In the late 19th century, American Jewish philanthropists founded a number of institutions for providing vocational training to Jewish children and teenagers, hoping to teach a new generation to work with their hands. Jenna Weissman Joselit describes the most prominent of these schools, established in New York City in 1884:

Harnessing the latest educational theories about vocational training to growing concern about the city’s steadily increasing population of immigrant Jews, the Hebrew Technical Institute for Boys sought to better their lot in the New World, lest they fail to make the most of their opportunities and flail about, unable to find a secure footing in the urban economy. To prevent that from happening, it offered “lads” between the ages of twelve-and-a-half and seventeen a three-year program in the practical arts: woodworking and metalwork, toolmaking, applied electricity, and the drafting of architectural plans.

[It also] made a point of discouraging them to follow the traditional pursuits that had for years characterized the Jewish ethnic economy such as business, law, or medicine. Referring to “diversification,” and “redistribution,” it actively steered its students away from these more typically overcrowded fields of endeavor and into brand-new arenas of “usefulness.”

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.