In 2020, the vice-president of the University of Southern California’s student government resigned after being subjected to constant anti-Semitic abuse. The school’s president, Carol Folt, responded by launching a “Stronger Than Hate” campaign, which, Jonathan Marks writes, “addresses anti-Semitism only as one among a grab-bag of other hatreds, . . . and recognizes only one kind of anti-Semitism, the right-wing kind.”

But another anti-Semitism scandal has recently prompted Folt to issue a very different kind of statement:

[This] statement was occasioned by the social-media pronouncements of an engineering student, who said, among other things, “I want to kill every motherf**cking Zionist” and “yel3an el yahood” (curse the Jews). Perhaps the “Stronger Than Hate” campaign, looking solely to its right, didn’t reach this particular student who was serving as “diversity, equity, and inclusion senator” for the engineering school’s Graduate Student Association.

President Folt says that USC will now form a new Advisory Committee on Jewish Life to “review a number of proposed actions to tangibly support Jewish and Zionist students, faculty, and staff.” . . . USC’s belated move to include anti-Semitism among the affronts to campus values it aims specifically to address is laudable. One applauds, too, Holt’s recognition that “Zionist students, faculty, and staff” have confronted hostility—in one instance, in a statement released by an academic department—on campus.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.