by Zev Chafets
This sounded self-pitying and false to me. It certainly wasn’t a position I wanted to defend to journalists. And so I quit.
For the next decade I wrote books and helped found the Jerusalem Report. It was at the magazine’s first anniversary party that I met Lisa Beyer. She was the new Time bureau chief in Jerusalem. One thing led to another. We fell in love and decided to get married.
Lisa isn’t Jewish. Her mother is a very lapsed Cajun Catholic, her father a born-again Pentecostal who once spoke in tongues on Jim Bakker’s Praise the Lord television show. When the time came to fly down to her hometown, Lafayette, Louisiana, to meet the family, I felt like Woody Allen on the way to visit Annie Hall’s grandmother.
That weekend, two of Lisa’s elderly Cajun aunts happened to be visiting. Although it is not the custom in Lafayette to discuss politics at the dinner table, the aunts talked about the upcoming gubernatorial race. Both, it turned out, were planning to vote for David Duke, the former head of the Louisiana Ku Klux Klan. They were mad at Duke’s opponent, Edwin Edwards, over some arcane local issue, but still, rooting for Duke struck me as rather extreme. Lisa was amused by my attempt to nod my way through the conversation, but I thought I covered up pretty well.
After dinner the aunts announced that they would teach me bourré, a Cajun card game. As we sat down at the kitchen table, one suddenly called to Lisa’s mom, “June, bring in the sheet.”
The sheet? What was this, some sort of Klan game? “What do you need a sheet for?” I asked.
“You put it down when the table’s sticky,” said one. I saw they were grinning. They had seen Annie Hall, too.
The next day we went to meet Lisa’s father. As we settled down in his living room I pointed to a picture of the Western Wall in Jerusalem that hung over the mantel. “Reminds me of home,” I said.
Lisa’s dad didn’t know we were planning to get married but he had his suspicions. “Since you live in Israel, am I right in assuming that you’re a Jewish fella?” he asked.
“Yes.”
There was a pause. A long pause, it seemed to me. Then he said, “It is my belief that the Jews are God’s Chosen People.”
“Well, sir,” I said, “in that case I’ve got some very good news for you about your future grandchildren.”
Lisa and I spent nine years in Israel and then moved to the United States. It was a deal we had made before our wedding—stay until my eldest son, Shmulik, entered the army, then go to New York so Lisa could continue her career. I joked that it was a triumph of feminism over Zionism but I was very unhappy about leaving. A consolation was that, in August 2000, Israel appeared to be in the final stages of making peace with the Palestinians.
We bought a house in Pelham, New York, a Westchester suburb popular with journalists and literary types. We had decided to raise our two children as Jews, which meant joining a synagogue. When I called the Pelham Jewish Center, a Conservative synagogue, the rabbi informed me that we wouldn’t be welcome. The Conservative movement, he explained, follows the rule of Talmudic Judaism: only the offspring of a Jewish mother are born kosher. Our kids, with a gentile mother, are ipso facto goyim. He suggested I join a Reform temple, where they aren’t so choosy about racial bloodlines. I did.
I SAW THE attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon through Israeli eyes, as part of a worldwide jihad. My neighbors and friends didn’t see it that way. Some viewed it as a discrete act of terrorism, like Timothy McVeigh’s bombing in Oklahoma City. Others felt that the United States had it coming. At a party not long after the attack, a friend took me aside and warned me that people—by which he meant liberal Christians like himself—were starting to grumble about American support for Israel. The Bush administration was very committed to Israel, wasn’t it? And weren’t some of the Bush advisers, well, neocons? You could see how that might upset the Arabs. Maybe a more balanced American policy would help straighten things out.
The main culprit, as far as my friends were concerned, was George W. Bush, followed closely by Republican Christians. Wasn’t Osama Bin Laden just a bearded version of Pat Robertson? And did you hear that Jerry Falwell blamed the attack on American promiscuity and immorality? The fact that Falwell and Robertson and the other Christian fundamentalists were on their side of what Bin Laden called “the jihad against Jews and crusaders” didn’t seem to register with many liberal Jews. As far as they were concerned, the real enemy was George W. Bush and his fundamentalist supporters.
