{"id":4368,"date":"2024-07-15T08:28:04","date_gmt":"2024-07-15T13:28:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/18.217.136.120\/?p=4368"},"modified":"2026-04-23T06:47:45","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T11:47:45","slug":"what-is-it-about-the-jews-american-protestants-and-israel-palestine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/?p=4368","title":{"rendered":"What IS it about &#8216;the Jews&#8217;, American Protestants, and Israel\/Palestine?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><div class=\"wp-block-group__inner-container is-layout-constrained wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained\">\n<p><em><strong>The answers are older and deeper than some of us want to know.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>By&nbsp;Jim Sleeper <\/strong> <strong>(January, 2025<\/strong>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table><tbody><tr><td><\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>First, just for fun, here&#8217;s A-I&#8217;s account of this essay&#8217;s content and its reception<\/strong>. Actually, it&#8217;s not just for fun; somewhat to my surprise, the A-I account is measured, accurate, and even (dare I say it?) insightful. It&#8217;s followed below by my preface to the essay and then by the essay itself:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>January 27, 2026 <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jim Sleeper\u2019s essay,&nbsp;<strong>Israel and the Puritans: A Dangerous Historical Romance,&#8221;<\/strong>&nbsp;(originally published in&nbsp;<em>Salon<\/em>&nbsp;on March 31, 2024) explores the deep historical parallels between the Hebraic-inspired &#8220;errand into the wilderness&#8221; of New England Puritans and the modern Zionist movement.&nbsp;The essay has sparked significant engagement across intellectual circles, with reactions ranging from praise for its historical nuance to critical updates from Sleeper himself regarding the escalating conflict in Gaza.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Core Themes and Analysis<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>Historical Parallels:<\/strong>&nbsp;Sleeper argues that early English settlers in North America behaved much like Israeli Zionists today, viewing themselves as a &#8220;New Zion&#8221; and eventually displacing indigenous populations.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>The &#8220;Dangerous Romance&#8221;:<\/strong>&nbsp;He explores how American Protestants and Jews are bound by a &#8220;Puritan-Hebrew entente,&#8221; which he warns is being disrupted by modern evangelical and nationalist politics.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Civic Republicanism:<\/strong>&nbsp;Sleeper suggests that while the Puritans&#8217; &#8220;Hebraized Christianity&#8221; cannot be restored as a governing model, it offers lessons on balancing personal liberty with communal obligation.&nbsp;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Key Reactions and Citations<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>Hendrik Hertzberg (<em>The New Yorker<\/em>):<\/strong>&nbsp;Described Sleeper as the &#8220;Jonathan Edwards of American civic culture,&#8221; intending it as a compliment for his moral and historical depth.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Philip Gorski (Yale Professor):<\/strong>&nbsp;Cited Sleeper\u2019s description of Puritans as &#8220;America\u2019s very first serious people&#8221; during a conference at the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.jpost.com\/jerusalem-report\/a-window-to-the-world-the-puritans-and-the-hebrew-republic-581261\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem<\/a>.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>The Hannah Arendt Center:<\/strong>&nbsp;Highlighted the essay as a&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/hac.bard.edu\/amor-mundi\/on-zion-zionism-and-zionists-a-biblical-history-2024-04-07\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">&#8220;manifold corrective&#8221;<\/a>&nbsp;to simplified narratives of &#8220;settler colonialism&#8221; and &#8220;antisemitism,&#8221; noting Sleeper\u2019s focus on the ancient religious passions driving modern history.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Clyde Prestowitz (<em>Substack<\/em>):<\/strong>&nbsp;Referenced the essay as an essential comparison for understanding Israel\u2019s policies toward its neighbors through the lens of early American&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/clydeprestowitz.substack.com\/p\/israel-and-the-american-pilgrims\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Pilgrims and Pioneers<\/a>.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Righting America:<\/strong>&nbsp;Praised the piece for its&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/rightingamerica.net\/what-is-it-about-the-jews-american-protestants-and-israel-palestine\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">&#8220;intellectually rich&#8221; paradoxes<\/a>&nbsp;that challenge binary political thinking.&nbsp;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Author Updates (2024\u20132025)<\/strong>: Since its initial publication, Sleeper has added a&nbsp;<strong>preface and updates<\/strong>&nbsp;to the essay. By mid-2025, he noted that while his historical assessment remained unchanged, the reality of Israel\u2019s strategies in Gaza had shifted from &#8220;plausible&#8221; charges of genocide to what he characterizes as &#8220;brutal ethnic cleansing,&#8221; further complicating the &#8220;romance&#8221; he initially described.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Explore Sleeper&#8217;s earlier work on&nbsp;<strong>civic republicanism<\/strong>&nbsp;or more recent critiques of the&nbsp;<strong>Zionist movement<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>_________________________________________________________________________________________________________<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em><strong>Author&#8217;s preface<\/strong>:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Israel invaded Gaza 28 centuries ago, but few Americans know that such ancient \u201cundercurrent events\u201d ever really happened, let alone that they still drive \u201ccurrent events\u201d that divert our attention from the older, deeper realities. The following essay, revised only slightly from one that I wrote for Salon in 2024, doesn\u2019t track current events in Israel\/Palestine. Instead, it takes a dive, or at least a dip, into long\u2013running undercurrents that are still shaping the conflict and American Jews&#8217; and Protestants&#8217; preoccupations with it.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Not only Jews and Muslims obsess about Israel\/Palestine. So do some descendants and legatees of early American Protestant-Calvinist &#8216;Puritans,&#8217; who infused that obsession into America&#8217;s civic-republican culture from its beginnings.<\/em> <em>Even more obsessive about the Israel\/Palestine conflict are today&#8217;s evangelical Christian Zionists, sometimes in ways that imperil Jews&#8217; standing in the United States, as I warned in 2019 in<strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.tikkun.org\/todays-christian-jewish-zionist-alliance-imperils-american-jewry\"> Tikkun<\/a><\/strong> and on the London-based website <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.opendemocracy.net\/en\/todays-christian-jewish-zionist-alliance-imperils-american-jewry\/\">openDemocracy.net<\/a><\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.salon.com\/2024\/03\/31\/israel-and-the-puritans-a-historical-romance\/\"><\/a><em><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.salon.com\/2024\/03\/31\/israel-and-the-puritans-a-historical-romance\/\">The original Salon essay<\/a><\/strong> was posted in March, 2024. It was re-posted almost immediately by the international website <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.resetdoc.org\/story\/israel-puritans-dangerous-historical-romance-p-ii\/\"><strong><em>Reset.doc<\/em><\/strong><\/a><em>, which also&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.reset.it\/idee\/israele-e-i-puritani-un-pericoloso-intreccio-storico\"><em>translated it into Italian<\/em><\/a><em>. It was<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/hac.bard.edu\/amor-mundi\/on-zion-zionism-and-zionists-a-biblical-history-2024-04-07\"><strong><em> <\/em><\/strong><\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/hac.bard.edu\/amor-mundi\/on-zion-zionism-and-zionists-a-biblical-history-2024-04-07\"><strong><em>excerpted and assessed on the website of The Hannah Arendt Center at<\/em><\/strong><\/a><em> Bard College. If you&#8217;re inclined to read the essay after you&#8217;ve read this brief preface, please read the very slightly updated version that&#8217;s right below it here on screen.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>When Salon posted it under the headline, &#8220;Israel and the Puritans: A Dangerous Historical Romance,&#8221; charges that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza were plausible, but so were doubts about the protestors\u2019 motives. Since mid-summer of 2024, however, Israel\u2019s strategies have become genocidal in reality. At the least, they amount to brutal ethnic cleansing. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Explanations of its causes differ, but anyone who thinks that I\u2019m interpreting the biblical and 17th-Century undercurrents to justify the current events is misreading this essay.<\/em> <em>Having grown up in an intersection of my family\u2019s ancestral Jewish tradition and of my youthful encounters with strong Protestant, Calvinist traditions that dominated my hometown, I\u2019m trying here to depict converging, conflicting realities that drive many other Americans\u2019 \u2018Judeo-Christian\u2019 preoccupations with the Israeli\/Palestinian war.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Some commentators and editors have dived under their desks or jumped out of windows instead of sharing what I actually show here. But others have commented in ways that enhance our understanding of what\u2019s developing.<\/em> <em>For example, the head of a private school who teaches in Columbia College\u2019s Contemporary Civilization curriculum sent a message to a mutual friend calling this essay&nbsp;\u201ca fascinating and intellectually rich article, the difficult paradoxes of which may escape most modern readers\u2026. But if we are ever to escape the binary thinking of every political and civic argument that plagues us currently, we need historically nuanced analyses like Sleeper\u2019s. The ancestral thread tying Calvinists and ancient Hebrews together is a lens I hadn\u2019t seen through before, though most of us know the two sides of each (culture? religion?) \u2014 its ambitious, questing, covenantal side and its \u2018manifest destiny\u2019 brutality.\u201d&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>A political and intellectual historian in New York wrote me,&nbsp;\u201cThanks for sending this amazing piece.&nbsp; I devoured it immediately.&nbsp; I know a bit about the Biblical influence on New England\u2019s elimination of America\u2019s very own Canaanites, but most of the works you cite were new to me.&nbsp; I am also glad you appreciate the work of my friend Adam Shatz.&nbsp; Anyway, it seems to me you have the core of a book condensed into a few pages here.&nbsp; I hope you keep developing this line of thought.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Dive in with me now as I keep on developing this line of thought.&nbsp;Help me do that by sending your comments to me at jimsleeper12@gmail.com and by sharing this with others who may comment.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>_______________________________________________________________________________________________________<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What <em>is <\/em>it about &#8216;the Jews,&#8217; American Protestants, and Israel\/Palestine?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>By <\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.salon.com\/writer\/jim_sleeper\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>JIM SLEEPER<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>\u201cH<\/strong>umankind cannot bear very much reality,\u201d T.S. Eliot wrote in the first of his <em>Four Quartets,<\/em> but Americans\u2019 increasingly warlike divisions, deepened by the Israel-Palestine conflict in ways that I want to show, are forcing some of us to bear realities we haven\u2019t borne so heavily before. These include an animus against Jews that Eliot himself held and that may become menacing again, not least as some Jews\u2019 own frantic, often-counterproductive efforts to suppress antisemitism prompt only more of it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Many other eruptions of hatred in America\u2019s increasingly uncivil society are driven not by antisemitism, and not even mainly by global riptides of capital and technology that are prompting desperate migrations and belligerent nationalisms. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In what follows, I show that Americans\u2019 preoccupations with the Israel\/Palestine conflict are driven &#8212; still now, importantly &#8212; by biblical Hebraic and 17<sup>th<\/sup> Century Puritan adaptations of ancient origin stories about Israelites and Philistines that seeded America\u2019s own political culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Fragmented though that civic-republican culture has become in our lifetimes, we can\u2019t escape the truth that the United States is engaged in Israel&#8217;s assault on Gaza not only strategically and materially, but also historically and culturally. America\u2019s entanglement in this tragedy is foundational in that it began with Puritans\u2019 founding of what they called their \u201cHebrew republic\u201d in their New England \u201cZion.