"Humankind cannot bear very much reality," T.S. Eliot wrote in the first of his Four Quartets. Today’s Israel-Hamas war and America's own increasingly warlike divisions are forcing some of us to bear realities we haven’t borne quite so heavily before. Some of those realities involve attitudes against Jews that Eliot held and that may have become menacing again — as have the recent frantic efforts to censure antisemitism itself, sometimes in ways that risk prompting even worse antisemitism.
But larger eruptions of hatred and mayhem in America’s increasingly divided, uncivil society are driven not by antisemitism or by today's Jews, nor by the riptides of global capital and technology and the desperate migrations and belligerent nationalisms that they accelerate. More than most of us recognize, they’re driven by ancient religious passions that figured deeply in Israel’s and America's origins. Both nations’ professedly “liberal” and civic-republican cultures are profoundly and perhaps fatally conflicted, in ways that prompt not only news headlines but also biblically resonant upheavals, even when the participants don’t consider themselves religious at all.
