A Primer for the Promised Land

To have the pleasure of knowing, and learning from, Peter Berkowitz, is to encounter a polymathic mind whose insightful intellect ranges across politics and the academy, law, philosophy, and history. My own experience working with Berkowitz as a member of the State Department’s Commission on Inalienable Human Rights was a true privilege for which I will be forever grateful. The range of Berkowitz’s knowledge can be found in a newly published collection of columns that are ostensibly all about one subject—the state of the State of Israel—but range across 10 years of that country’s controversies and crises, especially on the debate on the future of the Judiciary and the world after October 7.

Some of the reflections regarding the latter subject are especially invaluable. Thus there is Berkowitz’s succinct summary of all that is wrong with the odious International Court of Justice in The Hague. Drawing on his own experience in foreign policy, Berkowitz describes all the true injustices this purported court has ignored. Most noteworthy of all, perhaps, is the "internment of some 1 million Muslim Uyghurs by the Chinese Communist Party."

And then there is a moving description of the author engaging in the unusual activity of teaching the writings of Burke, Mill, and Locke, to a group of adult members of the Israeli Haredi community (often inaccurately rendered "ultra-Orthodox"). I know of no one else who could have the right balance of gifts to lead this unique form of pedagogy. Berkowitz movingly describes the discussion between himself and his students, and reflects how freedom and religion are not "inevitable antagonists," but rather "working partners and perhaps friends."