Turning to the American scene, a state appellate court in Indiana issued a ruling an April 4 that mentioned Jews and Judaism over 70 times. The court decided that, in certain circumstances, Jews can claim a religious right to abortion that overrides state restrictions. Michael A. Helfand explains:

Jewish law’s approach to abortion is generally understood—as much as anything within Jewish law is “generally understood”—to place the well-being of the mother, including physical and emotional well-being, at the center of its analysis. As a result, where an abortion is necessary to protect the well-being of a mother, broadly construed, Jewish law sanctions—and often requires—the termination of the pregnancy. If a mother, motivated by these underlying Jewish values, were to seek an abortion in a state that imposed significant restrictions on such procedures, her religious commitments could run afoul of state law.

Advocacy addressing this tension between Jewish commitments and abortion restrictions is not new. Back in the late 80s and early 90s, Agudath Israel of America, [the more religiously conservative of the two U.S. Orthodox umbrella organizations], filed friend-of-the-court briefs encouraging the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. But, prefiguring much of the contemporary debate, it also argued that those religiously motivated to seek abortions—such as American Jews—ought to have religious-liberty protections for such decisions even in the absence of a more general right to abortion.

With an easy-to-follow blueprint now available, last week’s decision may signal that a Jewish right to abortion is no longer merely a theoretical argument.

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].