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Although these undercurrents seem alien to most Americans now, they\u2019ve been converging recently, prompting not only \u201cbreaking news\u201d but also renewals of what we might call &#8220;broken news&#8221; &#8212; biblically prophesied upheavals whose fury grips people who aren\u2019t religious at all. Donald Trump has been riding those riptides, along with his evangelical Christian supporters, toward an American civic implosion. In Israel, belligerent Jewish nationalists who govern the state are accelerating a doom-eager Zionism that the Hebrew Bible\u2019s own prophets condemned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Some American college students combine passionate moralism about the Israel\/Palestine conflict with historical and political ignorance to produce an ersatz \u201cpolitics\u201d of moralistic and ideological self-justification that intensifies self-righteous fury. They aren\u2019t wrong to charge that many Israelis, from the early Zionist leader Ze\u2019ev Jabotinsky to prime ministers such as Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon, and Benjamin Netanyahu, have treated Palestinians cynically since long before Palestinians\u2019 \u201cSecond Intifada\u201d hardened many decent Israelis\u2019 hearts. Jews\u2019 own Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943 should have reminded even defensive Israelis that, sooner or later, \u201cghettos\u201d and other holding pens explode. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Palestinians in Gaza &#8212; not only Hamas fighters &#8212; exploded on and after October 7, 2023, 80 years after the Warsaw ghetto and only five years after Israel had brutally suppressed a largely nonviolent \u201cMarch of Return\u201d by Gazans seeking to cross back into Israel, where many of their families had lived for centuries before they were driven out in 1948. Only more recently have different demonstrations in Gaza made clear that many Palestinians feel oppressed by Hamas, even if not as much as by Israel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Perhaps the bitterest irony is that many Palestinians and Israelis have worked side by side for decades, amicably or at least civilly, in businesses, universities, hospitals, and other public and private facilities in Israel itself. I witnessed that cooperation in Haifa and the Galilee in 1969, when I was a guest of the small Movement for Arab\/Jewish cooperation. (I\u2019ve recounted what I experienced there in&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/jimsleeper.com\/?attachment_id=4985\"><strong>The New Jews<\/strong><\/a>, an anthology of essays by young American-Jewish activists that I co-edited with the late scholar of Hebrew literature Alan Mintz.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If more Israelis had been less defensive and domineering toward Palestinians, perhaps there would have been more non-violent Palestinian resistance &#8212; along lines like those developed by Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and huge, unarmed peoples in Soviet eastern Europe &#8212; to curb their exploitation by Israeli political leaders and extremists. Prime Minister and retired general Yitzhak Rabin hoped that something analogous would resolve the Israeli\/Palestinian conflict, but he was assassinated in 1995, not&nbsp;by a Palestinian but by an Israeli extremist, whose triumphant cheerleaders sang the biblical phrase&nbsp;<em>David, melech Yisrael!<\/em>&nbsp;[\u201cDavid, King of Israel].<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>These recent developments needn\u2019t have been so brutally \u201cbiblical.\u201d Writing after Hamas\u2019 October 7 atrocities, the <em>Washington Post <\/em>columnist Ishaan Tharoor r<a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/world\/2023\/10\/10\/gaza-strip-israel-history-violence-hamas-occupation\/\">eminded readers<\/a>&nbsp;that in 1956, Moshe Dayan, the steely commander of the Israel Defense Forces, said the following in a funeral oration for an Israeli soldier murdered by Palestinians in Gaza: \u201cLet us not hurl blame at the murderers. Why should we complain of their hatred for us? Eight years have they sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and seen, with their own eyes, how we have made a homeland of the soil and the villages where they and their forebears once dwelt.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Some of this tragedy stems from longstanding interpretations of Jews\u2019 own \u201corigin story,\u201d in&nbsp;Genesis 12:1, in which God tells Abraham to \u201cGo from your country [Ur, in Mesopotamia] and your father\u2019s house to the land that I will show you.\u201d Ever since then, many Jews have envisioned God\u2019s \u201cpromised land\u201d as a conflicted and conflictual destination or foundation. Sometimes Jews have even uprooted themselves, or been uprooted by others, in ways that have stimulated but also exasperated the peoples among whom they\u2019ve sojourned. In effect, they\u2019ve been a \u201ctribe\u201d that negates what\u2019s usually tribal by crossing communal boundaries, sometimes prophetically: The word \u201cHebrew\u201d \u2014<em>ivry<\/em>&nbsp;\u2014 means \u201cHe passed over,\u201d as in crossing borders that are metaphysical and cultural as well as geographical, sometimes doing so not imperialistically but to pursue universal knowledge and justice across time as well as space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Many of us consider such pursuits essential to the Enlightenment, not to any religion or tribe. But the Hebrew, Philistine, Arab, and other tribal histories of that time and place are more parochial and patriarchal than \u201cenlightened,\u201d notwithstanding their featuring independent judgments and actions taken by female exemplars such as Sarah, Rachel, Leah, Miriam, Ruth, and Esther; even the 17th Century Puritan narratives counterpose Anne Hutchinson\u2019s dissident leadership against the formidable authority of John Winthrop. In the Genesis myth itself, Abraham\u2019s tent and hospitality are open to all comers from all directions, and his grandson Jacob wrestles with an angel, demanding to clarify the terms of the tribal mission, until the angel releases him at dawn without an answer, naming him <em>Yisrael,<\/em> meaning, \u201cHe contends with God.\u201d That has been \u201ctoo much reality\u201d for many Jews as well as non-Jews to bear. Yet it has driven American civic culture in ways and for reasons that we need to acknowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">An American &#8216;origin story&#8217;<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Given the preconceptions that many Americans, including serious scholars, will bring to this essay, let me emphasize that my interest is <em>not<\/em> in whether the following origin stories and pre-histories are true, but in how people who <em>believed<\/em> that they were true and foundational used them to justify actions that they truly did take. The 17th-century English Calvinists who colonized lands that they called &#8220;New England&#8221; also often referred to their settlement as &#8220;Zion.&#8221; A century and a half later, their descendants and legatees participated in founding and extending the American republic with strategies that anticipated strikingly those of today\u2019s Israeli settlers in the West Bank and military invaders of Gaza, claiming a divine mandate or nationalist \u201cmanifest destiny\u201d to impose their Hebrew-derived, ethno-religious identity at the expense of longtime Palestinian inhabitants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The &#8220;settler-colonial&#8221; paradigm that progressives apply to these developments certainly did fit Puritans, who seized lands to which they had no ancestral claims but who imposed ancient Israelite claims to a divinely promised Zion to justify their ventures in America. If you don\u2019t know how literally they meant it for a century and a half, from John Winthrop to John Adams and beyond, you may be surprised by the following accounts of how deeply biblical Hebrews and 17th Century Puritans seeded America\u2019s civic-republican culture in ways that still drive its messianic inclinations and preoccupations with Israel\u2019s presence in the Middle East.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>____________________________________________________________<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>In retrospect, American Puritans seem almost to have been \u2018copying\u2019 today\u2019s Israeli Zionists 300 years ahead of the latter, tactic for tactic and pious justification for pious justification.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>____________________________________________________________<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>An autobiographical note here may clarify this essay&#8217;s perspective. I experienced the strange convergence of Hebraic and Calvinist mythologies personally in the 1950s while <a href=\"https:\/\/www.huffpost.com\/entry\/how-i-escaped-puritanisms_b_8565380\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>growing up in<\/strong><\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/www.huffpost.com\/entry\/how-i-escaped-puritanisms_b_8565380\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong> Longmeadow, Massachusetts,<\/strong><\/a> an old Puritan town whose public-school teachers passed on to us some echoes and remnants of its origins. My fourth-grade teacher Ethel Smith didn\u2019t just look <em>at<\/em> us 9-year-olds; she looked <em>into <\/em>each of us, as if arraigning our souls before something awesome. At that same time, I was learning biblical and liturgical Hebrew two afternoons a week and on weekends in a nearby synagogue and, later, in eight years of Jewish summer camp.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Even when \u201cPuritans\u201d like Miss Smith looked into us sternly, they sometimes did so caringly. In December, 1956, she told me and another boy to stand as she announced, \u201cJim and Richard are Jewish boys, and they don\u2019t accept our Lord as their savior, and they won\u2019t be celebrating Christmas. But I want you all to know that the Jewish people is a noble and enduring people, and our Lord himself was a Jew. You may sit down now.\u201d Disoriented though I was by that introduction to my classmates at age 9, I sensed from Miss Smith\u2019s gentler-than-usual tone that she meant well in a way that has never left me. Later I\u2019d understand that for her then, only eleven years after the Holocaust (about which I knew nothing at the time), we Jews weren\u2019t pariahs but sacred librarians of some sort, keepers of foundational texts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>By the time I entered Yale nine years later, in 1965, in the twilight of its Puritan ethos, I understood the significance of the Hebrew phrase that the college\u2019s founders had put on its seal \u2014<em>Urim v\u2019tumim, <\/em>meaning, approximately, \u201cLight and Truth\u201d or \u201cIllumination and Testimony.\u201d I learned that the university\u2019s president, Kingman Brewster Jr., himself born in Longmeadow, was a lineal descendant of Elder William Brewster, the minister on&nbsp;<em>The Mayflower<\/em> that had carried Puritan pilgrims from England to Massachusetts in 1620 in what they considered their own Exodus from slavery that fulfilled \u201cthe type of Israel materially,\u201d according to Cotton Mather, their most-prominent tribune and chronicler.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><a href=\"https:\/\/jimsleeper.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/image.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"240\" height=\"240\" src=\"https:\/\/jimsleeper.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/image.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-5481\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/image.png 240w, https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/image-150x150.png 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 240px) 100vw, 240px\" \/><\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image is-resized\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn2.opendemocracy.net\/media\/images\/2000px-Yale_University_Shield_1.svg.width-500.png\" alt=\"Yale University Shield\" style=\"aspect-ratio:1;width:26px;height:auto\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Seal of Yale University<\/strong>,<strong> founded 1701 (The Hebrew letters convey the phrase <em>u&#8217;rim v&#8217;tummim.<\/em>)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At my opening freshman assembly at Yale in 1965, a thousand of us mostly white young men in dark suits rose and sang (or read and mumbled) a hymn composed by Yale Divinity School Professor Leonard Bacon in 1833 that rendered the Yale founders&#8217; Exodus from their English Egypt to found what they called their &#8220;Hebrew Republic&#8221; in New England:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>1 O God, beneath Thy guiding hand<br>Our exiled fathers crossed the sea,<br>And when they trod the wintry strand,<br>With prayer and psalm they worshiped Thee.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>2 Thou heard&#8217;st, well pleased, the song, the prayer;<br>Thy blessing came, and still its pow&#8217;r<br>Shall onward through all ages bear<br>The memory of that holy hour.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>3 Laws, freedom, truth, and faith in God<br>Came with those exiles o&#8217;er the waves,<br>And where their pilgrim feet have trod,<br>The God they trusted guards their graves.