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A scholar sees a common root for antisemitism and racism: ‘Christian supremacy’
(JTA) — Magda Teter’s new book, “Christian Supremacy,” begins in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 11, 2017. Hundreds of white nationalist neo-Nazis who ostensibly gathered to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from a local park broke into a chant: “Jews will not replace us.”
Other writers and scholars would note how antisemitism shaped white nationalism. But Teter, professor of history and the Shvidler Chair of Judaic Studies at Fordham University, saw something else: how centuries of Christian thought and practice fed the twin evils of antisemitism and racism.
“The ideology espoused by white supremacists in the US and in Europe is rooted in Christian ideas of social and religious hierarchy,” she writes. “These ideas developed, gradually, first in the Mediterranean and Europe in respect to Jews and then in respect to people of color in European colonies and in the US, before returning transformed back to Europe.”
In the book, subtitled “Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism,” she traces this idea from the writings of the early church fathers like Paul the Apostle, though centuries of Catholic and Protestant debates over the status of Jews in Europe, to the hardening of racist attitudes with the rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Antisemitic laws and theology, she argues, developed within Christianity a “mental habit” of exclusion and dominance that would eventually be applied to people of color up to and including modern times.
Teter is careful to acknowledge the different forms antisemitism and racism have taken, distinguishing between the Jews’ experience of social and legal exclusion and near annihilation, and the enslavement, displacement and ongoing persecution of Black people. And yet, she writes, “that story began with Christianity’s theological relation with Jews and Judaism.”
Teter is previously the author of “Blood Libel: On The Trail of an Antisemitic Myth,” winner of the 2020 National Jewish Book Award. At Fordham, the Catholic university in the Bronx, she is helping assemble what may be the largest repository of artifacts and literature dedicated to the Jewish history of the borough.
We spoke Thursday about how groups like the Proud Boys embrace centuries-old notions of Christian superiority, how “whiteness” became a thing and how she, as a non-Jew raised in Poland, became a Jewish studies scholar.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Your book was conceived and written during the COVID lockdown. Where did the idea for the book come from?
It’s an accidental project. I’ve been teaching the history of antisemitism for years, and I live in Harlem so questions of race and racism are very stark in my daily life. And since I grew up in Poland, and American history was not something we were taught or studied, I’ve never been satisfied with the various explanations for the strength of antisemitism and history of racism. And as I mentioned in my prologue, I watched the Raoul Peck documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro,” which has a clip with James Baldwin saying that white people have to figure out why they invented the idea of the N-word and must “embrace this stranger that they have maligned so long.” You could also say that the European Christians created the idea of “the Jew” and that sort of caricature had absolutely nothing to do with flesh and blood Jews. I kept noticing these parallels, as an outsider, reading American and African-American history.
I was also thinking about this idea of servitude that was attached to Jews in Christian theology, and then in law.
You write in your book that “Over time, white European Christians branded both Jews and people of color with ‘badges of servitude’ and inferiority.” What do you mean by servitude in this context?
In Christian theology, from the earliest Christian texts, the idea of servitude and slavery is attached to the concept of Jews and Judaism. Paul does it in his Epistles. He uses this quote from the book of Genesis that “the elder shall serve the younger,” which becomes really embedded in Christian theology. It is the Jews, the elder people, who should serve the Christians, the younger people. Later on in medieval theology and canon law, Jews are in a servile position, consigned for their sin of rejecting Jesus to perpetual servitude. So even though Jews were free people and could live mostly where they wanted to live, marry whoever they wanted to marry — nobody was sold and some even had slaves — that idea of Jews as confined to perpetual servitude to Christians created a habit of thinking of Jews as having an inferior social status.
That language became secularized in modern times, and we see the development of the [antisemitic] trope of Jewish power: that they are in places where they shouldn’t be. I worked on fleshing out the parallels between the idea and then legal status of Jewish servitude and the conceptual perception of Black people in servile and inferior positions.
Magda Teter’s new book explores how “white European Christians branded both Jews and people of color with ‘badges of servitude’ and inferiority.” (Chuck Fishman)
What other kinds of parallels did you find between racism and antisemitism?
In the Christian theology, Black people, like Jews, will be seen as cursed by God. Jews were [portrayed as] lazy because they didn’t work physically — they made money and exploited Christians. Black people were [portrayed as] lazy because they were trying to avoid physical labor at the expense of white men. Both people were seen as carnal, both as sexually dangerous, and so on.
