A Sleeper Sampler
Plus ca change? In 1970, in a letter to The New York Times, — Secret-service-files-1970.pdf — I knocked the Feds for identifying and tracking anti-Vietnam War protestors. I was 23 at the time, recently out of college. The History News Network has also preserved the text.
Life After ‘Diversity’ The best way to understand the current controversy over Trump’s unremitting assault on “D.E.I.” (“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”) protocols in business corporations and public institutions is to revisit the argument against D.E.I. that I made in my book Liberal Racism in 1997, long before I or anyone else imagined that anyone like Trump would win control of our government and much of our public discourse. Hideous though his and MAGA’s premises and policies are, I haven’t departed from my conviction that it was liberals who, in “a colossal blunder,” opened doors to those racist assaults in the ways I described in Liberal Racism, whose introductory chapter I’ve linked above. Twenty five years later, I reiterated and extended my argument for Commonweal, “Scrapping the Color Code.” But be sure to read Life After ‘Diversity’, which shows what we should have seen in 1997.
Why Niebuhr Now? My review of John Patrick Diggins’ book about the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, for Bookforum, in 2011.
What I saw on 9/11 and immediately after. These four columns, each for a different newspaper, took distinctive but related approaches. The New York Daily News column, written on 9/12, when the horror was still raw, was published on 9/14. Two months later the New York Observer column made some counterintuitive observations about the social bonds and motivations of the city’s first responders. The New York Post column, published in January of the following year, noted an odd personal connection to the attacks on the World Trade Center that I hadn’t mentioned before. And here’s my three-minute NPR commentary, broadcast four days after the attacks. (Ten years later, I adapted the NPR commentary for the Yale Daily News.
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What IS it about ‘the Jews,’ American Protestants, and Israel/Palestine? The answers are older and deeper than many of us know, and they aren’t easy. I offer them in a personal testament in three dimensions: ancient biblical, 17th century Calvinist, and autobiographical. I was torn for months about undertaking this essay, knowing that no “side” in the Israel/Palestine conflict will feel supported by it. Some will “read into” it whatever they’ve come to it wanting to take away from it, and they’ll miss or skip what they don’t want to see. Several editors have dived under their desks or jumped out of windows instead of publishing this essay.
Fortunately, Salon editor Andrew O’Hehir sensed that the essay will have “a long tail,” whatever its limitations — meaning that although it will be resisted, it will be read and discussed. And it has been! Salon posted it originally on March 31, 2024. Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center featured it almost immediately, prefacing excerpts from it with analysis by the center’s director Roger Berkowitz. The international association Reset: Dialogue of Civilizations, re-posted the essay in full and translated it into Italian.
Individual bloggers and associations with whom I don’t always agree gave it well-balanced presentations: Former U.S. trade negotiator Clyde Prestowitz commended it to his Substack readers, and Righting America, an evangelical forum for scholarly conversation about Christianity, culture, and politics in America, posted the essay in its entirety, notwithstanding my vigorous criticisms of evangelical Christian “support” for Zionism.
I’ve been writing about the subject in several venues since 2009, when my essay “American Brethren: Hebrews and Puritans was published by the now-defunct World Affairs Journal and was taken up by the History News Network, where it’s online. As mentioned, I also tackled the subject in 2015 in an Atlantic article, “Gifts of the Puritans”, adapted from a piece published by DEMOCRACY JOURNAL. In 2019. I reviewed Princeton historian Daniel Rodgers’ As a City on a Hill for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Please read and share What IS it about ‘the Jews’, American Protestants, and Israel/Palestine?
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How both political parties’ establishments seeded Trump’s rise, Salon, March 16, 2016. Written as Trump was soaring through the Republican primaries, this was picked up by several other sites, including AlterNet, and History News Network, and it prompted this interview with me on New York City’s NPR station.
Why free speech is on not one but two slippery slopes, Salon, August 3, 2018. This post summarizes arguments I’ve made in two more substantive essays: “Speech Defects,” in The Baffller, June 2018, and “How Hollow Speech Enables Hate Speech,” in The Los Angeles Review of Books, October, 2018
This isn’t only a constitutional crisis; it’s a civic-republican implosion. Written a few months after Trump’s inauguration, for Moyers & Co., on May 11, 2017. Also posted by AlterNet.
Donnie Bone Spurs, the demander-in-chief, compared to some of his age-mates whom I watched defying the Vietnam War openly, and at great risk, while he was dodging it with a bogus medical excuse. Moyers & Co., Sept. 27, 2017
My ‘Holocaust’ story — and ours. The Washington Monthly, June 2018
Puritans and Hebrews: American Brethren? New England’s Puritans Hebraized their Christianity to emphasize a covenant of law and social obligation that has inflected American self-understandings (and self-criticisms) ever since. That mixed covenant certainly “inflected” me. World Affairs Journal, April 2009.
How Rudy Giuliani went from being authoritative to being authoritarian, and then just nuts. Foreign Policy, Nov, 2016. When I first published a version of this column in 2007, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani was still popular because of his performance on 9/11, and his campaign for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination was getting underway. The column, reprinted by the Tallahassee News during that year’s Florida primary, dented celebratory perceptions of him among opinion makers. By 2016, when president-elect Trump was reported to be considering making Giuliani his Secretary of State or Attorney General, I updated and expanded this column for Foreign Policy Magazine. It explains why some of us who’d been impressed by him as a U.S. Attorney and, in my case, even for a few years, as mayor, had learn that he wasn’t entirely what he seemed.