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At Yale&#8217;s 1964 Commencement three months before my freshman assembly, Brewster, the legatee of the Puritan Exodus, had presented the university&#8217;s honorary doctorate of laws to Martin Luther King, Jr., who at that time was telling America&#8217;s lords of segregation to \u201cLet my people go,\u201d as Moses had told pharaoh, as King was leading American Blacks to what he called \u201cthe promised land,\u201d again echoing <em>Exodus<\/em>. As Brewster handed him the certificate of Yale\u2019s degree, their&nbsp;handshake reached across time and space, stirring Protestants and Jews whose ancestors had made history of the Exodus myth in ages past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/omeka-yale-prod.s3.amazonaws.com\/original\/91aae3668fa7856a096ecaf4ffece83daf127d23.jpg\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><a href=\"https:\/\/omeka-yale-prod.s3.amazonaws.com\/original\/91aae3668fa7856a096ecaf4ffece83daf127d23.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/ci3.googleusercontent.com\/meips\/ADKq_NZ4pNIC8rKaxtVDPf0B4lsq9lU3FyORZ0WX_lvUev3csShMLuT_ZACkDlZYfpKATM8YlC5q-U5pDjgaUMclGNHVUtbKXbLr82hjMlq2FU3wzrESAVje9JIrUizonOy2MG7vbMy-HK5i5FeESGizqXt6=s0-d-e1-ft#https:\/\/omeka-yale-prod.s3.amazonaws.com\/large\/91aae3668fa7856a096ecaf4ffece83daf127d23.jpg\" alt=\"\"\/><\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Yale President Kingman Brewster, Jr. at the 1964 Yale Commencement<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Like the Hebrew prophet who \u201clives out a myth that may be dead in us and for us, whose fruitfulness cannot be known except by exposing it (and himself) to possible failure,\u201d as political theorist George Shulman puts it, King and Brewster revivified a sacred past and, not incidentally, made some of us moderns do double takes on our presumptions. Yale\u2019s civic poetry had enough power then to sway Authority, as it did when Lyndon Johnson told Congress, a year after the Yale Commencement, that \u201cWe <em>Shall<\/em> Overcome,\u201d shortly before Congress enacted voting rights laws.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Strange though it may seem, biblical undercurrents resurfaced in me a few years later, at the onset of a war between Hebrews and Egyptians: Early in June, 1967, I stood in a line at the Jewish Agency in Manhattan, hoping to register as a noncombatant supporter of Israel in the Six-Day War. Not yet 21, I needed parental permission, which I didn\u2019t get, so I didn\u2019t go. But two years later, I was holding intensive conversations with Palestinian citizens of Israel at the invitation of the country\u2019s small Movement for Arab-Jewish Cooperation, as I\u2019ve recounted in&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/jimsleeper.com\/?attachment_id=4985\"><strong><em>The New Jews<\/em><\/strong><\/a><a href=\"file:\/\/\/C:\/Users\/James%20Sleeper\/Downloads\/staples_scan%20(37).pdf\"><strong><em>.<\/em><\/strong><\/a> <a href=\"file:\/\/\/C:\/Users\/James%20Sleeper\/Downloads\/staples_scan%20(37).pdf\"><\/a>Note my expressions there of my early doubts about Jewish nationalism and Zionism, even as an idealistic young supporter of Israel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The personal experiences that I mention occasionally in what follows exposed me to origins of the Israel\/Palestine conflict that help us to understand why Jews have figured so disproportionately in Americans\u2019 and other peoples\u2019 civic imaginings and international interventions. Brewster&#8217;s and King&#8217;s handshake at Yale in 1964 might not have happened if Hebrews\u2019 ancient uprooting from Ur and their contributions to public understandings of human destiny hadn&#8217;t still figured, thanks to the Puritans, in non-Jewish Americans\u2019 understandings of their country as a nation of clean breaks and fresh, but covenanted, starts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Those understandings matter even now, as America is becoming less Hebraic and covenantal and more gnostic, agnostic or libertarian. To understand why Americans\u2019 preoccupation with the Gaza war continues to divert much-needed attention from larger, even-more lethal wars, let me say more about the original Jewish break from other traditions, and then about how American Puritans transported that break into what is now this country\u2019s fraught, disintegrating civic-republican culture. (A different, equally powerful intervention in American political culture was made by Spanish Catholics who colonized Florida and the American Southwest, but in this essay I trace the Calvinist\/Hebraic origins of the Northeastern, classically liberal \u201cProtestant Establishment\u201d that governed the United States well into the 20th Century.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Today there are so many variants of proselytizing in America that some readers may be tempted to misread what I\u2019m about to present as if it were only more such preaching. But I\u2019m not evangelizing or propagating what I\u2019m about to describe. Having grown up at an intersection or crossroads of the belief systems I discuss here, I\u2019m recognizing their influence in American public life from several perspectives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Jewish sublimity and its discontents<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The constitutive act of Judaism was an unprecedentedly stark separation of spirit from nature that transformed human self-consciousness. It turned the enchantments of natural cycles and sacred physical sites into soaring new aspirations, projected into the vast unknown between human beings and God. That prompted restless yearnings to know and do God\u2019s will on earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>According to the Bible itself, the sublimity of that great separation of spirit from nature didn\u2019t last long. Hebrews feared and fled it at times, indulging in idol worship and, later, kingly arrogance and priestly legalism. Some say that first the prophets, and then exile, purified the Jews and their transnational mission, but Puritans grounded their \u201cerrand into the wilderness\u201d in ancient Hebraism\u2019s sublimity and its inflected nationalism in communities of law and work, believing that most other Christians had succumbed to a hypocritical other-worldliness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the Genesis myth, as interpreted in <em><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Genesis_Rabbah#:~:text=Genesis%20Rabbah%20(Hebrew%3A%20%D7%91%D6%B0%D6%BC%D7%A8%D6%B5%D7%90%D7%A9%D6%B4%D7%81%D7%99%D7%AA%20%D7%A8%D6%B7%D7%91%D6%B8%D6%BC%D7%94,of%20the%20Book%20of%20Genesis.\"><strong>Midrash Genesis<\/strong><\/a><\/em>, one of the rabbinic commentaries on that book, Abraham smashes Ur&#8217;s idols as he&#8217;s leaving, and he even prepares to sacrifice his own son Isaac at the command of his hidden but omnipotent Interlocutor. But that command is rescinded at the last minute, even as Abraham is binding his trusting son and raising his hand to strike the fatal blow: His grief and loneliness are broken by the angel Gabriel, who brings a ram to substitute for Isaac in the offering. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yet Abraham has other disputes with God &#8212; for example, against God&#8217;s decision to obliterate the corrupt cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, killing many innocents. And Y<em>israel&nbsp;<\/em>contends with God ever after.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Such biblically informed accounts of humans\u2019 separation from what seems divinely ordained demonstrate not only a degree of human autonomy in thought and action; they also demonstrate individual humans\u2019 futility: A central prayer in the liturgy of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, originated the claim that \u201cman\u2019s origin is dust, and his destiny is dust,\u201d and it depicts every individual&#8217;s life \u201cas a fragile potsherd, as the grass that withers, as the flower that fades, as the fleeting shadow, as the passing cloud, as the wind that blows, as the floating dust, and even as a dream that vanishes.\u201d Such a scourging awareness of human fragility projects the faithful into the vast unknown between them and a ubiquitous but hidden God. It prompts yearnings like Jacob\u2019s to discover God\u2019s will and to justify humans&#8217; often-flailing efforts to transform a world that isn\u2019t wholly impervious to their efforts to displace tribal insularity with missions across time and space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThe Jewish nation is the nation of time, in a sense which cannot be said of any other nation,\u201d the German Protestant theologian&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.proquest.com\/openview\/915ca5f9eef71570ac014d7b265b4f9e\/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&amp;cbl=51922&amp;diss=y\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>Paul Tillich explained<\/strong><\/a>&nbsp;in 1938. &#8220;It represents the permanent struggle between time and space. \u2026 It has a tragic fate when considered as a nation of space like every other nation, but as the nation of time, because it is beyond the circle of life and death, it is beyond tragedy. The people of time \u2026 cannot avoid being persecuted, because by their very existence they break the claim of the gods of space, who express themselves in will to power, imperialism, injustice, demonic enthusiasm, and tragic self-destruction. The gods of space, who are strong in every human soul, in every race and nation, are afraid of the Lord of Time, history, and justice, are afraid of his prophets and followers.&#8221;  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Afraid, indeed: \u201cThe eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me,\u201d wrote Blaise Pascal, a French contemporary of the Puritans. Jews have negated much of what\u2019s tribal yet haven\u2019t disappeared as a \u201ctribe\u201d themselves, at least in many other people&#8217;s minds. \u201cHow odd of God to choose the Jews,\u201d&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/en-academic.com\/dic.nsf\/enwiki\/665435\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>quipped journalist&nbsp;William Norman Ewer<\/strong><\/a>&nbsp;a century ago, capturing the mixture of antipathy and admiration that they&#8217;ve provoked ever since Judaism prompted its axial break in Western consciousness. You don\u2019t need to \u201cbelieve in\u201d that break in any religious sense to notice that Jews have indeed stimulated and exasperated other peoples among whom they\u2019ve sojourned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>______________________________________________________________<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>\u2018How odd of God to choose the Jews,\u2019 quipped&nbsp;<\/strong><strong>William Norman Ewer<\/strong><strong>&nbsp;a century ago, capturing the mix of antipathy and admiration they have provoked ever since Judaism prompted its \u2018axial\u2019 break in Western consciousness.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>_____________________________________________________________<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Judaism&#8217;s derivative religions, Christianity and Islam, adapted its separation of spirit from nature: &#8220;We are all, in all places, strangers and pilgrims, travelers and sojourners,&#8221; intoned Robert Cushman, a contemporary of the Elder William Brewster and an organizer of the Pilgrims&#8217; &#8216;Exodus&#8217; to Massachusetts, in a sermon he gave in 1622.&nbsp;Three-hundred-fifty years later, the American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that&nbsp;the \u201cparadoxical relation between the possible and the impossible in history proves that the frame of history is wider than the nature-time in which it is grounded. The injunction of Christ: \u2018Fear not them which kill the body but are not able to kill the soul\u2019 (Matthew 10:28) neatly indicates the dimension of human existence which transcends the basis which human life and history have in nature.\u201d Somewhat analogously,&nbsp;Islam commemorates Abraham\u2019s readiness to sacrifice Isaac in its holiday, the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/prezi.com\/d9h69bj-_qvw\/eid-al-adha\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>Feast of the Sacrifice<\/strong><\/a>, which honors Abraham\u2019s obedience but celebrates Isaac\u2019s release.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In some Jews&#8217; judgment, however, Christianity and Islam go too far to relieve humankind of having to bear \u201ctoo much reality\u201d in this fallen world. In <strong><em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/2464\/9780271017945\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Jews<\/a>,<\/em><\/strong> the late Israeli philosopher Yirmiyahu Yovel notes that Christians have depicted God \u201cas a suffering, agonizing man, but thereby\u2026 transformed a human need into a theological principle that ends with an illusion\u201d and \u201ca false consolation.\u201d For two millennia, Christians have affected to transcend tribalism by intoning, \u201cMy kingdom is not of this world\u201d and \u201cBaptized in Christ, there is no Jew or Greek.\u201d Yet they\u2019ve reigned from golden thrones over armed states whose national identities are rooted even more strongly in sacred &#8220;blood and soil.