I was struck by the fact that the racist turn of Christian supremacy — justifying the enslavement of Black people on theological grounds — is a fairly late development, taking hold in the early modern period when Europeans established slaveholding empires.
That’s right. In the summer of 2020, the summer of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, we were all thinking about these issues of race and racism and America. And as I was in the middle of writing the article that became the book, I felt that there was a deeper history that needed to be told, and that slavery is not bound by color until the enslavement of Black Africans by Europeans during the colonial expansion of Europe.
After the French Revolution, when Jews were offered “emancipation” in much of Europe, there were deep debates about whether they could be citizens and be entitled to the same rights and protections as Christian citizens of France and England and other countries. How was that debate informed by Christianity?
In pre-modern Europe, there was obviously both a religious and legal framework under which Jews existed. They had their place in a social hierarchy. After the French Revolution, people are creating a new political reality. The idea of equality obviously challenged the social hierarchies that existed, including the idea that Christians were the superior religion. And that begins to play a role on two levels. One is the level of, well, “how can you be equal and be our judges and make decisions about us?” It’s fear of power — political power and political equality. That challenges the habit of thinking that sees Jews as inferior, in servitude and otherwise insolent and arrogant.
The other level comes from Enlightenment scholars who begin to place Jews in the Middle East and in the Holy Land, in Palestine. Jews are no longer seen as European. They are seen as “Oriental,” and they are compared to the non-European religions and practices that these Enlightenment scholars have been studying. Their differences are now also racialized. “They are not like us, they can’t assimilate. They can never be Frenchmen, they can never be Germans.”
And I guess it’s a short step from that to regarding people with dark skin as inferior and subordinate.
That’s right. Enlightenment scholars are also trying to to understand why it is justified to enslave Black Africans and they do it through “scientific” and other means. They classify Africans as inferior intellectually and they create this idea of race.
I began to think about these European politicians and intellectuals in terms of creating their identities, and what I ended up arguing is what we saw in Charlottesville, what we’re seeing in Europe. It’s not necessarily just about hate, but it’s about exclusion and rejection of Jews and people of color from equality, from citizenship.
And the common thread here is that whiteness and Christianity become inseparable. You write that “freedom and liberty now came to be linked not only to Christianity, but to whiteness, and servitude and enslavement to blackness.”
That’s right. White Christian “liberty” becomes embedded and embodied in law.
Did you see any pitfalls in drawing parallels between the Black and Jewish experiences? I am thinking of those in either community who might say, “How dare you compare our suffering to theirs!”
Yes, I was tempered. I think what some call “comparative victimhood” has paralyzed conversations about this subject, and I kept it in my mind all the time. What I hope comes through is that there’s incredible value in a comparative approach. Coming from Jewish studies as my primary field, the comparison with the Black experience gave me clarity on the nature of antisemitism as well as on the nature of the Jewish experience, and vice versa: The Jewish experience can also give clarity to some of the aspects of anti-Black racism.
What’s an example?
So, for instance, questions like, “Are Jews white? Are they not white? When did they become white?” That’s a whole genre of scholarship. And when you look at it through the lens of law and ideology, you begin to see that from a legal perspective, Jews were considered white in the United States because they could immigrate and they could be naturalized according to law. They did not have to go to court to become American. Their rights to vote were not challenged. There was discrimination, they couldn’t stay in hotels and in some places they couldn’t find employment, but by law, they were considered citizens. The debate about the whiteness of Jews is creating a fog of misunderstanding.
Black Americans were targeted by specific legal statutes from the very beginning in the Constitution and then in naturalization law and so on. And then there was the backlash even after the Civil War to the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments [aimed at establishing political equality for Americans of all races].
Statues at the Strasbourg Cathedral depict Ecclesia and Synagoga, representing the triumph of the church, at left, and the servitude of Judaism, which is represented by a blindfolded figure, drooping and carrying a broken lance. (Edelseider/Wikimedia Commons)
How much do modern-day white supremacists, like the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys, see themselves as Christian? Or is this a kind of white supremacy that doesn’t name itself Christian but doesn’t even realize how many of its ideas are based in theology?
