<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Plus ca change?<\/em> <\/strong>In 1970, in a letter to The New York Times,<\/em> — Secret-service-files-1970.pdf<\/a><\/strong> — 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<\/em> has also preserved the text<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Life After \u2018Diversity\u2019<\/a><\/strong> The best way to understand the current controversy over Trump\u2019s unremitting assault on \u201cD.E.I.\u201d (\u201cDiversity, Equity, and Inclusion\u201d) protocols in business corporations and public institutions is to revisit the argument against D.E.I. that I made in my book Liberal Racism <\/em>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\u2019s premises and policies are, I haven’t departed from my conviction that it was liberals who, in \u201ca colossal blunder,\u201d opened doors to those racist assaults in the ways I described in Liberal Racism<\/em>, whose introductory chapter I\u2019ve linked above. Twenty five years later, I reiterated and extended my argument for Commonweal<\/em>, \u201cScrapping the Color Code.\u201d<\/a><\/strong> But be sure to read Life After \u2018Diversity\u2019<\/a><\/strong>, which shows what we should have seen in 1997.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why Niebuhr Now?<\/em> My review <\/a><\/strong>of John Patrick Diggins’ book about the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, for Bookforum<\/em>, in 2011.<\/p>\n\n\n\n *<\/a>**\u00a0 PBS’ Mark Shields had an “Ivy League’ problem –and he had a point.<\/strong>\u00a0<\/a>He and I were Massachusetts boys, acquainted almost intimately in many ways, even though we came from different religious traditions and never met each other in person. His Irish-Catholic-parish wit and working-class sense of justice enriched his assessments of American politics and resonated very strongly with mine.\u00a0The Boston Globe<\/em>, June 28, 2022<\/strong>\u00a0online, and in print, in the\u00a0Globe\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0Sunday Ideas section, July 10. <\/p>\n\n\n\n What I saw on 9\/11 and immediately after.<\/strong><\/a> These four columns, each for a different newspaper, took distinctive but related approaches. The New York Daily News<\/em> column, written on 9\/12, when the horror was still raw, was published on 9\/14. Two months later the New York Observer<\/em> column made some counterintuitive observations about the social bonds and motivations of the city\u2019s first responders. The New York Post<\/em> column, published in January of the following year, noted an odd personal connection to the attacks on the World Trade Center that I hadn\u2019t mentioned before. And here’s my three-minute NPR commentary, broadcast four days after the attacks<\/a><\/strong>. (Ten years later, I adapted the NPR commentary for the Yale Daily News.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n ______________________________________________________________________________<\/p>\n\n\n\n **** <\/strong>What IS<\/em> it about \u2018the Jews,\u2019 American Protestants, and Israel\/Palestine?<\/strong><\/a> The answers are older and deeper than many of us know, and they aren\u2019t easy. I offer them in a personal testament in three dimensions: ancient biblical, 17th century Calvinist, and autobiographical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was torn for months about undertaking this essay, knowing that no \u201cside\u201d in the Israel\/Palestine conflict will feel supported by it. Some will \u201cread into\u201d it whatever they\u2019ve come to it wanting to take away from it, and they\u2019ll miss or skip what they don\u2019t want to see. Several editors dived under their desks or jumped out of windows instead of publishing this essay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Salon<\/em> posted it originally on March 31, 2024. <\/a><\/strong>Bard College\u2019s Hannah Arendt Center featured it<\/a><\/strong> almost immediately, prefacing excerpts from it with analysis by the center\u2019s director Roger Berkowitz. The international association Reset: Dialogue of Civilizations, re-posted the essay<\/a><\/strong> in full and translated it into Italian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Individual bloggers and associations with whom I don\u2019t always agree gave it well-balanced presentations: Former U.S. trade negotiator Clyde Prestowitz commended it <\/a><\/strong>to his Substack readers. Righting America,<\/em> <\/a><\/strong>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 \u201csupport\u201d for Zionism.