by Jim Sleeper

Jim Sleeper, a writer and teacher on American civic culture and politics, was a lecturer in political science at Yale from 1999-2020. His reportage and commentary have appeared in most major American newspapers and magazines. In the 1990s he appeared occasionally on The PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer, the Charlie Rose show, and National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation” and was a commentator on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Sleeper writes frequently about American civic culture, ethno-racial politics and identity, early America history, electoral politics, foreign policy, higher education, and freedom of speech. (See “Recent Work” on this site.)

Author’s Preface

Israel invaded Gaza 28 centuries ago, but few Americans know that such ancient “undercurrent events” ever really happened, let alone that they still drive “current events” that divert our attention from deeper realities. The following essay, revised slightly from one that I wrote for Salon in 2024, doesn’t track or parse current events in Israel/Palestine. Instead, it takes a dive, or at least a dip, into long–running undercurrents that are still shaping the conflict — especially as it figures in American Jews’ and Protestants’ preoccupations with it.

Not only Jews obsess about Israel/Palestine. So do some descendants and legatees of early American Puritans who infused that obsession into America’s civic-republican culture from its beginnings. Still more obsessive are today’s evangelical Christian Zionists, sometimes in ways that imperil Jews’ full standing and security in the United States, as I warned in 2019 in Tikkun and on the London-based website openDemocracy.net.

The original Salon essay was posted in March, 2024, and re-posted almost immediately by the international website Reset.doc, which also translated it into Italian. It was also excerpted and assessed on the website of The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. But if you’re inclined to read the essay itself after you’ve read this brief preface to it, please read the updated version that’s right below it here on screen.

When Salon posted my essay under the headline, “Israel and the Puritans: A Dangerous Historical Romance,” charges that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza were becoming plausible. But equally plausible were doubts about the protestors’ motives and intentions. Since mid-summer of 2024, however, Israel’s strategies have become genocidal in reality and in some of its strategists’ intentions. At the least, the strategies amount to brutal ethnic cleansing. 

Explanations of its causes and origins differ, but anyone who thinks that I’m interpreting the biblical and 17th-Century undercurrents to justify the current events is misreading this essay, which has been updated only slightly here below to add some of my references but not to change my assessment. Having grown up in an intersection of my family’s ancestral Jewish tradition and education and, on the other hand, my youthful encounters with strong Protestant, Calvinist traditions that dominated my hometown, I’m trying here to depict converging, conflicting realities that drive many Americans’ ‘Judeo-Christian’ preoccupations with the Israeli/Palestinian war.

Some commentators and editors have dived under their desks or jumped out of windows instead of reporting or sharing what I actually show here. But others have commented in ways that can enhance our understanding of what’s developing.

For example, the head of a private school who teaches in Columbia College’s Contemporary Civilization curriculum sent a message to a mutual friend calling this essay

 “a fascinating and intellectually rich article, the difficult paradoxes of which may escape most modern readers…. 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’s. The ancestral thread tying Calvinists and ancient Hebrews together is a lens I hadn’t seen through before, though most of us know the two sides of each (culture? religion?) — its ambitious, questing, covenantal side and its ‘manifest destiny’ brutality.” 

A political and intellectual historian in New York wrote me, “Thanks for sending this amazing piece.  I devoured it immediately.  I know a bit about the Biblical influence on New England’s elimination of America’s very own Canaanites, but most of the works you cite were new to me.  I am also glad you appreciate the work of my friend Adam Shatz.  Anyway, it seems to me you have the core of a book condensed into a few pages here.  I hope you keep developing this line of thought.”

Dive in with me now as I keep on developing this line of thought. Here’s a link to the essay. Help me develop these ideas by sending your comments to me at jimsleeper12@gmail.com.