According to a newly released study from the Pew Research Center, American Jews continue, overwhelmingly, to vote Democratic—as has been the case for nearly a century. But the study found one exception: 75 percent of Orthodoxy Jews say they lean Republican—an even greater percentage than in past surveys. Tevi Troy comments:

Decades ago, the late Milton Himmelfarb famously summed up the Jewish vote by saying “Jews earn like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans,” suggesting that the ballots of high-earning Jews unexpectedly looked like those of low-income voters. This pithy observation summed up Jewish demographics and voting for half a century. It also launched a trove of articles and more than a few books on the mystery of Jewish voting patterns. Why didn’t Jews follow the pattern of other white ethnic groups like the Irish or the Italians, who became more conservative as they assimilated?

[The] new Pew study . . . suggests that the behavior is no longer a mystery: the bulk of the Jewish community remains liberal, but this allegiance no longer puts them out of step with the group’s demographics. The study found that “Jewish Americans, on average, are older, have higher levels of education, earn higher incomes, and are more geographically concentrated in the Northeast than Americans overall.” Accordingly, the study shows that secular Jews vote like other secular, highly educated, and urbanized populations.

Like their secular counterparts, Orthodox Jews are clustered in the Northeast, but they differ in having lower levels of educational attainment. About 60 percent of Jews overall are college graduates, almost double the rate of the American population as a whole, but only 37 percent of Orthodox Jews have college degrees. And even though these religious Jews are largely urban and suburban, they vote like rural religious voters. . . . They live near hipsters but vote like Mormons.

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.