I think they might not be conscious of this legacy, but neo-Nazis take from the legacy of the Nazis who themselves were not thinking of themselves as Christian necessarily. But what I argue in the book is that white Christian supremacy becomes white supremacy. It never discards the Christian sense of domination and superiority that emerges from its early relationship with Jews and Judaism.
In the United States, Black people serve as contrast figures to whiteness, in the law and in the culture. You cannot have whiteness without Blackness. For Christians, Jews serve as that contrast figure. Consciously or unconsciously, the Proud Boys are embracing that. They talk of “God-given” freedoms for white people. That is the Christian legacy.
You said that the Nazis didn’t necessarily see themselves as a Christian movement. But I must ask, even though it is not the scope of your book, was the Holocaust a culmination of white Christian supremacy? Because I think many Christian theologians would want to say that Nazism was godless, and a perversion of the true faith.
I’ll say that when exclusionary ideology is coupled with the power of the state, that’s where it can lead.
In the years since the Holocaust especially, there have been many efforts by Christian leaders to address the ideological failings of the past. You write about Nostra Aetate, the 1965 declaration by the Catholic Church absolving Jews of collective guilt in the death of Jesus and some Protestant documents of contrition. But I got the feeling you were disappointed that many denominations haven’t gone far enough in reckoning with the past.
There was a sort of a moral sense that something needs to be addressed after the Holocaust. But then it is not fully addressed. I don’t think anybody has addressed the issue of power — the roots of hate, yes, but not the dynamics of power. We’ll see where the book goes, but maybe theologians will begin to grapple with this legacy of superiority and domination, and the way hierarchical habits of thinking have been developed through theology and through religious culture.
What other impact do you hope the book may have?
White supremacy is very much in the air. We need to speak up against it, and make connections and allyships. I hope that maybe because the book deals with law and power, it may create bridges among people who care about “We the People” as a vision of people who are diverse, respectful and equal, and not the exclusionary vision offered by white and Christian supremacy.
A cross burns at a Ku Klux Klan rally on Aug. 8, 1925. (National Photo Company Collection)
I’d love to talk about your background. You’re not Jewish but you are chair of Jewish Studies at Fordham, a Catholic university. What drew you to the study of Judaism and the Jews?
I grew up in Poland with a father who from the time I was a little girl would point out to me that there had been Jews in Poland. We would drive through the countryside, and he’d say, “This used to be a Jewish town and there used to be a synagogue and there was the Jewish cemetery.” I grew up being very conscious of the past’s presence and this kind of stark absence of Jews in Poland, where in the 1970s when I grew up Jewish history was taboo.
As soon as Jewish books on Jewish subjects began to be published, including those that dealt with antisemitism, we would read it together. We would talk about it. He wouldn’t just shift the destruction and murder of Jews in Poland on to the Nazis.
There was no Jewish studies program in Poland when I was applying to universities, so I studied Hebrew in Israel, and then studied Yiddish in New York at YIVO. I came to Columbia University to get my PhD in Jewish history and my career went in the direction it did. I was a professor of history and director of the Jewish and Israel studies program at Wesleyan University. I came to Fordham eight years ago and created a program in Jewish studies.
Your previous book was about the blood libel, the historic canard that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood. This one’s about antisemitism. I don’t want to presume, but is your interest in these subjects in any way an act of contrition?
I grew up in a very secular household. I did not grow up Catholic. But I think growing up in Poland made me very, very aware of antisemitism and the history of antisemitism. I got my PhD from Columbia University in Jewish history, which did not emphasize Jewish suffering, but Jewish life, and I have studied Jewish life and teach about Jewish life — not just about Jewish suffering.
However, in the last few years, antisemitism has certainly been on the minds of many of us. I also am committed to the idea of shared history, and therefore all my scholarship, as much as it is about Jews, it is also about the church and Poland and the law. Jews are an integral part of that history and culture. And, as such, I’m committed to that, to teaching about the vibrancy of Jewish life as much as the dynamics of what made that life difficult over the centuries.
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Trump Says Iran Can Phone If It Wants to talk; Iranian Minister Heads to Russia
US President Donald Trump speaks about research into mental health treatments in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, April 18, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Nathan Howard
President Donald Trump said on Sunday Iran could telephone if it wants to negotiate an end to their two-month war and stressed it can never have a nuclear weapon, after Tehran said the US should remove obstacles to a deal, including its blockade of Iran’s ports.
