I. Is America Exceptional?
In a single afternoon, a visitor to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem can walk through several thousand years of Jewish life. The Ketef Hinnom scrolls, with their priestly blessing, predate the Babylonian exile. There are reconstructed synagogue interiors carried out of Germany and India and Suriname and Italy, silver Torah cases from Persia, bridal costumes from Morocco, illuminated manuscripts from medieval Spain. Each object encodes a way of life, customs of marriage and burial, a liturgy, a set of distinctively Jewish answers to the permanent questions of how to live and what to pass on. Most of the communities that produced these objects are gone. The Jews survive, thank God, but the societies that wrote these scrolls have dissolved into history.
There is one community conspicuously absent from those galleries: American Jewry. Why are the Jews of America missing from this portrayal of what the Jewish people has created in its long dispersion? The most obvious answer is that our story is too young to have deposited its artifacts. Jews began arriving in North America in the 1650s, and the great migrations came only in the last decades of the 19th century. By the standards of Jewish communities that endured in Persia for two-and-a-half millennia, or in Yemen for 2,000 years, or in Ashkenaz for more than a thousand, American Jewish history has barely begun.
We also know that the American Jewish experience seems different. No previous diaspora can claim the security, the wealth, and the level of participation in the major institutions of the world’s most powerful nation; and even when access has been withheld, we have had the freedom to build institutions of our own. If a great Jewish civilization were simply a function of safety, resources, and liberty, American Jewry may already be the greatest diaspora in history. So why is our case in the Israel Museum still empty? How does our way of living compare to the legacy and culture of the Jewish past? What is the meaning of being an American Jew?
Now look again at those galleries, because they are not, in the end, a celebration. They are an elegy. Persian Jewry, Moroccan Jewry, the Jews of Yemen and the Jews of Poland: each of them venerable, and each of them gone or nearly so. They vanished because they were politically helpless, dependent on the tolerance of the powers among whom they lived, and when that tolerance was withdrawn there was nothing they could do. The community that made the ornate silver Torah case was not defeated in argument. It was brought low by forces it had no means to resist. Without ever quite announcing it, the real argument of the gallery in Jerusalem is Zionism: only Jewish sovereignty, with the means of Jewish national defense, can secure the achievements of Jewish civilization and rescue them from the caprice of the nations.
And yet here we are, in the United States, millions of us, across the generations. We have chosen America. Viewed in everyday human terms, the choice is understandable: we are settled here, in school and in work; we have family here, living and buried; we speak English, and we love our community and country. Yet viewed through the Providential eyes of history, our choice rests—or should rest—on a deeper proposition: that America is genuinely different from every prior place of Jewish dwelling, that the iron logic of the Jewish diaspora has an exception, that America is that exception, and that the laws of political gravity which consigned all those other Jewish histories to the galleries of the Israel Museum do not apply here.
For most of its history, America understood itself as a biblical nation, shaped in its origins and purpose by the Hebraic idea of the covenant. This is the heart of American exceptionalism: not our wealth, not our might, not our toleration of religious difference, but our self-image as a nation made in the Israelite image. Seen in this light, the Jewish presence in America is not an accident of migration but, rightly understood, a summons.
In the current age, American exceptionalism is on trial. Amid the celebrations of America at 250, there is a widespread feeling that something in our common life has unraveled, that the institutions are hollow, the families smaller, the young more anxious, the public angrier and more distracted than it has ever been. And folded inside that general unease, for Jews, is a more specific alarm, because the old signals are sounding again, and loudly: in the universities, in the voting booths, on our screens, and in the streets, anti-Semitism is ascendant. American Jews rightly wonder whether the proposition of American exceptionalism may be less stable or less true than we once believed.
The Jews of past ages and lands left their legacy encased in museums only when their histories were finished. Our history as American Jews is not finished. The trial of American exceptionalism is not a reason to flee or surrender; it is a reason to rededicate ourselves, in partnership with American Christians, to renewing our nation’s Hebraic spirit and rekindling our biblical inheritance. To understand our path forward, our first task is regaining clarity about the true nature of the American project and our Jewish purpose within it.
II. In the Israelite Image
The fear that America has come off the tracks is usually voiced as a political complaint, and with reason. The administrative state writes the laws instead of elected legislators, the national government crowds out the states and civil society, the office of the president has overwhelmed the other branches designed to hold our Madisonian system in balance. But whether one thinks the constitutional machinery is broken or merely worn, these political tendencies are symptoms of deeper disorders.
To locate them, we’re going to have to look at America in a more capacious sense, at our regime as a whole, at the things that bring us honor and shame, what we teach our children, the stories we tell ourselves about what a human being is and what is required of citizenship. Aristotle treated poetry and drama as political questions because he understood that the formation of souls is the most important political work a city can do. That formation is often prior to law, because law presupposes the kind of people—peaceable or warlike, altruistic or avaricious—whose actions it will restrain. There have been substantial changes in American politics and law since our founding, and we have always been a nation with regional, cultural, and moral divisions. Yet our common culture, until recently, remained rooted in a shared biblical inheritance, a covenantal account of what bound Americans to one another, in the capacity for prophetic self-accountability, and in a sense that the national story has a transcendent moral purpose.
In the sociology of American liberty, biblical religion supplied the habits that restrain liberty from collapsing into license and fueled the underlying faith that gave Americans our pioneering spirit, beginning with the courage to cross the ocean from the old world to the new. This biblical inheritance does considerably more than shape our actions. It also provides a tableau of the American moral imagination. It instructs our self-understanding. And it is in light of ancient Israel that we became who we are.
