The intense anti-Israel agitation at Columbia University, and the increasing hostility faced by its Jewish students, has garnered much national attention, reminding some of the early-20th-century era of quotas aimed at keeping Jews out. But there were better times in the more distant past. Michael Hoberman describes the commencement address delivered by a Jewish Columbia student named Sampson Simson in 1800—in Hebrew—about the history of the Jews of New York City:

Simson had not written the speech himself, and the Hebrew words probably did not roll off his tongue. Gershom Mendes Seixas, his Hebrew teacher since boyhood and the hazan of Shearith Israel, the city’s only synagogue at that time, had prepared his script. The graduate probably understood enough Hebrew to appreciate the gist and comprehend the import of what he was saying.

The ultimate import of Sampson Simson’s oration was that it equated the establishment of a Jewish community in New York with the birth of the American nation. In the biblically allusive words of the oration’s stirring conclusion, “notwithstanding that the Jews came here one by one within the space of 150 years yet through the greatness of divine mercy, [they had] multiplied in the land, so as to be numbered among the citizens of America.” For Seixas and his pupil, New York, like the entire continent of North America, had been a launching point for a new era, both from a Jewish perspective and in the annals of world history.

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].