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yet the Hebrew Bible depicts Hebrews repeatedly as no less terrified of existential uprootedness than Blaise Pascal or any Christian king. Even as the <em>Book of Exodus<\/em> recounts God revealing the terms of His covenant to Moses on the summit of Mount Sinai, the chosen people are busy fabricating and idolizing a Golden Calf at the foot of the mountain, and later they turn to kingly and materialist protections against their wandering. Zionism emerges in several later historical periods &#8212; even among Protestant Christian Zionists &#8212; as an attempt to return to and possess the promised land. The latest, most decisive such attempt emerged among Jews in the 20th Century, prompted by their urgent need to escape rising persecution and even extinction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But returning doesn\u2019t guarantee succeeding. For three millennia, Jews celebrating the Passover holiday&nbsp;have invoked, poetically and ritually,&nbsp;a \u201creturn\u201d to Jerusalem from exilic, often ghostly, wandering. At times they&#8217;ve actually returned to what Tillich called \u201cthe gods of space, who express themselves in will to power, imperialism, injustice, demonic enthusiasm, and tragic self-destruction.\u201d For example, in the Book of Samuel, Israelites importune&nbsp;its eponymous judge to \u201cGive us a king to rule over us, like all the other nations.\u201d Although their demand displeases Samuel, he and the Israelites commit genocidal assaults against neighboring Canaanites, Amalekites and Philistines:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;Remember what the Amalekites&nbsp;did to you\u2026 [when] they met you on your journey and attacked all who were lagging behind; they had no fear of God. When the&nbsp;Lord your God gives you rest from all the enemies&nbsp;around you in the land he is giving you to possess as an inheritance, you shall blot out the name of Amalek&nbsp;from under heaven.&#8221; [<a href=\"https:\/\/www.biblegateway.com\/passage\/?search=Deuteronomy%2025&amp;version=NIV\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Deuteronomy 25<\/a>]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;Then Samuel said, \u2018Bring me Agag king of the Amalekites.\u2019 Agag came to him cheerfully, for he thought, \u201cSurely the bitterness of death is past.\u201d But Samuel declared: \u2018As your sword has made women childless, so your mother will be childless among women.\u2019 And Samuel hacked Agag to pieces before the Lord at Gilgal.&#8221; [<a href=\"https:\/\/www.biblegateway.com\/passage\/?search=1%20Samuel%2015&amp;version=NIV\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1 Samuel 15<\/a>]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Eight centuries before Christ, and 28 centuries before the Netanyahu government waged war against Hamas in Gaza, the prophet <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/Amos 1:6 This is what the LORD says: &quot;For three transgressions of Gaza, even four, I will not revoke My judgment, because they exiled a whole population, delivering them up to Edom.\">Amos said,<\/a><\/strong> \u201cFor the three transgressions of Gaza, Yea, for four, I will not reverse [its punishment]: Because they carried away captive a whole captivity [of Israelites] to deliver them up to Edom. So I will send a fire on the wall of Gaza, and it shall devour the palaces thereof; \u2026 and the remnant of the Philistines shall perish, Saith the Lord.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So the militarized nationalism of today\u2019s Zionists can be understood as another such reversion or &#8220;return&#8221; to the promised land, reinforced in 2018 by the Knesset\u2019s &#8220;Basic Law&#8221; declaring that Israel is \u201cthe Nation-State of the Jewish People\u201d and greatly diminishing it as a liberal democracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Such contradictory, conflicted uprootings and re-rootings have sometimes given Jews their mobility, marginality and occasional magnificence and malfeasance, breeding tough, defiant spirits not only in Moses and Jesus but also in Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, inventor of the atomic bomb and self-avowed \u201cdestroyer of worlds.\u201d The Jew as interloper, living marginally in homogeneous societies but flourishing and sometimes predominating in pluralistic and open ones \u2014 agile, entrepreneurial, walking on eggshells and thinking fast \u2013 has sometimes seemed most \u201cat home\u201d in media of exchange, whether of information, social commentary, money, merchandise, music, movie-making, math, medicine or scientific discovery. Confirmation of their prominence in those realms is presented sociologically, lyrically, and abundantly in Yuri Slezkine\u2019s <strong><em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/2464\/9780691192826\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Jewish Century<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That Jews &#8212; unlike \u201csettler-colonial\u201d American Puritans &#8212; did have ancestors in their \u201cpromised land\u201d was confirmed in 1947 by the discovery of what became known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are written in Hebrew that even I can read, haltingly, with little more than my &#8220;Hebrew school&#8221; and summer-camp training. Some of those scrolls were buried in those caves seven centuries before Jews&#8217; exile from the area (in 70 C.E). and before Islam existed and Arabic was spoken in the region. Some of them had been in those caves for almost a thousand years before the second century C.E., when Roman Emperor Hadrian coined the name \u201cPalestine\u201d for the land, elevating its Philistines at the expense of the rebellious Israelites whom his legions had recently defeated and forced into exile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Although Jews were mostly absent from Palestine for the ensuing two millennia, the settler-colonial paradigm that applies so clearly to English Puritans applies only ambiguously to Jews who settled there in the 20th Century, <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/newrepublic.com\/article\/177306\/israel-colonialist-state-history-today\">as John Judis explained<\/a><\/strong> invaluably and grimly two months after the October 7, 2023 attacks. The settler-colonial paradigm, or accusation, is especially ambiguous in regard to the half of today&#8217;s Israeli Jewish population whose ancestors never left the Middle East after Rome&#8217;s conquest but settled in Iraq, Yemen, Egypt and in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Ethiopia for millennia until they were driven from those countries to the State of Israel after its founding in 1948. Most of these \u201cMizrahi\u201d Jews and their ancestors had never set foot in Europe, nor had they had \u201cmother countries\u201d to which they could return safely, as most European colonizers could have done and sometimes did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yet even the biblical passages on the Dead Sea scrolls include prophetic warnings that Israelites\u2019 territorial claims were contingent on their keeping a covenant sealed at Sinai \u2014 or, as we might put it now, on their transcending narrow tribalism to meet a higher standard. If they failed to do that, God would punish them at the hands of their enemies: Here is the prophet Amos again, sounding pretty much like many a college campus protester against Israel today:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;Woe to those who are at ease in Zion, and to those who feel secure on the mountain of Samaria, the notable men of the first of the nations, to whom the house of Israel comes! \u2026. Go down to Gath of the Philistines. Are you better than these kingdoms? Or is their territory greater than your territory, O you who put far away the day of disaster and bring near the seat of violence? Woe to those who lie on beds of ivory and stretch themselves out on their couches, \u2026 who drink wine in bowls and anoint themselves with the finest oils, but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph!&#8221; [<a href=\"https:\/\/www.biblegateway.com\/passage\/?search=amos+6&amp;version=NIV\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amos 6<\/a>]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Another reluctant but overwhelmed biblical prophet, Isaiah,&nbsp;warned&nbsp;that God would punish Israelites\u2019 arrogance by destroying their Zion &#8220;until the cities lie ruined and without inhabitant, until the houses are left deserted and the fields ruined and ravaged, until the Lord has sent everyone far away and the land is utterly forsaken.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">How Puritan America became the \u2018New Israel\u2019<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.salon.com\/app\/uploads\/2024\/03\/pilgrims_arriving_in_new_world_515508266.jpg\" alt=\"The first landing of the Pilgrims, 1620. (Getty Images\/Bettmann)\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><strong><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/ecp.yusercontent.com\/mail?url=https%3A%2F%2Fci3.googleusercontent.com%2Fmeips%2FADKq_NZ2LhQxbbnLNmAcwUvi25na5IJH9by_I2mZY-vM-8wSEEpTug3LwlrUpD1mSWE4wdOp981igSE0LLOmCp8uSoxzLJQWmIJkeldRK35sknQ_1X6KdwT7MF_AJO6gowdW7_hUPyGfMWo8v2GGbTRYTMfLlaRg8xtKiT8KwD5UVeraUlQ9-VQlVWOuNCw%3Ds0-d-e1-ft%23https%3A%2F%2Fmediaproxy.salon.com%2Fwidth%2F1200%2Fhttps%3A%2F%2Fmedia2.salon.com%2F2024%2F03%2Fpilgrims_arriving_in_new_world_515508266.jpg&amp;t=1721049779&amp;ymreqid=d41d8cd9-8f00-b204-1ca6-a4004201e500&amp;sig=AH0wMTEkozL2qqPN2YmvhA--~D\" alt=\"The first landing of the Pilgrims, 1620. (Getty Images\/Bettmann)\">The first landing of the Pilgrims, 1620.&nbsp;(Getty Images\/Bettmann)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In 1637, Puritan soldiers surrounded a major settlement of Connecticut\u2019s Pequot people as Puritan leader John Mason \u201csnatched a torch from a wigwam and set fire to the village, which, owing to the strong wind blowing, was soon ablaze,\u201d according to James Truslow Adams\u2019 1921 Pulitzer-winning <em>The Founding of New England<\/em>: \u201cIn the early dawn of that May morning, as the New England men stood guard over the flames, five hundred men, women, and children were slowly burned alive.\u201d Ministers of Christ saluted one another \u201cin the Lord Jesus,\u201d some of them profiting directly from selling surviving Pequot boys and girls into slavery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In 1676, future Harvard president&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Increase_Mather\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>Increase Mather<\/strong><\/a>&nbsp;urged and then celebrated a genocide of the Narragansett people, declaring, in his chronicle of &#8220;The Warr with the Indians in New England&#8221;:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;The Heathen People amongst whom we live, and whose Land the Lord God of our Fathers hath given to us for a rightfull Possession, have at sundry times been plotting mischievous devices against that part of the English Israel which is seated in these goings down of the Sun\u2026. And we have reason to conclude that salvation is begun [because] there are two or 3000 Indians who have been either killed, or taken, or submitted themselves to the English\u2026. [T]he Narragansetts are in a manner ruined\u2026 who last year were the greatest body of Indians in New England, and the most formidable Enemy which hath appeared against us. But God hath consumed them by the word, &amp; by Famine and by sickness \u2026&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Gregory Michna, a historian of that war, writes that \u201cJust as [the biblical] Canaan was wrested from the hands of heathens through sacral violence\u2026 the Rev. Joshua Moodey advocated infanticide as a wartime strategy, writing that &#8216;The Bratts of Babylon may more easily be dasht against the Stones, if we take the Season for it, but if we let them grow up they will become more formidable, and hardly Conquerable.\u2019\u201d Similar warnings can be made now about young Gazans who may grow up as bitter, vengeful, and unconquerable survivors of the current slaughter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>___________________________________________________________________<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>It&#8217;s remarkable how closely the early American Puritan strategies, including mass murder, anticipated those of today&#8217;s Zionist settlers<\/strong><strong>&nbsp;on the West Bank and the IDF in Gaza.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>___________________________________________________________________<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Indigenous people made retaliatory attacks against the English, including in an infamous raid in 1704 on Deerfield, Massachusetts that destroyed that settlement &#8212; by the measures of its time, nearly as horrifying as Hamas&#8217; October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. The devastation of Deerfield has figured deeply in my own moral imagination ever since a February morning in 1957, when my fourth-grade class in Longmeadow &#8212; including some of my classmates who were descendants of the town\u2019s Puritan settlers &#8212; sat on the floor, with the lamps turned off for effect, as Miss Smith stood before us in the pale, wintry light, telling us that on another cold February morning approximately 250 years earlier, howling, hatchet-wielding \u201cIndians\u201d had slaughtered nearly 20 English settlers of Deerfield, 40 miles upriver from us, and then force-marched nearly a hundred more through the frigid wilderness to captivity in Canada.