Among the foremost legal debates over religion and state in the U.S. at the moment is the question of whether government funds may, or perhaps must, be directed to religious educational institutions. For the Orthodox, who tend to spend a large portion of their income on private religious schooling for their children, the question has pressing, practical consequences. Michael A. Helfand, in conversation with David Bashevkin, carefully outlines the fundamental constitutional issues at stake, and tells the story of how, as early as the 1960s, these concerns prompted Orthodox Jews to form a distinct organizational profile within American Jewry. Helfand also addresses the relationship between advocacy for parochial group interests and the broader duties of citizenship. (Audio, 93 minutes. A transcript can be found at the link below.)

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].