Defenders of the beleaguered Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh have taken to arguing, in a lawyerly way of exploring a hypothesis, that even if Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations of sexual assault were completely accurate, Kavanaugh would still deserve to be confirmed. “Let’s say he did this exactly as she said,” New York Times Opinion editor Bari Weiss said on the MSNBC show hosted by Stephanie Ruhle. “Should the fact that a 17 year old, presumably very drunk kid, did this, should this be disqualifying? That’s the question at the end of the day, isn’t it?”

Weiss is suggesting the alleged offense might be excusable because of extenuating circumstances: Kavanaugh having been a teenager and drunk. An even more extreme variant of this argument is that what Kavanaugh is accused of was not so terrible as to merit losing a Supreme Court position. Former Time magazine essayist Lance Morrow made that argument in the Wall Street Journal on Monday, writing:

The thing happened—if it happened—an awfully long time ago, back in Ronald Reagan’s time, when the actors in the drama were minors and (the boys, anyway) under the blurring influence of alcohol and adolescent hormones. No clothes were removed, and no sexual penetration occurred. The sin, if there was one, was not one of those that Catholic theology calls peccata clamantia—sins that cry to heaven for vengeance.

The offense alleged is not nothing, by any means. It is ugly, and stupid more than evil, one might think, but trauma is subjective and hard to parse legally.

A major problem with these arguments is that they are viewing the accusations through the prism of criminal law. For the sake of argument, one might allow that a 17-year-old who has been convicted of attempted rape should, later in life, have his record expunged and be reintegrated into society. That isn’t necessarily the case under existing law, but there’s an argument it should be.

But those are not the circumstances of this case. The Senate Judiciary Committee, which is holding the hearings on the accusations, is not a criminal court. It’s not their place to decide whether Kavanaugh was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and what the appropriate punishment is. Rather, their task is to decide whether Kavanaugh should be allowed to proceed in a nomination process for one of the most powerful jobs in America, a lifetime tenure as a Supreme Court Justice.

In a criminal case, the burden of proof would be necessarily high, in order to make sure that an innocent man is not punished. In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, the burden of proof is not about punishment but about evaluating qualifications and also apprising potential harm if a bad person is made a judge. In this process, anything that has bearing on Kavanaugh’s character is pertinent.

If there is credible reason to believe that Kavanaugh did attempt to rape a 15-year-old girl when he was 17-years-old, even if those reasons don’t meet the threshold of legal certainty, then the accusation is highly relevant to whether he should be a Supreme Court Justice. After all, putting someone with a credible accusation against him of a crime in a position of judicial power would undermine the legitimacy of the courts. When Kavanaugh decides on matters relating to gender justice, Americans would have good reason to question his fairness.

Further, if we do view this as a criminal case, it’s not necessarily true that a 17-year-old convicted of attempted rape would receive mercy later in life. In Maryland, where the alleged attempted rape occurred, a 17-year-old facing these charges would be tried as an adult. Of course, once we talk about a trial, then we have to face real-world issues of the fairness of the system. As a white child of well-to-do parents, a 17-year-old Kavanaugh, in a hypothetical trial, likely would not have received the harshest punishment. But it’s not obvious that those calling for forgiveness now are concerned about the real inequities of the criminal justice system, including the over-incarceration of children in the United States. Kavanaugh’s defenders’ current preoccupation with the particularities of youth can easily appear opportunistic.

Finally, saying that Kavanaugh deserves forgiveness and restoration ignores the fact that he’s never been punished and denies any wrong-doing. As writer Ezekiel Kweku tweeted, we’re having a conversation “about forgiveness without confession, redemption without repentance, restoration without restitution.”

If Kavanaugh did admit he wronged Christine Blasey Ford, then we could have a fruitful discussion about putting the past behind us. But as long as he maintains his innocence, the only option is to try and evaluate how credible Ford’s accusation is.

Senator Bernie Sanders has spent much of the summer highlighting the low wages at major American corporations and contrasting it with the astronomical pay for top executives. The title of a town hall in July made his point clear: “CEOs vs. Workers.” (The workers showed up; the CEOs didn’t.) A petition he launched in August targeted Amazon specifically, noting that CEO Jeff Bezos makes “more money in ten seconds than the median employee of Amazon makes in an entire year” and arguing that “thousands of Amazon employees are forced to rely on food stamps, Medicaid and public housing because their wages are too low.” 

This assistance amounts to a form of “corporate welfare,” Sanders argued, and earlier this month he and California Representative Ro Khanna introduced a bill that aims to curtail it. The Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act (Stop BEZOS) would require companies with 500 or more workers to reimburse the government for the cost of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid, school lunch, and Section 8 benefits claimed by their employees. The bill received predictable pushback from the employers targeted, but it also was criticized by a variety of experts on the left.

Stop BEZOS, progressive wonks argued, not only stigmatized programs like SNAP, but misunderstood how those programs work. Because these benefits aren’t predicated on work, they aid low-wage workers, not low-wage employers. The only thing Stop BEZOS might accomplish, critics said, is incentivizing employers like Amazon to avoid hiring workers, such as single parents, that are likely to be eligible for public assistance. The bill’s proponents didn’t take the criticism lightly. Sanders’s policy director, Warren Gunnels, created a stir when he claimed that one of the plan’s critics, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), was motivated by its receipt of donations from the Walmart Foundation. 

Sanders and Khanna are right that parts of the threadbare U.S. safety net act as a form of corporate welfare, but they singled out the wrong parts. If progressive legislators and wonks are serious about making sure that public assistance intended for the poor doesn’t flow to companies like Amazon and their billionaire owners, they need to fix the Earned Income Tax Credit and challenge the conservative “pro-work” philosophy that underpins it.

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which was claimed by 27 million workers and families last year, is a refundable tax credit that’s tied to a worker’s earnings. Starting with the first dollar of earned income, the EITC gradually phases in, growing larger with each additional dollar of earned income until it reaches a maximum amount. Workers who don’t earn the full phase-in income—currently about $10,000 for a worker with one child—don’t get the full EITC credit. The EITC also phases out as a worker earns more than the full-credit income. At that point, each dollar of earned income gradually reduces the value of the EITC until it reaches zero. 

In its four-decade history, the EITC has enjoyed enviable bipartisan support. It’s been expanded by Democratic and Republican presidents alike, growing dramatically in both the size of the credit and total cost of the program, and ultimately assuming the role of the largest anti-poverty program for the non-aged. Democrats and liberal think tanks have put forward an endless array of proposals to expand it—something that both Khanna and the CBPP, despite taking opposite stances on Stop BEZOS, have championed. Meanwhile, Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan called the EITC “one of the federal government’s most effective anti-poverty programs” and put forward his own expansion proposal. 

The EITC has flourished despite—or perhaps because of—the racist and anti-poor assumptions that animated its creation. By the mid-1960s, both liberals in the Lyndon Johnson administration and conservatives like Milton Friedman had coalesced around the idea of replacing the complex, paternalistic system of cash welfare then known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with a “negative income tax” (NIT) that would level up every poor person to a basic income amount, regardless of whether they worked, then phase out gradually as work income replaced NIT dollars. President Richard Nixon embraced a moderate version of the idea with his Family Assistance Plan (FAP), while progressive activists in the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) pushed liberal Democrats to back their more generous proposal. Ultimately, Senator George McGovern made a $1,000 “demogrant” that would have gone to every American regardless of income or work—thereby making it more of a “universal basic income” (UBI) than an NIT—central to his 1972 presidential campaign.

For conservative Republicans, none of these proposals was acceptable. But as chair of the Senate Finance Committee, conservative Louisiana Democrat Russell Long led the charge in killing any variant of an NIT/UBI. While Long had no problem defending various forms of corporate preferences embedded in the tax code, he had deep antipathy for the non-working poor. He allegedly referred to the NRWO—which featured many African American mothers in its leadership—as “Black Brood Mares, Inc.” and slammed NIT/UBI proposals as plans to “reward idleness and discourage personal initiative” by “paying people not to work” and “lay about all day making love and producing illegitimate babies.” Instead of giving the poor (or every American) money regardless of whether they worked, Long proposed a “work bonus” tied to employment. This “work bonus” ultimately became the EITC, which President Gerald Ford signed into law as part of the Tax Reduction Act of 1975.

Long’s work-conditional vision captured the shift to the right on welfare taking place in both parties. Ronald Reagan, who’d strenuously opposed FAP, filled the void in the GOP left by Nixon in the wake of Watergate, while moderate Democrats like Bill Clinton assumed power in the Democratic Party in the wake of McGovern’s defeat. Reagan famously demonized a “welfare queen” in his failed 1976 campaign for president, and as president he pushed cuts to a variety of safety net programs in order to combat what he called “welfare culture.” Clinton ran for president in 1992 as an unabashedly anti-welfare, pro-work Democrat, pledging to “end welfare as we know it” by forcing the poor off of the welfare rolls and into the workplace.

Conservatives (and some liberals) are fond of quoting liberal economist Arthur Okun’s likening of income redistribution to a “leaky bucket.” According to Okun, both administrative costs and foregone economic growth mean that if the government takes a dollar from the rich, it won’t necessarily be able to give that entire dollar to the poor. While the size of the leak is hotly debated—and despite the fact that Okun argued that we should be willing to tolerate significant leaks for the sake of greater equality—the leaky bucket has become a staple of Econ 101 as a representation of the unintended consequences and inherent “inefficiency” of social welfare programs. 

But programs like the EITC are the leaky bucket we should really worry about. Because the credit is conditioned on work, it expands the supply of available labor and increases the power of employers relative to workers. The program thus drives wages down to the extent that a dollar spent on EITC only raises worker wages by around 70 cents, while employers keep the rest, according to research by economist Jesse Rothstein. (Other scholars have reached similar conclusions.) So a substantial chunk of the $60-plus billion spent on the EITC every year really is the type of “corporate welfare” that Sanders rightly decries. 

The “end of welfare” has had a predictably deleterious impact on the most vulnerable, pushing them into deep poverty, and tying assistance to work has placed programs like the EITC out of reach for the (disproportionately black and Latino) Americans who can’t find work. The U.S. simply can’t afford to let nearly a third of its largest non-elderly anti-poverty program “leak” back to companies like Amazon and Walmart. If Sanders and Khanna want to rid the safety net of hidden corporate welfare, they’d do well to propose ending the EITC’s work requirements and turning it into an NIT, providing every poor person with a basic income regardless of work. According to Rothstein’s estimates, an NIT would have the opposite effect of the EITC. An NIT would increase workers’ bargaining power, thereby increasing wages for those at the bottom by $1.39 for every dollar spent. 

But making a full-throated case for the NIT will require Sanders, Khanna, and other left-wing lawmakers to stop equating work with deservingness—an association that “job guarantee” proposals, and mantras like “Nobody who works 40 hours a week should be living in poverty” inadvertently deepen. It will also require letting go of the myth that Republicans will accede to social programs tied to work. There’s a reason that Paul Ryan’s modest expansion of the EITC went nowhere. The GOP’s support for the EITC has always been exaggerated, and Republicans recently have attacked the EITC over (virtually nonexistent) fraud. For Republicans, work requirements are merely the precursor or second-best alternative to outright cuts.

At the very least, Democrats should move the EITC towards a de-facto NIT by setting the phase-in of the full credit to as low an income as possible. While the prospect of the non-working poor declaring phantom “earned income” to qualify for the EITC is an absurd exercise in tax chicanery, it’s certainly no worse than what many rich Americans get away with every year, and it’s significantly better than the status quo, where employers capture a substantial portion of the EITC and the non-working poor get nothing.

When protests inspired by uprisings in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia hit Yemen in 2011, the United States and the United Kingdom, the regime’s main backers, at first pooh-poohed the protestors’ grievances. Only after anger over the endemic corruption and the economy split Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s regime in two, sparking street battles between regime loyalists and Sunni military and tribal fighters, did Yemen’s foreign partners start to worry. Fearing Somalia-like chaos that would be exploited by the local Al Qaeda franchise, they brokered a deal for Saleh to step down.

Three years later, Western diplomats were celebrating the success of their “Yemen model” for dealing with political upheaval and suggesting it might work in Syria and Libya. But trouble was brewing. Despite a new president, the basis for a new constitution, and a genuinely impressive nine-month “national dialogue conference” attended by most major Yemeni factions including civil society groups, buy-in to the new-model Yemen—which looked an awful lot like the Yemen of old—was deceptively low. 

In July 2014, the entire post-Arab Spring arrangement broke down when the government tried to slash fuel subsidies, nearly doubling the price of fuel at the pump. The Zaydi Shia Houthi rebels accused the president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, and his government of corruption and fecklessness. By the end of September, after several days of fighting, the Houthis controlled the city—something that had seemed impossible just a few months earlier. By the following spring, the civil war had begun in earnest. Saudi Arabia, viewing the Shia Houthis as a proxy for Iran, added heavy aerial bombardment to the mix. 

Four years on from the hype of the “Yemen model,” Yemen is mired in a devastating civil war that has triggered the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Conservative estimates are that 10,000 civilians have died, although the total is likely much closer to 50,000. Upwards of 20 million need some kind of humanitarian assistance. A million people have been infected with cholera. And no end is in sight.

Often simplified into a proxy battle between Iran and Saudi Arabia, in reality the war has devolved into multiple, overlapping conflicts driven by an ever-changing patchwork of rivalry and alliance. Salafists and secessionists backed by the United Arab Emirates often expend as much energy battling their nominal allies, Saudi Arabia-funded Islamists and loyalists of the internationally recognized President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, as they do the Houthis.  The local franchises of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State publish videos from the frontlines of battles against the Houthis in areas the government claims is under its control. A common thread runs through each of these internecine struggles: the desire—or the demand—for legitimacy.