From the beginning, Americans saw our national story as a recapitulation of the sacred drama of Exodus. Americans understood their own collective strivings in the pattern of a people in bondage, a tyrant who would not let them go, a passage through sea and wilderness, the wanderings towards and trials in a promised land of natural abundance. The Puritans read their own crossing as a new exodus, seeing England as the Egypt they had fled and the new world as the promised land for which they were bound. When Franklin and Jefferson were asked to design a seal for the new republic, each reached for different scenes from this biblical motif. In June of 1790, Washington himself, writing to the Hebrew congregation at Savannah, hoped that the same “wonder-working Deity, who long since delivering the Hebrews from their Egyptian Oppressors planted them in the promised land—whose providential agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States as an independent nation—still continue to water them with the dews of Heaven and to make the inhabitants of every denomination participate in the temporal and spiritual blessings of that people whose God is Jehovah.” In the desperate year of 1861, staring down a constitutional and military crisis of the deepest kind, Lincoln hoped that, upon entering office, he would serve as “an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people.” By invoking the chosenness of ancient Israel, Lincoln took his place in a long and distinguished tradition.
The Exodus story gave the most oppressed Americans the very language they used for their own tear-stained longings for liberty. African slaves made the Israelite story their own and sang about Egypt as the plantation and the Jordan as the river to be crossed on the way to freedom; a century later, the Civil Rights movement that completed their emancipation kept the same cadence, and in Martin Luther King’s last great oration he told the people of Memphis that he had been to the mountaintop and had seen the promised land. Exodus provided America with its vernacular of deliverance, the conviction that bondage is not the last word and that freedom was a providential gift that could be secured by human action. For the Israelites, liberation from tyranny was forever intertwined with and completed by the moral and metaphysical teachings of Sinai. In America, a free people needed to be worthy of and capable of freedom. Only a biblical culture would make that possible.
III. America’s Biblical Inheritance: Covenant, Law, Prophecy, and Providence
Within this Hebraic frame lay the structures by which Americans would order their common life. Four of them matter most: covenant, law, prophetic speech, and a providential understanding of history as a directional drama. They are not four separate concepts but four parts of a single grammar, and like the parts of any grammar they are never found in isolation. The covenant is carried in the law; the law is the standard that the prophet invokes; the whole of it unfolds as a history with a purpose. To take them up one at a time is a convenience of exposition, not a claim that they can be spliced apart.
The first is covenant, which binds together the nation into a cohesive political unit. It is what makes it possible for the preamble to the Constitution to begin “We the people of the United States.” A contract, by contrast, is struck between parties who remain, underneath, strangers, each calculating its own interest, each bound only so long as the binding is worth the cost. The moral force of a contract is derived entirely from its consequences, and when the consequences shift the obligation loosens. But a covenant does not regulate a relationship, it creates one. The parties to a covenant do not stay strangers. They become, through the covenant, a new thing, a people, bound by obligations that the other party’s failure does not dissolve, because the obligations are not finally about interest at all. They are about identity. To break a contract is to incur a penalty. To break a covenant is to betray what you have become.
The Hebrew Bible is the source of this idea in the West. Sinai is not a bargain between Israel and God; it is the act by which former slaves are constituted as a nation with a law and a purpose. When the passengers on the Mayflower bound themselves in 1620 to “covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic,” they were not negotiating but enacting a biblical form and constituting thereby a people. When John Winthrop told those aboard the Arbella that they must be “knit together in this work as one man,” he was evoking passages from Judges (9:3; 20:1, 11), 1Samuel (11:7), 2Samuel (19:14), Ezra (3:1), Nehemiah (8:1), and many other places in which ancient Israel is said to have come together k’ish ehad, as one man, for military mobilization or national revival.
The closing pledge of America’s Declaration of Independence, in which the signers bind to each other their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, is a covenantal undertaking and not a contractual clause. The generations of Americans that followed are invited into this covenant, whose terms bind us to live in fidelity to the American story and way of life.
The second concept is a distinctly Hebraic view of law. That law forms character is not an idea original to ancient Israel. It can be found in Plato’s Laws and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. What the Mosaic law adds is not the fact of formation but the source of its authority, the end toward which it forms, and the reach of its claim. The Mosaic law, like the decrees of Athens, is accepted by the whole people, who answer at Sinai that they will do and they will hear. But the Athenian people, having made their law, could unmake it, and could put Socrates to death, with no higher law to which the verdict might be appealed; the demos was itself the final authority. At Sinai the people consent to a law they cannot revoke, given by a Sovereign higher than themselves, so that it binds the ruler as readily as the ruled and answers to neither. The Hebraic contribution is not the consent but what the consent is to: a law above king and people alike, which having accepted they are no longer free to unmake.
The notion that even kings and high priests are subject to the law is the part of the Mosaic inheritance that most plainly shaped the American self-understanding. America placed its law above its rulers and made the rulers answerable to it: a government, in John Adams’s formula, of laws and not of men. Even a skeptic like Thomas Paine made this a central pillar in his 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, which did as much as any other work of polemic to turn Americans toward independence. In contrasting free and absolute government, he wrote that in the one the king is law, while in the other “the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.” He proposed that a charter be laid upon the divine law, the word of God, and a crown set upon it, so that all the world might see where sovereignty truly lay, and then that the crown be broken and scattered among the people. Where is the king of America, Paine asked? “I’ll tell you, friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Great Britain.”
The Greek legislator aimed at human excellence by cultivating the virtues that complete a man and perfect his city. The Mosaic law aims past it, at holiness, at a people set apart among the nations. Here, American law deliberately does not follow. The American legal order is the heir of multiple inheritances, and alongside the Hebraic strain runs a liberal and Lockean one that consciously abstains from trying to make men holy. Rather than forming souls toward a specific moral purpose, American law secures an arena of religious freedom within which citizens may form their children according to their own religious convictions. The architects of American constitutionalism left this vital task up to the family, the congregation, and the school.
Greek lawgiving aimed at the formation of the citizen and the gentleman, who were minorities in the polis. The biblical vision, by contrast, is rooted in the idea that all men are equally created in the image and likeness of God, and so the Mosaic law applied equally to each member of the nation. The Sabbath extends to the servant and the stranger and the beast; justice is owed to the widow and the orphan and the alien within the gates; discipline falls on every Israelite alike, because each bears the image of God and is bound within the same covenant.