<\/a><\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve been writing about the subject in several venues since 2009, when my essay \u201cAmerican Brethren: Hebrews and Puritans <\/strong><\/a>was published by the now-defunct World Affairs Journa<\/em>l and was taken up by the History News Network, <\/em>where it\u2019s online. I also tackled the subject in 2015 in an Atlantic <\/em>article, \u201cGifts of the Puritans\u201d,<\/strong><\/a> adapted from a piece that I wrote for DEMOCRACY JOURNAL<\/strong><\/a>. <\/strong>In 2019. I reviewed Princeton historian Daniel Rodgers\u2019 As a City on a Hill <\/em><\/strong><\/a> for the Los Angeles Review of Books.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Please read and share What IS<\/em> it about \u2018the Jews\u2019, American Protestants, and Israel\/Palestine?<\/strong><\/a> This link gives you the essay, preceded by a brief, interesting A-I summary of how the essay has been received.<\/p>\n\n\n\n __________________________________________________<\/p>\n\n\n\n How both political parties\u2019 establishments seeded Trump\u2019s rise<\/strong><\/a>, Salon, <\/em>March 16, 2016. Written as Trump was soaring through the Republican primaries, this was picked up by several other sites, including AlterNet,<\/em><\/a> and History News Network, and it prompted this interview<\/strong> <\/a>with me on New York City\u2019s NPR station.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why free speech is on not one but two slippery slopes,<\/strong><\/a> Salon, <\/em>August 3, 2018. This post summarizes arguments I\u2019ve made in two more substantive essays: \u201cSpeech Defects,\u201d<\/strong><\/a> in The Baffller,<\/em> June 2018, and \u201cHow Hollow Speech Enables Hate Speech,\u201d<\/strong><\/a> in The Los Angeles Review of Books,<\/em> October, 2018<\/p>\n\n\n\n This isn\u2019t only a constitutional crisis; it\u2019s a civic-republican implosion.<\/strong><\/a> Written a few months after Trump\u2019s inauguration, for Moyers & Co., <\/em>on May 11, 2017. Also posted by AlterNet.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Donnie Bone Spurs, the demander-in-chief, <\/strong><\/a>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., <\/em>Sept. 27, 2017<\/p>\n\n\n\n My \u2018Holocaust\u2019 story \u2014 and ours. <\/strong><\/a>The Washington Monthly<\/em>, June 2018<\/p>\n\n\n\n Puritans and Hebrews: American Brethren?<\/strong><\/a> <\/strong>New England\u2019s 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 \u201cinflected\u201d me. World Affairs Journal,<\/em> April 2009.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How Rudy Giuliani went from being authoritative to being authoritarian, and then just nuts.<\/strong><\/a> Foreign<\/em> Policy,<\/em> 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<\/em> during that year\u2019s 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<\/em> Magazine. It explains why some of us who\u2019d 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\u2019t entirely what he seemed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Above the Battle: The Price We Pay, <\/strong><\/a>The Harvard Crimson, January 28, 1976. <\/em>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, <\/em>click this digital version <\/em><\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDuty Bound,\u201d <\/strong><\/a>The American Prospect, <\/em>2006. This is one of my typically counter-cyclical essays (See \u201cLooking for America,\u201d the lead essay on this site): In 2006, as journalists were following Ned Lamont\u2018s bid to unseat Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman in opposition to Lieberman\u2019s support for the Iraq War, I went to Yale\u2019s Sterling Memorial Library to look up Lamont-family history and found striking accounts of a long-forgotten, would-have-been uncle who\u2019d 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<\/em> of the American republic, a fading mirage of our civic virtue, \u201chis sacrifice a requiem for the kind of citizen we\u2019re losing not at the terrorists\u2019 hands but our own.\u201d The essay was posted in The American Prospect,<\/em> and I adapted some of it for a New York Times <\/em>op-ed column that\u2019s linked in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gip, Gip, Hooray!<\/strong> <\/a>How Ronald Reagan hijacked many Americans\u2019 dreams. History News Network,<\/em> <\/a>August, 2007. Ronald Reagan\u2019s hold on the American imagination reflects but distorts a sobering truth: His \u201cMorning in America\u201d meme was delivering only \u201ca glorious euthanasia to the civic-republican spirit.