I lived and worked in Yemen during the transitional period following Saleh’s ouster in 2011. Beyond the headlines, what I found was a country in the midst of a slow-motion collapse. It didn’t matter whether you were talking to Sunni Islamists or Zaydi Shia Houthis, southern secessionists or frustrated technocrats: Yemen was plagued with fuel and job shortages. The cost of living was soaring as incomes fell to zero. The government was unable to provide security and the judicial system, broken as it was before, had collapsed. The new “unity” government—made up of rival factions from the old regime—was paralyzed by infighting. Few Yemenis outside of the big cities knew or cared much about the political transition or dialogue process. They were too busy trying to eke out a living. For many, the main symbol of international intervention in Yemen was a regular succession of U.S. drone strikes that all too often killed innocent people rather than Al Qaeda militants. Unsurprisingly, secessionist sentiment was growing in the South while the Houthi rebels in the North were both making gains on the ground, and marketing themselves as a meaningful alternative to the old elite—as in fact was Al Qaeda. The legitimacy of the political order in Sana’a was in crisis, sparking a free-for-all.

Legitimacy, according to New Zealand political scientist Kevin Clements, “is about social, economic and political rights, and it is what transforms coercive capacity and personal influence into durable political authority.” It’s about “whether the contractual relationship between the state and citizens is working effectively or not.”

In the first decade of the 2000s, the political economist Sue Unsworth proposed a way of testing the overall legitimacy of the political order that underpins a state by asking four questions: 

1.     Does the political system comply with the agreed-upon rules of procedure (the constitution and the law) in the country in question?

2.     Does the state provide basic public goods (like healthcare, education, security and a legal system)?

3.     Is there a shared vision for the country among the ruling class and the ruled?

4.     Is there international recognition for the political order?

If you’re a diplomat or a local government official you are likely to think rules and recognition are the priority. But if you’re a normal person going to work or trying to find work, shopping for food, and bringing up a family, the services and a shared vision are likely the most important. And the worse conditions are, and the less likely they seem to change, the more appealing the idea of overturning the status quo becomes. 

For this reason, there is a simpler test for the legitimacy of a state, which is to ask whether the current setup is good enough that the population at large doesn’t feel the need to agitate for major change. If people take to the streets in huge numbers demanding the fall of the regime, even if the regime responds with violence – as happened across the Arab world in 2011—that’s generally a sign that the system is failing the test. From 2011 onwards, Yemen scored a pretty consistent F.

Western officials I spoke to in Sana’a between 2012 and 2014 recognized that the economy, the failure of basic services like electricity and water, and rule of law were big issues. But they were struggling to strike a balance between directives from their own capitals largely focused on counterterrorism, maintaining the fragile détente between Saleh supporters and their elite rivals, and keeping an increasingly vulnerable president Hadi grounded. Because they and their Yemeni counterparts were focused on Sana’a politics, that’s what they perceived as ultimate priority.

You’d hope that people would learn from past mistakes. But since a Saudi-led coalition entered the war in March 2015 with the stated aim of restoring Hadi, who fled the Houthi-controlled capital earlier that year, little effort has been made to restore the state’s perceived legitimacy in areas ostensibly controlled by Hadi’s government (which likes to call itself al-shareia, or “the legitimacy”). 

Most officials work from Riyadh, with the prime minister and a select few officials cloistered in the presidential palace in Aden. Yemen’s southernmost provinces were liberated from the Houthi-Saleh alliance in 2015 by local forces but lack basic services like electricity and water. The South remains deeply insecure. Forces loyal to Hadi clash regularly with UAE-backed secessionist militias. The security picture is better in Mareb, in central Yemen, where the Houthis were also largely ejected in in 2015. The province now exists as a largely autonomous region, run by the Governor Sultan al-Aradah, with little input from Hadi.

The Houthis aren’t doing any better: deeply unpopular in the territories they control in the highlands and the west coast, they rule largely through a mixture of fear and bribery. And for many Yemenis, the international community isn’t all that legitimate either.

In stark contrast to these slap-dash approaches, Al Qaeda seems to have been the group that thought hardest about legitimacy: When it took over the southern port city of Mukalla in 2015, it focused on service delivery and running its own local courts, with some success. This was part of a carefully-wrought strategy from then-Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) emir Nasir al-Wuhayshi, which can be seen emerging in letters to fellow Al Qaeda leaders in previous years. When Cyclone Chapala battered Southern Yemen in November 2015, AQAP-ruled Mukalla was best prepared for the deluge, evacuating residents from their homes and ensuring a steady supply of bottled water was available. (The group also filmed its work in Mukalla obsessively and heavily promoted videos of life in Mukalla that presented a softer vision of its mission than the then-ascendant Islamic State.) In April 2016, the group was forced out of the city by local UAE-backed forces.

The fact is, no one in Yemen is consistently perceived as legitimate across all cross-sections of society. And Al Qaeda and Marebi sheikhs aside, no one seems to be all of that interested in earning their legitimacy.

Why does this matter? Earlier this month, the new U.N. special envoy to Yemen, Martin Griffiths, tried to get Hadi and the Houthis to sign up to his framework for a peace process during meetings in Geneva. The Houthis ultimately failed to show, but Griffiths’s plan—which remains unchanged—is a familiar one: form a unity government and start a new period of political transition, and then bring other groups in later.

It makes sense that Griffiths wants to simplify peace talks for now. But the danger is that Griffiths’s backers—the member states of the U.N. Security Council, the Gulf states and others—will fall back into the same old patterns: They will quietly help install some familiar faces in government, look for technical solutions and bold visions for the future that exist only on paper, and react with surprise when a government made up of the elite of 2018 fails to do anything to build legitimacy on the ground and the events of 2011 and 2014 repeat themselves.

Western diplomats and officials have yet to accept that legitimacy is not the same thing as the broad, legal authority that the international community can confer on an individual or group like President Hadi. Nor does legitimacy automatically accrue to a central government, even when an election has been won.

Legitimacy is won at the local level, by listening and engaging with people on the ground, delivering services, and creating buy-in to the wider national system, with all the messiness and complexity that entails. It is won by setting realistic goals, one at a time, and achieving them, not just setting out bold new visions for the future, although these are unquestionably an important part of a longer-term process. Until people are ready to get their priorities straight in Yemen, the country is likely to remain deeply unstable.

For the second time in almost 30 years, the Senate Judiciary Committee is publicly weighing sexual-misconduct claims made against a Supreme Court nominee. Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley announced on Monday that the committee he chairs will hear testimony from both Brett Kavanaugh, a federal appellate judge in D.C., and Christine Blasey Ford, a psychology professor in California who says he sexually assaulted her at a house party during high school in the early 1980s.

Many women have stories similar to Blasey’s, but only one knows what she is currently going through. Anita Hill faced a similar gauntlet in 1991 when she told the committee that Clarence Thomas, her former boss and a pending Supreme Court nominee, had sexually harassed her on multiple occasions. He denied any allegations of wrongdoing and was narrowly confirmed to the court. He serves there to this day.

In a New York Times op-ed on Tuesday, Hill offered some advice to senators as they prepare for next Monday’s hearing. She recommended that senators avoid “pitting the public interest in confronting sexual harassment against the need for a fair confirmation hearing.” She urged them to respect Blasey by referring to her by name instead of vague references like “Judge Kavanaugh’s accuser,” and to appoint a neutral, experienced investigative body to weigh the allegations on the committee’s behalf. She also emphasized that the committee should proceed cautiously, since haste would “signal that sexual assault accusations are not important.”

“A fair, neutral and well-thought-out course is the only way to approach Dr. Blasey and Judge Kavanaugh’s upcoming testimony,” Hill wrote. “The details of what that process would look like should be guided by experts who have devoted their careers to understanding sexual violence. The job of the Senate Judiciary Committee is to serve as fact-finders, to better serve the American public, and the weight of the government should not be used to destroy the lives of witnesses who are called to testify.”

This is a task that may be beyond the committee’s capacity. Some key senators have already expressed doubt about Blasey’s account and questioned its relevance. Utah’s Orrin Hatch told a reporter that even if she was telling the truth, “I think it would be hard for senators not to consider who he is today.” Grassley told reporters, “We’re talking about—you understand we’re talking about 35 years ago. I’d hate to ask—have somebody ask me what I did 35 years ago.” South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham likened the revelation to “a drive-by shooting” against Kavanaugh. “I’ll listen to the lady, but we’re going to bring this to a close,” he added.

That mood pervaded Republicans’ response this week. On Tuesday night, Blasey’s legal representative sent a letter to the committee asking lawmakers to delay the hearing until the FBI conducts an investigation into her allegation. “A full investigation by law enforcement officials will ensure that the crucial facts and witnesses in this matter are assessed in a non-partisan manner, and that the committee is fully informed before conducting any hearing or making any decision,” the letter said. Grassley responded to the letter by not really responding to it at all, pointedly noting in a statement that her invitation to appear before the committee on Monday still stands.

It may be tempting to turn to another institution in American society that could properly weigh the situation. But one of the persistent lessons of the past year is that no such institution exists. The rot runs deep in American society: in movie studios and in media empires, in television networks and major publications, in churches large and small, in courthouses and statehouses, in prosecutors’ offices and prisons, in the military, and universities, and Olympic teams, and Congress, and the White House. If there is a nerve center in American society where persistent, gendered abuses of power have not been found, it may only be because nobody’s thoroughly scrutinized it.

The inescapable conclusion is that the #MeToo movement represents, in practical terms, a crisis for the American rule of law. Countless women and some men have come forward over the past year to describe what are essentially criminal acts committed against them. With rare exceptions, there are typically no formal indictments against those they name, no prosecutions or trials, no verdicts or sentences. Organized society hinges on the premise that there can be restitution for harms done and consequences for those who inflicted them. The consequences felt by those swept up in the Weinstein effect, however, often appear to be rare and fleeting. (Weinstein himself is among the few facing criminal charges.)

Even those who endure workplace sexual harassment and other misdeeds that aren’t quite criminal sometimes have little recourse. Human-resource departments have the paradoxical responsibility of both protecting workers and limiting their company’s legal liability, and the latter often triumphs over the former. The Supreme Court dealt workers a harsh blow earlier this year in Epic Systems v. Lewis, upholding the use of forced-arbitration clauses in employment contracts to foil class-action lawsuits like those used to challenge systemic sexual harassment. The impact is felt at all levels of the workforce: Hundreds of McDonald’s workers went on strike this week to protest the company’s failure to address harassment in its franchises.

It’s hard to imagine that an epidemic of arsons or car thefts or letter bombs would be treated like this. And it’s no great leap to conclude that a breakdown in a society’s response leads to a loss of confidence in the public institutions that are supposed to support them. Look no further than the relationship between residents of major cities and police departments that fail to solve large numbers of homicides. “If these cases go unsolved, it has the potential to send the message to our community that we don’t care,” an Oakland police captain told The Washington Post earlier this year.

We are already seeing similar signs. Last week, when Blasey’s accusations were known but her identity was not, Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick noted that it was unsurprising that she wanted to remain anonymous. “I would have told her that neither politics nor journalism are institutions that can evaluate and adjudicate facts about systems in which powerful men use their power to harm women,” Lithwick wrote. “I would have told her that she would be risking considerable peril to her personal reputation, even as she would be lauded as a hero. I would have also told her that powerful men have about a three-month rehabilitation period through which they must live, after which they can be swept up once again in the slipstream of their own fame and success.”

This is what makes the allegations against Kavanaugh so resonant: the idea, perhaps a naive one, that the Supreme Court is supposed to be different. The justices, at least in the ideal, are supposed to represent the American rule of law. The president controls the bureaucracy and the military; Congress controls the budget and impeachment. All that the high court can draw upon is the public’s faith in its integrity. And now the Senate faces the question of whether or not to elevate a new justice whose alleged behavior represents that rule of law’s negation.

Will senators be able to properly weigh this? So far, it’s doubtful. Kavanaugh’s confirmation would markedly shift the court’s ideological balance to the right. As a result, the GOP has generally shown more interest in placing him on the court than in properly vetting his record, even before he was accused of sexual assault. Democrats have performed little better. Kavanaugh’s evasiveness during the hearing never quite reached the threshold of committing perjury, despite their claims. And Democratic senators squandered some of their credibility with insinuations that he discussed the Russia investigation with a Trump-linked legal firm or racked up gambling debts in New Jersey that ultimately went unproven.

Those failings have no bearing on the veracity of Blasey’s story, of course. The would-be justice has consistently denied that anything happened between him and Blasey. “This is a completely false allegation,” he said in a statement on Monday. “I have never done anything like what the accuser describes—to her or to anyone. Because this never happened, I had no idea who was making this accusation until she identified herself yesterday.” Kavanaugh even reportedly suggested in private conversations with Republican senators that it may be a case of mistaken identity.

Some of his defenders, however, are still going out of their way not only to dispute the allegations, but to minimize their significance if they are true. Conservative legal activist Carrie Severino suggested on CNN that what Blasey described was a range of acts that stretched “from boorishness to rough horseplay to actual attempted rape.” Writer Rod Dreher opined that Kavanaugh’s “loutish drunken behavior” offered no insights into his current character, adding that it was a “terrible standard to establish in public life.” Bari Weiss, a New York Times opinion editor, said in an MSNBC interview that she believed Blasey, but added, “By all accounts, other than this instance, Brett Kavanaugh has a reputation as being a prince of a man, frankly, other than this.”