This is the metaphysical basis for the self-evident truth that all men are created equal. In the early years, America held this standard in principle even as it was violated in practice, keeping millions in bondage in plain contradiction to the text of the Declaration. But the standard was the nation’s own, and a standard once written into a people’s founding does not depend for its authority on the fidelity of those who hold it. It waited, and in time it prevailed, because a law that claims the whole people does not fall silent when the people betrays it. It turns back upon the nation and calls it to account.
In ancient Israel, prophets call the nation to account, and prophetic accountability is the third Hebraic frame that structures American life. It is that impulse that asks us to hold the nation to the terms of its own founding. Amos indicts the comfortable northern kingdom for succeeding at the expense of the poor. Jeremiah denies the city its comfort on the eve of its destruction, reading the catastrophe as consequence. What the prophets insist upon is that the nation is a moral subject, capable of discharging or betraying its obligations and answerable in history for the difference.
Lincoln’s Second Inaugural is the greatest prophetic speech in the national canon. Looking at the nation in the fourth year of its wartime agony, he exempts neither side and reads the war itself as a divine judgment upon the country, the wealth piled by unrequited toil to be sunk and every drop of blood drawn by the lash to be repaid by the sword. And why? Because, as Psalm 19 teaches, “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” A century later, Martin Luther King held the nation to the promise of its own founding and named racial segregation as the betrayal of a covenant the country had not honored. Lincoln and King each indicted America by its own terms in prophetic speech: the nation is a moral subject, answerable in history for what it has done.
But note that in the Hebraic model of prophetic speech, indictment is only the first movement. The prophets do not end in accusation. They end in the possibility of return, the turning back toward the covenant. Amos closes in restoration. Jeremiah writes to the exiles in Babylon to build houses and plant gardens and to “seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives.” Just so, neither Lincoln nor King ends in despair: Lincoln turns from divine judgment to “malice toward none,” and King from the betrayed promise to the dream of its fulfillment.
The fourth concept is the biblical understanding of history. The ancient world understood time as a circle: seasons turned, generations repeated, kingdoms rose and fell and rose again, and wisdom meant aligning oneself with a pattern that led nowhere, because there was nowhere for it to lead. The Hebrew Bible broke the circle. Genesis begins not in recurrence but in creation, the opening of a story, and the story has a direction. A people is called, fails, is held to account, and is summoned back, so that what falls between the beginning and the promised redemption is not mere repetition but an unfolding moral drama that continually reaffirms the moral potential and metaphysical significance of man, illuminated for the world through God’s education of the Israelites.
No American gave this sense of national time a more exact voice than Lincoln at Gettysburg. The address reaches back “four score and seven years” to a nation “conceived in Liberty,” stands in a present “testing whether that nation can long endure,” and turns toward “the unfinished work” and “the great task remaining,” so that the dead become a charge upon the living and the nation’s survival made to depend on what is done next. This is not the cyclical time in which a republic decays as all republics decay, but a single story in which a people may forfeit its inheritance or, by its own resolve under God, secure “a new birth of freedom.”
These Hebraic ideas—covenant, law, prophecy, and providence—are not four separate doctrines but one portrait drawn from four sides, the portrait of a particular kind of human being and a particular kind of human commonwealth defined by the pursuit of ordered liberty under God. Covenant shows him in his bonds, obligated by ties he did not choose. Law shows him formed, his desires shaped toward a providential end. Prophecy shows him answerable, standing under a judgment higher than his own preferences. History shows him inside a story he did not begin and cannot complete by himself. In every one he is the same creature: bound, formed, answerable, unfinished, yet on-the-way. This is the human being the Hebrew Bible gave to the West and to America, and the slow disappearance of this account of the human person underlies everything that follows. Biblical man was, among other things, the carrier of hope, for only a creature who knows that redemption is possible and that his choices have consequences can believe the way back is open.
When the Hebraic metaphysic dissolves, hope is the first thing to go. Tragic drama, comic irony, and pure evil usually compete to fill the void. Yet our present trial is not simply defined by the loss of this Hebraic metaphysic. It is something stranger. America’s Hebraic patterns of thought are still in use, but they have turned against themselves, and that is the contemporary disorder we must now examine.
IV. That Hebraic Inheritance, Inverted
Moses, in his last speech, warns the Israelites against the one danger he fears most: not the enemy at the border but the amnesia within. Beware, he says again and again, lest you forget. A people in its prosperity ceases to remember the discipline that made it free, and a people that has forgotten the terms of its freedom struggles to find its way back to them. But mere forgetting is not, at the moment, what afflicts America. If the biblical inheritance had merely faded, it could be taught again and recovered. Our problem is the inversion of our own inheritance. The patterns of biblical thought persist in perverted form; they still govern what is spoken and still supply the categories in which Americans understand themselves. But the content within them has turned against itself.
This is the insight Joshua Mitchell developed in his 2020 book American Awakening and in articles before and since. The ideologues and activists of our moment have their gatherings and rites, a hierarchy of purity and defilement, a liturgy of confession, a sense of righteousness betrayed. These are biblical categories deployed towards anti-biblical ends. Whereas Scripture asserts that where there is sin there can be repentance and atonement, the new creed ascribes sin to the immutable characteristics of race and sex, and, as we will see, to Jewish belonging, rendering repentance impossible for those in the “privileged” castes. The moral seriousness of the old language is kept; only its substance is reversed.
Begin with the family, where everything a civilization transmits is passed on first, and where its dissolution is felt first. The American family is in bad shape. The figures are familiar: the portion of Americans ages twenty-five to fifty-four living without any partner at all, with or without marriage, has increased since 1990 to about four in ten. The numbers of those who say they don’t want children (not even counting those who are childless for other reasons) is rapidly rising. Of those under age fifty without children, 47 percent say they have no intention to have any.