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The captives included Deerfield minister John Williams and his family. Two of his children were killed in the attack, and his wife, Eunice, became weak on the trek north and fell down a ravine, tumbling into a river that swept her away. Williams\u2019 account of that personal and communal calamity, all the more harrowing for its self-sacrificing affirmations of faith amid crucifixion, was published as <em><a href=\"https:\/\/quod.lib.umich.edu\/cgi\/t\/text\/text-idx?c=evans;cc=evans;view=toc;idno=N01123.0001.001\"><strong>The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion<\/strong><\/a><\/em> soon after he and his son Stephen were returned to Massachusetts in a hostage exchange. For a while, his account rivaled John Bunyan\u2019s&nbsp;<em>The Pilgrim\u2019s Progress<\/em>&nbsp;as a parable and primer for the Puritans\u2019 holy but dangerous errand into the \u201chowling wilderness,\u201d as the historian John Demos recounts in&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/2464\/9780679759614\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong><em>The Unredeemed Captive; A Family Story of Early America<\/em><\/strong><\/a><em><strong>,<\/strong><\/em>&nbsp;highlighting Williams&#8217; daughter&#8217;s refusal to leave her Native captors to rejoin the English world<em>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Williams&#8217; son Stephen later became the minister of Longmeadow\u2019s Congregational church, which stands 100 yards from the classroom where Ethel Smith told us about his captivity. The great Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards visited him there in 1740, and a year later Stephen Williams rode the five miles south from Longmeadow to Enfield, Connecticut, to hear Edwards preach his (in)famous sermon,&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/daily.jstor.org\/sinners-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-god-annotated\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>\u201cSinners in the Hands of an Angry God,\u201d<\/strong>&nbsp;<\/a>and write an eyewitness account of its listeners\u2019 writhing reactions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My belief that this matters may be overdetermined by the fact that, 215 years later, I bicycled along Williams Street every weekday, passing the church where Edwards had visited Williams, on my way to and from Miss Smith\u2019s classroom. (Fifty-eight years after that, in 2014, I wrote a&nbsp;<strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.salon.com\/2014\/07\/04\/we_the_people_are_violent_and_filled_with_rage_a_nation_spinning_apart_on_its_independence_day\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">quasi-puritanical jeremiad<\/a>&nbsp;<\/strong>for <em>Salon<\/em> about the American republic\u2019s dimming prospects. I wasn\u2019t thinking of Edwards at the time, but <em>The New Yorker\u2019s<\/em> Hendrik Hertzberg&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/rickhertzberg\/status\/486254767250108417\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>tweeted<\/strong><\/a>&nbsp;in response, &#8220;Jim Sleeper is the Jonathan Edwards of American civic culture \u2014 and that\u2019s a compliment.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Miss Smith didn\u2019t tell us that the English had included some rogues, swindlers and mountebanks who drove the expulsions and massacres of Pequots, Pocumptucs, Mohawks, Narragansetts, Wampanoags and Abenakis. Despite the settlers\u2019&nbsp;proclaimed good intentions, their land hunger generated duplicitous trade and land deals, alongside pious missions to convert indigenous people into \u201cpraying Indians.\u201d James Truslow Adams explains that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;as the whites increased in numbers and comparative power, and as their first fears of the savages, and the desire to convert them, gave place to dislike, contempt, spiritual indifference, and self-confidence\u2026 it was no longer considered necessary to treat with the Indian as an equal\u2026. [T]he lands of the [Indians] gradually came to be looked upon as reservations upon which their native owners were allowed to live until a convenient opportunity, or the growing needs of the settlers, might bring about a farther advance.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Today\u2019s Israeli settlers on the West Bank might take note and take caution. So might \u201cold stock\u201d American descendants of the intrepid Puritans who prefer not to remember these awful precedents for our present civic-republican crisis. Even Stephen Williams, the redeemed Deerfield captive who followed his father into the ministry, wound up owning Black slaves as house servants in Longmeadow, as recent Harvard graduate Michael Baick recounts in&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1KoUM--b4apQ1DlXHvjmf6ZFQqkuqlYxD\/view\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>a fascinating senior essay<\/strong>.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It would be wrong for today\u2019s \u201cmainline\u201d Congregationalists, Presbyterians and other Protestants to displace onto today\u2019s Israel their own discomforts with the fraught aspects of their Puritan history and with the soulless neoliberalism \u2013 and, in some white-nationalist evangelists, the reactionary tribalism &#8212; that it has spawned. If we could reweave older, stronger covenantal threads into our civic-republican fabric, we might remember that its strength has depended on convictions that armies and wealth alone can\u2019t nurture or defend. Puritans placed the Hebrew approximation of \u201cIllumination and Testimony\u201d on Yale&#8217;s seal because they decided to ground their salvation-hungry faith in covenanted, earthbound communities of law and work whose model they called \u201cthe Hebrew republic.\u201d And some Jews would learn from them, as I did in Longmeadow and &#8220;old&#8221; Yale, to cherish &#8220;Protestant&#8221; personal and moral introspection.<br><br>Even when Puritans held New England in their thrall, slaughtered native Americans, and hanged 40 witches, they sometimes knew better than to forgive themselves as casually as many Americans do now when we excuse or even valorize our country&#8217;s collective hysterias and brutalities. In 1697, a&nbsp;conscience-stricken Judge Samuel Sewall, who&#8217;d presided over the Salem witch trials five years earlier, stood penitently in Boston&#8217;s Old South Meeting House one Sunday as its pastor, Samuel Willard, read aloud a note from Sewell confessing his &#8220;guilt contracted&#8230; at Salem&#8221; and his desire &#8220;to take the blame and shame of it, asking&#8230; that God&#8230; would powerfully defend him against all temptations for Sin, for the future: and vouchsafe him for the efficacious saving conduct of word and spirit.&#8221;<br><br>Who among America&#8217;s current and recent leaders desires to take such blame and shame for enabling the killing or unjust incarceration of thousands of innocent young black men? Who begs forgiveness for opening floodgates of slaughter in Vietnam and the Middle East or enabling the official brutality on our streets and the subtler but equally decisive dispossession of hard-working but under-informed Americans from their homes and jobs? Who takes blame for designing and operating the powerful engines and marketing sensors that play upon the lower viscera which Puritans like Edwards probed and restrained?<br><br>Against the present conventional presumption that globalization is flattening the world for the better, Puritans would warn that our &#8220;flat&#8221; world has abysses that open suddenly at our feet and in our hearts and that a good society needs to plumb those depths in ways that are spiritually potent enough to face down the demons in them and in ourselves. John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts, urged his followers \u201cto abridge our selves of our superfluities, for the supply of others necessities\u2009[\u2026] [and]\u2009make others Condicions our owne\u2009[\u2026]\u2009allwayes haveing before our eyes our Commission and Community in the worke.\u201d The historian Daniel T. Rodgers <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/lareviewofbooks.org\/article\/winthrops-city-was-exceptional-not-exceptionalist\/\">reminds us<\/a><\/strong> that Winthrop was even more pointed in economic terms, warning that \u201cIt is a true rule, that particular estates cannot subsist in the ruin of the public.\u201d Parts of Winthrop&#8217;s legacy are still well-worth living up to, <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/magazine\/37\/our-puritan-heritage\/\">as I showed in DEMOCRACY Journal.<\/a><\/strong> If we nervously satirize, demonize and dismiss them, we may only be displacing blame for our own darker side. We have apps and algorithms that Puritans never dreamed of, but do we have their wisdom and will?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">How the American republic&#8217;s founders valorized biblical Hebrews<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In 1771, the young James Madison, then a future framer of the republic and president, stayed on for a year at the College of New Jersey (later known as Princeton), to study&nbsp;<strong><a href=\"https:\/\/latterdaysaintmag.com\/the-old-testament-and-hebrew-influence-on-james-madison-the-first-amendment-and-religious-liberty\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hebrew and Puritan theology<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In 1776,&nbsp;<strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/sections\/arts-letters\/articles\/pilgrims-american-jewish-holiday\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Benjamin Franklin proposed<\/a>&nbsp;<\/strong>that the great seal of the United States depict &#8220;Moses in the Dress of a High Priest standing on the Shore, and Extending his Hand Over the Sea, Thereby Causing the Same to Overwhelm Pharaoh.&#8221; (The Continental Congress chose instead the Masonic-inspired seal that\u2019s now on every dollar bill.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In 1790, Jews\u2019 own hope for a fully \u201cenlightened\u201d citizenship in America that they hadn\u2019t yet achieved in Europe was ratified in George Washington\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/davidbahr1\/2018\/11\/25\/the-perennial-importance-of-george-washingtons-letter-to-the-jews-of-newport\/#64bc0cc733fb\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>letter to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island<\/strong><\/a>, which affirmed the new republic\u2019s full tolerance of \u201cthe stock of Abraham\u201d. In Providence, Rhode Island&#8217;s capital city, Brown University&#8217;s founding charter in 1764 explicitly stated that students of all religious affiliations, including Judaism, would be admitted &#8212; a provision unheard-of in the other colleges of that time, although Harvard did hire a Jew, Judah Monis, to teach Hebrew as part of its students&#8217; religious instruction.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In 1809, John Adams, a descendant of New England Puritans and by then a former president, wrote, \u201cI will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize Men than any other Nation. If I were an Atheist and believed in blind eternal Fate, I should still believe that Fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential Instrument for civilizing the Nations.\u201d Adams employed that \u201cinstrument\u201d to advance something like the Hebrew covenant, writing, in what is still part of the&nbsp;<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/constitutioncenter.org\/the-constitution\/historic-document-library\/detail\/massachusetts-constitution\">preamble to the Massachusetts constitution<\/a>, that \u201cThe body politic is \u2026 a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Note well what this entails: Covenants require extralegal agreements, or traditions of trust, even among competing participants. But they also require the rule of law, which can be undercut only too easily by its judges and enforcers if they can&#8217;t also rely on a strong, nourished consensus favoring the rule of law itself. &nbsp;That consensus has to rely, in turn, on an overriding sense of trust. A civic-republican society that&#8217;s as pluralist as ours can&#8217;t rely on semi-sacred ties of \u201cblood and soil\u201d or on ethno-racial, quasi-familial bonds that sustain a sense of intimacy among people who share what historian Benedict Anderson called \u201cImagined Communities.\u201d Rather, a civic-republican society needs a&nbsp;<em>covenant<\/em>, a semi-spiritual agreement among autonomous individuals to hold one another to certain public virtues and norms that neither the liberal state nor &#8220;the free market&#8221; alone can nourish or defend. Something additional, or foundational, is required: a civil society that reinforces the \u201csocial compact&#8221; sought by Adams. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>A civic-republican society is secured not only by institutional and legal authority but also by understandings that cannot be legislated. Such a social compact cannot be rooted ultimately in sacred  blood and soil.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In 1869, the British critic<strong>&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Culture_and_Anarchy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Matthew Arnold observed<\/a>&nbsp;<\/strong>that Protestant Americans had internalized Hebraism\u2019s scourging demands for \u201cconduct and obedience\u201d and \u201cstrictness of conscience\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;To walk staunchly by the best light one has, to be strict and sincere with oneself, not to be of the number\u2026 who say and do not, to be in earnest \u2013 \u2026. this discipline has been nowhere so effectively taught as in the school of Hebraism\u2026. [T]he intense and convinced energy with which the Hebrew, both of the Old and of the New Testament, threw himself upon his ideal, and which inspired the incomparable definition of the great Christian virtue, Faith \u2014 the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen \u2014 this energy of faith in its ideal has belonged to Hebraism alone.