It looks like the Senate Judiciary Committee’s flaws aren’t unique to it after all. Maybe that means it’s not necessarily the committee, or any other institution, that’s truly the problem. Maybe it’s just the people and the culture that occupy it.

Before he left for North Carolina on Wednesday to survey damage caused by Hurricane Florence, President Donald Trump released a video celebrating his administration’s response. “This was tough hurricane,” he said, “one of the wettest we’ve ever seen, from the standpoint of water.” The sentiment, though redundant, was technically correct. Florence was the rainiest hurricane on record for the Carolinas, and the eighth-rainiest to ever hit the contiguous United States.

But North and South Carolinians may take issue with Trump’s idea that Florence was a tough hurricane—past tense. Yes, the storm has since dissipated and moved out into the Atlantic. But thousands are still in immediate danger due to flooding caused by overflowing rivers, some of which have yet to reach their highest point. For those people, Florence is a tough hurricane—an ongoing disaster that’s may only get tougher in the coming days. Rivers were still rising in North Carolina on Tuesday, and in South Carolina are expected to continue rising throughout the week.

Trump’s remarks weren’t the first time a technically accurate statement has failed to relay Hurricane Florence’s particular dangers. Miscommunication about the storm abounded. As Florence approached the Carolina coastline, forecasters noted it had weakened from a Category 4 to a Category 1 storm. This prompted many people to cancel their evacuation plans. “[We] didn’t think it was actually going to be as bad,” North Carolina corrections officer Famous Roberts told the Associated Press. They were wrong.

But they weren’t wrong because the forecasters were wrong. They were wrong because the Saffir-Simpson scale, as the hurricane ranking system is known, only measures hurricane danger in terms of wind speed; it doesn’t take excessive rainfall, storm surge, or the potential for river overflows into account. Americans react accordingly. When preparing for a hurricane, we expect a one- or two-day impact of wind damage, and perhaps some rain and storm surge, before it eventually passes. We don’t expect slow-moving rainstorms like Florence that overflow inland river systems.

The reality is that wind and storm surge are only one part of a hurricane—what University of Georgia meteorologist Marshall Shepherd has called “Phase A.” In a piece for Forbes last week, he argued there’s a lack of public understanding around “Phase B,” the “slow-moving to stalled weakened storm with a lot of rainfall.” Florence has had a particularly dangerous Phase B. So did Hurricane Harvey, which tortured Houston, Texas, with slow-moving rainfall and life-threatening flooding last year.

It’s essential that the public be aware of Phase B because such extreme rainfall is becoming more likely. “For every degree Celsius of [global] warming, water vapor in the atmosphere increases by 7 percent,” said Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at Columbia University and NASA. “We’re as sure that climate change means rainier storms as we are that smoking causes cancer.” Phase B is also arguably the more deadly part of a hurricane. According to one major study, only 11 percent of hurricane fatalities are due to wind or embedded tornadoes. The rest are caused by water: ocean storm surge and high surf, for instance, but more importantly inland flooding, which accounts for 55 percent of all deaths.

Some solution-oriented discussion has already begun, such as changing or replacing the Saffir-Simpson scale. “It should definitely be modified to have some factors, including not only wind, but also flooding and maximum storm surge height, or amount of rainfall,” said Irwin Redlener, the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness. Others aren’t convinced. “[The scale] provides value on the information it as intended for and is useful for historical context or scientific studies,” Shepherd wrote.

Instead, Shepherd suggested forecasters be more frank about the limitations of the Saffir-Simpson scale. “Meteorologists must continue to hammer home the message that inherent dangers of hurricanes like Florence are not completely captured by the scale,” he said. “A simple reminder that Hurricane Sandy was not really even a Category 1 storm when it devastated the northeast United States usually gives people perspective.” The public also has to start listening, he said; many forecasters have been talking about these limitations for years.

But solving the miscommunication problem posed by Florence may require something bigger than changing one meteorological tool. It could require changing how to refer to slow-moving, rain-heavy hurricanes in the first place. Redlener suggested “water disaster.” But whatever the solution, he said, “There are significant reasons to start rethinking how we understand the consequences of large natural disasters.” The main reason being that more are on the way.

It hasn’t always been the case, but devout Christians can be curiosities, if not objects of outright skepticism, among American liberals and the broader left.

While this state of affairs owes itself to all sorts of complex social shifts, some of which predate the twentieth century, the political transmutation of evangelicalism into the Christian right since the 1960s is certainly an important part of the story. The strength of that religious-political alliance has helped maintain one of the greatest divides in contemporary American society—with many Christians having become chronically vulnerable to a belief that liberal politics are literally against God, and many liberals to a belief that whatever God these politicized Christians have in mind is literally against humanity. Those aren’t tendencies that favor common ground; and in any event, as a result of them, when liberals hear the idioms of evangelical Christianity, they can now often hear the idioms of political reaction.

There’s a whole other level to this story, though, that goes considerably deeper into the history of the modern West—to the long association between ideologies of liberation and radical secularism. It’s common today for people to understand the self-actualization of humanity in terms of a freedom from theistic narratives about our place in the cosmos, our reason for being, our divine purposes (vs. fallen desires), etc. I suppose it has to be one among Western history’s many ironies, from a hard-secular perspective, that a Christian view of personhood was originally responsible for the modern idea of the human being as an “individual,” with all the interiority of heart and mind, and all the related significance of free choice, this idea of individuality entails. But the tensions between secularism and theism are real, and profound, and won’t abate in the imaginable future.

Which means that as committed secular liberals and serious evangelicals, of the kind Bryan Mealer writes about for us this month, come to identify with each other politically, that’s a political identification between kinds of people who live in ways that are in some respects powerfully alien to one another. Mutual super-revulsion with Trump and elements of his base can only obscure this reality so much.

Which in turn represents a great hope for the still-tenuous future of liberal democracy in the United States: If you can sustain a common political identity despite such profoundly different beliefs about the nature of the universe and humanity’s place in it, you can sustain the promise of American life.

God first appeared to me in a photograph. I was six years old. A deacon in my family’s Pentecostal church called me over one morning and pulled out a grainy photo from his suit pocket. It was taken from an airplane window, he said. Out past the wing, suspended in the clouds, was the faint image of a man. “That’s Jesus,” he told me.

At twelve years old I hit what evangelicals call the age of accountability, when I was no longer exempt from the sins of my flesh. If eternity is a sea, that year I was dragged from the safety of the beach and tossed into perilous waters, my little footprints washed away from the sand. Out in these depths, God appeared to me as a wave roaring over my head.

That was the year I also encountered demons. It was a Sunday night at our church on the west side of San Antonio, in 1987, in a building that was once a grocery store. A visiting evangelist had reached the point of the service that I’d come to fear, the hour of spiritual warfare. He told us that a man in the audience suffered from depression and had asked for healing. I knew Bill and his wife from the Bible studies held in our home. He was a math teacher at the high school, kind and rather quiet.

The evangelist backed away from Bill, and then extended his arm. “In the name of Jesus,” he ordered Bill’s demons to “manifest” and flee. The command was like a thunderbolt that dropped Bill to the floor. The preacher then stepped over him like a fighter, shouting into a body that was now occupied and haunted. Bill’s chest heaved and bowed and then, to my horror, out of his mouth came a chorus of anguished voices. My mother quickly turned and pressed her hand over my eyes, saying, “Don’t look, baby,” for the Scriptures tell us how demons go house hunting once evicted, how they left the madman of Gerasenes only to swoop into a herd of pigs, 2,000 in number, who fled into a lake and drowned. “Just close your eyes,” she said. Her hands were trembling.

The church taught us that demons lurked beneath the benign: in Care Bears cartoons, carnivals, and prayer candles sold at the grocery store. We battled the devil of Halloween and secular music and held “rock and roll seminars” where they played “Stairway to Heaven” backward, a demonic Robert Plant singing, “So here’s to my sweet Satan. ... There was a little toolshed where he made us suffer sad Satan.”

Our church readied soldiers for the culture war. We stood on busy streets holding picket signs showing bloody aborted fetuses. We were about Pat Robertson and James Dobson and didn’t bother ourselves with soup kitchens or food pantries. We pushed purity culture and the “Twelve Steps of Dating” as ways to avoid the trap of premarital sex. Once I found a stack of Hustler magazines in the woods and devoured them with a fire of lust and self-loathing. On Sunday the pastor stopped mid-sermon and walked right up to me, “The Spirit is telling me someone here is battling demons of pornography.” I was saved only when someone else raised his hand, but I knew what punishment lay in store.

Sundays at church were no place for the spiritually meek. The pastors preached Kingdom Now sermons about taking dominion over the earth and ceding what was lost in the Garden. One of them was a former hooligan from England, his arms covered in faded ink, the same man who pressured my parents to remove me from karate for fear of “Eastern religions.” He vanquished demons and anointed the sick, leaving people in crooked rows before the carpeted altar, hands raised, eyelids quaking, in a state of spiritual sleep. Once they staggered away, the dancers leapt with their long silk streamers. My father sang with the band.

When I graduated from high school, I joined the over 60 percent of churchgoing people 17 and older, who, according to a recent study, walk permanently out the door. Whenever I found myself missing God, I went looking for Him not in church but in literature, weed, and in the dim lights of last call. In New York City, where I moved, He sang to me in the subways and slept in His own waste, but I didn’t recognize this as Him and walked past.

At 30, I was in central Africa covering a war and desperately needing Him to appear. In the burning villages I looked for Him; in the mass graves I did not see His face. Walking through a displaced camp one cold morning, three women brought me their babies who had died in the night. “It was God’s will,” said one, and I didn’t have the nerve to tell her that God was not there and never had been. Because what kind of God killed children?

This past May, I found myself in the packed auditorium of the First United Methodist church in downtown Austin, listening to Bible stories. The creak of the wooden pews and the smell of hymnals summoned a rush of memory. Yet the hundreds of mostly young, tattooed people surrounding me suggested I’d ventured far from the old religion. The tales about Elijah, Mary, and the Roman centurion that evening were part of a live recording of The Liturgists, one of the country’s most popular podcasts on spirituality, with over four million listeners per month. Its creators, Michael Gungor and Mike McHargue, both based in Los Angeles, are former evangelical Christians who had abandoned their faith only to return via the teachings of mystics, and by embracing science, philosophy, and social justice. While they insist their show isn’t explicitly Christian, McHargue told me, “Helping Christians deal with feelings of marginalization, oppression, and alienation is part of our work.” It explains how I came to find them, and why I still felt itchy in the pew. For me, to sit in a church is to be vulnerable, and no passage of time could stop that.

A couple of years earlier, after a decade of estrangement, I felt a tug to reconnect with organized religion. My two oldest children started having questions. When my daughter asked, “What is God?” we gave the kids a book that said God is everything, which led to my son telling my mother that God was our Honda. So, I started looking for a church. There was no rock band playing slick praise-and-worship music at Trinity Church of Austin, and certainly no speaking in tongues. During services, I saw gay couples and transgender people sitting alongside white-haired Methodist women. The pianist shared that it was the anniversary of his coming to this church, and then explained how his last congregation had ostracized him for being gay. He began to cry as he spoke, and I felt my own tears running down my face.

At Trinity, I realized I could be both liberal and Christian—that the church could be an affirming and reconciling place for gay and transgender people, along with advocating for the poor and oppressed. It was liberating. Mainline Protestant denominations such as the Episcopalians figured this out years ago (if not on an institutional level, certainly in many of their churches), but growing up I was always taught these people were going to hell. Somewhere within me, beneath the scar tissue, was a child who’d once believed that Sunday school lesson of universal love and was waiting for it to be true. He clung to the verse about seeking justice and loving mercy and remembered what Jesus said about “Blessed are the peacemakers.” I followed that child, running.

Despite my newly found church community, claiming faith in the Donald Trump era still amounted to an existential quandary—one the Liturgists have tapped into. They’re part of a wave of liberal Christianity that’s emerged since the 2016 election—an event that saw their audience more than double. It’s a wave that rippled when Trump ascended to the White House, and evangelical Christians, like the ones who’d taught my Sunday school classes and stood at our pulpit, suspended their moral convictions, and followed him like a dime-store messiah. We watched Jerry Falwell Jr. tell Fox News, “I think evangelicals have found their dream president” and Franklin Graham tweet in April, “Progressive is generally just a code word for someone who leans toward socialism, who does not believe in God.” The photos of them jostling to lay their hands on him to pray, calling him a “baby Christian,” and telling us that God had answered their prayers was disingenuous. But what hurt the most is watching our family and fellow church members not just vote for Trump, but continue to support him through his racist, xenophobic rhetoric, his ramped-up policy of separating children along the border, his tax cuts for the wealthy and proposed cuts to Medicaid, and, most recently, his pandering to a Russian regime that jails gay people and actually persecutes Christians.

It’s hard to decide which truth actually stings worse, that white evangelicals sold out Christian values for a couple of seats on the Supreme Court, or the grim prospect that our rigid Christian upbringing, with all its trauma and guilt, was nothing but a lie; it was never about the Good News at all, but white nationalism maintaining power through slavery and Jim Crow and now against a color-shifting, globalized society. (See Attorney General Jeff Sessions quoting Romans 13 in defense of family separations.) As the former evangelical and bestselling author Rachel Held Evans told me, “Right now, there’s a need to process the sense of betrayal. We’re in a period of grieving for what was lost.”

