew, “a common person, an ignoramus, a boor”—rather than in Hebrew, and for thinking that he and his fellow Yiddish writers could capture the spirit and poetry of Jewish life without following Jewish law themselves. Khlavneh refutes the brother in a brilliant show of erudition, then concludes: “You hate the jargon boys and girls because they have the courage to be different from their fathers and grandfathers, even to wage battles with their fathers and grandfathers, and yet, they don’t run away from home.” The father, who everyone thinks will be offended by a guest’s outburst at the Sabbath table, laughs in delight. Grade, having fashioned a world in which the old fights mattered, now gets to win them.

In Grade’s lifetime, he was considered one of the most important living Yiddish novelists—by those who could read Yiddish. When Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, some fellow Yiddish writers believed it should have gone to Grade instead. (In a 1974 review, Elie Wiesel had called him “one of the great—if not the greatest—of living Yiddish novelists,” and “the most authentic.”) But he never received the wider recognition he deserved. In 1969, Cynthia Ozick published a short story in Commentary called “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” which paints a comi-tragic picture of a literary universe that has room for only one famous Yiddish writer. An obscure Yiddish poet in New York named Edelshtein rages against an old friend and enemy—Ostrover, another Yiddish writer in New York—who is internationally acclaimed for his colorful tales of love and sexual perversion, dybbuks and other folkloric creatures. In a harassing late-night call, Edelshtein howls at Ostrover that the murder of Yiddish has turned him into a ghost who doesn’t even know he’s dead.

[From the January 1979 issue: Lance Morrow on the spirited world of I. B. Singer]

Ostrover is Singer, of course, and Edelshtein could have been Grade. Some scholars think he was; others say he was modeled on another forgotten genius, the poet Jacob Glatstein. Ozick herself once said that she’d based Edelshtein at least partially on an uncle, a Hebrew poet. Whichever writer she had in mind, it was a pitch-perfect portrayal of Grade’s situation. And he suffered an additional indignity: His name was posthumously all but erased by his widow, Inna. For whatever reasons, including possible mental instability, she foiled almost every attempt to publish his work, whether in Yiddish or in translation. After his death, she signed a contract with his English-language publisher Knopf to bring out Sons and Daughters (under a different title, The Rabbi’s House), but then she stopped responding to the book’s editor and the project stalled. His unpublished work became available to the public only after she died, in 2010.

In the four decades since Grade’s death, Yiddish has had a revival. Chairs in Yiddish have been endowed at major universities. Klezmer is cool. The number of haredim, or ultra-Orthodox Jews, who grow up speaking Yiddish has risen and keeps rising: The haredi community has the highest rate of growth in the Jewish world. To be sure, none of this guarantees that Grade will finally get his due. As a rule, haredim don’t engage with secular texts. And many of those who learn the language in college or read it in translation are drawn to it because it’s coded as politically and sexually radical. In the old days, Yiddish—especially written Yiddish—was associated with women, who were not taught Hebrew. Yiddish literature and theater had their golden age in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when a Jewish left and a Jewish avant-garde defiantly embraced the then-stigmatized dialect. Today, it appeals to some in search of an alternative Judaism: Yiddish is not Hebrew, and therefore not Israeli. In the latest twist in the singular history of Yiddish, it has become the emblematic language of Jewish diasporism, the quest to reinvent a Judaism without a Jewish homeland.

Grade’s work, however, is not radical. He dabbled in socialism in Vilna, but then he encountered Soviet Communism. He wrote sympathetically about women and created formidable female characters, but his protagonists are mostly male (as is rabbinic society), and I wouldn’t call him a feminist. Nor does Grade’s account of life in prewar Europe support the diasporist claim that Jews would be perfectly safe without a state.

In the introduction to Sons and Daughters, Adam Kirsch calls it “probably the last great Yiddish novel.” In all likelihood, he’s right, but I like to think that a vibrant Yiddish literary culture just might emerge from the ranks of the religious, as it did in 19th-century Europe. Ex-haredim such as Shalom Auslander are writing remarkable memoirs and novels. Admittedly, they’re in English. Any real renaissance of the Yiddish novel would require a critical mass of native Yiddish speakers and writers, who almost certainly would have to come from ultra-Orthodox enclaves—which is not unimaginable. Hasidim are already producing historical and adventure novels in Yiddish.

In 2022, the Forward ran an essay by Yossi Newfield, who was raised as a Hasidic Jew, about his discovery of Grade’s novel The Yeshiva: “The struggles Grade so masterfully described between faith and doubt, between Torah and the world, in his words, di kloyz un di gas, were my own.” Intentionally or not, Newfield echoed something Grade wrote in a letter in 1973: “The writer inside me is a thoroughly ancient Jew, while the man inside me wants to be thoroughly modern. This is my calamity, plain and simple, a struggle I cannot win.” The struggle may be an affliction, but it fueled Grade’s masterpieces. Who knows? The next great Yiddish novelist may be growing up in haredi Brooklyn right now.

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “The Last Great Yiddish Novel.”

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