Last week, the New York Times published an article about the purported inadequacy of secular education in many ḥasidic schools and the efforts to convince municipal authorities to do something about it. The article, notes Ira Stoll, is one of several recent pieces on the subject and is deeply flawed:

This report is faulty [in part] because it quotes four different people complaining about the supposedly inadequate education offered by the yeshivas, but not a single person defending the schools from the accusation. . . . Another flaw was the article’s conclusion, an anonymous negative quotation. . . . The Times doesn’t subject [the informant’s words] to any of the skeptical scrutiny that other news sources are often subject to. . . . The anonymous quote appears despite a recent and highly publicized supposed New York Times crackdown on the use of such anonymous quotes in news articles. . . .

It’s certainly possible that some yeshivas could indeed do a better job of educating children in math, English, and science, and that some parents and former students are upset about it. But I know, too, that plenty of other schools that aren’t run or attended by Orthodox Jews are also doing sub-par jobs at teaching those topics, without even trying to teach the children any Talmud along the way. It’s certainly not clear to me that bringing down the government bureaucracy, [the civil-liberties activist] Norman Siegel, or the New York Times on the Jewish schools will do anything to improve the education offered to the children there. . . .

If the Times is going to choose to cover, rather than ignore, the topic of Jewish education, it would be nice to read some success stories, instead of just the complaints and scandals. In the long view, this whole area is such a success story, and quite an incredible one at that.

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.