This same outrage has brought other leaders to the fore. Most visible are black evangelical clergy like the Reverend William Barber II, who recently resumed the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign and fights tirelessly against white religious nationalism. In Chicago, the Reverend Otis Moss III has championed environmental causes and defended same-sex marriage when other black clergy deemed it sinful. Among white evangelicals, there’s Jen Hatmaker, the writer, pastor, and TV star who in 2016 torpedoed her Christian career by publicly supporting same-sex marriage. Hate mail and death threats poured in, and the Christian bookstore chain and publisher LifeWay yanked her titles. She’s now an advocate for LGBTQ inclusion and racial equality in the church and speaks widely across the country. Another is Shane Claiborne, a leader of the Red Letter Christian movement, a network of left-wing evangelicals who imagine a Christianity that “looks like Jesus” and try to adhere to his teachings, relying on his direct statements in the New Testament, which are often printed in red ink. Last April, Claiborne and his group held a revival in Lynchburg, Virginia, near the campus of Liberty University, where Falwell Jr. is president, to protest Falwell’s support of Trump. Claiborne asked Falwell if they could pray together. The school responded by threatening to have him jailed if he stepped on campus. Around the same time, the evangelical pastor and veteran activist Jim Wallis joined other prominent clergy in publishing a powerful manifesto called Reclaiming Jesus: A Confession of Faith in a Time of Crisis, which said, in part, “We believe that truth is morally central to our personal and public lives. Truth-telling is central to the prophetic biblical tradition. ... Therefore, we reject the practice and pattern of lying that is invading our political and civil life.” The group held a vigil outside the White House and read it aloud, to no avail—the president never acknowledged them. A video of them reading it went viral on social media and still moves me to tears.

My return to faith in this time of crisis was part of a larger “deconstruction,” a term borrowed from Jacques Derrida that’s become popular of late in the Christian community, especially among liberals. When applied to Christianity, it’s—complicated. At its most basic, it’s a natural process of seeing the Bible and its teachings from a fresh perspective as one gets older or switches denominations. Likewise, throughout American history, deconstruction has also occurred as society and organized religion rejected political institutions, such as slavery and segregation, that white leadership had justified using Scripture. In those instances, deconstruction set off a foundational upheaval of belief, a recalibration of faith that I would argue tilts inevitably leftward—which is what’s taking place now among white evangelicals, former and current. And it’s happening around issues like racial and income equality, gay marriage, and immigration. Deconstruction is where the old canards fall away and the heart can be changed, and for many, it’s where God reveals Himself in the very people they were taught to condemn. It’s when Jesus stops looking like an action-figure culture warrior and more like the brown-skinned revolutionary who preached radical love.

“For a lot of people who were raised sorta fundamental, this process is inevitable if you’re moving into a more progressive space,” Hatmaker said recently on the podcast Homebrewed Christianity. “Nobody gets to skip it. ... I think this is just messy; it’s very imperfect. ... When you shift your theology toward the affirmation of the LGBTQ community, it very quickly becomes a very deep justice issue. It’s not just belief. It’s just justice. ... It’s human rights. So what may have begun as a spiritual gut check, it does become advocacy pretty quickly.”

It wasn’t that long ago that both Gungor and McHargue were staunch Republicans whose worldviews aligned with their fellow evangelicals. Gungor is a musician who grew up the son of a charismatic megachurch pastor. Like me, his childhood was a landscape of demons lurking around every bend. And like me, fear drove him to be the best little Christian he could be. In college, he put out a few praise-and-worship albums, and then gained attention in 2005 when his band played the traveling Christian youth rally Acquire the Fire. As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan boiled over, he released an album called Battle Cry: Worship from the Frontlines. In 2010 he formed the band Gungor with his wife, Lisa, and began playing the megachurch circuit. Over the years their sound evolved into a quieter mix of folk and experimental, with heavy spiritual and Christian themes.

In 2012, with a coveted Dove Award and a Grammy nomination under his belt, Gungor entered a period of deep deconstruction, growing disillusioned with institutional religion and its inherent hypocrisy, and for a brief period even identifying as an atheist. “I was seeing behind the curtain in these giant megachurches, and it was grim,” he said. “The pastors were not the people their congregations saw on stage.” The closer he started examining his beliefs, the less they held up. Two years later he took heat for publishing a blog post dismissing creationism and mocking the story of Noah’s Ark. (“Do I believe that God literally drowned every living creature 5,000 years ago in a global flood except the ones who were living in a big boat? No, I don’t.”) The fallout from the evangelical community was swift. Gigs were canceled. Christian radio boycotted his music. By then he was already meditating, exploring mysticism, and his political views were evolving. These days he sometimes goes by the name Vishnu Dass, given to him by the spiritual teacher Ram Dass while on a retreat in Hawaii. Gungor’s last album, One Wild Life, featured a song called “Let Bad Religion Die,” in which he sings, “A million lives for Jesus Christ/They spread the word with genocide.”

“I’m in a weird complicated status with Christianity,” he told me.

Gungor met McHargue in 2013. McHargue had grown up in the heavily conservative Southern Baptist church in Tallahassee, Florida, and, like Gungor, was a lifelong Republican. As a kid, he was bullied because of his weight and found refuge in science, computers, and talking to Jesus in the woods. In 2007, he was married with two children and working in advertising when his father announced he was leaving his mother. Their sudden divorce, which went against the family’s evangelical beliefs, shattered him, and for once the Bible offered no real answers. With help from Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan, McHargue watched his belief in God disintegrate. For three years he lived as a closeted atheist, not even telling his wife, all while serving as a deacon in their church. He met Gungor at a party in Denver hosted by the left-wing pastor and writer Rob Bell, who has been condemned by traditional evangelicals for questioning the existence of hell, and other controversial stances. McHargue knew Bell through a mutual friend and had attended one of his conferences in Los Angeles, after which he’d had a mystical experience on the beach. (God had spoken to him, he said.) He was in the process of reassembling his faith, one that leaned more heavily into science, meditation, and social justice. These days, he and his family attend an affirming Methodist congregation in Pasadena.

McHargue’s interest in cosmology, neuroscience, and philosophy has earned him the nickname “Science Mike” on the podcast. It also provides a rare bridge between faith and science that’s become the bedrock of the show’s subject matter, along with social issues such as race and LGBTQ inclusion. In a March 2016 episode called “Black and White: Racism in America,” Science Mike offered such a clear-eyed breakdown of how white fragility and the decline of white prosperity led to Donald Trump that their guest, the hip-hop artist Propaganda, declared him “the most stay-woke white boy I’ve ever met in my life.” The episode on race remains one of their most popular, along with one about using the Enneagram—a model of the human psyche that is popular among many Liturgists fans—as a tool kit for deconstruction.

For me, discovering The Liturgists was like entering spiritual rehab. I felt like I’d found a kindred tribe, or stumbled into a country made up of people who’d all survived plane crashes. Nowhere had I heard an intelligent discussion about speaking in tongues, much less for 80 straight minutes. (“My dad used to put on the timer and we’d all have to pray in tongues for 15 minutes,” Gungor recalled.) A two-part exploration of evangelicalism with Hatmaker and Matthew Vines, an evangelical LGBTQ activist, was deeply moving and convincing. The episode on spiritual trauma, I had to stop halfway through and take a walk. For the first time in 25 years I was venturing into my own banished territory, and once there, I couldn’t turn away. Entire days flew past sitting in my office listening to episode after episode. “There is no media out there that talks to people in a post-Christian framework, and that’s our audience,” Science Mike told me. “And we provide those people a safe place to doubt and question without fear of judgment.”

In that safe space I continued to deconstruct, demythologize, and reassemble. Alongside my stacks of C.S. Lewis, Thomas Merton, and Marcus J. Borg, I added writers and biblical scholars who offered a modern interpretation of liberal faith. I read Rob Bell’s Velvet Elvis, which helped me to start seeing the life of Jesus and the Bible in a radical new way. Austin Channing Brown’s I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness grabbed me by the collar and showed me what racial justice should really look like. I absorbed Rachel Held Evans’s Searching for Sunday, about leaving the evangelical church and the crisis of identity it brought. Richard Rohr describing the embodiment of God at the flash of the Big Bang ripped the lid off my head (“Cosmic Christ” episode, April 2016).

These people helped me speak a new language, and then gave me the tools to tear down the moldy firmament that had long entrapped my beliefs. Things I’d been told never to question—heaven and hell, the bodily resurrection, the rapture and the end of days—were at once removed from their confusing and narrow constraints. And with proper theology and interpretation, those stories took on newer and greater meaning. The kingdom of heaven was finally ripped from its mansions and pearly gates and brought to its proper place, on earth, among the homeless, disabled, and the immigrant seeking asylum, as a profound way of living we can experience now through our actions. This is what deconstruction became for me—taking all the old stories and watching the mythology crumble, and then reexamining them in a way that brought benefit to my life, and for the first time ever, actual hope.

Every few months Gungor and Science Mike host a gathering in a different city and record a live episode. It’s a way for fans to connect over two days of music, discussion, and meditation. They’ve toured as far away as London, and in the States, people fly in from around the world to attend. When I heard they were doing one at First United Methodist in Austin in May, I paid the $89 and signed up.

I’m not sure what I was expecting. Above all I wanted to meet people who had similar experiences, and I quickly found them. At a happy hour gathering before the event, a woman had spilled her entire messed-up Pentecostal childhood to me, and the music leader of a megachurch had confessed to no longer believing in God. Within a minute of finding a seat, the guy next to me slid over and said, “If you don’t mind me asking, what stage of deconstruction are you in?” With this group, there was no such thing as small talk.

Instead, over the next 24 hours I’d hear about people’s drug abuse and suicide attempts and deep poisonous rage toward fathers and pastors and a God they just couldn’t leave, in whose name their lives had been squeezed, interrupted, thrown into confusion. And like me, they’d found some camaraderie and guidance from a couple of guys who ran a podcast from their living rooms. So you can guess there was a wild energy in the church that night, a kind of restlessness you feel from people who are waiting for answers.

When Gungor and Science Mike took the stage, the crowd of several hundred greeted them with raucous applause. Gungor is 37 years old, tall and gangly with olive skin, glasses, and a rocker’s mop of brown curly hair. Science Mike, 40, is stocky with reddish hair and a beard that’s turning gray. He was dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt. The pair were joined by their regular cohosts, Hillary McBride and William Matthews, who, respectively, bring a female and a black evangelical perspective to the show. Matthews is a celebrated Christian singer based in Los Angeles, while McBride is a writer and therapist from British Columbia.

Gungor kicked things off with some music, and then McBride led us through an embodiment exercise, something I’d never heard of. I later read on the internet that embodiment is the practice of feeling and being present inside your body, something I’m pretty sure I wasn’t doing. “In white church we don’t move very much,” she said. “This is a chance to reclaim your body and your embodiment, and to experience freedom. It’s you dropping down from your head and letting your body tell a story about this moment.”

We were instructed to do whatever felt natural: lie down, run around in circles, flap our arms in the air. Or we could do nothing at all, but I was game to try. While Gungor played a didgeridoo, I closed my eyes and tried to let my body lead the way. I flapped my arms a bit, and then raised them in the air, palms to the ceiling. Growing up in the charismatic church, I could never bring myself to join the others when they raised their arms in spiritual surrender. It never felt honest, or perhaps I was too afraid of what would happen if I did let myself go. Above all, I was terrified of speaking in tongues. Reclaim the movement, I told myself again and again, like a mantra. I waited for McBride’s voice to soothe and relax me. I wanted to experience freedom, to own my past fear. I wanted glossolalia from on high, but I don’t think that was the point of McBride’s exercise. Embodiment is something therapists like her use to treat clients who’ve experienced trauma. It plunges you back inside your body to do ... I’m not sure what. Before anything could happen, the exercise was over, and all I felt was agitated.

The night’s main event was a live recording of the podcast. The topic, Gungor said, was favorite Bible stories the panel wished to share, and I swore I heard a few groans coming from the back rows. I understood. The Bible is a loaded gun, and its misinterpretation and application has ruined countless lives, gay people in particular, some of whom were probably in that room wondering how they could ever approach it again. For me, one of the most surprising things about returning to faith was that I remembered very little Scripture. As a kid I won contests at church camp for memorizing Bible passages. But at some point, most of it faded away. Part of that was lack of use, but I also believe that around age 13 or 14, I subconsciously started tuning out. My prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that responds to trauma, simply shut down when the church band began to play. It would explain why I have very few memories of Sundays.

But since returning to church, one of the great pleasures has been rediscovering the Bible, to see it again as a living, sacred text, and not just that, but as a blueprint for pursuing justice in a time of oppressive empire. As Rachel Held Evans said, “We don’t cede the Bible to white religious nationalists, but we reclaim it.” And that meant taking back Romans 13 from Jeff Sessions as he jailed the asylum seekers the Scriptures tell us to welcome (Leviticus 19:33-34).

There was no better example of that reclamation than when Science Mike stood up and read from Matthew 8. It was a story we’d all heard growing up—about the Roman centurion who approaches Jesus on the road and asks him to heal his servant. In the story, Jesus offers to go right away, but the soldier replies, “Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof, but only speak the word, and my servant will be healed.” The centurion goes on to say that like Jesus, he has great authority. When he tells servants and soldiers to come, they obey. Jesus is so impressed that he heals the servant, sight unseen. The takeaway, as I’d learned, was the blind faith of the soldier, who was not only a Gentile, but a member of the oppressive Roman regime. But of course, there’s a better way to apply that story to our times.

“For most of my life, as a good, white Christian evangelical, I understood that we this ‘persecuted minority,’ represented a modern-day Israel, direct spiritual descendants from first-century Jews,” Science Mike said, drawing laughs from the audience. “And it was our job to stand up to the liberal secular media of Rome and stand up for truth and for love and for justice, meaning spiritual-warfare justice and not things that inconvenience suburbanites in any possible way. And that’s my spiritual heritage: a Roman who believed in sincerity that he was a Jew.”