Hopes of reviving peace efforts receded on Saturday when Trump scrapped a visit to Islamabad by his envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi shuttled to and from mediators Pakistan and Oman on Sunday before heading to Russia, where he is due to meet President Vladimir Putin.
Oil prices rose, the dollar inched higher and US stock futures wobbled lower in early Asia trade on Monday after the peace talks stalled, leaving Gulf shipping blocked.
“If they want to talk, they can come to us, or they can call us. You know, there is a telephone. We have nice, secure lines,” Trump told “The Sunday Briefing” on Fox News.
“They know what has to be in the agreement. It’s very simple: They cannot have a nuclear weapon, otherwise there’s no reason to meet,” Trump said.
Axios reported on Sunday, citing an unnamed US official and two sources with knowledge of the matter, that Iran gave the US a new proposal through Pakistani mediators on reopening the Strait of Hormuz and the ending of the war, with nuclear negotiations postponed for a later stage. The US State Department and White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the report.
Iran has long demanded Washington acknowledge its right to enrich uranium, which Tehran says it only seeks for peaceful purposes, but which Western powers say is aimed at building nuclear weapons.
Although a ceasefire has paused full‑scale fighting in the conflict, which began with US-Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28, no agreement has been reached on terms to end a war that has killed thousands, driven up oil prices, fueled inflation and darkened the outlook for global growth.
TRUMP FACES DOMESTIC PRESSURE TO END WAR
With his approval ratings falling, Trump faces domestic pressure to end the unpopular war. Iran’s leaders, though weakened militarily, have found leverage in negotiations with their ability to stop shipping in the economically vital Strait of Hormuz, which normally carries a fifth of global oil shipments.
Tehran has largely closed the strait while Washington has imposed a blockade of Iranian ports.
Before heading to Russia, Araqchi returned to Islamabad after holding talks on Sunday in Oman.
Iranian state media said Araqchi discussed security in the strait with Omani leader Haitham bin Tariq al-Said and called for a regional security framework free of outside interference.
Araqchi said on X that the focus of his Oman talks “included ways to ensure safe transit that is to benefit of all dear neighbors and the world.”
Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency said topics for Araqchi’s talks with Pakistani officials included “implementing a new legal regime over the Strait of Hormuz, receiving compensation, guaranteeing no renewed military aggression by warmongers, and lifting the naval blockade.”
Iran’s envoy in Russia, Kazem Jalali, said in a post on X that Araqchi would meet with Putin “in continuation of the diplomatic jihad to advance the country’s interests and amid external threats.”
“Iran and Russia are present in a united front in the campaign of the world’s totalitarian forces against independent and justice-seeking countries, as well as countries that seek a world free from unilateralism and Western domination,” Jalali said.
On Saturday, Trump said he canceled his envoys’ visit due to too much travel and expense for what he considered an inadequate Iranian offer. Iran “offered a lot, but not enough,” he said.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian told Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif by phone on Saturday that Tehran would not enter “imposed negotiations” under threats or blockade, an Iranian statement said.
He said the United States should first remove obstacles, including its maritime blockade, before negotiators could begin laying the groundwork for a settlement.
US AND IRAN HAVE EXTENSIVE DISAGREEMENTS
Disagreements between the US and Iran extend beyond Tehran’s nuclear program and control of the strait.
Trump wants to limit Iran’s support for its regional proxies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, and curb its ability to strike US allies with ballistic missiles. Iran wants sanctions lifted and an end to Israeli attacks on Hezbollah.
After the latest diplomatic trip was called off, two US Air Force C-17s carrying security staff, equipment and vehicles used to protect US officials flew out of Pakistan, two Pakistani government sources told Reuters on Sunday.
Trump said on Saturday there was “tremendous infighting and confusion” within Iran’s leadership.
Pezeshkian said last week there were “no hardliners or moderates” in Tehran and that the country stood united behind its supreme leader.
The war has destabilized the Middle East. Iran has struck its Gulf neighbors and conflict between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon has been reignited.
In Lebanon, Israeli strikes killed 14 people and wounded 37 on Sunday, the health ministry said.
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Seismic shift in Israeli politics as opposition leaders Lapid and Bennett form joint party
(JTA) — Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett teamed up once before to unseat Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, striking an unusual power-sharing deal after Israel’s 2021 election that briefly ousted Netanyahu from power.