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cFrom Maine to Florida and back again, all America Hebraizes,\u201d Arnold wrote, and Hebraic intrepidity and prickly fidelity indeed characterized the training of many American leaders and followers at college-preparatory schools like the Groton School, whose founding rector Endicott Peabody was a descendant of Puritans \u2013 ironically, of <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/de.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/John_Endecott\">a Puritan rogue, John Endecott, <\/a><\/strong>whose brutality toward indigenous peoples&nbsp;thankfully wasn\u2019t sustained by Peabody or by a later relative &#8212; Endicott &#8220;Chubb&#8221; Peabody &#8212; who was governor of Massachusetts in my own lifetime. One of the Groton School Rector Peabody&#8217;s students, Franklin D. Roosevelt, continued to correspond with him from the White House. In 1912, FDR\u2019s older cousin Theodore Roosevelt, another of Groton\u2019s founders, had&nbsp;challenged the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, himself a latter-day Puritan,<a href=\"https:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com\/history\/1912-republican-convention-855607\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">&nbsp;<\/a><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com\/history\/1912-republican-convention-855607\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">by thundering<\/a><\/strong>&nbsp;at the Republican National Convention, \u201cWe stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord!\u201d (The loudest &#8220;thundering&#8221; at Republicans&#8217; 2024 national convention came from the theatrical wrestler Hulk Hogan.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In 1987, the&nbsp;historian Shalom Goldman discovered&nbsp;that George W. Bush\u2019s great-uncle five generations removed, the Rev. George Bush, was the first teacher of Hebrew at New York University in 1835 and the author of a book on Islam, &#8220;A Life of Mohammed,&#8221; which pronounced the prophet an imposter. In 1844, the Rev. Bush wrote &#8220;The Valley of the Vision, or The Dry Bones Revived,&#8221; interpreting the biblical Book of Ezekiel to prophesy the return of the Jews to Palestine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I don\u2019t know if George W. Bush has read his ancestor\u2019s exegesis, but Barack Obama cited Ezekiel in his&nbsp;<strong><a href=\"http:\/\/transcript:%20barack%20obama's%20speech%20on%20race%20:%20NPR\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">2008 speech on race<\/a>,<\/strong> recalling that at his Trinity Church in Chicago (a branch of the Puritans&#8217; Congregational Church), \u201cEzekiel\u2019s field of dry bones\u201d was one of the \u201cstories \u2014 of survival, and freedom, and hope\u201d \u2014 that \u201cbecame our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears.\u201d Obama seemed to want to weave back into America\u2019s civic-republican fabric some tough, old threads of the Abrahamic, covenantal faith that had sustained Kingman Brewster Jr. and Martin Luther King Jr. Now that we\u2019re looking through gaping holes in that fabric, the republic is faltering, as is its founders\u2019 hope that it could rely on \u201cstrictness of conscience\u201d and citizens\u2019 inner beliefs as strongly as on their outward performances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Some of the founders&#8217; civic hopes, visions, and \u2018origin stories\u2019 animated the civic-republican culture of Brewster, King, and Obama \u2013 as well as the culture of my upbringing in Longmeadow. But that culture has gone missing, other than rhetorically, in the 70 years since Miss Smith implanted a little Puritan and Hebraic discipline in an impressionable nine-year-old. Even John Adams\u2019 covenantal civic-republicanism seems to have given way to narrowly personalistic strains in evangelical Christianity and in the republic\u2019s Lockean premises, now commercialized and technologized beyond recognition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">An Evangelical evasion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jews&#8217; longstanding security in the U.S. has relied on a hard-won &#8220;Judeo-Christian&#8221; consensus that&#8217;s now being weakened by an unholy alliance. By indulging and even hyping an &#8220;End of Days&#8221; eschatology that places all Jews in the Holy Land for the Second Coming, that alliance is upsetting an American, civic-republican balance that began when early American Puritans, trying to &#8216;Hebraize&#8217; their Christianity in their new, American Zion in opposition to Rome and the Church of England, tempered their &#8220;End of Days&#8221; eschatology a bit in ways that left American Jews some wiggle room. Even strong critics of today\u2019s Zionist Organization of America can\u2019t have anticipated the intensity of its collaboration with leaders of 40 million evangelical Christian Zionists, whose theology predestines Jews to be \u2018called in\u2019 to Palestine for Armageddon, there to embrace Christ as their Messiah or else to perish in the wake of his Second Coming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This strange collaboration reflects more than a savvy Zionist maneuver to increase American support for Israel. It has ominous implications, not only for Israelis, but also for American Jews\u2019 sense of belonging and security <em>in America<\/em>. It certainly threatens Obama\u2019s American civic-republican understanding of Ezekiel because it situates Jews\u2019 destiny wholly in a final solution in a final reckoning in Palestine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Even when Puritans identified themselves as fulfilling \u201cthe type of Israel materially,\u201d Israel, they situated themselves in what Cotton Mather called \u201cthe desarts of America,\u201d believing, \u2018by the light of their consciences,\u201d that their freedom depended on virtues and practices which a liberal state and \u2018free\u2019 markets alone couldn\u2019t nourish or defend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Although Puritanism cracked beneath the weight of its own materialistic contradictions and hypocrisies in the 19th century, it had seeded a national myth that inspired generations of Americans to integrate their personal salvation with their social obligations and to challenge society\u2019s most-glaring evils. Many anti-slavery Abolitionists and critics of other capitalist abominations were Puritan to the core: When Harriet Beecher Stowe, the daughter of the Puritan-descended preacher Lyman Beecher, was growing up in the 19th century in Litchfield, Connecticut, she read \u2018<em>Magnalia Christi Americana\u2019<\/em>, Cotton Mather\u2019s magnum opus on New England Puritanism, which animated her writing of \u2018<em>Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin\u2019<\/em>, the novel that Abraham Lincoln told her was \u201cthe little book that started this great war\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThe great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right,\u201d Martin Luther King Jr said during the 1950s and \u201860s. The German philosopher Jurgen Habermas marveled at what he called the \u201cconstitutional patriotism\u201d of Americans in the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam war movements who confronted the state not in the name of nationalist fantasies of presumptively sacred national blood and soil but on behalf of an experiment testing, as Lincoln put it, whether republics relying on a higher faith and virtue can long endure. I don\u2019t see how \u201cconstitutional patriotism\u201d can be sustained without the Puritan and Hebraic wellsprings from which King and others drew their strength to face dogs, fire hoses and murder. To predestine American Jews, instead, to rapture or damnation in Palestine is to abandon them and their contributions to that American experiment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Puritans believed that although a biblically covenanted community might shelter and guide an individual\u2019s flame of faith and dignity, that community couldn\u2019t have ignited it in the first place. The spark came only from God, and its light would hearten dissenters against earthly powers. Believers sometimes went so far in judging others that they conducted witch hunts and other misguided crusades. But their depths of conviction sometimes inspired death-defying dissents, as well as fasting and repentance for excesses such the Salem witch hunts, one of whose judges, Samuel Sewall, confessed his guilt publicly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The New England cultural critic and historian Van Wyck Brooks noted in the 1920s that when the old jug of Puritan wine cracked, its liquid ran to earth as rank commercialism and its vapors floated up into airy transcendentalism. Those vapors, echoes, and remnants, along with recent tremors in the Zeitgeist, make old orthodoxies seem almost plausible amid today\u2019s deepening doubts and fears about the present. Early Protestant Christianity gave dissent a legitimacy that was drawn partly from Hebraism\u2019s law-grounded moral order, to resist monkish or airy otherworldliness. Somewhere between airy transcendentalism and Gilded Age commercialism, there arose a civic-republican synthesis which countless Jewish immigrants invigorated, contributing modern skills and aspirations along with a residual, covenantal moral rigor. Some, such as the poet Emma Lazarus, whose verses grace the Statue of Liberty, and the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, matched the cultural influence of flinty Yankees such as my fourth-grade teacher Miss Smith in riding and channeling Puritan\/Hebraic and Enlightenment currents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Will Americans ever again harness their personal struggles to such powerful currents, inspiring ordinary individuals to bear civic republican obligations nobly, even redemptively? Even to propose any such \u201cpilgrim\u2019s progress\u201d in today&#8217;s America may be only to imagine working one\u2019s way up dry streambeds toward wellsprings that have themselves run dry. The evangelical Christian historian William Vance Trollinger, Jr. <a href=\"https:\/\/ecommons.udayton.edu\/cgi\/viewcontent.cgi?article=1044&amp;context=hst_fac_pub\">has observed <\/a>that \u201cMany Jews in the United States and in Israel are willing to swallow their concerns and accept the support of Hagee and other Christian Zionists,\u201d and he counters wisely that \u201cenabling such typecasting carries with it significant dangers, given that the prophetic script can change (particularly if Jews do not play their Christian-assigned roles).\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Some Jews still pretend to role-play: When <em>New York Times<\/em> columnist Bret Stephens was editor-in-chief of the neoconservative <em>Jerusalem Post<\/em> in 2003, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.israelnationalnews.com\/Articles\/Article.aspx\/1908\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">he characterised Christian Zionists<\/a> as \u201ca huge reservoir of support\u201d that Jews would be \u201cstupid to spurn, especially when we don\u2019t have so many friends and allies\u201d. Even as late as 2015, Stephens, then a columnist for <em>The Wall Street Journal,<\/em> accepted an invitation from Pastor Hagee\u2019s Christians United for Israel to interview American presidential candidates for the 2016 election. And the Zionist Organization of America invited alt-right firebrand Trump adviser Steve Bannon to address its conference in 2017 and gave him a standing ovation, notwithstanding Bannon\u2019s documented links to anti-Semitic white nationalists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jewish Zionists who indulge a Christian Zionist theology that\u2019s even more apocalyptic than that of the Rev. Bush in 1844 are hollowing out both American Jews\u2019 and \u201cmainline\u201d Protestants\u2019 civic-republican foundations. They\u2019re enlarging the civic vacuum into which have swept demagogues such as Glenn Beck, the televangelist who produced a three-part Fox News series denouncing the Jewish financier George Soros as a malignant \u201cpuppet master,\u2019 and such as the torch-bearing white supremacists who marched onto the University of Virginia campus in 2017 shouting, \u201cThe Jews will not replace us!,&#8221; and such as the conspiracy fantasist who massacred Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue a year later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Forsaken?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/jimsleeper.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/image-3.png\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Jewish youth rescued from the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp show their camp tattoos on their forearms on board the refugee immigration ship Mataroa July 15, 1945 at Haifa port. (Zoltan Kluger\/GPO via Getty Images)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Many Jews of my American generation grew up with photos like this, not as historical curiosities but as reminders of what we ourselves might not have escaped had we been born only a decade or so earlier in the Europe of our grandparents, instead of in postwar America. (That was true of me, born in Worcester, MA, in 1947 to parents whose Lithuanian-Jewish parents had emigrated to the U.S. shortly before World War I. Had I been born in 1937 in my paternal grandfather\u2019s village of Dusetos &#8212;<em>\u201cDushat,\u201d<\/em> as he and other Jews pronounced it &#8212; I wouldn\u2019t have survived what happened to Jews still living there in the summer of 1941.