Born to a working-class Arab family in Haifa, the thirty-three-year-old Nasrin Kadry is without question the Jewish state’s leading performer of popular music. Matti Friedman explains her unusual story, and what her success says about Israeli society:

Nasrin, known to all by her first name, became famous the modern way: on a reality-TV talent show, a kind of local American Idol dedicated to a genre of music known as Mizraḥi. That’s Hebrew for “eastern” and refers to an Israeli blend of Middle Eastern pop with Greek and Western influences.

Yaron Ilan, an influential Mizraḥi radio host, sees a generational change. People around his age, fifty, still call the music Mizraḥi or Mediterranean. “They still think of the Mediterranean sound as something different from Israeli music,” and that has changed among younger listeners, he said. To them, what Nasrin is singing is Israeli music—and she’s doing it not in small clubs in south Tel Aviv but in the Menorah Arena, the biggest indoor venue in the city.

If Nasrin is representative of the hybrid culture emerging [in Israel], there’s one part of her biography that’s truly unique: her decision not just to sing in Hebrew but also to . . . embrace Judaism. [Nasrin’s] first interest in spirituality was through a Jewish boyfriend, a darbuka drummer from a traditional Moroccan family. She began fasting on Yom Kippur and keeping the Sabbath in her twenties. They broke up a few times over the course of a decade, got engaged, then broke up again, but she decided to go through with conversion anyway in 2018, immersing herself in a ritual bath, accepting religious commandments and adding a Hebrew name, Brakhah, or “blessing.” It was all covered by the tabloids.

She has been speaking to God for years, she said, in the language spoken by Jews. “When I need him, I speak to him only in Hebrew,” she told me. “He stayed with me. He helped me. Everything I asked for until now He made come true.”

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.