On April 1, the National Archives made the data from the 1950 U.S. census available online to the public. Andrew Silverstein explains the sorts of information historians of American Jewry, and genealogists, hope to find therein:

This census is of special interest to American Jews, showing life in the years after the Holocaust and the establishment of the state of Israel. It captures recently arrived Jewish refugees from Europe’s displaced-persons camps settling into their new country, while upwardly mobile Jews were moving to the suburbs and populating new Jewish centers in places like California and Florida.

Unlike other genealogical records like birth and death certificates and immigration documents, the census shows people in their everyday lives—except for Jewish Americans in 1950 because that year’s census started on Passover. When mid-century Jewish Americans opened the door to let in the prophet Elijah during their seder, they may have been greeted by a census taker with pen and paper in hand.

Still, many Jewish households would have been tallied during the week following Passover. Answers to the census question “How many hours did he work last week?” could reveal if the respondent took days off for Passover, which could give insight into the irreligious observance and economic position.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].