The Roman who called Jesus “Lord,” he continued, was part of the same empire that later arrested this dark-skinned Jew for speaking truth to power and hung him on a cross. And as Romans living in our own empire—straight, white, middle-class America—we are born with inherent privilege and influence. As Romans, he implied, we wield incredible power with our wallets, tax dollars, and votes. When we tell corporations what to do, they obey. And when enough of us tell our congressmen to listen, they listen.

“So what does that mean?” Science Mike asked. “What do we do with a religion that’s so tied up with patriarchy, colonialization, heterosexism, sexism, antifeminism, and anti-blackness? How do we redeem that? Matthew 8 holds the key. Centurion: ‘Call the marginalized “Lord’” because they are the descendants of the role of Israel in society. They have the embodied spiritual experience to understand that the Gospel is not a get-out-of-hell-free card and the gospel is not a license to claim the world for yourself. That the Gospel is a demand to lay down what you have for the healing of the world. Anything less is not...good...news.”

It was one of the best sermons I’d ever heard. The audience went nuts. Already William Matthews had whipped everyone up with a story about the prophet Elijah calling God’s fire down on the mountaintop, how he challenged King Ahab and Jezebel and the prophets of Baal. “Do you guys feel like you’re sort of going insane?” he asked. “There’s always lies and deceit. ... They want us to normalize it ... but that only works for the status quo. So what do we do? What do we do, because the dissonance is getting louder and we’re all going a bit crazy? You have to call racism racism. You have to call sin sin. ... We need to keep speaking truth. ... Speak truth to power and to each other and to our family members and to our communities.”

Sitting there among my hip and tattooed brethren, it was hard to believe that 30 percent of the Liturgists’ audience identify as Republican, an estimate I got from Science Mike. And while I didn’t spot any anti-Trump T-shirts or Indivisible voter registration booths (McBride did urge us to call our representatives), what I was experiencing was a liberal call to arms, probably one of thousands taking place at that exact moment in America. And it felt good. It felt good to be angry as a crowd, to let the collective rage course through my blood like an amphetamine. We were taking back territory. We would march forth from this church and defend the immigrant and refugee, and slay the false prophets who peddled their toxic nationalism. And yes, we would defeat Ted Cruz! We would win because the one true God was on our side.

Later that evening, though, when I went home, I felt confused and restless, haunted almost. I was too jittery to sleep, so I ended up walking around the neighborhood until exhaustion and mosquitoes drove me indoors. I managed to return the next morning feeling better. The energy in the room was still palpable, despite many having closed the bars the previous night. Science Mike led us through a series of exercises to demonstrate the vulnerability of the conscious and subconscious mind—to things like religion, advertising, and Facebook. “We’re going to tear our conscious awareness to pieces,” he said, and we all cheered. We listened to a robot say the word bar and half of us heard far. Next, he had volunteers try to guess certain objects held in their peripheral vision. Several got it wildly wrong. “Your brain makes shit up,” he said. “Your senses are big fat liars!”

I was following along but wondered where it was all going. Then Science Mike said it was time to play around with our subconscious. “Our consciousness is a story we tell ourselves,” he explained. “But sometimes, somebody else tells that story.” He was talking about charismatic preachers. He would demonstrate this by conducting a group hypnosis.

Cool, I thought. I’d never been hypnotized.

It started off simple. We clasped our hands together and imagined them covered with super glue, then tried pulling them apart. The room filled with laughter as people found their fingers stuck together, unable to budge—including me. Science Mike then instructed us to watch the overhead screen, where there appeared a giant twisting spiral. “Look at the spiral and listen to the sound of my voice,” he said. “Don’t take your eyes off the center. ... Your eyelids are getting heavier and heavier...” He then snapped his fingers and my eyes closed, and when they did, panic flooded my body.

My pulse quickened, and I started to sweat. I forced my eyes open and saw everyone around me stiffly swaying in a trance. A woman near the front fell to the floor and the crowd closed in around her. I then realized what was happening. I was suddenly 13 again, back in those folding metal chairs at a Sunday night revival. Back to the short breath and clinching anxiety. An old siren wailed from my deepest memory: Surrender yourself, and the devil will slide in. However absurd, my animal brain was on fire. And I wasn’t the only one being triggered. Others were walking out, unable to cope.

Then Gungor got up to sing. All day Science Mike had referred to him as “Vishnu” and I was still struggling with how I felt about that. Dressed in a kimono, he sang songs from his latest album, otherwise beautiful songs, but at that moment they sounded channeled from the track-lit church of my youth. “Holy ... beautiful and holy ... trees clap their hands for you, oceans they dance for you, for you are holy ...” The triggers only kept coming. The woman next to me burst into tears. Everyone around me seemed to be crying. In my strongest lingering memories of church, there was always so much crying.

Science Mike looked into the crowd at all the broken people. “I can’t fix your trauma,” he said. “But we can offer you a place where your hurting is comforted.” He said he liked an institution that was into the death and resurrection business. “Because we all know what it’s like to be dead, and we all know the feeling of the empty tomb.”

He jumped down off the stage, his own voice cracking. “I believe God loves you,” he said. “And if you don’t believe that, believe that I love you. I truly do.”

He then offered hugs to anyone who needed one, and within seconds, a line of people, mostly women, streamed down to the front like an altar call, weeping and looking for solace. What I realized is that when you surround yourself with people with shared negative experience, it isn’t comforting at all, no matter how united you want to feel. Instead it draws on you like an exorcism, until all that pain, all those ghosts of your dead religion, come roaring up from the dark.

The following week I flew to Los Angeles and met with Science Mike and Gungor. At a Starbucks on York Boulevard near Pasadena, we sat at a picnic table and I told them what had happened. I wanted to know why the gathering had made me so uncomfortable, with the charged politics of Friday night followed by the weird triggering. I still felt agitated, I said. They both nodded.

“The gatherings can be messy endeavors,” Gungor said.

“It happens a lot,” said Science Mike. People who’ve grown up in oppressive churches suddenly get exposed to safe spiritual experiences. “And once they trust you, the lid they’ve been holding onto gets loose. At some point in the weekend it just pops off.”

I guess it made sense, but it still felt a bit cruel.

Gungor admitted that Friday night had bothered him, too, and afterward the hosts had gone out for beers and stewed over what had happened.

“I felt how quickly we could get activated,” he said. “I was feeling like I did when I was on the Right, when I’d be at big youth events saying, ‘We’ve got to take back America!’ We didn’t start The Liturgists to be the Left version of Christianity, we started it to not be alone.”

And now that there were so many people, he wondered if it was possible for them to be angry together at the injustice that required their anger, but without simply shouting and pointing fingers like all the rest.

“The election ruined everything,” Science Mike said. He told me how they’d hit their sweet spot back in May 2015. They’d aired an episode entitled “LGBTQ” that they considered their best work yet. At the same time they were discovering their audience resembled something like America: gay people and people of color, along with liberal whites and conservative Republicans, even a lot of atheists. “We’d created this beautiful fragile space that included solidarity and advocacy for marginalized voices,” he said, “but in a way that the people who were unknowing participants in that system didn’t feel attacked, but they felt educated.”

After the episode aired, they received a flood of emails from white evangelicals saying they were rethinking some of their political positions. “We’d framed the show in a way that was unapologetically justice-oriented,” Science Mike said. “But we also acknowledged that people who are non-affirming didn’t choose to be non-affirming but were handed a story. So we gently expanded their perspective, not by arguing, but by putting on queer people to talk about how non-affirming theology had impacted their real life.”

Then Trump got elected. “Trump gets in and says, ‘You know what? You’re either with me or against me.’ And the Left turns around and says you’re with us or against us, and that middle space we were trying to create got much more complex.”

Now people are just confused and quick to anger, Gungor said. “All the amygdalas are on high alert.”

“For a reason,” Science Mike said. “People feel threatened.”

Their work is harder now, they said, but ultimately it’s worth it. Because while Franklin Graham, Robert Jeffress, and Jerry Falwell Jr. speak for the evangelical hardliners when they kowtow to the Oval Office, they don’t represent everyone. There are many evangelicals who are morally and legitimately conflicted about gay marriage, accepting refugees, and police officers killing black teenagers. Their conscience is telling them what to do, but fear and complacency keeps them silent.

“The reality is there’s just a whole lot of straight white people in this country,” Science Mike said. “And to make progress you’ve got to win a lot of them over. That’s the messy space we find ourselves in.”

Because no matter how angry people like me get at white evangelicals or how many calls to arms we put forth, on its own, it will get us nowhere in the end. To defeat hatred and creeping fascism and begin the healing of this nation, we—all Americans—need a new social gospel, and not just one that makes liberals feel comfortable. It is a gospel forged from the rubble, and it must include everyone. It will be messy and painful, and we must push forward even when our friends ask us, “What’s the point?” When they ask us, “How can you speak to those people?” Our big tent must shine like a light unto the world, and it must be a home to all—Republicans and Democrats, Jews and Romans, even to the demons that fly out from the debris.

New York, NY—(September 20, 2018)—The New Republic today published its October issue, which features an incisive cover story by Bryan Mealer that explores a liberal’s search for God and faith in a divided country. In “The Struggle for a New American Gospel,” Mealer declares, “To defeat hatred and creeping fascism and begin the healing of this nation, we—all Americans—need a new social gospel, and not just one that makes liberals feel comfortable.”

Additional information about the October 2018 issue is included below.

[FEATURES]

In “Israel’s Season of Discontent,” Joshua Cohen questions whether the Jewish State has abandoned the American diaspora seventy years after its founding. Cohen writes, “To be sure, Netanyahu feels as betrayed by American Jewry as American Jewry feels betrayed by him, and it’s difficult to tell to what degree these feelings have been motivated by disgust and spite (Netanyahu hating American Jewish naivete, American Jews hating Netanyahu’s cronyism and violence), and to what degree they’ve been motivated by opportunism and self-interest (Netanyahu wanting the evangelical money and political cover, American Jews wanting to shore up their credentials on the identitarian left).”

Scott Sayare explores whether French security law has turned holding Islamist ideas into proof of a crime. The association de malfaiteurs terroriste statute, loosely translated as “terrorist criminal association,” remains the primary tool of counterterror magistrates today. Sayare notes in “Terrorist by Association,” that “Civil libertarians have long argued that association de malfaiteurs terroriste criminalizes ideas” and that France has never taken these criticisms particularly seriously. He continues, “Thousands of Islamists have been arrested and many hundred convicted under the association law, and French security and intelligence officials long hailed the statute as the reason that since 1995 not a single Islamist attack had been carried off on French soil.”

[U.S. & THE WORLD]

In “Best Coast,” David Sarasohn explains how the West Coast’s early conservatism has caused Democrats from the region to be uniquely suited to challenge President Trump. Sarasohn argues that because “The West Coast has created a platform that is almost the polar opposite of Trump’s xenophobia, protectionism, and environmental carelessness,” West Coast Democrats have a real shot at the White House in 2020.

Lee Drutman examines how much the Democrats will have to compromise the party’s liberal economic and social principles in order to win a House majority in “A New Suburban Strategy”. The party could safely move left on economic issues and still win suburban voters, believes Drutman. Instead, he observes, “in these pivotal suburban swing districts, the party has consistently supported corporate-friendly candidates who can raise tons of money (often because they have personal networks of wealthy friends and business associates) and who present a ‘moderate’ face to upscale suburban voters”.

“Going for Broke” by Alexander Sammon questions how accurately a candidate’s personal debt indicates a lack of fiscal responsibility in an age when about 80 percent of Americans owe money. “The sheer ubiquity of debt may have begun to change how Americans see the issue—as a structural condition more than a personal failing—and therefore how they see candidates who owe money,” Sammon considers.

Bryce Covert explores the enduring scam of corporate tax breaks in “Long Cons”. “Ultimately, these deals aren’t just about corporations looking to get a windfall where they can,” Covert explains, “It’s politicians, too, who, through their desire for a quick and easy win, end up robbing their constituents of money that could be much better spent elsewhere”.

In “What Trump Gets Right on Trade,” John B. Judis claims there is an important truth behind President Trump’s attack on globalization. “Globalization has undermined the fundamental promise of liberalism: to provide economic and social security and upward mobility,” states Judis.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft analyzes the potential outcomes for the United Kingdom during the uncertainties that surround Brexit. In “The Trouble With Brexit,” Wheatcroft states “Brexit could bring a new golden age of prosperity—or British industry grinding to a halt,” but most likely “a lot of political grandstanding”.

[BOOKS & THE ARTS]

“All the Rage” by Rebecca Solnit  explores what the literature of female anger can achieve by examining three new books, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger by Soraya Chemaly, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger by Rebecca Traister and Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower by Brittney Cooper. Solnit writes, “These books arrive at a moment when a lot of women have changed and too many men have not—and some are, in fact, retreating into revved-up misogyny and rage against the erosion of their supremacy. Women no longer obliged to please men may finally be able to express rage, because we’re less economically dependent on men than ever before, and because feminism has been redefining what’s appropriate and acceptable”.

David Sessions reviews A History of America in Ten Strikes by Erik Loomis, which examines the American workers’ struggle to pair militancy with political power. In “A More Perfect Union,” Sessions explains that what Loomis’s book perhaps does best is “remind us that the promise of the labor movement, despite its many failures and compromises, has always been to make everyday life more democratic. American labor militancy has always been about more than pay, with workers seeking respect and fairness in the workplace.” He concludes that in order for a twenty first-century labor movement to succeed, it will need to “revive that promise, and show sidelined, disaffected Americans that democracy begins at work”.