Lisa and I were invited to the fiftieth birthday party of a close friend. The party was held in a cozy Riverdale inn. Most of the guests were journalists, writers, and academics; many were very successful and quite well known. Almost everyone there was Jewish, a fact commented upon by each of the few gentiles who rose to give a toast.
As for the Jews, they mostly mixed their tributes to the birthday boy with insults directed against the recently reelected George W. Bush.
We sat next to a married couple, a pair of high-powered academic psychologists affiliated with a prestigious New York university, who loudly applauded every dig at the president. “It’s frightening to realize that this man was elected,” the woman said to me. “What kind of person would vote for him?”
A few weeks earlier I had cast a ballot, for the first time in my life, in an American presidential election. I voted for Bush and I told her so.
She and her husband looked at me in amazement. How could a Bush voter have infiltrated the party? Was this some sort of grotesque joke? Finally the woman said, “I refuse to believe that!”
“A lot of people voted for Bush,” I said mildly. “Sixty million and change.”
“Not Jews,” she snapped. “A Jew who voted for George Bush is a Jew for Jesus.”
Lisa was smiling. She is often taken to be Jewish and, as a result, has had quite an education about what liberal Jews say to each other when they think gentiles aren’t listening.
“My parents are Holocaust survivors,” added the woman, as if this clinched the argument.
“Sorry to hear it,” I said, which, I immediately realized, might be subject to interpretation. The husband saw the conversation heading off the cliff and intervened.
“It’s just that we’ve never met anyone who voted for Bush,” he said in the fake nonjudgmental tone of a man who deals professionally with psychopaths. “We’re really interested. It would be fascinating to talk to you more about this, to see how your mind works.”
“Yeah, that would really be something,” I said. I could just picture these two in laboratory coats, peering deep into my eyes to find the gleam of perversity that would compel me, an Israeli and a Jew, to vote for the most pro-Israeli, pro-Jewish president in American history.
“What could you possibly find to like about Bush? He’s a fundamentalist Christian,” said the woman. “He wants to start Armageddon!”
I had been hearing variations on this theme from friends and family for the past few years. They, like the shrinks, couldn’t fathom how I could tolerate, much less support, a born-again Christian like George W. Bush, or think a positive thought about Jerry Falwell. I understood them well enough. I myself am constantly infuriated by Israeli rabbinical politicians who act morally superior and want to impose their religious views on society at large. But the intifada (and, subsequently, 9/11, the rise of Hamas and Hezbollah, and the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons) shifted my priorities.
Evangelical Christians—led by George W. Bush—were offering an alliance with Israel and its American Jewish supporters based on what they were calling “Judeo-Christian” values. Liberal Jews were disinclined to accept this offer because it would mean tolerating, if not supporting, the evangelical domestic agenda and cultural style. Maybe in peacetime I would have been, too. It is more emotionally satisfying to fight the Falwells than to join them.
But this isn’t peacetime. And, no matter how often Jewish liberals declare that the United States isn’t a Christian country, that is exactly what it is. Jews make up less
than 2 percent of the population—an influential percent, to be sure, but still, a tiny minority. The bargain extended by the evangelicals—to add “Judeo” to the name of the firm—is not easily dismissed.
Like all offers of partnership, this one needs to be weighed in terms of its costs and benefits. For Israel, the gains are obvious, even though some liberal Jews try very hard to make it look like a bad deal. In her 2006 book, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, Michelle Goldberg, a young American journalist who describes herself as a Jewish secular humanist, asserted that “the alliance between Christian Zionists and the most fanatical Israeli settlers is well known.” But like many things that are well known, it doesn’t happen to be true.
The evangelical-Israeli alliance is not a pact between Christian and Israeli religious nuts. It is a well-established relationship between the leaders of evangelical American Christianity and mainstream Israel. Every prime minister since Begin has relied on the support of the Christian right. Ehud Barak, the last Labor Party prime minister, is actually listed as a member of the faculty at Pat Robertson’s Regent University (the only unsaved member, as far as I could discover).
