Rabbi Jonathan Sacks Blames ‘Politics Of Anger’ For Corroding American Public Life
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Accepting the American Enterprise Institute’s annual Irving Kristol award, Jonathan Sacks, Britain’s chief rabbi emeritus, inveighed against a “politics of anger” he said was corroding the fabric of U.S. society.
“The politics of anger that’s emerged in our time is full of danger,” Sacks said, speaking Tuesday night at the conservative institute’s annual gala.
He decried the breakdown of American society into narrower and narrower identities that nurtured a “culture of grievances.”
“The social contract is still there, but the social covenant is being lost,” he said.
He noted the rise of the far right and the far left in Europe and what he said was an increasingly shrill atmosphere at universities that inhibits speech.
In what appeared to be an allusion to the election of President Donald Trump, Sacks described a “populism” in which “the belief that a strong leader can solve everything, and that is the road that leads to tyranny.”
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