Which brings us back to tuberculosis. If military duty and action are seen as un-Jewish, then weakness becomes a venerated Jewish value. Weakness, that is, not as a sense of vulnerability, and not as the risk of being killed by an enemy, but rather as the essence of morality. The devious genius of the late Palestinian activist Edward Said was to tell American Jews that their intellect, their artistry, and their virtue were all the flowering of weakness. Indeed, the exilic Jew, untainted by power and arms, is the truest Jew. In such a reverie, it is easy to forget that tuberculosis, untreated, is fatal. Mimi, Violetta, Camille—in the end, they all die.

Implicitly, if not explicitly, Haim Watzman’s book Company C seeks to address this American Jewish ambivalence about military Israel. Even though Watzman has lived in Israel for nearly thirty years, the book’s subtitle features the phrase “an American’s life.” As an American who made aliya and still has relatives and friends in the United States, he must experience their bewilderment that he would (as the phrases invariably go) “live there,” “put yourself in the line of fire,” “do that to your kids.” Company C follows Watzman over twenty years of reserve duty in the IDF, and it culminates with the impending entry of his oldest child, a daughter, into the army. Very little, from an American Jewish perspective, could seem as implausible as the narrative he relates—and not only for Jewish liberals who cannot imagine any cause worth dying for, but for the many right-wing activists who prefer to hang on to the territories so long as they can do so from a fundraising dinner in a Manhattan hotel.

Not being an Israeli myself, I must leave it to others more knowledgeable to judge the accuracy and perceptiveness of Watzman’s portrayal of army life. Coming to the book as an American Jew, though, lets me read it as a kind of companion volume to Moore’s. Company C is about the connection of soldier and citizen, individual and nation, comrade and comrade. Those bonds hold even, or one might say especially, when the cause is complicated and troubling, as the Israeli occupation is to Watzman.

Among the reservists in his unit, he is one of the doves, and the frequent object of mockery as a result. He regrets the duty that requires him to barge into Palestinian homes at night, even as he concedes the deterrent logic of such shows of force. He yearns for a peaceful solution that he grows increasingly certain will never come. His war, then, is not the black-and-white moral arena of World War II, 1967, and 1973, but it is nonetheless a war worth his service.

His description of the company puts an Israeli face on the classic American World War II movies. Here, instead of the bomber crew with its farm boy, Irish pug, and wisecracking Jew, a reader gets Yemenites, Ethiopians, gays, religious nationalists, and North Tel Aviv cosmopolitans, all of them lashed together in mutual dependence. Israelis are bound to read the pages about the soldiers’ internal debates over the Oslo process with particular attention and anxiety as the disengagement from Gaza approaches, and, with it, the question of whether religious nationalist soldiers and officers will obey military orders to evacuate Jews. From an American perspective, what is most striking is the way military service forms a community out of disparate elements, and how it magnifies each reservist’s credentials as a citizen. When Watzman nearly dies from toxic shock late in the book, for example, his fellow reservists make the pilgrimage to his hospital bedside. And when he finally recovers, having lost his toes to gangrene and gone deaf in one ear, he insists on resuming his duty.

The GI Jews of Moore’s book lived out such experiences. The confidence, the agency, the gravitas, the profound nationalism that they gained as a result informed their later lives as Americans and Jews. No veteran, I am sure, wants to see the next generation march off to war, but some veterans, like Watzman, accept the necessity and indeed the purpose of service. The children and grandchildren of Moore’s men, people like me, may not have tuberculosis, but we never took the vaccine, either.