Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale, is the author of The Closest of Strangers (Norton, 1990) and Liberal Racism (Viking, 1997). In 1971 he co-edited the anthology The New Jews with the late Alan Mintz. Sleeper’s 2009 essay, “American Brethren: Puritans and Hebrews,” in the World Affairs Journal, anticipated the current crisis in American civic culture and quoted the Israeli philosopher Yirmiyahu Yovel, who died two weeks ago.
Early in the 1990s — so many years ago that it’s nowhere to be found online — I was on a panel about black anti-Semitism at New York’s 92nd Street Y, where the historian of slavery Eugene Genovese observed that if a black demagogue called Italian Americans “racists,” they’d come after him with baseball bats,…
“It’s almost a war without a home front,” journalist Bob Woodward told Time magazine just before Christmas. “Taxes are down, everyone’s buying…. There is a sense almost that we’re not at war. I can’t explain that phenomenon.” I can’t explain it, either. But I think that most of us who’ve never been asked to do…
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