In the first part of her book God, Grades, and Graduation, Ilana Horwitz puts forward a simple argument: religious children do better at school than their nonreligious peers. Michal Leibowitz praises Horwitz’s “uncommonly good” research, which manages to disentangle religion from socioeconomic factors, and combines quantitative analysis with the qualitative data that come from numerous interviews. But Leibowitz is less convinced by Horwitz’s other conclusions:

In the less impressive second half of her book, Horwitz discusses her other, “paradoxical” finding: that the same intense religiosity that boosts educational achievement across all socioeconomic groups also lowers academic ambition among some, making more affluent religious teens likely to attend less-selective colleges.

Religious girls, she tells us, “yearn for the comfort of the familiar.” They are “happy doing what is expected” and content to follow “the path laid out for girls” in their families and communities. But girls raised by at least one Jewish parent, [another cohort the book examines], couldn’t be further from this, she tells us. They are ambitious, career-driven, and free-thinking and display an early focus on attending a highly selective university. Consider teenager Stacy, who wants to attend “a good college—like an Ivy League kind of college” and then law school. How adventurous! How bold! Surely this ambition of Stacy’s arose spontaneously, was freely chosen and pursued? No, of course not.

Throughout the book, Horwitz operates within a paradigm in which education is always good, more education is always better, and education at a selective institution is always best. (Horwitz herself holds four degrees, including a masters from Columbia and a doctorate from Stanford). This leads to some unforced errors. . . . The backdrop of intellectual and cultural assumptions that Horwitz clearly shares with most of her peers blinds her to what should have been obvious without any statistical study: not every American high-school student is a rational prestige maximizer when it comes to education.

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.