As his first semester at Columbia University drew to a close, Shai Goldman realized something: his fellow students were far less committed to learning the material than his classmates at the Israeli yeshiva where he studied before college. As a result, class discussions were far less enriching. He analyzes why:

There were no grades given at the yeshiva, and our future careers would hardly be determined by our understanding of the laws of Jewish divorce. So why did we sit at the edges of our seats to be sure to hear every word our rebbe spoke?

The yeshiva succeeded in cultivating a culture of erudition and studiousness in its students in large part because it taught students to be proud of the inherited tradition which they were studying. . . . The pedagogical culture I encountered at Columbia was entirely different. Officially, Columbia prides itself on its century-old core curriculum, a series of classes every student is required to take which present an overview of the best works of the Western canon. But when I actually entered Columbia’s classrooms, I found that this outward pride was hollow. In fact, it camouflaged a much deeper, pervasive shame which most Columbians felt about their inherited intellectual and artistic traditions.

My friends showed up to class each day to preserve their GPA, not to uncover truths about the world—and it showed.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.