The dislike and contempt for evangelical Christians that is so integral to American Jewish cultural and political thinking is almost wholly absent in Israel. A few very reactionary Orthodox rabbis object to any connection with goyim. A few Israeli leftists whose views are in constant conformity with Western fashion hate Zionist Christians mostly because the New York Review of Books does. But the average Israeli—even the average anticlerical secular Israeli like me—appreciates evangelical support.
For American Jews, who tend to deny that they are in any way personally threatened by the jihad, the issue is obviously more clouded. But it should be said that if Jews feel entirely safe in the United States, it is because they are wrapped in the larger American polity. If the conservative Christians they believe to be anti-Semites actually were anti-Semites, life wouldn’t seem so secure to them.
It is also worth considering what would happen if the U.S. government were to actually decide—as some on the Pat Buchanan right as well as the Ramsey Clark left argue—that supporting Israel, with its paltry 6 million people, isn’t worth alienating the billion plus Muslims. Do American Jews really want to make the case for Israel all by themselves, without support of Christian Zionists? And, do they believe they can continue to count on this support as they position themselves as the chief adversaries of evangelical cultural and political aspirations?
It is clear from every poll and survey that no community in the United States is more philo-Semitic than conservative Christians. Most Jews are, by now, aware of this, but find it impossible to believe. They can’t get past two thousand years of Christian persecution and two hundred years of secular liberalism. Many believe that evangelicals want to convert them, or to use them as cannon fodder in some great End of Days Armageddon battle. They suspect that behind the warm, toothy smiles of the evangelicals is a coldhearted desire to establish a Christian theocracy in the United States. When they get to thinking about rural folk their minds go—as mine did on my first meeting with Lisa’s aunts—to white sheets and burning crosses.
I understand the skepticism. And, during the year I spent among evangelicals, I kept an eye out—the same critical eye I have been casting on Christians since my Little League days in Pontiac.
What I found was that Evangelical Christians, for reasons of their own, are, in an unprecedented way, extending a hand of friendship and wartime alliance to Jews; and the ancient tribal instinct to slap that hand away is a dangerous one. It may be that American Jews will decide they would rather face the jihad alone than rely on conservative Christians. But if they do, it is a decision that will come at great cost to their connection to Israel and their relationship with tens of millions of their fellow Americans. It is not a choice that ought to be made based on stereotypes, knee-jerk partisanship, or simple prejudice. Christian Zionism, in a time of jihad, deserves a closer look.
TWO
IN THE BEGINNING
Protestant philo-Semitism got off the Mayflower. The Pilgrims saw their voyage to the New World as a reprise of the exodus from Egypt. They adopted Old Testament laws, gave their children and their settlements Hebrew names, and taught the Bible in their schools and universities. For a wild moment they even considered making Hebrew the language of the New World, an initiative that foundered on the first Puritan attempt to pronounce the throat-scraping Hebrew letter chet. Writing came easier. The shield of Yale University is inscribed Urim v’Thummim (“light and truth”), a phrase from the book of Exodus.
The first actual Jews in the colonies, a group of twenty-three refugees fleeing the Portuguese Inquisition in Brazil, arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654. The Dutch governor, Peter Stuyvesant, who did not share the English Puritans’ taste for Hebrews, wanted to expel the lot, but intervention by the Jewish investors of the Dutch West Indian Company saved them—the first example of Jewish lobbying in the New World.
There were about two thousand Jews in America at the time of the Declaration of Independence. Most were Sephardim, Jews of Portuguese or Spanish origin who came to the colonies by way of Holland or England. Some settled in Savannah, Charleston, and other southern ports, but the majority, even then, lived in the cities of the Northeast.
A number of Jews fought in the Revolutionary War, none more disastrously than Francis Salvador, who, at the head of a frontier force in Georgia on July 1, 1776, had the misfortune of encountering a band of pro-British Creek Indians, who promptly scalped him.