In “The Crack-Up,” Rachel Syme explores how BoJack Horseman, a cartoon sitcom whose title character is a melancholic, middle-aged stallion, brilliantly reckons with grief. Syme notes that “Midway through the show’s new season, BoJack (voiced by Will Arnett) wears a charcoal suit and stands at a pulpit next to a coffin. His mother has died. For over 20 full minutes, with no interruption, he delivers a brilliant, pained, rambling eulogy”.  At the end of the eulogy, she continues, “he looks up, and we finally see his audience: a confused-looking room full of reptiles, icking their tongues. He is in the wrong funeral parlor. The ordeal sends him on a long bender, a dizzying descent toward tragedy. But for a moment, the show conveys all the ache of another person’s loss, whether he is man or beast”.

“Personality Clash” from J.C. Pan examines the uses and abuses of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) by looking at The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing by Merve Emre. How did the MBTI establish such wide appeal? Pan notes that according to Emre the answer lies in its early-twentieth-century roots and is both by design and in practice, a tool of workplace management. He concludes, “Maybe after all this time, the significant distinction between types isn’t between the Is and the Es, or the Ps and the Js, but between those who engineer our workplaces for productivity and those who must engineer our personalities to fit them”.

“Bad Faith” by George Scialabba answers the question of whether atheists think too much like believers by exploring Seven Types of Atheism by John Gray. Scialabba writes, “God’s inexplicable reticence has always made life difficult for theists. John Gray thinks that such problems with theism shouldn’t make most atheists any more confident about their own outlook ... Seven Types of Atheism
does not offer a rigorous or exhaustive taxonomy of nonbelief. The seven sections mainly provide a convenient way of organizing Gray’s likes and (more often) dislikes”.

In “Divided States” Michael Kazin delves into Jill Lepore’s new book, These Truths: A History of The United States, and how it captures a history of American contradictions. “For [Lepore], the United States has always been a nation wrestling with a paradox, caught between its sunny ideals and its darker realities,” writes Kazin. He continues, “Throughout the book, Lepore takes particular delight in tracing how both Americans with power and those without made effective use of new forms of media either to advance the ideal of equality or to betray it”.

Poems by Tess Taylor and Jericho Brown are featured this month. For Res Publica, Editor-in-Chief Win McCormack explores individual freedom and the public square in “False Concepts of Liberty Pt. 2”.

The entire October 2018 issue of The New Republic is available on newsstands and via digital subscription now.

For additional information, please contact newrepublic@high10media.com.

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I am exhausted by Israel. My exhaustion isn’t much compared to the humiliation and oppression of the Palestinians, who have withstood the forced conversion of the occupied West Bank into a skein of Bantustans and of Gaza into an internment camp—or an “open-air prison,” as it is sometimes called, because to call it anything harsher is to invite an apoplectic response, even from those liberal Jews who view Israel with disapproval. Exhaustion is insufficient, but it is difficult to escape when every conversation about what it is to be a Jew, regardless of your faithful observance or lack thereof, whether you keep the Sabbath or barbeque pork in the backyard on a bright Saturday afternoon, returns to the question of Israel, this distant, foreign country, a lodestar to some of us and a millstone to others, but either way a central and immediate concern to our Jewish lives.

This spring and summer, Israel engaged in the indiscriminate killing of Palestinian demonstrators at the Gaza border. The victims included journalists and at least one medic. This is not the first time that Israel has engaged in indiscriminate killing, and it is unlikely to be the last. I do not believe we are going to convince this Israel government that Palestine is a place, let alone a nation.

The relentlessness of Israel’s brutality has become impossible to ignore, and even many American Jews reflexively inclined to support Israel have at least come to admit, however reluctantly, that its actions are, in the weakly clinical turn of phrase, “disproportionate.” In the Jewish press in both America and Israel, there’s been an outpouring of worry about the growing disaffection of American Jews, especially younger American Jews, when it comes to Israel. Young Jewish voices are prominent in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, which seeks to isolate Israel. Over the past year there have been several well-publicized incidents of Jews on “Birthright” trips, long a cornerstone of pro-Zionist education for non-Israeli Jewish youth, walking off their carefully curated tours to meet with Palestinians and to see how they struggle to live.

These developments are salutary, and there is no doubt that American Jews in particular have a moral obligation to speak out, since so much Israeli policy is ultimately undergirded by American dollars and American arms. But I also worry about the powerful gravitational pull that this Jewish outpost exerts on our lives in the Jewish Diaspora, the harmful influence that this pull has on our conception of Judaism as a culture, as a religion, and as a people.

Modern Judaism is a religion of the Diaspora. Our customs, our prayers, our architecture, our cuisines, our nearly-lost European languages, and our many literatures were all born far away from Palestine. We became a European people and an American people, despite the many centuries of bigots who tried to say otherwise. When I consider my own Judaism, I think of my Russian and Lithuanian and Ukranian and German (and Spanish, even!) ancestors, who came at various times and places to the United States. I never consider with regret whatever imaginary forbearer of mine, two millennia ago, who perhaps pulled a cart and a mule out of some old Roman province toward the Central Asian steppes.

The central question of Jewish life in America ought to be Jewish life in America, and I resent the moral necessity of endlessly calculating my position vis-à-vis the right-wing politics of a foreign government. I resent the necessity of even feeling anger and disdain, born of both American national policies and the centrality of Israel in Jewish-American life.

How do we create an authentic and enduring Jewish community in America? This is a far more existential question to American Jewry than the question of whether the Hamas charter recognizes Israel’s “right to exist.” The decline of a communitarian Jewish identity in the United States is inextricably tied to a sense of ossification, a sense that the same murmured prayers are insufficient to the present moment, a sense that endless apologia for Israel have eclipsed our commitments to equity, justice, and community in our own country. These are the reasons so many young Jews have found themselves drawn into leftist politics, which address spiritual and communal longings to which their parents’ and grandparents’ Judaism no longer speaks.

In the immediate future, American national policy toward Israel is unlikely to change. Ours is a reactionary right-wing government as well, and the convergent commitments of the GOP base and a staunchly pro-Israel Democratic establishment form a bulwark against any major shift away from the status quo support for the Israeli state and its policies of apartheid in all but name. The incipient challenges to entrenched Democratic Party leadership suggest the possibility of an alternate approach to Israel, but for the time being they represent only that: a possibility.

Meanwhile, even as right-wing support for Israel has grown even more extreme, we see the return of an older, open anti-Semitism in the political coalition of the American right, a rebirth of the old calumny that Jews represent something foreign and subversive in the American body politic—long after Jews were admitted to the country clubs, after we became convinced that we were well and fully white. This, too, calls us back from our old, unquestioning views. We cannot depend on a foreign refuge, a refuge that is, ironically, walled against another people’s legitimate claims to freedom. To some extent, this is our real obligation—not to carve out a Jewish home abroad, but to defend the home that we’ve built right here.

In 2015, nearly every country on Earth signed the Paris accord, a recognition that climate change is an existential threat and that the solution is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That historic pact has inspired a left-leaning think tank to put forth an even bolder international pact to address the crisis of inequality by increasing labor’s strength.

In a paper released Tuesday, the Roosevelt Institute calls for “a fundamental re-visioning of the role of government in rebuilding worker power. Instead of resignation, despair, modest legal changes, or waiting for unions to save themselves, we recommend ambitious and linked strategies at the international and domestic level to strengthen labor institutions.” To that end, it proposes the Workers Power Agreement, “a new international labor rights framework modeled on the Paris climate deal. Unlike the Paris deal, where countries set targets for reducing carbon, countries in a new Workers Power Agreement would adopt targets for increasing union density in nations. Like the Paris deal, countries would retain sovereignty over how they achieved these targets.”

There should be no doubt that inequality is as real a problem as climate change. President Donald Trump boasts of the economy’s health, but data presents a very different picture. Previous research by analysts with the Economic Policy Institute found that the U.S. has rates of economic mobility, a key measure of inequality, that are much lower than the rates of most other developed countries. And as the U.S. Census Department’s September poverty numbers reinforced, America’s wealthiest households are experiencing economic gains that aren’t shared equally across all economic brackets. The supplemental poverty measure—which, as The New York Times noted on September 13, is generally considered a more accurate measure of poverty than the national poverty rate—actually increased last year.

As Alana Semuels recently detailed in a piece for The Atlantic, a pair of studies from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute and the Center for Economic Policy Research supports the conclusion that a steep decline in union membership negatively influenced wages for unionized workers and non-union members alike, and that union membership has also been shown to shrink the racial wealth gap. Further research, published by Princeton University economists through the National Bureau for Economic Research in May, examined 80 years of data to conclude, in part, that “unions have had a significant, equalizing effect on the income distribution over our long sample period.” (The Princeton study was limited by the constraints of the available data, which examined union membership by household and not individual union members, but researchers did establish that unions had “their own causal effect in reducing inequality.”)

“I think that is something that is not discussed to the degree that it ought to be,” said Cedric de Leon, director of the Labor Center at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. De Leon believes the data supports one conclusion: that inequality correlates to rates of union membership. “And there’s a very simple reason for this,” he added. “If you’re in the union, then the boss doesn’t dictate to you what your wages will be. You actually have to sit across the table from the union and negotiate over wages, working conditions and benefits and that creates an upward pressure on wages.”

As a proposal, WPA presupposes a problem—that U.S. workers have few rights, and need more protections—and then places that American problem within a global context. A country’s inequalities have consequences beyond its borders. As Roosevelt’s proposal notes, domestic inequality destabilizes nations, which influences currency valuations, immigration policies, and trade relationships. Relatedly, right-wing governments promise voters a strong economy, but rather than pass economic policies that build up worker power and raise wages, they direct voter hostility at foreign workers. “This is not good for countries like Canada or Denmark, which have more successfully adapted their domestic labor markets to globalization’s challenges,” the report concludes.

The WPA would bind participating nations in a commitment to strengthen worker power, though it would leave the means by which a nation can honor its agreements up to its elected officials. Nations would commit to certain benchmarks, like increasing union density, and those benchmarks would vary depending on the existing health of a nation’s trade union movement. Nations who fail to meet those benchmarks would be penalized, though Roosevelt believes those penalties should “be advisory and not carry a specific sanction beyond public humiliation and reputational costs.” “One thing [Paris] did really well is it balanced the ends of policy with the national means of achieving that policy,” said Todd Tucker, the political scientist who authored the Roosevelt Institute paper. (Some nations already have the proposed reforms in places, and others do not. But just as the U.S. is among the top countries in greenhouse gas emissions, it also distinguishes itself in most measures of economic inequality and union strength.)

According to Tucker, the WPA provides one possible framework to address a real and pressing problem. “It does give us a few things,” Tucker said of the WPA model. “One is that it establishes that there is now a growing body of academic research that documents a link between the demise of the labor unions, and declining unionization ratios, and increasing inequality.” The result, in theory, would establish a pattern of globalization that distributes its economic gains to workers, and not just elites in developed and developing states. U.S. workers might experience an especially pronounced increase to the rights they’re able to wield at work, but that’s simply because the U.S. lags so far behind other developed states in this regard.

The WPA isn’t without flaws. Even if the concept became reality, it wouldn’t be a permanent safeguard. Nations can leave such agreements, as Trump is demonstrating. The same flaw would probably present a real danger to a WPA, since it, like the Paris agreement, would engender deep antipathy from the political right in its member states. The WPA’s very existence would challenge one of the central tenets of laissez-faire economic doctrine—that the sort of market regulation that would inevitably follow from increased union density would negatively impact a nation’s economic health. And if the U.S. or another major nation pulled out of the WPA, the consequences for workers could be severe.

There’s no chance of the WPA becoming reality soon. Democrats likely won’t retake all of Congress in the November election. Even if they do, they won’t control the White House until 2020 at least. But the work of politics spans beyond electoral victories. Democrats don’t just need to fill seats, they need ideas. Health care reform proposals, like Medicare for All, have emerged as one way for both Democratic candidates and elected officials to expand the party’s progressive political imagination. Labor rights should be part of the conversation about how to remedy economic disparity. Unions are popular, too: In 2017, a Gallup poll put public approval of labor unions at 61 percent—the highest rate since 2003. And in June, Pew Research found that just over half of Americans view the decline in union membership negatively, though sentiment divides sharply on partisan lines.

Experts agree that building worker power, as a means of addressing inequality, should be a priority for Democrats if the party successfully retakes power. “Social legislation certainly matters, but union density is a critical part of the puzzle. If the Democrats are really serious about addressing economic inequality, they can’t just do things like insist on raising the minimum wage floor,” de Leon said. “The labor movement is pushing the 15 dollar minimum wage. That’s good, but that is still not workers having power in the workplace.”

“There’s a big discussion right now about how workers’ wages aren’t growing and that’s totally true, but that’s not a recent phenomenon,” said Heidi Shierholz, a senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute. “For most of the last 40 years, we’ve seen a situation of rising productivity growth. Sometimes faster, sometimes slower, but it’s been marching along. Whereas for most of that period, wages for most workers have been largely stagnant, and that growth represented by the productivity growth is going somewhere. It’s going to people at the top. It’s massive, rising inequality. That’s what has characterized our economy in recent decades, and it’s just a huge imbalance of power.”

She added, “Policymakers who want an economy that works for everyone and not just for the already well-off should be calling that out and talking about what needs to be done to solve that.” In August, Shierholz and two of her colleagues produced a report on what they call First Day Fairness, or labor policy priorities for a prospective Democratic supermajority. The agenda calls for stricter penalties for employers who interfere with worker organizing, or who penalize workers for attempting to organize. It would also require employers to bargain contracts with unionized workers in a timely manner, and ban employers from replacing workers on strike with secondary labor.

