On her first day at a public magnet high school with a focus on marine biology, Paige (her last name has been kept private) experienced bigotry for the first time in her life, as Sharon Otterman reports:

[Paige] came home in tears because two teachers had laughed when pronouncing a student’s last name, Guiffre, as “Jew-Frey.” “I wouldn’t want a last name like that,” she recalled one teacher saying. The same teacher would later recommend Mein Kampf to her class as a great book. Late that school year, Paige’s mother complained about some of the incidents to the school district, including that one student had identified himself on social media as a member of the Hitler Youth. Nothing seemed to change.

This sort of thing became commonplace over the next two years, but the following incident nonetheless stood out:

The letters stretch over 30 feet, written into the sand on a beach in New Jersey. The teenager in the photo rests casually on his side above the words, smiling, his head propped up in his hand. “I h8 Jews,” the words read. The anti-Semitic picture, taken on a junior class trip and texted to a group of classmates at a high school on the Jersey Shore in 2018, was portrayed to the group as an edgy joke.

“Yearbook cover,” the boy in the picture texted. “Oh yea,” responded one girl, active in the yearbook club, adding that she had already submitted the photo to the faculty adviser. “It’s gonna be great.”

Paige, who was among the many students receiving the picture, complained to her parents, who then brought up the incident with the principal, who took some limited disciplinary action. After that, the harassment grew worse: Paige was not just Jewish but a “snitch.” When her parents went to the principal again, he “recommended she worry less about friends at school and find friends in her synagogue.” Unsurprisingly, perhaps, other parents rallied around the offending students, who insisted that they weren’t anti-Semites at all—just teenagers with a healthy sense of humor.

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.