1. Many of you, I suspect, are familiar with Bari Weiss’s Substack newsletter, now called The Free Press. It’s an intelligent and interesting digital publication, written by intelligent and interesting people. Its politics, in my view, are centrist-conservative. Woke it is not.
One of the things it does well is interview sharp observers of what’s going on in the world. What follows is an excerpt from an interview Ms. Weiss conducted with Walter Russell Mead, author of “The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People”. (Walter is an old friend going back many moons and, equally if not more important, a high performing sales rep for News Items and Political Items).
One thing I had not anticipated on the morning after 10/7 was the explosion of anti-semitism in countries around the world. Ms. Wiess asked Walter about that. Here’s the exchange:
On how antisemitism equates to societal decline:
BW: One of the things that has happened since the massacre of October 7 is an orgy of antisemitic assaults, harassment, and violence all over the world, and it feels like the lid was just pulled off of something that was already boiling for most Jews. In your latest column for The Wall Street Journal—and you’re not Jewish, Walter—you make the case that this isn’t really a Jewish issue. It’s an issue for all Americans and for all people in the West. How is that?
WRM: I’ve just written this book on the history of U.S.-Israel relations, Arc of a Covenant, which involved a really deep dive into the history of the Jewish people in America. It struck me over and over how the attitudes that have made the United States historically the most hospitable country in the world for the Jewish population are directly linked to the ideas that make America work for everybody. We’ve long thought that in order for this country to work, it has to be a place where people from many different cultural backgrounds, ethnic backgrounds, and religious backgrounds can work together, all accepting the common ideas of constitutional order, or the rule of law. You can be whomever you want. It doesn’t matter to the government or to society as long as you just pull your weight in this common American enterprise. That’s the vision that enables us to work. Now, it’s always been imperfect, but here’s the thing. Those who believe in the American way, and I am one of them, believe that while we haven’t built Utopia, it has gotten remarkably better. The essence of America is to get better.
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