The most famous Jewish patriot was Haym Solomon, a Philadelphia financier who loaned the Continental Congress a fortune, got stiffed, and died broke. But the loyalty of Solomon, Salvador, and other Jewish revolutionaries gave standing in the new republic. In 1790, President George Washington himself dispatched a letter to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island. “May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in the land continue to merit and enjoy the goodwill of the other inhabitants,” he wrote.
It doesn’t seem like much today but that letter sent a welcoming signal to the Jews of Europe. Immigrants began arriving, most of them from Germany. They didn’t necessarily see themselves as the “seed of Abraham” or, in the words of Haym Solomon, members of the “Hebrew nation.” They wanted to be regular Americans of the Jewish faith. In 1841, at the dedication of the Reform temple of Charleston, South Carolina, Rabbi Gustav Posnanski put it into words: “This country,” he proclaimed, “is our Palestine, this city our Jerusalem, this house of God our Temple.”
Forty years later, this attitude was challenged by the emergence of a proto-Zionist movement. Groups of young Eastern European Jews, called Chovevei Zion (“Lovers of Zion”) began moving to Palestine and establishing agricultural colonies. This excited the interest and support of several European benefactors, chief among them the Rothschild family, but American Jews didn’t like the looks of it. In 1885, the dominant Reform movement published a strong anti-Zionist statement: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation but a religious community; and we therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning a Jewish state.” Orthodox Jews, a minority within the American Jewish community at the time, did expect a restoration, but considered the idea of building a secular Jewish state to be heretical.
Some Christians saw it differently. To them, the return of the Jews to the Holy Land was a sign that biblical prophecy was being fulfilled. In 1878, William E. Blackstone, a self-educated farm boy from Adams, New York, wrote a best-selling book, Jesus Is Coming, which set forth Blackstone’s Zionist ideas about the end times. Blackstone traveled to the Holy Land, met the young Jewish pioneers, and declared them to be living proof that God was right on time.
In 1891, in the midst of a wave of Russian pogroms, Blackstone circulated a petition titled “What shall be done for the Russian Jews?” “Why not give Palestine
back to them again?” he demanded. “According to God’s distribution of nations, it is their home—an inalienable possession from which they were expelled by force….
“A million exiles, by their terrible sufferings, are piteously appealing to our sympathy, justice and humanity. Let us now restore them to the land of which they were cruelly despoiled by our Roman ancestors.”
Blackstone’s petition was signed by 413 leading Americans—virtually all of them Christians—including Melville Fuller, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court; Thomas Reed, Speaker of the House of Representatives; John D. Rockefeller, Cyrus McCormick, and J. P. Morgan. Blackstone, who by this time was calling himself “God’s little errand boy,” sent it to President Benjamin Harrison, who proceeded to ignore it.
In 1916, Blackstone tried again. This time the signatories were lesser figures, but the president, Woodrow Wilson, was more sympathetic. The following year, on the eve of the British conquest of Palestine, when British foreign minister Arthur Balfour, himself a devout Protestant, promised a Jewish national home, Wilson said amen.
Blackstone and his fellow American evangelicals saw World War I and the Balfour Declaration as further signs of biblical prophecy. By the end of the war, kibbutzim had been established in the Galilee and the Sharon Plain; the first Jewish city, Tel Aviv, was founded on the sands of the Mediterranean; and the Jewish population of Palestine reached 80,000. “Prophetic conferences” were held in churches throughout the United States, and developments in the Holy Land were checked against biblical predictions. The prospect of a Jewish state in Zion was more exciting to American Christians than to American Jews.
ISRAEL AFTER THE Holocaust should have been an easy sell in the United States, but it wasn’t. The Truman administration grudgingly recognized the Jewish state but slapped an arms embargo on it in 1948, during Israel’s War of Independence. Six thousand Israeli soldiers died in that war—roughly 1 percent of the entire Jewish population of Palestine—while the United States withheld military support and the FBI chased down Zionist-American gunrunners.