Now, the two men are going even further in seeking to repeat their feat. Lapid and Bennett announced on Sunday that they would run in this year’s election in a shared party called Yachad, or Together.
“Our unity is a message to the entire people of Israel: The era of division is over. The era of correction has arrived,” Bennett said at a press conference announcing the collaboration.
The two men are betting that Israelis will see their coming together as an antidote to the polarization that has deepened under Netanyahu, who was reelected in late 2022 after an 18-month interlude in which Bennett was prime minister for a year and Lapid for six months. They hope that Lapid’s centrist supporters and Bennett’s center-right backers can overlook policy differences, which they acknowledged, for the greater good of the country.
Their announcement invigorated some Israelis on Sunday who believe it is essential to unseat Netanyahu, who has been prime minister for about 14 of the last 17 years and who is facing both criminal prosecution and calls to reckon with the security failures that led to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Many of them are willing to make compromises on policy nuances to achieve that goal.
But the union also ignited scorn on the right, as even some who might prefer to see Netanyahu unseated said they could no longer support Bennett if he is working with Lapid, whom they perceive as left-wing. Both Netanyahu and his far-right coalition partners posted on social media suggesting that Yachad would partner with Arab parties or even do the bidding of the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, posted an AI-generated image of Abbas presiding at a wedding of Lapid and Bennett, whom he called “an extreme leftist.”
Neither Bennett nor Lapid has prioritized resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or supported the creation of a Palestinian state. Their 2021 coalition included an Israeli Arab party.
Current polls show that the two men alone would not garner enough votes to be able to form a coalition on their own this year. But they could negotiate to add other parties to reach a governing majority either before or after the election, which must be held before the end of October. Gadi Eisenkot, a former army chief of staff who launched his own party last year, reportedly called for a three-way union earlier this year.
Their union in some ways resembles the pre-election alliance-building conducted by Peter Magyar in Hungary, who recently unseated Netanyahu’s ally Viktor Orban there. Many Israeli critics of the current government see the election in Hungary as a template for what could happen in Israel.
In the lead-up to the Yachad announcement, Bennett in particular announced some personal policy shifts that could make him more palatable to centrist and non-Orthodox voters. He said that he would now support same-sex unions in Israel and back public transportation operating on Shabbat.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Seismic shift in Israeli politics as opposition leaders Lapid and Bennett form joint party appeared first on The Forward.
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His kippah was a symbol of coexistence. Israeli police officers seized and destroyed it.
(JTA) — Alex Sinclair had no idea what would follow when he posted a picture of his mutilated kippah to Facebook on Thursday.
Sinclair, who lives in central Israel, described being detained by police officers who told him that his kippah, which had both the Israeli and Palestinian flags woven in, was illegal. When he was released from their custody, he was allowed to take his kippah home — but only after the Palestinian flag was cut out, leaving him with roughly half a head-covering.
To Sinclair, a British-born writer and educator whose books include “Loving the Real Israel: An Educational Agenda for Liberal Zionism,” the situation was galling, and not just because he had been accused of breaking a law that does not exist.
“She’d taken my possession, a religious ritual object, something that is very dear to my heart, and destroyed it,” he wrote about the officer who returned his kippah. He added, “That was it. I walked home, shaken, angry, depressed.”
A day after publishing his account of the encounter, eliciting hundreds of almost universally supportive comments, Sinclair said he had not heard from anyone in the government about his Facebook post or the complaint he filed on the Israel Police website.
But he had gotten offers of legal aid; calls from left-wing politicians, including Yair Golan; and even Shabbat flowers from a prominent liberal activist. His phone had been ringing off the hook with calls from journalists, and someone he barely knows was planning a rally for outside the police station in Modiin where he was detained.
“I’ve never experienced anything like this,” Sinclair said in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday afternoon.
The Israel Police has acknowledged the incident, saying publicly that a man had been detained after they were contacted about his kippah and had been released “following a clarification process.” They said the official complaint about the incident prevented further comment.
Sinclair said he thought the image of the defiled kippah was resonant for Jews who instinctively associated it with centuries of antisemitism. But he said he wondered whether the depth of the response reflected something else, too.