Our problem is not simply that Americans have abandoned the covenantal account of marriage and procreation in favor of an ethic of autonomy. It is that we have turned the idea of autonomy into a counterfeit covenant with the self. Listen to the speech of adults who choose not to marry at all, or choose casually to leave their spouses, or who choose never to have children. They speak of authenticity, of honesty, of integrity, of the refusal to live a lie, of owing something to oneself, of the courage to leave what no longer serves me. They try to ennoble personal desire into fulfilling a commandment: thou shalt be true to thyself. The man who leaves his marriage is keeping faith with this new cultural expectation. The therapeutic language of “self-care” is the language of duty inverted, now owed inward. This is what makes it a counterfeit and not a mere abandonment: the words of fidelity and conscience are kept, and only their object is reversed, so that the breaking of a bond is performed in good conscience and even with pride.
The communitarian critics in the 1980s like Michael Sandel, Christopher Lasch, and Charles Taylor called the figure who lives this way the unencumbered self, bound by no unchosen obligations. The falling birthrates and declining marriage rates are consequences of this new cultural norm. The loneliness now spoken of as an epidemic is another indicator of our brokenness, along with the despair and addiction that travel with it. This is the condition Tocqueville foresaw when he feared that equality would throw the democratic citizen “back toward himself alone” and confine him at last “in the solitude of his own heart.”
The human cost of this cultural breakdown falls on everyone, but not equally. The postmodern professional, who holds that marriage is simply another at-will contract and that children are optional, tends quietly to marry anyway and to raise his children, aided by a well-paid staff of nannies, therapists, life coaches, and expensive private schools. His core conviction—thou shalt be true to thyself—is a luxury belief, conferring cultural standing on those who profess it and sending its costs downward. The expectation that one marries before having children, that a family is built and sustained, was once a public good that held equally for everyone. But without the affirmation and restraint of a biblical culture of family formation, it is the poor who are most likely to experience family breakdown and who suffer the most from it. Why endure the difficult trials of family life when the self’s own fantasies are just a click away, and when the message of the culture is that fidelity to family is only required when it is not a betrayal of the self?
What the family begins, the school was built to support, refine, inculcate, and carry on: that is, to form young men and women capable of carrying forward a way of life as responsible adults. And for most of American history, there was one book that nearly every schoolchild read and knew, one text that shaped the shared moral and civic imagination of American students, and that book was the Bible. It supplied the common tongue of the country’s culture, the stock of stories and phrases and images through which Americans reasoned with one another.
At some point we came to believe that the Bible was a source of division rather than unity, and that secular neutrality required removing that book from the shared curriculum, so that no child would be made to sit before another’s scripture. Many Jews led the way in this campaign against teaching the Bible in our schools, with the “separation of church and state” as their dogmatic north star. This was all a grave mistake. What it produced was not neutrality but civilizational illiteracy, a generation that cannot hear the biblical cadences in its own founding documents or its own literature, and so cannot fully read or understand its own inheritance at all.
Many of our elite universities have gone even further, making the brazen inversion of the Hebraic vision of man a defining ethos. In the months after October 7, 2023, the campuses convulsed: Jewish students were harassed and barred from parts of their own schools, the murder of Israeli civilians was rationalized and celebrated in the quad, faculty who could find oppression in every nook of Western life were unable to name Hamas’s slaughter for what it was. None of this needs rehearsing; it has been documented exhaustively, and the spectacle has dulled into something we half expect. What is worth saying is that it was not an aberration of the university but an expression of it, the visible eruption of a derangement that runs deeper than campus politics, into the university’s understanding of what learning is for.
Harvard was founded in 1636 to train ministers, Yale in 1701 by men who feared Harvard had gone soft, Princeton in 1746 by Presbyterians who wanted a serious clergy. These were not incidentally religious institutions. They rested on a conviction about knowledge itself, that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, that learning is the pursuit of a truth the mind receives rather than invents, and that whoever would know must first humble himself before the great minds and traditions of the past. That conviction is the thing most thoroughly inverted. Learning now begins not in humility but in suspicion, in the unmasking of every claim as a disguise of power, so that nothing is received and everything is deconstructed, and the student stands smugly over the text and the tradition.
The academic elite that adheres to this ideology of deconstruction has kept the religious form and changed only the creed. Harvard and Yale still aim to create a priestly caste, still sort the world into the pure and the defiled, still demand confession and assign penance, still preach sin and election and a redemption to come. Only the doctrine is turned over: whiteness is the stain, an intersectional hierarchy of grievance assigns each soul its place in the order of election, and the promised land has become the decolonized institution. It is a rival religion in the vestments of the one it displaced, and it has captured the very institutions built to form citizens in the older faith.
The disorders so far have been inward, reshaping the institutions of family, school, university, and culture at the heart of American life. But a nation must also face outward, especially an American regime that remains the most powerful and most influential nation in the world. And here, too, the same inversion of the biblical spirit deforms our vision and weakens our will in the face of real enemies. The biblical prophets longed for the day when men shall beat their swords into plowshares, when “nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more,” and every man shall sit “under his vine and under his fig tree” with none to make him afraid (Micah 4:3-4). But the same Scripture describes the road to that end without illusion. There is “a time of war, and a time of peace” (Ecclesiastes 3:8); and war is a recurring condition, peace the achievement wrested from a hostile world and kept by strength. The national story attests it in nearly every generation: Abraham raises an army to rescue his kinsman (Genesis 14); the generation barely out of Egypt is set upon by Amalek (Exodus 17); Judges is one long cycle of subjugation and rescue; there was “hard war against the Philistines all the days of Saul” (1Samuel 14:52).
The pattern breaks exactly once, and the exception proves the rule, for when Solomon built the Temple in the one age of rest he named the reason his father could not: “David my father could not build an house unto the name of the Lord his God for the wars which were about him on every side, until the Lord put them under the soles of his feet. But now the Lord my God hath given me rest on every side” (1Kings 5:3-4). David shed blood so that Solomon could lay stones. Peace is not the alternative to the sword; it is what the sword, rightly wielded, secures.