De Leon supports the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have preempted a number of EPI’s current proposals by requiring employers to reach a contract with unionized workers within a certain timeframe and increased penalties for employers who obstruct the organizing process. Democrats introduced the bill in 2009, when they had supermajority, but they failed to pass it nonetheless. More recently, Democrats introduced a number of bills that would have addressed some root causes of weakened worker power. The Workers’ Freedom To Negotiate Act, introduced by Representative Bobby Scott in the House and Senator Patty Murray in the Senate, would allow the National Labor Relations Board to assign financial penalties to employers who wrongfully terminate staff and would prevent employers from requiring workers to attend anti-union meetings. Similarly, the Workplace Democracy Act, introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Mark Pocan, would end right-to-work laws by repealing part of the Taft Hartley Act and ban employers from mischaracterizing union-eligible staff as supervisors or as contract labor.

Whether it’s these bills or a WPA or the Employee Free Choice Act, or some yet-to-be-announced labor platform, Democrats will have plenty of ideas to choose from should they ever find themselves with unified control of government again. The question is whether they’ll actually take advantage of that opportunity to empower workers.

In some ways, Barry Cohen, the central character of Gary Shteyngart’s new novel Lake Success, resembles the hapless, straight, male protagonists of the author’s earlier novels. In Super Sad True Love Story and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Shteyngart gave us strivers and hopeless romantics, who frequently faced forces much larger than themselves. Barry, “a man with 2.4 billion dollars of assets under management,” is a new variation: One part (Tom) Wolfean Master of the Universe, one part comic antihero, he blends a photogenic lifestyle with a haunting lack of interpersonal understanding. Barry is certainly hapless, but unlike his Shteyngartian predecessors, he starts his journey at the top and proceeds haltingly down. And as Barry travels across the country, he gives Shteyngart a way to address toxic masculinity, fatherhood, and the state of American politics.

The 2016 election serves as backdrop to much of the action of Lake Success, as does the partisan divide that underscores some of Barry and his estranged wife Seema’s marital difficulties. “I was going to bundle for Hillary for you,” Barry tells her in the midst of a fight. His displeasure at this but willingness to do so—Barry is a middle-aged Marco Rubio donor with a distaste for Donald Trump–serves as a good shorthand for larger aspects of his character. The fact that he never goes full “deplorable” seems relatively spot-on for a character with his background—Barry seems solidly in the “Never Trump” camp. He is conservative enough to be out of step with most of the characters in the novel, several of whom upbraid him for his beliefs, but liberal enough to feel unmoored by the rise of Trumpism.

Over the course of Lake Success, Barry embarks on a Quixotic quest across the country in search of his long-lost college girlfriend, Layla, and to find an escape from a series of personal and professional catastrophes. It’s an ambitious task: a comic novel that also meditates on recent national events, with a measured dissection of ignorance and inspiration thrown in. Finding the right balance for such a narrative is no easy task; the same is true for creating a protagonist who’s both compelling and ridiculous. Shteyngart asks his readers to empathize with a frequently boorish conservative financier—the sort of person whose politics and position have created untold sadness for many.

When the novel opens, Barry has arrived, drunk and bleeding, at the Port Authority Bus Terminal after an argument with Seema, who is over a decade his junior, and the nanny they employ. He opts to venture out of New York City by bus, partly to go looking for Layla, and partly because traveling through America is what generations of stories have billed as the means by which one finds oneself. (There are more than a few nods to the influence of Jack Kerouac here—even though, to Kerouac’s credit, his characters were not disgruntled finance bros having midlife crises.) He discards his phone, as this is what one does when one abandons one’s life for a journey of self-discovery.

Barry’s clichéd quest takes on a new layer of self-involvement when, in a flashback Shteyngart reveals that when Barry was at Princeton he wrote a story about “a forty-something partner at Goldman Sachs who is driving around Vermont in his S500.” There, his protagonist encounters a pastoral scene, befriends a sheepdog, and eventually has a metaphysically-charged reunion with his college-era ex. Barry hasn’t simply bought into a cultural myth: He’s bought into his own particular strain of it, which is both egomaniacal and a little sad.

That’s but one manifestation of the ways in which Barry profoundly doesn’t get it: He enjoys the nominal proximity to art, but he hasn’t actually taken the time to think about what certain creative works might be questioning. Perhaps the most forceful demonstration of this comes when Barry wanders around Baltimore and is mistaken by several residents for a participant on a The Wire-themed tour. Barry, having never actually seen The Wire, remains oblivious. Here, too, Shteyngart adopts a take-no-prisoners approach to satire, mocking both Barry’s cluelessness and the way in which one person’s memorable narrative is another’s opportunity for commoditization. There’s more than a little of The Bonfire of the Vanities in Lake Success’s literary DNA—both its bleak view of the wealthy and its sprawling social criticism.

Barry’s abuses of art are even more pronounced in the way he reads the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. This isn’t particularly subtle: The name of Barry’s fund—This Side of Capital—riffs on This Side of Paradise, and the title of Shteyngart’s novel comes from the real-life Long Island town located just south of the models for The Great Gatsby’s East Egg and West Egg. There’s a sense that Barry sees Fitzgerald’s work (and a whole canon of American literature) largely as a status symbol—that, like the absurdly expensive whisky and watches he favors, he likes literary prestige and the perception of seriousness more than the work of analyzing and interpreting text. “I just really liked the name,” Barry tells Layla’s son Jonah late in the novel, when recalling his childhood fascination with Lake Success. “I wanted to be successful.”

Barry seems drawn to the depictions of wealth and glamor at which Fitzgerald excelled. Fitzgerald’s books also offer, however, plenty of cautionary tales about the effects of wealth, the way that a nominally thrilling marriage can stagnate into something toxic, and the impossibility of recapturing the past. For someone who ostensibly loves Fitzgerald enough to reference him constantly, Barry shows no signs of having comprehended any of this. He also tells Jonah that “The Great Gatsby is about a man who wanted to improve himself. And when I was your age I wanted to improve myself, too.” Barry knows all about aspiration, but what he struggles to grasp is the consequences of those aspirations.

In the hands of some authors, Barry’s road trip would be the stuff of mockery. His many attempts to make cultural inroads with the rest of America are poorly-timed and miscalculated, leaving him even more hopelessly out of touch. He has a cringe-inducing encounter with his college girlfriend’s aging parents; crashes with Jeff Park, a former subordinate in Atlanta, where he becomes obsessed with Outkast’s 2000 song “Ms. Jackson” (which, to him, is brand-new); and ponders starting a foundation “that would help urban youth buy their first mechanical watch and learn to care for it.” He also buys crack on his ill-fated trip to Baltimore, which takes on an almost Chekhovian significance as he travels across the country and it goes unsmoked for more and more of the book.

But Shteyngart humanizes Barry by showing his love for his son, and by endowing him with quirks, such as his penchant for rare watches. The latter, to be fair, is a manifestation of his absurd wealth, but his borderline-obsessive fascination with them emerges as a genuine passion, rather than something that he believes he must do. Watches are among the handful of possessions that he sets out with on his cross-country journey, and they bring him a feeling of security that nothing else does. There’s a running riff on the cost of absurdly expensive whiskies that serves a counterpoint to Barry’s watch obsession. Early in the novel, Barry notes, “I got a batch of the forty-eight-year-old Karuizawa single cask whiskey,” which, he goes on to declare, sells for $33,000 a bottle. (The prices are, incidentally, not inflated for satirical effect; if anything, Shteyngart has slightly undervalued the whiskey in question.)

Seema’s life in New York after her husband’s departure provides a counterpoint to his increasingly aimless journey across the country. Seema is a far less toxic character to follow through life than Barry with more relatable problems (her intrusive parents undermine her methods of raising her son; she has an awkward affair with her novelist neighbor). Hers and Barry’s perspectives on the world sharply differ: Barry’s describes the event at which they first met, for instance, as “a cultural art thing.” In Seema’s recollection, the same event takes on a slightly less idealistic tone: It was, in fact, a celebration of the 120th anniversary of Vogue.

The event that sets Barry and Seema on diverging paths is a dinner with their neighbors, Luis and Juliana Goodman. Luis is a writer who describes his books as being about “American colonialism, crimes against the indigenous, yada yada yada.” (Among his novels is one called The Sympathetic Butcher.) Luis mentions that he’s presently working on a novel set in the world of hedge funds. “I, for one, think a hedge-fund manager would make the perfect hero,” Barry tells Luis. “And I volunteer to be your muse!” Part of the joke of the novel that follows is Barry’s shamelessness here; part of the joke is that Shteyngart has written a variation on that very book, albeit in a way that would likely satisfy neither Luis nor Barry.

When Barry reaches Layla in El Paso, the novel’s twin motifs of misunderstanding art and the 2016 election converge. In the course of discussing the Holocaust with a college class she teaches, with Barry in attendance, Layla endeavors to make a connection between its history and the rise of online hate groups. (Pepe the Frog and a host of other examples of social media toxicity make an appearance.) Barry recalls being aware of “these new pro-Trump fascist memes” even before he embarked on his journey, but doesn’t understand why “the ugliness was right in front of him and these kids.”

Barry’s next thought will likely resonate with anyone who didn’t take Trump’s campaign seriously: “Surely this stuff would pass once Hillary was elected and everything went back to normal.” Several students in Layla’s class are equally unable to grapple with this information: one in particular chimes in with a Forrest Gump metaphor, followed by a misattributed quote from Evelyn Beatrice Hall’s biography of Voltaire. They share Barry’s inability to think critically or deeply about the things he cares about—and here, Shteyngart isn’t coy or subtle about where this leads. Deluding oneself is a powerful thing, but it won’t hold back election results or a rising neo-fascist movement.

In a flashback to a college writing workshop, Barry recalls his professor telling the class that “the best fiction is the fiction of self-delusion.” This may be true, but in the slapstick Shteyngart has written, he illustrates the darker side of self-delusion as well—and the unsettling places that it can lead.

George Alvarez spent four years in a Texas prison because a jail guard lied. The guard told prosecutors that the 17-year-old teenager had grabbed him by the throat while being transferred to another cell in a Brownsville detention center in 2005. Alvarez, a special-education student in the ninth grade at the time, pleaded guilty to assaulting a peace officer in exchange for a suspended eight-year prison sentence—so long as he completed a substance-treatment program. He did not, and began serving the eight-year term.

Halfway through his sentence, video footage came to light that prosecutors had never gathered from police officers, and thus never shown to the grand jury. The footage showed no such attack. Instead, the guard could be seen placing Alvarez in a choke hold and eventually a head lock while the young man flailed beneath him. His hands and arms were pinned down, nowhere near the guard’s throat. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals found Alvarez to be “actually innocent” of the charges and vacated his conviction in 2010.

Alvarez then did what any citizen whose rights are violated can do: He sued the city of Brownsville, citing Supreme Court rulings that require the government to turn over exculpatory evidence in their possession to the defendant. This week, however, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals threw out his lawsuit, siding with the city’s defense that it wasn’t legally liable for the guard’s actions. But the judges also rejected Alvarez’s constitutional argument. Yes, the court said, prosecutors have to turn over evidence that may prove a defendant’s innocence for a criminal trial. But that constitutional right doesn’t apply when the defendant agrees to a plea bargain, they concluded.

How can that be? After all, plea bargaining is not some ancillary feature to the criminal-justice system. In many ways, it is the modern criminal-justice system. More than 95 percent of criminal cases are resolved through plea agreements in the state and federal systems. Jury trials, for all their ubiquity in American films and television shows, are now the exception instead of the rule. The result is a bureaucratized method of dispensing punishment, one that sometimes evades key protections for Americans’ constitutional rights.

Prosecutors are obligated under what’s known as the Brady rule to disclose any evidence in the government’s possession that may benefit a defendant’s case. The rule takes its name from the landmark 1963 case Brady v. Maryland, where the Supreme Court held that withholding exculpatory evidence violated a defendant’s right to due process under the Fourteenth Amendment. But the lower courts are divided on whether that also applies to the plea-bargaining process. The Supreme Court itself has never ruled on the matter.

Fifth Circuit Chief Judge Carl Stewart wrote in his thirteen-judge majority opinion that their court was bound by its own precedents, which narrowly interpret the Supreme Court’s rulings on the matter. “In sum, case law from the Supreme Court, this circuit, and other circuits does not affirmatively establish that a constitutional violation occurs when Brady material is not shared during the plea bargaining process,” he wrote. “The en banc court will not disturb this circuit’s settled precedent and abstains from expanding the Brady right to the pretrial plea bargaining context for Alvarez.”

The four dissenting judges noted that, under that precedent, Alvarez likely would have served his entire eight-year sentence had he been convicted of a federal crime in the Fifth Circuit’s jurisdiction instead of a state crime. “That is because we are the only federal court of appeals that has held that a defendant who pleads guilty is not entitled to evidence that might exonerate him,” Judge Gregg Costa wrote in his dissent. “Fortunately for Alvarez, and for those who believe that ‘justice suffers when any accused is treated unfairly,’ he was convicted of a state offense.” (Texas courts have ruled that the Brady rule does apply in state-level plea-bargaining cases.)

Plea bargaining’s flaws, as used on a massive scale today, are well established. The practice favors defendants with the financial resources to defend themselves at trial and disfavors poorer defendants who must instead rely on the overburdened public-defender system. Like virtually every other aspect of the criminal-justice system, it punishes non-white defendants more harshly than their white counterparts. Plea bargaining also shifts power away from judges and juries and hands it to state, local, and federal prosecutors instead. In doing so, it subverts the structural protections afforded to defendants by the Constitution.