After the ceasefire in the Iran war, Israelis were “beginning to be able to breathe a little bit and look above the parapet and just sort of see, OK, maybe we can start to think about the future in a way that we really weren’t able to as a society for the past couple of years,” he said. Now, the thought for many is: “If we are looking ahead, oh my God, is this what is in store for us?”
The incident comes amid a broad crackdown on Palestinian symbols in public spaces, and allegations that police, who have come under the control of a far-right minister, are increasingly intimidating liberal activists.
Soon after being named national security minister in January 2023, Itamar Ben-Gvir told Israeli police officers to exercise wide latitude in removing Palestinian national flags from public places in order to preserve public order. He characterized the flag as a terrorist symbol, even though it is legal in Israel.
“It cannot be that lawbreakers wave terrorist flags, incite and encourage terrorism, so I ordered the removal of flags supporting terrorism from the public space and to stop the incitement against Israel,” he said at the time. Following the Oct. 7 attack on Israel later that year, the crackdown intensified even more.
During the same period, the police have been accused of using inappropriate force against people protesting against the right-wing government. Sinclair said he was concerned about the threats to liberal values in his chosen country.
“The job as a police officer is not to police people’s political opinions,” he said. “That happens in other countries that we don’t want to become.”
Among the hundreds of people responding to Sinclair’s Facebook post were many who echoed that sentiment — even while saying they did not share his appreciation for the Palestinian flag. (Elsewhere in Israel and online, Sinclair drew more scorn.)
“While I don’t agree with your choice of kippa, I do agree you have every right to wear it,” wrote one commenter. “This is awful and I’m sorry you experienced it. And I hate that this is where we are now, that someone could be detained for something like this.”
Gilad Kariv, a Reform rabbi and member of the opposition in Israel’s parliament, said in a statement that there was “systemic madness” within the Israel Police and that he believed a criminal investigation and civil lawsuit would be appropriate. He also called for introspection.
“If police officers had cut off a Jew’s kippah in any other country in the world, there would have been an uproar here in Israel,” Kariv wrote.
Sinclair said the kippah that was destroyed was not his first with the same design. After the wind blew away the first one, which he had custom-made by a popular Jerusalem vendor nearly 20 years ago, he ordered a replacement — that’s how motivated he was to wear his values on his head.
“I’m a Zionist, and I believe in the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in this part of their historic homeland. And I also think that the Palestinians are also people who have a right to self-determination in part of this place, which is also their historic homeland,” Sinclair said.
“By the ironies of history, the same chunk of land ended up being a place where two peoples have a legitimate connection, and we have to figure that out,” he continued. “People from both sides who want to delegitimize or erase the other side forget about whether they’re being nice or nasty; they’re just not being true to history.”
That was once a relatively widely held view among Israelis and Jews around the world. But decades of failed peace efforts, violent attacks on Israelis from Palestinian terrorists, and increasing extremism among both Jews and Arabs have caused a two-state solution to fall sharply out of favor during that period.
Sinclair says he sees himself as a peace activist, though he called the term “grandiose” and said, “I’ve got a lot of respect for people whose life is much more about the activism than mine.”
What he is, he says, is a Jew who loves Israel and is scared for its future. His next book, out this fall, will tackle what he believes is “a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people,” a topic on which he has suddenly become an unwilling case study.
On one side, he said, are far-right extremists, including Ben-Gvir, who “want a kind of Judaism and an Israel which doesn’t have a place for all kinds of things that feel very important to me,” including egalitarianism, Palestinians and left-leaning politics. (That side, he noted, is currently advancing legislation that would ban egalitarian prayer at the Western Wall.) On the other, he said, are those who promote an Israel that “is open and pluralist,” one in which people tolerate people who practice Judaism in ways they would not and hold values they do not.
“We’re in a struggle between these two versions of Judaism and versions of Zionism,” Sinclair said. “I very much hope that we’ll win the struggle. I think it’s not too late to win that struggle. … But it’s not a slam-dunk. And we, the Jewish people, are in real trouble if we lose.”
Sinclair believes his book could help turn that lofty vision into a how-to guide for Israeli liberals. But he also has more practical concerns, like where to get another kippah. He isn’t sure the vendor who made it before will be willing to do so again. And this time, it’s not just him but many of his friends who say they are interested in getting their hands on one.
“Some bright lefty entrepreneur,” he joked, “has got a big money-making opportunity there.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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