\u201d It\u2019s one thing to romanticize the republic, as I did in \u201cDuty Bound,\u201d above; it was something else for Ronald Reagan to stage-manage such romances in lieu of welcoming public deliberation about his policies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cManufactured Consent,\u201d <\/strong><\/a>The Washington Monthly, <\/em>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\u2019etat. It\u2019s one of my most impassioned invocations of American civic republicanism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBush and the Bad-Boy Vote,\u201d<\/strong> <\/a>Los Angeles Times, <\/em>2004. This column flagged the \u201cmacho\u201d current in Bush\u2019s re-election campaign with an old photo that I\u2019d 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<\/em> 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<\/em>, a Murdoch paper, which ran it as a winking, faux-populist gesture to the Herald\u2019s<\/em> own \u201cbad boy,\u201d Reagan-Democrat readers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Forty-plus years ago, I encountered and exposed a predecessor of Jeffrey Epstein, the late elite influence peddler and sex trafficker.<\/a><\/strong> I was an idealistic young editor of a struggling weekly newspaper in Brooklyn, tempted by the possibility of \u201crescuing\u201d our paper by working for our Brooklyn district’s wealthy businessman-turned congressman, Fred Richmond, who wanted to woo me from the newspaper to his congressional staff. When Richmond’s and my professedly compatible premises and promises turned out to reflect irreconcilable political, preferential, and moral conflicts, I decided to assess the experience publicly in \u201cWhat\u2019s Really Wrong With Fred Richmond?\u201d<\/strong><\/a>, in The Village Voice,<\/em> on March 30, 1982. Now, almost half a century later, The Voice <\/em>has re-published my account digitally, <\/a><\/strong>and I’ve written this assessment, in AlterNet,<\/em><\/a><\/strong> of how closely my experiences back then resemble others’ recent experiences with Epstein. <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBoodling, Bigotry, and Cosmopolitanism,\u201d <\/strong><\/a>Dissent<\/em>, 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, <\/em>which I also edited, and Empire City: New York Through the Centuries<\/em> (Kenneth Jackson and David Dunbar, eds.) an anthology of 400 years of writing about New York City. New York City\u2019s white-ethnic and Jewish \u201cNew Deal\u201d political culture was expiring with the administration of Mayor Edward I. Koch in the late 1980s, amid scandals and demographic upheavals that presaged Koch\u2019s defeat by the city\u2019s first non-white mayor, David Dinkins, in 1989. This was my assessment of a city in transition. <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/strong>\u201cLessons From Lorena Bobbitt\u201d <\/strong><\/a>New York Daily News<\/em>, 1993. About the dangers of vigilantism by the abused and about the superior effectiveness of nonviolent \u201ccivil disobedience,\u201d even against abuse that\u2019s violent and, sometimes, even private.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOrwell\u2019s \u2018Smelly Little Orthodoxies\u2019 and Ours,\u201d<\/strong><\/a> <\/strong>in George Orwell: Into the Twenty-First Century<\/em>, (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\u2019s helped me to understand my own difficult experiences in American journalism. Prepared originally for the Centenary Conference on Orwell at Wellesley College, May, 2003.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tales of a Teenage Guru\u201d, <\/strong><\/a>The Boston Phoenix<\/em>, 1973. One of my first-ever published essays, this was a lament for progressive \u201cMovement\u201d politics that I saw imploding in a mass gathering of young followers of the teen Guru Maharaj-Ji. The allure of the guru\u2019s \u201cperfect wisdom\u201d for thousands of American youth signaled the advanced decay of civic-republican synapses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Photos of Jim Sleeper, immersed in Brooklyn in 1979-80.<\/strong> Here are two never-before published photos, one of me in 1980 with the staff of my small weekly newspaper, The North Brooklyn Mercury <\/em><\/strong><\/a>(I\u2019m wearing the tie). The other, taken by our staffer Joel Gallob, is of <\/strong>me conducting a 1979 interview with a Satmar Hasidic man <\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. 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