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jews who\u2019ve facilitated but also challenged modernity\u2019s dislocations have often been targets of others\u2019 resentments, owing to what George Steiner called their role as \u201ca moral irritant and insomniac\u201d in Western civilization and as what Assaf Sagiv, in his essay <a href=\"https:\/\/azure.org.il\/include\/print.php?id=242\"><strong>\u201cGeorge Steiner\u2019s Jewish Problem,\u201d<\/strong> <\/a>called an &#8220;unwitting catalyst and interlocutor for the darkest impulses of man.\u201d Steiner considered that role \u201can honor beyond honors,\u201d but some Jews who\u2019ve been persecuted, or haunted by memories of persecution, have resorted to sinuous subservience to established powers, especially in times of populist frustration and backlash. The Jew as fixer or apologist for the powerful \u2014 suspicious and opportunistic, legally and commercially underhanded, contemptuous of detractors \u2013 has been a stereotype too often earned by Jews such as Trump\u2019s former henchmen Michael Cohen, Roger Stone, and Allen Weisselberg, who\u2019ve acted as if such behavior would serve them in societies presumed hostile to progressive, humanitarian hopes and even to Jews.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Not only some Jews have latched onto preemptively negative assessments of their societies. Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, a Roman Catholic who became a Trump acolyte and chair of the U.S. House of Representatives\u2019 Republican Conference, became a self-appointed alarmist against American antisemitism when she spearheaded a Dec. 5, 2023 House committee hearing on what she called \u201cthe rot of antisemitism\u201d in student protests against Israel\u2019s attack on Gaza. Stefanik demanded that university presidents seated before her answer \u201cYes or No\u201d to her accusatory question about anti-Gaza war campus protesters: \u201cDoes calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard\u2019s rules of bullying and harassment?\u201d So saying, she struck a politically decisive blow not only against the presidents of Penn and Harvard, whom she admonished to resign because of their equivocal responses, but also against American civic-republican culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Some protesters who shout \u201cFrom the river to the sea, Palestine will be free\u201d or \u201cGlobalize the intifada!\u201d and who hold Israel \u201centirely responsible\u201d for Hamas\u2019 violence are indeed historically uninformed and politically immature. But very few of them have been \u201ccalling for the genocide of the Jews,\u201d as Stefanik insisted. Instead, they\u2019ve been <em>accusing Jews <\/em>of <em>committing genocide against Palestinians<\/em>. Stefanik flipped their script to make their intentions seem genocidal against Jewish victims and to make university presidents seem their enablers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Tellingly enough, Stefanik herself had been asked to resign from the advisory board of the Harvard Kennedy School\u2019s Institute of Politics two years earlier, when she supported Trump\u2019s efforts to overturn the 2020 election with her \u201cpublic assertions about voter fraud\u2026 that, in the words of the school&#8217;s dean, &#8220;have no basis in evidence, and\u2026 public statements about court actions related to the election that are incorrect.\u201d When Stefanik refused to resign and was removed by the board, she departed gracelessly,&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.democratandchronicle.com\/story\/news\/2021\/01\/12\/elise-stefanik-harvard-trump-removed\/6638194002\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">claiming<\/a>&nbsp;that it was a \u201cbadge of honor to join the long line of leaders who have been boycotted, protested, and canceled by colleges and universities across America\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>_________________________________________________________________<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Protesters who shout \u2018From the river to the sea\u2019 or \u2018Globalize the intifada\u2019 may be historically uninformed or politically immature. But they\u2019re not \u2018calling for the genocide of the Jews.\u2019 They\u2019re&nbsp;<em>accusing Jews&nbsp;<\/em>of&nbsp;<em>committing genocide<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>________________________________________________________________<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Anti-antisemites like Stefanik aren&#8217;t wrong to charge that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/international\/archive\/2023\/10\/hamas-covenant-israel-attack-war-genocide\/675602\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hamas\u2019 intentions toward Jews<\/a> are genocidal and nihilistic and that Hamas is despotic to Palestinians under its rule. But that doesn\u2019t cancel the historical reality that English settlers who founded Harvard and Yale, and later, the American republic were sometimes as genocidal as the biblical Hebrews upon whom they modeled themselves. Condemning today\u2019s student protesters for excusing or defending Hamas while ignoring the murderous extremism of Israeli settlers on the West Bank and of the IDF in Gaza only intensifies what the writer Adam Shatz has called&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.lrb.co.uk\/the-paper\/v45\/n21\/adam-shatz\/vengeful-pathologies\"><strong>\u201cvengeful pathologies\u201d<\/strong><\/a>&nbsp;of both Holocaust-traumatized Jews and Nakba-traumatized Palestinians.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Such pathologies are inflaming not only those who are tied ancestrally or materially to either side in this war; they&#8217;re also inflaming people with no such ties who are enraged by this war far more than by other regional conflicts that are as devastating as the IDF\u2019s killing of tens of thousands of Gazans, including many women and children, and destroying their homes, schools and hospitals. Unless we\u2019re truly unable to \u201cbear too much reality,\u201d as T. S. Eliot surmised, we also need to note the sadism of Hamas leaders who\u2019ve maimed countless Palestinian dissenters, as well as the sadism of Hamas fighters and allies whose body-camera footage depicted their murders of Israelis who were forced to watch their own children or parents being butchered just before being slaughtered themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Some young Americans protesting the Gaza war are engaged in an ersatz politics driven by zeal to \u201cprove themselves\u201d in moralistic posturing and ideological position-taking. \u201cThis concern for the Palestinians is not a matter of anti-Semitism so much as it is a reflection of self-absorption,\u201d Shatz wrote in <strong><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thenation.com\/article\/world\/writers-or-missionaries\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The Nation<\/a> <\/em><\/strong>in 2014. \u201cPalestinians are for the radical Western left what Algerians were for Third Worldists\u2026: natural-born resisters, fighting not only Israel but its imperial patrons\u2026. Palestine is still \u2018<em>the<\/em>&nbsp;question\u2019 because it holds up a mirror to us. \u2018Too many people want to save Palestine\u2019 one activist said to me. But it could just as well be said that too many people want to be saved <em>by <\/em>Palestine.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The \u201call-consuming preoccupation with America and Israel,\u201d Shatz continued, has left some progressives \u201cstrangely incurious about the crimes for which the West can\u2019t be blamed and the developments, such as the politicization of sectarian identity, that are shaking the region far more profoundly than the Israeli-Palestinian arena.\u201d Since progressives champion freedoms of speech, of conscience, of sexual identity, and of reproductive choice, and since hundreds of millions of people in the Middle East and North Africa are denied those freedoms, why aren\u2019t progressives chanting, \u201cFrom Tehran to Tripoli, Muslims will be free!\u201d?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My criticism of the left on such grounds doesn\u2019t excuse the Zionist movement and Israel\u2019s degrading and now, yes, genocidal assaults on Palestinians. Yet I cannot condemn Israel uniquely when it&#8217;s blamed or valorized by Americans, some of whose own ancestors destroyed Indigenous peoples and enslaved millions of Africans, or when their justifiable condemnations of destructive Zionism ignore or excuse an equally destructive, state-theocratic Islamism. \u201cForgetfulness, and\u2026 historical error, are essential in the creation of a nation,\u201d noted&nbsp;Ernst Renan,&nbsp;the 19th-century scholar of Semitic languages and civilizations. Equally \u201cessential,\u201d it would seem, are demagogic leaders who safeguard their own nations\u2019 false memories by ginning up moralistic condemnations of other peoples\u2019 vengeful pathologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Beyond vengeful pathologies<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A wiser, more effective strategy would acknowledge with Renan that no nation\u2019s emergence has been morally innocent, and it would seek fuller explanations and answers, even when they\u2019re painful. Several courageous American Jewish writers have tried to do this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The former liberal Zionist Peter Beinart has held <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=8Yf3hXxh6ZM\"><strong>instructive public conversations<\/strong><\/a> with young Palestinian activists and thinkers such as Ahmed Moor. The <em>New York Times<\/em> columnist <a href=\"http:\/\/transcript:%20Ezra%20Klein%20Interviews%20Amjad%20Iraqi%20-%20The%20New%20York%20Times%20(nytimes.com)\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>Ezra Klein<\/strong><\/a> has held reflective, informative conversations with Palestinian and Israeli thinkers such as Amjad Iraqi and Yossi Klein Halevi. Roger Berkowitz, director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, worries that changes in the nature and dimensions of war have ended its plausibility as a \u201csolution\u201d to conflicts such as the Israeli-Palestinian, but that has left him with a tragic realism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In 2014, in a remarkably prescient essay, <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/When The Hell That Is War Loses Its Power - The American Interest (the-american-interest.com)\">\u201cWhen the Hell that is War Loses its Power,\u201d<\/a><\/strong> Berkowitz gave richly deserved attention to Sari Nusseibeh, a Palestinian philosopher and president for 20 years of al Quds University in East Jerusalem, who had tried to build bridges and common ground with Israelis for decades but who, despite meeting some very fine, humanist Israelis, encountered a reality that has become too hard to bear. \u201cDo I see Israel now as a failed project?,\u201d Nusseibeh asked himself. \u201cDo I see a time when, like South Africa, it will disintegrate from within? I cannot say I can see that. But I can easily imagine it happening. I can easily see how whatever it is that is rotten and has embedded itself in the system will eventually wear it out of existence, replacing it by something else. Not by war, but by its own body-grown cells\u2026. &nbsp;It will not be place for normal human beings who want to pursue normal lives, let alone a place where anyone can hope to fulfill a sublime life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Berkowitz adds that \u201cWar no longer serves&#8230; to resolve those problems that cannot be resolved politically.&#8221; Instead, we now live in an age of total war that \u201cerases the traditional distinctions that underlie the law of war. Civilians are willingly used as shields and children are seen as reinforcements. Since in total war, the decimation of an enemy is the only path to victory, the logic\u2026 is inherently escalatory. Nothing can be held back\u2026. The tragedy that is the Middle East would, traditionally, have been solved by a war\u201d in which \u201c[t]he Israeli advantage in weapons of war would be met by the Palestinian advantage in unconventional warfare\u2026. But war today is increasingly impossible, at least wars with clear victors and losers\u2026.It is nearly inconceivable that Israel and Palestine would fight a war to the end in which one side was defeated\u2014imagine the unthinkable horrors that defeating either side would require\u2026. \u201cAnd thus we are left,&#8230;.as Nusseibeh sees, with the hell of war as a relatively permanent part of everyday life. Nowhere is that possibility more visible than in the Middle East.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We no longer need to \u201c<em>imagine <\/em>the unthinkable\u201d because it&#8217;s unfolding before us and, as Nusseibeh suggests, within some of us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Beinart, Klein, Shatz, Berkowitz, and other, even younger writers now exemplify another irony: Jews\u2019 ancient, proto-cosmopolitan breakthrough still drives liberal Jews who are passionate about America, not only because their own forebears escaped the European nightmare but also because the Puritan-Hebrew emphasis on communal covenant has figured so strongly in America&#8217;s civic-republican ethos. Free now of Calvinist preoccupations with personal salvation, and also largely free of rabbinical constraints, the liberal Jews whom I\u2019ve mentioned are more \u201cJewish\u201d than ever in striving to strengthen a covenant that entwines personal renewal with public progress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Where To?