To honor the prolific and best-selling American Jewish novelist, Jeff Jacoby recalls the impact Wouk’s work had on him:

I had discovered [Wouk’s 1955 novel Marjorie Morningstar] in the library of my Orthodox synagogue in Cleveland. I’m not sure what it was doing there, inasmuch as the abandonment of religious observance in favor of more worldly and unbuttoned lures was one of the book’s themes. Be that as it may, it more than held my interest—especially its description of the “necking” and “furtive sex fumbling” of Marjorie’s love life, a subject that for me was then wholly theoretical and utterly enthralling.

For all I know, I’m the only person who ever read Marjorie Morningstar in a synagogue on Sabbath afternoons. While my father studied Talmud in a class that was taught in Yiddish, I was preoccupied with Wouk’s vivacious heroine. Reading at the rate of a chapter or two each Saturday, it took a while to get through the book. I finished it just in time: one day before I was due to head off to college. . . .

But none of this is why I say that Herman Wouk forever transformed my life.

In 1959, with The Caine Mutiny and Marjorie Morningstar and a few other novels under his belt, Wouk startled his agent by sending him the manuscript of a book quite unlike anything he had written before. Its topic was religion, it bore the title This Is My God (the phrase comes from Exodus 15:2), and it was an explanation of the Modern Orthodox Judaism to which he was and is deeply committed. Wouk had brought all of his gifts as a storyteller to this exposition of his faith; what he produced was learned, warm, and sincere, an exploration of the beauty of Jewish life that managed to be both intellectually rigorous, yet broadly appealing.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.