What Happens in Middle America When Israel Goes to War

What happens in middle America when Israel goes to war?

I reside in Northfield, Minnesota, a town of roughly 20,000 people in the southern part of the state. We have the distinction of being the town whose citizens, in 1876, rose up to oppose the gang of murderous bank robbers that included Jesse James. Since then, the famous line of the town’s vigilantes has become a sort of town slogan: “Get your guns, boys, they’re robbing the bank!” We also have the distinction of being home to two liberal-arts colleges, Carleton and St. Olaf. In addition to my day job at the Tikvah Fund, the organization dedicated to Jewish education that is also Mosaic’s publisher, I teach at one of these schools, Carleton. Largely because of the colleges, the political commitments of the town’s citizens make it a politically blue island in a sea of red.

Northfield has no synagogue and, not including the population of the two colleges, only a handful of Jews. Thus, as I have written about before in Mosaic, I have over the years taken on the role of unelected and unsupervised ambassador of the Jewish people in town. Mostly this means hosting Gentile neighbors for Shabbat, Sukkot, and other holidays. But it has always included being an advocate for Israel. The colleges supply a fair amount of ardent Israel-bashers, of course—St. Olaf has a particularly bad record of hosting hostile speakers—but there are also townies who make Israel the target of their activism. We have a cell of activists who take to the local newspapers to detail Israel’s crimes, who organize protests and marches in solidarity with the Palestinians, and who make sure that the mainstream Protestant churches in town are hosting speakers who tell the story of Israel and its Palestinian neighbors in a damning way.