Many Americans have lost such biblical realism, and the resulting failure of nerve takes two forms. The first is the refusal to see that there is an enemy at all: our progressive apologists search for any causal explanation of political Islamism’s violence other than what radical Islam itself states as its purpose; they insist that poverty or colonialism, rather than fanaticism, are its motivations; they pretend that jihad is simply an inward spiritual quest; they treat a civilizational assault as a noble form of free speech. Jeremiah named the type: the false prophets who “healed the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14). Ruth Wisse has said that the most important of her mother’s Yiddish sayings (itself a variation on a talmudic aphorism) was a rakhman oyf gazlonim iz a gazlen oyf rakhmonim, kindness to the cruel is cruelty to the kind. To pronounce peace where there is none is not gentleness but a dangerous delusion that exposes everything one loves to defeat.
The second failure is the refusal to finish the battles we begin. The wars that formed the modern American mind, from Vietnam through Afghanistan and Iraq to the current confrontation with Iran, were not lost primarily on the battlefield, where American power was never in doubt, but left unwon by a waning of will: a concession to the pain of American losses, or to the impatience of an American electorate that believes all wars are optional, or by an excessive guilt and self-doubt about the use of overwhelming American force when the collateral damage of seeking victory is used by our enemies as propaganda against us. Against an enemy like Hamas or Hizballah or the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps there may be no Lee-at-Appomattox moment, no gentlemanly surrender to mark the end. Yet that is precisely why we need to summon the will to bring such enemies to demoralization, defenestration, and defeat. Otherwise they fester, awaiting the day when they can secure the technical means to bring an inattentive and wavering American people to its knees.
The rabbis found the principle in the first Israelite king’s war with Amalek. Saul was charged to destroy Amalek, and he fought, and won, and then spared the king and the spoils, and the Lord did not count the mercy to him as mercy. Samuel’s rebuke was total: “Because thou hast rejected the word of the Lord, he hath also rejected thee from being king” (1Samuel 15:23). The sin is incompletion, leaving the enemy alive and calling the leaving compassion. Such biblical realism is the only antidote to the false belief that good nations can endure while compromising with evil or pretending that evil is not real.
V. The Meaning of Anti-Semitism
The inversion of our biblical inheritance fully reveals itself in the rise of anti-Semitism: a creed that preserves the idea of sin and stain while abolishing repentance and return, an ideology that needs a bearer for the guilt it can no longer discharge, a campaign against the Jews that signals a civilization in crisis. At its core, anti-Semitism is the inversion of chosenness itself. It is fixated on the Jews for a metaphysical reason.
To the universalist, the Hebrew Bible’s most scandalous claim is that the one and only God singled out one small and seemingly unpromising people as the bearer of His covenant. Christian theologians call this the scandal of particularity, and Norman Podhoretz later argued that it is the key to Jewish endurance: God’s redemption would be manifest in and through this people, this law, this city, rather than through a principle available to everyone everywhere simultaneously.
In a democratic age, when equality of condition lends universal and abstract ideas their authority, particularity itself comes to seem an offense, every unchosen bond a parochialism to be dissolved, and the Jew is the oldest and most stubborn embodiment of the thing such an age cannot forgive. The Jew refuses to vanish, to be absorbed or destroyed like every other ancient people; his endurance defies the claim that the covenant was revoked, overtaken, or transferred to a successor. Today’s progressive universalists cannot accept this: the fact of chosenness remains, the Jewish people remain set apart, but the people marked for blessing become instead the people marked for blame, and the survival that ought to evoke wonder is seen as a kind of cheating, a power got illegitimately and by conspiracy, since the alternative is to grant that it was given by a Providential hand.
It will be said that this inversion is only the scapegoating described by the French academic René Girard, a universal impulse older than Sinai and present where the Bible never reached. But the generic mechanism does not fasten on one people across 3,000 years, refitting the charge to each generation, nor accuse in the name of an ideal of justice that only the biblical inheritance supplies. Of all the scapegoats available, the worst elements in the West, and in much of the world beyond it, keep returning to the Jews.
To see the inversion at work one needs Wisse again, who insists that anti-Semitism is not a prejudice but “the organization of politics against the Jews,” an ideology that serves a political purpose, uniting a coalition that agrees on little else, drawing a people’s grievances away from the powers that govern it, and fixing them on a target with neither the will nor the means to strike back. It is always anti-liberal, for the Jew comes to stand for the open and plural society itself, and the assault on the Jew is an assault on that order through its most exposed member.
Since October 7, the Democratic Socialists of America, a fringe group of a few thousand discontents a decade ago, has swelled into a formidable political movement, and the energy filling it is not the old quarrel with capital but the new one with the Jewish state. Its foremost figure, Zohran Mamdani, was elected mayor of New York, the most Jewish city on earth, and made himself a kingmaker of other candidates. The insurgents who followed him into Democratic primaries beat established incumbents not on housing or transit but on Israel, every local grievance soldered to the Jewish state until the link became a reflex. “When the boot of the police is on your neck,” Mamdani told a gathering of the faithful, “it was laced by the IDF.” The affordability of an apartment, the conduct of the police, the hunger of the poor, each traced back to one small people held answerable for the troubles of all.
Washington and Lincoln looked to the Israelites as a model upon which to build and then renew America. The anti-Semites seek to use the Jews as a totem and a tool to destroy America. Anti-Semitism is the clearest barometer of what has gone wrong and how wrong it has gone. The grievances that pervert our culture and our politics all stem from the same inversion: a biblical form is kept while its substance is turned against itself. Covenant becomes the sovereign self’s fidelity to itself, destroying the family bond. The fear of the Lord becomes the will to unmask, eroding the reverence for tradition and wisdom that once shaped our schools and universities. The peace that strength secures becomes the peace that pretends no enemy exists. And Jewish chosenness becomes a mark of Jewish guilt. The skeleton of the biblical inheritance remains, but the Hebraic life has been replaced by an anti-biblical monster.
