At a public elementary school in California, the Parent-Teacher Association organized a Christmas-tree lighting; a Jewish parent then asked if she could bring a six-foot inflatable menorah to be positioned alongside the tree. The principal demurred and the issue soon wound up in a federal court, which ruled—based on a 1989 Supreme Court decision—that the school could display the tree, which is a secular symbol, but may not display the menorah, a specifically religious symbol, lest it violate the First Amendment’s establishment clause. Michael A. Helfand examines this counterintuitive finding:

Establishment-clause cases often function as a Rorschach test. But, at a minimum, there are good reasons to question the district court’s importation of a line from the Supreme Court’s 1989 opinion. In that case, County of Allegheny v. ACLU, the Supreme Court addressed multiple religious displays erected in Pittsburgh. One of the displays, set in front of a local government building, included a 45-foot Christmas tree, an 18-foot menorah, and a “salute to liberty sign” with the mayor’s name on it.

In the contemporary case, the Carmel River School sought to exclude, as opposed to include, the menorah in its display. So while some might not normally think of a Christmas tree as a religious symbol, that view might change when government officials prohibit the inclusion of a menorah by its side.

Under those circumstances, you might start to wonder whether the display has started to take on a narrower religious meaning. . . . In this way, the district court’s attempt to pluck a sentence from a 1989 Supreme Court opinion, drop it into a present-day dispute, and then call it a day may not be the most thorough and thoughtful way to deal with the case before it.

And yet, it’s hard not to end with the following relatively straightforward point. Notwithstanding all these contextual niceties and jurisprudential trends, it would be nice to think that—as we desperately seek ways to join together after so long apart—schools could find ways to make sure their students and their families all feel included in communal gatherings. After all we’ve been through, is it really so hard to make space for a 6-foot inflatable menorah?

Examining the effects of Iran’s decision to launch nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel on October 1, Benny Morris takes stock of the Jewish state’s strategic situation:

The massive Iranian attack has turned what began as a local war in and around the Gaza Strip and then expanded into a Hamas–Hizballah–Houthi–Israeli war [into] a regional war with wide and possibly calamitous international repercussions.

Before the Iranians launched their attack, Washington warned Tehran to desist (“don’t,” in President Biden’s phrase), and Israel itself had reportedly cautioned the Iranians secretly that such an attack would trigger a devastating Israeli counterstrike. But a much-humiliated Iran went ahead, nonetheless.

For Israel, the way forward seems to lie in an expansion of the war—in the north or south or both—until the country attains some sort of victory, or a diplomatic settlement is reached. A “victory” would mean forcing Hizballah to cease fire in exchange, say, for a cessation of the IDF bombing campaign and withdrawal to the international border, or forcing Iran, after suffering real pain from IDF attacks, to cease its attacks and rein in its proxies: Hizballah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

At the same time, writes Morris, a victory along such lines would still have its limits:

An IDF withdrawal from southern Lebanon and a cessation of Israeli air-force bombing would result in Hizballah’s resurgence and its re-investment of southern Lebanon down to the border. Neither the Americans nor the French nor the UN nor the Lebanese army—many of whose troops are Shiites who support Hizballah—would fight them.