Above the Battle: The Price We Pay, The Harvard Crimson, January 28, 1976. This account of how I brought white working-class military veterans to hear James Baldwin speak at Harvard was written a year before I moved to Brooklyn and began a decade of immersion in black politics and community life. Forty years later, white-ethnic men such as those I described here in 1976 would vote for Donald Trump, for reasons you will see in this column. (If you have trouble reading the pdf, linked above, of the original as it looked in The Crimson, click this digital version .)
“Duty Bound,” The American Prospect, 2006. This is one of my typically counter-cyclical essays (See “Looking for America,” the lead essay on this site): In 2006, as journalists were following Ned Lamont‘s bid to unseat Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman in opposition to Lieberman’s support for the Iraq War, I went to Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library to look up Lamont-family history and found striking accounts of a long-forgotten, would-have-been uncle who’d given his life at 21 in a submarine off Japan in World War II. I portrayed the young Thomas W. Lamont II as a fata morgana of the American republic, a fading mirage of our civic virtue, “his sacrifice a requiem for the kind of citizen we’re losing not at the terrorists’ hands but our own.” The essay was posted in The American Prospect, and I adapted some of it for a New York Times op-ed column that’s linked in it.
Gip, Gip, Hooray! How Ronald Reagan hijacked many Americans’ dreams. History News Network, August, 2007. Ronald Reagan’s hold on the American imagination reflects but distorts a sobering truth: His “Morning in America” meme was delivering only “a glorious euthanasia to the civic-republican spirit.” It’s one thing to romanticize the republic, as I did in “Duty Bound,” above; it was something else for Ronald Reagan to stage-manage such romances in lieu of welcoming public deliberation about his policies.
“Manufactured Consent,” The Washington Monthly, 2001. Written just after the Supreme Court ruled for George W. Bush in the 2000 election, this remonstrance contemplated civil disobedience against what I regarded as a creeping coup d’etat. It’s one of my most impassioned invocations of American civic republicanism.
“Bush and the Bad-Boy Vote,” Los Angeles Times, 2004. This column flagged the “macho” current in Bush’s re-election campaign with an old photo that I’d discovered of him making an illegal play in a rugby game while a student at Yale. The photo was unknown because it had appeared only in the yearbook of my Yale Class of 1969, a year after Bush had graduated. Some wondered if I had doctored the photo and its amusing yearbook caption. To confirm its authenticity, a Japanese television crew taped me holding and opening the yearbook itself to the page with the photo and caption. The column raced around the net, not least on rugby websites, and was re-published in other newspapers. Especially predictable was the reaction of the Boston Herald, a Murdoch paper, which ran it as a winking, faux-populist gesture to the Herald’s own “bad boy,” Reagan-Democrat readers.
Experiencing ‘the Epstein treatment’ long before Epstein. In 1982 I encountered corrupting but tempting come-ons very much like those that have been offered in recent years by the late Jeffrey Epstein. As an idealistic young editor of a small Brooklyn weekly newspaper, I had delicate interactions with Fred Richmond, a wealthy Brooklyn businessman-turned congressman, that revealed irreconcilable political premises, preferences, and moral boundaries. I recounted it all in “What’s Really Wrong With Fred Richmond?”, for The Village Voice, on March 30, 1982. Although Epstein’s crimes and cruelties have been far more devastating than Richmond’s, the dynamics are strikingly similar. Anyone who has indulged and/or embraced Epstein’s ‘loaded’ generosity and connections will recognize clearly what I describe here. (Eight months after my Voice account was published, my observations about Richmond and his ways were reinforced by a deeply reported account of Richmond’s rise and fall by Pete Hamill and Dennis Hamill in New York Magazine.)
“Boodling, Bigotry, and Cosmopolitanism,” Dissent, 1987. Written first for a special issue of the magazine that I edited, this was re-published in two anthologies: In Search of New York, which I also edited, and Empire City: New York Through the Centuries (Kenneth Jackson and David Dunbar, eds.) an anthology of 400 years of writing about New York City. New York City’s white-ethnic and Jewish “New Deal” political culture was expiring with the administration of Mayor Edward I. Koch in the late 1980s, amid scandals and demographic upheavals that presaged Koch’s defeat by the city’s first non-white mayor, David Dinkins, in 1989. This was my assessment of a city in transition.
“Lessons From Lorena Bobbitt” New York Daily News, 1993. About the dangers of vigilantism by the abused and about the superior effectiveness of nonviolent “civil disobedience,” even against abuse that’s violent and, sometimes, even private.
“Orwell’s ‘Smelly Little Orthodoxies’ and Ours,” in George Orwell: Into the Twenty-First Century, (Thomas Cushman and John Rodden, editors), 2004. This essay, written for a conference on Orwell at Wellesley College in May, 2003, to mark the centenary of his birth, explains how his work and Alexis de Tocqueville’s helped me to understand my own difficult experiences in American journalism. Prepared originally for the Centenary Conference on Orwell at Wellesley College, May, 2003.
Tales of a Teenage Guru”, The Boston Phoenix, 1973. One of my first-ever published essays, this was a lament for progressive “Movement” politics that I saw imploding in a mass gathering of young followers of the teen Guru Maharaj-Ji. The allure of the guru’s “perfect wisdom” for thousands of American youth signaled the advanced decay of civic-republican synapses.
Photos of Jim Sleeper, immersed in Brooklyn in 1979-80. Here are two never-before published photos, one of me in 1980 with the staff of my small weekly newspaper, The North Brooklyn Mercury (I’m wearing the tie). The other, taken by our staffer Joel Gallob, is of me conducting a 1979 interview with a Satmar Hasidic man .