Amid this trial, Jewish endurance remains the thing the counterfeit can neither explain nor forgive, the standing proof that the covenant it claims to have superseded was never revoked. That is the deepest reason why madmen, renegades, and desperate fools will always be obsessed with the Jews, and the surest sign that what afflicts America is not amnesia but inversion, the inheritance turned, with particular fury, against the people in whom it began.
VI. The Hebraic Prescription for American Renewal
The cure for these American ailments is contained in the diagnosis. If they are indeed species of an anti-Hebraic inversion, then Hebraic remedies are what they call for. America has renewed itself before, twice, without waiting for catastrophe to force it. The First Great Awakening preceded the Revolution and gave it its moral seriousness; the Second preceded the Civil War and gave the war its meaning as a moral reckoning. In both cases, the religious renewal came first and the political consequences followed, moving through the institutions of formation before it reached the institutions of government. The question before us is what this generation’s renewal requires, and who will undertake it.
Let us begin with who is called to do this work. The guiding premise of this essay is that Jews have a special role to play in renewing the American covenant. Yet it is also obvious that the Jewish community cannot be the primary agent of the next great American awakening. America was built largely by Christians who understood themselves as heirs to the covenant, and the restoration of America’s biblical inheritance must be kindled through Christian churches and schools, Christian homes and communities, Christian leaders and institutions.
Much will depend on the Christian worldview that prevails—a subject that Jews must approach with great humility. The Thomists build on Aristotle’s foundations the most impressive account of why the earthly city matters and why reason can discern a law woven into the fabric of nature itself. The Augustinian strain understands human sin and the human need for redemption, subordinating the earthly city to the City of God. American Christianity—or what Mitchell calls “Hebraic Christianity”—is something different and unique. Hebraic Christianity takes the City of Man seriously, as the Thomists do, but on the ground of covenant. Hebraic Christianity takes human frailty and human limits seriously, as Augustinians do, but as a summons to accountability rather than a reason to withdraw. Hebraic Christianity treats the family and school and communal institutions as the places where souls are formed and citizens shaped. This Hebraic strain is the one that Jews can perhaps help galvanize and strengthen.
Some Jews may initially and understandably resist the very idea of strengthening Christianity. For the better part of two millennia, Christian power was the chief earthly danger to Jewish life, the source of expulsions and forced conversions and massacres, and even in America, within living memory, a confident Christian establishment kept Jews at arm’s length from its universities and clubs. Yet times have changed, and the situation we face is very different. The force dissolving Jewish life in America today is not the church; it is the same secular and pagan solvent that is emptying the churches themselves. Jews who abandon Judaism do not, in any great numbers, become Christian. They become nothing in particular, absorbed into the secular culture. The children of religious Christians are being lost to precisely the same nothing. The threat is common, and a Hebraic Christianity serious enough to resist the anti-biblical inversion of American culture is not the peril our history taught us to fear but an ally against the peril we must face together. The majority of American Christians love and respect the Jewish people. And the most pernicious alternative to Hebraic Christianity is nihilism, precisely the condition that invites anti-Hebraic Christians and pseudo-Christians (along with profiteering opportunists like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens) to fill the void.
In undertaking this work, Jews need two kinds of wisdom. First, a clear belief that the Jewish way of life should never assimilate or subordinate itself to the Christian way of life. Our difference matters, and our dignity as Jews runs directly to the Almighty and reverberates through Jewish history. Our Abrahamic covenant endures, and it is precisely our faithful commitment to the Jewish way of life that makes Jews both invaluable and indispensable to the American project of renewal. We teach others best by being who we are. Our summons to be a “light unto the nations” is not permission to surrender the Jewish difference but a call to reclaim it. Second, as Jews we need the humility not to assert an exclusive claim of authority over the sacred Scripture that Jews and Christians share. With respect, and in friendship, we must allow Christians to interpret the Hebrew Bible as Christians. We must share our wisdom as a gift.
Faithful Christians now find themselves where the Jews have always been, a minority whose deepest commitments are no longer sustained by the world around them and that must be transmitted against its current or not at all. This is the predicament we have spent 2,000 years learning to survive, and the knowledge we have developed is hard-earned. We know what it takes to hand a tradition to one’s children deliberately, rather than trusting the surrounding society to do it. We know how a community builds the institutions that hold it together when the wider culture will not, because we have never had the luxury of outsourcing our formation to the mainstream. We know how a people keeps a rhythm of life of its own, a calendar and a discipline, within a broader Western civilization heavily shaped by Hebraic ideas while often dismissive or intolerant of the Jews themselves. And we have experience in the hardest kind of cultural equipoise, figuring out how to resist assimilation without walling ourselves off altogether.
But here the analogy to the older diasporas reaches its limit. The Jews of Poland and Yemen practiced these arts for survival alone, because that was all their circumstances allowed. They could not dream of shaping the majority cultures around them, only of enduring within them. America is a nation whose culture was built on Hebraic foundations, and where the Jewish minority’s hard-won knowledge of how to keep its treasured inheritance alive need not be spent on mere survival but dedicated instead to recovery and renewal.
So much for who. The harder question is what this Hebraic great awakening requires. If each one of our current disorders is a biblical concept inverted, each is answered by that concept restored. But first, a word of caution. The formative power of the Hebrew Bible cannot be recovered because it is useful, or valued because it produces good citizens. A people that prizes the inheritance only for its social utility has already stepped outside it, standing above the very thing it means to receive. The habits that restrain a free people are the fruit of the thing and not the thing itself, and they do not grow once uprooted and kept only for their shade. Americans must come again to inhabit the biblical account of the world as true, as Lincoln did when he understood the Civil War in biblical terms. Its social utility cannot flower, or even last, unless it is watered by genuine conviction.