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThe past is never dead; it\u2019s not even past,\u201d wrote the novelist William Faulkner. From the biblical Abraham&#8217;s breaking Ur\u2019s idols to Abraham Lincoln&#8217;s forcing a bloody \u201cnew birth of freedom,\u201d and from Kingman Brewster\u2019s and Martin Luther King\u2019s handshake in1964 to Bill Clinton&#8217;s 1992 campaign for a \u201cNew Covenant\u201d to Barack Obama\u2019s \u201cChange we can believe in,\u201d America\u2019s political culture has often invoked a past whose threads we&#8217;d need to re-weave now somehow to keep the republic from dissolving into a neoliberal free-for-all or tumbling into a Trumpian abyss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Such a re-weaving would require acknowledging that, as John Winthrop anticipated, vagaries of&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/lareviewofbooks.org\/article\/how-hollow-speech-enables-hostile-speech-and-what-to-do-about-it\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>finance capital and intrusive consumer marketing<\/strong><\/a>&nbsp;have hollowed out the civic-republican culture that was planted problematically by Puritans. That culture sustained what G.K. Chesterton would later call \u201ca nation with the soul of a church\u201d for nearly two centuries, as it was still doing when I sat on the floor in Ethel Smith\u2019s classroom. That civic &#8220;church&#8221; expected us young citizens to be faithful, yet its constitution prohibited it from imposing a particular ecclesiastical doctrine. If a religion tries to rule with state power, as Puritans certainly did and as today\u2019s Christian nationalists and Catholic integralists intend to do, that religion can become odious, no matter what its Grand Inquisitors say in its defense. Yet without a faith that runs deeper spiritually than legalism, a society will wither and die.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>____________________________________________________________________________________________________________<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>If a religion presumes to rule with state power, as the Puritans did and as today\u2019s Christian nationalists and Catholic integralists intend to do, it can become odious no matter what its Grand Inquisitors say in its defense. Yet without a faith that runs deeper than legalism, a society will wither and die.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>____________________________________________________________________________________________________________<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The depth of that challenge often takes pundits and politicians by surprise. Civic-republican renewal and, with it, democracy&#8217;s prospects, can&#8217;t be conjured up in newspaper columns, blog posts, cable commentaries, and tweets. It has to be cultivated patiently in early social education, civic organizing, and political outreach as envisioned by John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, and others. The American civil-rights movement that enabled the handshake between Brewster and King struggled for decades to open such moments of opportunity, sometimes by discomfiting comfortable whites with what the late Rep. John Lewis, himself a former seminarian, called the \u201cgood trouble\u201d that prompts both anger and admiration, as Rosa Parks did by refusing to move to the back of a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama a decade before the King-and-Kingman handshake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Neither pundits nor plutocrats nourish such faith and action. Who might? I got a clue in 2015, when I attended my Longmeadow High School class&#8217;s 50th year reunion. We were meeting three weeks before the publishing industry&#8217;s huge <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stacyschiff.com\/stacy-schiff-events.html\">promotion<\/a> of Stacy Schiff&#8217;s energetically researched, dazzlingly narrated, ideationally empty <em>The Witches: Salem 1692<\/em>, with a 500-person Manhattan armory gala, dinners up and down Park Avenue, a book tour rivaling Odysseus&#8217; travels or David Niven\u2019s in &#8220;Around the World in Eighty Days,&#8221; and <em>four<\/em> feature pieces in <em>The New York Times. <\/em>I&#8217;ve had my say elsewhere about what was wrong with <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/democracyjournal.org\/arguments\/the-self-flattering-assumptions-behind-stacy-schiffs-the-witches\/\">that coronation of Schiff\u2019s and our self-servingly damning assessment of Puritans.<\/a><\/strong> But not until that reunion in 2015 did I begin to understand how growing up amid remnants and echoes of Puritan ways had shaped my reckonings with our civic-cultural crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Probably the only public &#8220;sin&#8221; we Longmeadow High School students committed came in painting &#8220;LHS &#8217;65&#8221; in huge white letters on a tobacco barn just across the town line in Enfield. But soon enough we committed sins of the heart and lower viscera that Edwards would have probed. So I was surprised at our reunion to discover that I owed something better to classmates whose Puritan antecedents had seldom crossed my mind. There I learned for the first time that the family of my classmate Will Thayer, one of our football stars, had come to Massachusetts in the 1630s and that he had become a minister in the Congregational Church, the original Puritan church, working with poor residents of Brooklyn&#8217;s beleaguered, mostly Black East New York &#8212; a neighborhood that, in an unlikely coincidence, I, too, had come to know well.<br><br>How had commitments like that been sown in Will Thayer and me while we were growing up in arboreal, funereal Longmeadow? Talking with Will and other classmates &#8212; Susan Shepard&#8217;s family, I learned, donated part of the land in 17th-century Cambridge that&#8217;s part of Harvard Yard; <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thedreamoflove.com\/\">Clark Shattuck<\/a>,<\/strong> a deeply reflective, artistic composer, had an ancestor, John Shattuck, who drowned in the Charles River in 1675 while returning from a battle in King Phillip&#8217;s War and another Shattuck ancestor who&#8217;d fought in Lexington in 1775; and Barbara Hubbard showed me that her mother&#8217;s lineage runs back to William Bradford, first governor of the Pilgrims&#8217; Plymouth Colony &#8212; I found myself awash in memories of growing up as a stranger among these kids half a century earlier. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>With due allowance for the fact that the Longmeadow I&#8217;d grown up in was hardly the Longmeadow of its Puritan founders, I understood how wrong we are to psycho-dramatize, satirize, and commercialize my classmates&#8217; ancestors. Do we have the courage to assess them without seeing them only  &#8220;in a mirror that reflects most brightly our own self-satisfied faces,&#8221; as the historian<strong> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/11\/01\/books\/review\/the-witches-salem-1692-by-stacy-schiff.html?_r=1\">Jane Kamensky has rightly rapped Schiff for doing<\/a><\/strong>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I encountered another instance of civic faith, as deep as the commingling of Hebraism and Calvinism that I&#8217;d known in Longmeadow of the 1950s, one wintry morning in 1968, my junior year at the old, all-male, nearly all-white Yale. Plodding along that morning on my way to a class, I noticed about fifty undergraduates gathered silently around three seniors and the university&#8217;s chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, Jr. One of the seniors was speaking against a gusting wind and, it seemed to me, against fear. &#8220;The government claims we&#8217;re criminals,&#8221; I heard him say as I leaned in to listen, &#8220;but <em>we<\/em> say it\u2019s the government that\u2019s criminal in waging this war.&#8221; He and the others were handing Coffin their draft cards, identical to the one in my wallet, and they were refusing conscription upon graduation six months hence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Coffin was there to bless a courage that few of us who were watching fully understood. \u201cBelieve me, \u201che said, smiling, a strand of his graying hair flying in the wind, \u201cI know what it\u2019s like to wake up feeling like a sensitive grain of wheat lookin\u2019 at a millstone.\u201d&nbsp;Although his&nbsp;Calvinist theology was conservative in many ways, it was revolutionary in carrying forward the Hebraic axial break with ancient Ur\u2019s idols and its conviction that resistance to tyranny is obedience to God. Something in us grasped at that convinced energy, because we were scared: As far as we knew, these guys were about to be arrested and sent to prison, and we felt arrested morally by their example.&nbsp;Something in their bearing of that reality&nbsp;made them seem as deeply, bravely prophetic as Rosa Parks. As the quiet dignity of her performance had credited her segregationist oppressors with some decency even while exposing their shortcomings, it had reconstituted civic life instead of trashing it. Now, too, as the seniors before us took grave risks to resist the United States government in the name of a civic nation transcending \u201cblood and soil\u201d and even capitalism and Cold War ideology, American civil society seemed to have risen from slumber and to be walking again, re-moralizing the state and the law. As I watched, the silent, wild confusion I was feeling gave way to something like awe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Some considered those student \u201cdemonstrators\u201d foolish, even elitist. A neoconservative professor to whom I described what I&#8217;d witnessed that morning at Yale dismissed the students who refused conscription by characterizing them as privileged moralists who didn\u2019t want to get their hands dirty in a necessary war. But the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas called acts of witness like theirs \u201cconstitutional patriotism,\u201d and he marveled that Americans were resisting the state on behalf of a civic-republican experiment testing whether republics that rely on a higher, deeper faith can endure. In&nbsp;<em>The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,&nbsp;<\/em>Edward Gibbon reminds us that Rome slid almost imperceptibly from republican self-governance to imperial rule when Augustus sensed that \u201cpeople would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As we deplete the stored-up moral capital of America\u2019s original Hebraic-Calvinist covenant, we\u2019re losing its conviction that resistance to tyranny is obedience to God. Let\u2019s at least give the biblical authors some credit for taking the sublimity of that loss straight up instead of chasing false consolations. Our best hope of transcending realities that seem too much to bear may come from seeing them for what they are, not for imagining them as we wish them to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong><em>Read more from Jim Sleeper on Israel\/Palestine:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>       <a href=\"https:\/\/washingtonmonthly.com\/2024\/01\/02\/israel-and-the-politics-of-paroxysm\/\"><strong>Israel and the Politics of Paroxysm | Washington Monthly<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>       <a href=\"https:\/\/jimsleeper.com\/?p=4289\"><strong>jimsleeper.com \u00bb What Israel\u2019s 2009 war in Gaza should have taught us<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong><em>And on free speech and history in America:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.historynewsnetwork.org\/article\/what-the-campus-free-speech-crusade-wont-say\">What the campus &#8216;free speech&#8217; crusade won&#8217;t say. <\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.salon.com\/2019\/05\/27\/billionaires-cant-fix-college-jim-sleeper-on-the-real-crisis-in-higher-education\/\"><strong>Billionaires can\u2019t fix college: Jim Sleeper on the real crisis in higher education<\/strong><\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.salon.com\/2019\/02\/25\/many-americans-want-a-new-national-story-how-about-this-one\/\"><strong>Many Americans want a new national story: How about this one<\/strong><\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.salon.com\/2024\/11\/05\/and-the-money-men-billionaires-are-making-the-hitler-mistake\/\"><strong>Trump and the money men: Billionaires are repeating the Hitler mistake | Salon.com<\/strong><\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/lareviewofbooks.org\/article\/how-hollow-speech-enables-hostile-speech-and-what-to-do-about-it\/\"><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table><tbody><tr><td><\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The answers are older and deeper than some of us want to know. By&nbsp;Jim Sleeper (January, 2025) First, just for fun, here&#8217;s A-I&#8217;s account of this essay&#8217;s content and its reception. Actually, it&#8217;s not just for fun; somewhat to my surprise, the A-I account is measured, accurate, and even (dare I say it?) insightful. It&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4368"}],"version-history":[{"count":349,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5599,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4368\/revisions\/5599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}