The dissolution of the family is answered by seeing marriage and child rearing as covenantal bonds that are not dissolved on the basis of pleasure or boredom. There is little evidence that policy experiments that incentivize marriage and family formation achieve much outside of the margins. What must be done instead is to honor and emulate the communities where covenantal family life is still practiced. The traditional Jewish family is a fine example of a people that has kept marriage and children at the center.
As we know, the majority of American Jews do not practice this traditional way of life. They see marriage and procreation as a choice—“thou shalt be true to thyself” has replaced “be fruitful and multiply” as the supreme commandment—and most Jews are choosing not to form households that pass down the Jewish covenant. For the Jewish people, the failure to marry within the faith and to raise the next generation inside it has the same long-term effect as divorce and childlessness within the wider culture, the leading edge of a community that is ceasing to perpetuate itself. Among Jews who have married since 2010, more than seven in ten married non-Jews (with Jewish identity very weak within most intermarried families), and the birthrate among the non-Orthodox has fallen well below replacement.
But the aggregate conceals a hopeful Jewish lesson within it. Among more traditional Jews, intermarriage is almost unheard of, fewer than one marriage in fifty, and the average Orthodox family has more than four children (compared to a national fertility rate of 1.6 births per woman). More than a quarter of American Jews under eighteen are growing up in Orthodox homes—a reversal that no demographer would have predicted just a few decades ago when Jewish secularism seemed to be winning the future. In the heart of the same corrosive culture, a community that has kept marriage and children and the daily transmission of its tradition at the center of its life has not merely survived but grown.
The lesson to draw is not a denominational one, nor an occasion for Orthodox triumphalism. The lesson is that Jewish life endures where it is deeply rooted and richly transmitted, and thins where it is not. A flourishing Jewish future requires a community of committed Jews at home in their heritage and its wisdom, and where that exists Jewish life grows against every current, and where it is missing nothing else can substitute for it. The resurgence of traditional Jewish families is proof that the covenantal idea of the family is not dead: it can be realized here, in this country, against this current, by a people that refuses both assimilation and retreat. In this, we are joined by religious Christians who similarly embrace the idea that forming families is our primordial duty, and that sustaining families is only possible when this cultural ideal is affirmed.
In partnership with families, the formation of the young depends on building schools that instill the wisdom and commitment embodied in tradition. The classical Christian school movement is one of the genuine successes of American cultural renewal, with its hundreds of academies and tens of thousands of pupils, its established networks and its proven models of replication. It has recovered what most of American schooling abandoned, the conviction that education forms souls and transmits an inheritance. Jews can learn much from the classical school movement, especially about the larger significance of Western civilization.
But its very name discloses an imbalance. The classical school is built largely on the pedagogical pillars of Athens and Rome, and it is thinner on the West’s patrimony that came from Jerusalem. A student educated in a Christian classical school will likely study Latin and read Virgil, but he will probably be unable to read, in the original language, the verse from Leviticus that is inscribed on the Liberty Bell, or even know that a verse from the Hebrew Bible was inscribed on our nation’s most enduring symbol of ordered freedom. As Jews, we can encourage classical schools to teach the Hebrew language, the Hebrew Bible, the literature and history of ancient Israel and the transcendent significance of a Jewish commonwealth reborn. Where the classical school has Latin, it should also aspire to have Hebrew; where it has Athens, it should also have Jerusalem.
The greatest threat to our schoolchildren is not simply ignorance but the many technologies of deformation and distraction that now dominate our children’s lives and schoolrooms. As the smartphone worked its way into high schools, then middle schools, then elementary classrooms, Jewish day schools led the way in calling for shared communal action to ban it, adopting phone-free policies while the public systems were still debating the question. They did not reach the decision through study; they already possessed the conviction the age had mislaid, that attention is the beginning of learning and that a formation worth the name requires the undivided presence of the young. They applied an old habit to a new intrusion, and it worked. It is a small proof of the larger claim, that a school built to transmit something will know how to guard the conditions of transmission.
Here, public policy can help. A federal measure enacted in 2025 created the first national tax credit for scholarships to private and religious schools. State voucher programs are finally leveling the playing field for religious families, creating the resources for a new American age of religious education rooted in the Bible. New schools of civic education at the public universities of Florida and Texas have made it possible to study Jewish and Western civilization, with the Hebrew Bible at the center of the undergraduate curriculum, an effort Tikvah has helped to lead. And the federal design is itself the frame that makes such things possible, for the states are still communities with both the authority and the responsibility to form their citizens. An enterprising governor who set out to shift a much larger share of his state’s children into religious schools of their families' choosing would be using the federal design as it was meant to be used.
In parallel, the recovery of our biblical inheritance is already reaching some public schools. In 2026, Texas voted to place biblical texts on the required reading list for its more than five million students, the first state to prescribe such a canon in modern times. American Jews should welcome this effort, even though the list does not confine itself to the Hebrew Bible. That it sets New Testament passages, the Sermon on the Mount and the Prodigal Son, alongside Exodus and the Psalms is not a defect but the point. We do not fear that a student who reads Hesiod will come to worship Zeus; we understand that he is learning the theology that made a civilization. The teacher who assigns these texts is not preaching the revealed word of God to her class; she is teaching the very texts that helped shape American civilization, without which a young person cannot read our nation’s literature, comprehend our laws, or understand our character.
Not all education happens in the classroom, of course, and a people is formed above all by the stories it tells itself. The shaping of the imagination runs ahead of the shaping of law, and an effort at biblical renewal must attend to the creative arts and storytelling media. The Wonder Project’s television series House of David dramatized the life of Israel’s greatest king. It rose to the top of the streaming charts and was renewed, with yet more Bible-centered dramas following in its wake. That a serious telling of the Hebrew Bible should find so large an audience is itself a sign of a deeper civilizational yearning.
Religious freedom allows this yearning to grow. The ideal of religious liberty is not merely a protection against an established church or prohibition of theological tests for public office. It is the arrangement, secured at the founding, by which a people declines to compel the structures of belief that are the proper province of families and houses of worship. American law does not aim to prescribe the specific pathway to holiness; what it does instead is guard the ground on which families can pursue holiness in freedom. That ground is the precondition of the whole recovery, for a faith compelled is a faith hollowed, and formation imposed by the magistrate forms no one. The liberty that protects the synagogue is the same liberty that protects the church, and the renewal of Hebraic Christianity depends on it no less than the survival of a faithful Judaism does. Among the defenders of that liberty, Jews have every reason to stand in the front rank, and to stand there not as a wary minority guarding its own exemptions but as devoted partisans of the American project.
This project faces external threats as well as internal ones. And in the great struggle to secure our way of life against America’s adversaries, the failure of nerve is best answered by the recovery of biblical realism: the knowledge that there is a difference in history between good and evil, that there are enemies who seek to destroy our civilization, that the defense of what one loves is an honorable duty and not only a regrettable necessity, and that a people that wants peace must be willing and strong enough to secure it. The Hebrew Bible is not sentimental here, as Saul learned when he spared the king he was charged to destroy. Israelis have had to relearn the lesson in our own time, at terrible cost, in a sovereign state that has discovered it cannot buy peace by trading away pieces of its ancient homeland or losing its wars slowly. Israel has not severed the citizen from the defense of the city. Its army is not a profession set apart for others to join but an obligation shared, the place where an often fractious people is bound into one body by common sacrifice, and where the connection between an individual life and the survival of the whole is a fact that most families live.
America remains the most powerful nation in the world, and it need not adopt the operational protocols of the IDF or imitate its conscription model. Yet, Israel offers a valuable lesson to America in how a free people keeps its nerve, by refusing to let its citizens forget that the survival of what they love is their own charge. That Israel has kept this fighting spirit alive while longing, as it does, for the day it might lay the burden down is the proof that the longing and the strength are two aspects of the same fidelity, the one that wants peace badly enough to keep the sword ready to defend it.
American anti-Semites believe that Israel should lie down for its enemies. They want the chosen people to disappear from history. And they use Israel as a battering ram for a more fundamental assault on Hebraic civilization. American anti-Semitism is simply the most virulent form of anti-Americanism. American Jews are rightly anxious about this assault on our community. We worry about our children and our safety. We fear that the dark forces that have haunted the Jewish past are gathering even here, in the very nation that long ago pledged “to give bigotry no sanction and persecution no assistance.”
But anti-Semitism will not destroy the Jewish people. We have outlived every nation that made us its scapegoat, and we have learned that societies that become consumed by Jew-hatred corrode from within. The question before us is whether America can resist this direct assault on its own Hebraic soul. And that means that the renewal we’ve been describing will determine the fate of American exceptionalism. A people secure enough in its own liberty to extend that liberty to others has no need of a scapegoat; a people that guards the freedom of its neighbors guards its own; a nation that respects “the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land” can become a covenantal land once again.
We Jews have an old and bitter expertise in what follows when a nation cannot hold itself to account, and we offer our prophetic voice not as a complaint on our own behalf but as a warning for America, in the hope that this nation, which has been better to us than any in our long exile, will prove once more the exception we have staked our future on believing it to be.
VII. The Jewish Summons
So let us return to the museum case in Jerusalem: a marvelous display of the artifacts and achievements of Persian and Moroccan and Italian and Polish Jewry, yet also a stark reminder that without sovereignty even the most accomplished diaspora civilization is provisional and can be wiped from history. As Jews, we celebrate the Zionist rebirth, and we honor those who dedicate their lives to building, sustaining, and defending the Jewish state. Yet we also believe that American Jews have a noble purpose: to help remind the almost-chosen nation what being chosen is all about.
From its primordial Puritan past, to its providential founding in Philadelphia, to its rededication at Gettysburg, America is woven through with a Hebraic soul, and so we as Jews are woven into what America is and might yet be. We live in a nation whose moral mission still depends on the biblical inheritance we first received and kept alive, a nation whose founders saw the history of ancient Israel as a significant source of inspiration, a nation whose renewal the Jews should help shoulder with faithful dedication. America is a post we cannot in conscience abandon.
The Jews are surely not inherently wiser or better than our neighbors. The chosen people is also a stiff-necked people. Hebrew Scripture is a record of our revolt and idolatry and stubbornness and forgetting, and down through the present we have given in to the same delusions as every other people. Jewish chosenness is not a sign of extraordinary virtue but a summons. Should we rise to answer it, the gain would not be America’s alone. An American Jewry that set out to recover its inheritance in order to share it would be stronger, better, wiser, and more Jewish.
Lest the argument of these pages be mistaken, this American vocation is not the whole of the Jewish purpose, nor its highest part. We are a people living under a much older covenant, commanded to a life of Torah and its observance, answerable to God for that life whether or not any nation is blessed by it. We would be so commanded in a wilderness. The service we can render America is the overflow of a faithfulness that structures our own community and directs our quest for holiness. A Jewry that forgets this would have little to contribute.
The purpose of America is to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. To secure them now means recovering the ancient wisdom that once taught a free people how to remain free. That inheritance is the Hebrew Bible, the ground on which Jews and Christians have met before and can meet again, and the recovery of it is the work this moment holds out to the Jews of America. It is answer enough to the question the museum poses. We stay because there is work here that is ours, for the country that received us and the posterity to whom its blessings are owed, and because no Jewish generation before us was ever so well placed to do it. As Jews, we understand that the fate of America matters to all who cherish the Hebraic vision of man. Other communities of the Jewish diaspora left their answers behind glass when their histories were finished. Ours is not finished. It is now dawning.
This essay has been made possible by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, conclusions, or recommendations expressed herein do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