Worst of all, the phenomenon appears to be sending countless defendants to prison who are actually innocent of the crimes for which they plead guilty. Thanks to the coercive power that flows from prosecutorial discretion and mandatory-minimum sentences, defendants may logically conclude that it’s safer to plead to a few years for a crime they didn’t commit than risk decades behind bars. Costa noted in his dissent that a nationwide registry for exonerations includes 73 Americans who had pleaded guilty to serious offenses like murder and manslaughter.

“And more than 10 percent of the 353 Americans whom the Innocence Project has helped exonerate through DNA evidence pleaded guilty,” he wrote. “Scholars believe false guilty pleas are even more common for less serious offenses when the cost-benefit analysis makes a plea that results in a minor sentence enticing.” Though precise numbers may be impossible to obtain, some researchers estimate that between 2 and 8 percent of people with felony convictions may be innocent.

In the worst cases, some of those guilty pleas may have been gained through coercion. A Connecticut court freed Bobby Johnson, who pleaded guilty to murdering a 70-year-old man during a 2006 robbery, after prosecutors acknowledged police misconduct in his case. Officers told him during his lengthy interrogation that he would face the death penalty if he didn’t confess to the crime, but would only receive probation if he did. Johnson, who was diagnosed with an IQ of 69, agreed to confess and received a 38-year prison sentence. Judges in Illinois tossed out cases connected to Jon Burge, the notorious Chicago police commander who oversaw the use of torture to extract false confessions from defendants for two decades.

Though cases like those represent the outer bounds of why innocent defendants may plead guilty, they vividly underscore the importance of skepticism towards the integrity of the plea-bargaining process. The lower courts are divided on whether exculpatory material should be provided during that process, so it’s possible that the Supreme Court could step in and clarify its ruling on the matter. That may not aid Alvarez or other Americans who have already been wrongfully convicted. But it could help those whose years have yet to be stolen.

Stacey Abrams is running for governor of Georgia, and she’s in debt. Throughout the summer, her opponent, Brian Kemp, criticized her for her financial situation, suggesting that funding a campaign while owing money to the IRS should be made “criminal.” In early August, the Republican Governors Association released a TV spot about her finances. “Stacey Abrams: a self-serving, fiscally irresponsible career politician,” the ad declared.

There is nothing new about conservatives pointing to personal debt as evidence that candidates are fiscally irresponsible, their unbalanced books a sign of some greater personal failing. As a campaign strategy, the criticism helps Republicans—with all their promises to rein in wasteful government expenditures—frame their liberal opponents as profligate spenders who shouldn’t be trusted to manage tax dollars.

Lately, however, the charge has been coming at Democratic candidates from people in their own party. Randy Bryce, the Bernie Sanders–backed Democrat running for Paul Ryan’s House seat in Wisconsin, went bankrupt in 1999, and has only recently paid off a delinquent car loan and $1,257 in late child support—facts that Cathy Myers, his opponent in the Democratic primary, returned to time and again this spring. (He won anyway.) In New York, Andrew Cuomo’s running mate, Kathy Hochul, has criticized Jumaane Williams, the democratic socialist running against her for lieutenant governor, for a home foreclosure he suffered in 2014. “Our NY state budget is $168.3 billion per year,” a recent attack ad charged. “If he can’t manage his own finances, do you really want him managing YOURS?”

In answering for their spending habits, women and people of color often face a particularly stark double standard. Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, has racked up tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt to pay for home improvements and Washington Nationals tickets, and as recently as 2016, he owed up to $200,000 between three credit cards and a loan. Few people expected this to impede his nomination. And why would they? The man who chose him has a string of bankruptcies to his name, and his companies owe a reported $315 million to ten different financial institutions. Even Kemp, Abrams’s opponent, is being sued for allegedly failing to repay a $500,000 loan he had used to invest in an agricultural company. For Kemp and Kavanaugh, debt was simply the cost of an intrepid, entrepreneurial spirit; for Abrams, it was a serious offense.

All may be fair in politics, but in an age when some 80 percent of Americans have personal debts, it’s not clear that denouncing people on the basis of what they owe is good campaign strategy. Student loan debt has almost tripled in ten years, and 26 percent of Americans under 65 are unable to pay their medical bills. The burden falls disproportionately on women, people of color, and young people—especially young people. Roughly 82 percent of millennials have debts. At least 63 percent owe more than $10,000 in student loans, 34 percent hold car loans, and another 46 percent hold credit card debt. And the wage gap means that many of them never reach the salary they’d need to pay off these bills.

That Abrams, Bryce, and Williams can understand these concerns may, if anything, make them more relatable, not less. The ways they fell into debt are hardly exceptional. Bryce, an ironworker, declared bankruptcy after he was forced to pay for cancer treatment without medical insurance. Williams’s home went into foreclosure after a restaurant he co-owned folded. Abrams took out loans to attend Yale Law School, and shouldered some of her family’s debt when her parents fell ill.

It is possible that these histories, which in the past may have been a liability, will prove to be an asset, resonating with the four out of five Americans who also owe money. “When you hear a candidate talk about their student loan debt, it’s not a turnoff,” said Lesley Lopez, a Democratic nominee for Maryland’s General Assembly. “It’s a sign the candidate understands what has become a generational struggle.”The sheer ubiquity of debt may have begun to change how Americans see the issue—as a structural condition, not a personal failing.

The sheer ubiquity of debt may have begun to change how Americans see the issue—as a structural condition more than a personal failing—and therefore how they see candidates who owe money. Democrats have plenty of good reasons to criticize Kavanaugh—his track record on the bench, for one, opposing abortion rights and environmental regulation; and whatever favors he may have gotten in return for buying tickets for Washington power brokers. But the mere fact of his credit card debt shouldn’t be counted among his faults, just as Abrams shouldn’t be kept from the Georgia governorship by her student loans, nor Williams barred from public service because he chose a bad adjustable-rate mortgage.

In the Trump era, as younger activists enter American politics, voters will likely encounter more candidates who owe money. These candidates may be wise to talk about their financial woes frankly. “As everyone following the race now knows,” Abrams wrote in Fortune in April, “I owe the IRS over $50,000 in deferred tax payments . . . and hold more than $170,000 in credit card and student loan debt.” Four weeks later, she won the Democratic primary.

There was a time before Ashkenazi American Jews were considered white. Not too long ago, Jews were still well acquainted with the ambivalence of their American compatriots. Reflected back at them in the windows of the country clubs that would not admit them, they saw the stooped, hook-nosed money-grubber of every Der Stürmer cartoon.

But in 1948, something astonishing happened, a plot-twist that would irrevocably change the American Jewish story, though it happened halfway across the globe. The Jewish state was established, and the tiny, fledgling country, which initially looked like it might be wiped out in a second Holocaust, prevailed against all the Arab states that sought to destroy it.

Israel’s military strength, especially during the Six-Day War in 1967, when the Israeli Defense Forces conquered Jerusalem, gave American Jews something they hadn’t had for two millennia: national pride. In so doing, it curbed the headlong rush to assimilation, the great aspiration of the American Jewish community for much of the 20th century.

In exchange for this gift of Jewish pride, American Jews gave Israel their undivided support, their financial aid, and, with the help of their evangelical friends, the support of the American government.

After half a century, that arrangement is coming to an end.

Poll after poll shows that young American Jews are losing their connection to Israel, largely over its systematic dispossession of Palestinian civil rights and property. Once temporary, the occupation of the West Bank after the 1967 war and the blockade of Gaza since 2007 have grown entrenched, especially throughout Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s tenure.

It’s in the shadow of this interminable occupation, rather than the military victory that gave rise to it, that millennial Jews have come of age—in the shadow of a Jewish state that brings them not pride but shame.

And it’s not just young American Jews. Older Jews are breaking ranks, too. Their outrage is not aimed at the disastrous fate of the Palestinians so much as at Israel’s increasing intolerance toward liberal Jews.

In Israel, control over matters of personal status—marriage, divorce, and conversion—belongs to the ultra-Orthodox rabbinate. Strict Orthodoxy is the only version of Judaism that the state recognizes. And since Israel has no separation of church and state, this monopoly grants the rabbinate the power to impose a fundamentalist version of Judaism on Conservative, Reform, and secular Jews, chronically disempowering women and refusing to recognize liberal conversions. This state of affairs is slowly eroding support for the Jewish state, even in the pro-Israel community—even in the donor class.

Just this year, Ronald Lauder, an erstwhile supporter of Netanyahu, and Charles Bronfman, one of the mega-donors behind the Birthright project of educating non-Israeli Jews about Israel, wrote scathing op-eds excoriating the Netanyahu government for its treatment of non-Orthodox Jews. “Many non-Orthodox Jews, myself included, feel that the spread of state-enforced religiosity in Israel is turning a modern, liberal nation into a semi-theocratic one,” wrote Lauder in The New York Times.

Such harsh words would have been unthinkable even a year ago.

In this context, Netanyahu’s alliance with President Donald Trump is a symptom, rather than a cause, of the crisis between the world’s two major Jewish communities. In fact, this break was a long time coming. For a while now, American Jews and Israelis have been separated by more than just geography.

A recent Pew Research Center study found that 69 percent of American Jews said that “leading an ethical and moral life” was “essential to being Jewish”—compared to just 47 percent of Israelis. And 56 percent of American Jews said “working for justice and equality” was essential to their Jewish identity, as opposed to just 27 percent of Israelis.

American Jews also ranked these values of ethics, justice, and equality as more important to their Jewish identity than Israel, along with remembering the Holocaust. American Jews ranked having a good sense of humor as equally important to their Jewish identity as Israel (Israelis disagreed—strongly).

In other words, for the majority of American Jews, their core beliefs about what is ethical and just—beliefs that preclude occupying Palestinians or denying Jews the right to practice their religion—are more central to their identity as Jews than the nationalism represented by a Jewish state.

As anti-Semitism in the U.S. has waned and American Jews found themselves part of the cultural and economic elites, many have eschewed an identity based on tribalism for one based on ethics. It was one thing to be the chosen people when we were chosen to suffer, but chosenness without persecution inevitably suggests supremacy.

Instead, liberal Jews have chosen to view their Jewishness not as a function of nationalism or religion but as the expression of universal values like justice and pluralism. They find these values in the Torah, and it’s this legacy that increasingly gives American Jews pride.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the different ways Israelis and Americans view intermarriage. For Orthodox Jews and many Israelis, intermarriage is synonymous with assimilation; to marry someone not of one’s tribe is to lose one’s identity as a Jew. To be a Jew according to this vision is to belong to a bounded group that admits the other only under duress. The new head of the Jewish Agency, Isaac Herzog, went so far as to call intermarriage “a plague.”

It’s a sentiment the American Jewish community, especially the younger generation, has all but abandoned. After fighting intermarriage for years, the liberal Jewish community is now embracing the intermarried, welcoming them and their children into their temples.

That same Pew study found that a rising number of the children of intermarriages are Jewish in adulthood. Only 25 percent of American Jews over 65 with one Jewish parent identify as Jewish, compared to 59 percent of Jews under 30. In other words, two out of three intermarried couples now raise their children Jewish. “In this sense, intermarriage may be transmitting Jewish identity to a growing number of Americans,” Pew concludes. Far from a plague, it’s viewed as a blessing, a way to open communities and spread Jewish values, and to foreclose on the devil’s choice of Orthodox coercion or nationalist pride.

For many Israelis and the Orthodox, being Jewish is not something one chooses but an inescapable fate that must be protected through demographics. In this view, Jews must marry Jews and raise Jewish babies. Jews must maintain an ethnic majority in the Jewish state.

For liberal Jews, the opposite is the case. Being Jewish is a matter of values, a matter of choice. One chooses to lead an ethical life, to remember the Holocaust, to pursue justice at all costs. Unless Israel changes course dramatically and soon, no obligation will remain that’s as strong as that choice.

I grew up with a Disneyland version of Israel: It was a country that had truly been a land without people waiting for a people without a land. It was immaculately conceived after Zionist leaders accepted the U.N.’s partition plan in 1947, and then fended off massive Arab attacks while demonstrating nothing but goodwill to the Palestinians living in what would become the new Jewish state. By the age of 18, I had been to Israel five times with my family and three times on my own, and went on to spend a gap year there before college, but I was unaware that Israel’s official borders did not encompass all of the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The space between what I thought I knew and what I actually knew was a canyon. And when that space began to narrow, it presented a challenge to my identity, values, and worldview.

Much of the churn taking place in the American Jewish community over Israel reflects a struggle over how best to deal with just such a fallout. For many older American Jews, social media and widely available English-language Israeli news have created a daily wealth of information about Israel unavailable to them before, challenging the milk-and-honey version they espoused. For others, the low esteem with which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government holds American Jewry—and in particular the 90 percent of American Jews who do not identify as Orthodox—has undermined the emotional attachment they have to the Jewish state. Many younger American Jews either disassociate themselves from Israel due to its policies toward the Palestinians, or direct their anger at the Israeli government and American Jewish institutions that they believe actively misled them about Israel’s true nature.

Yet just as the deification of Israel as a country that does no wrong was substantively wrong and tactically erroneous, so too is the demonization of Israel as a country that does no right. Like any country, Israel is a varied and complex place, and a real understanding of it will never come from an absolutist portrayal. More importantly, simply shedding all American Jewish identification with Israel—if that is even possible—will come at a high cost. Israel has played a central role in American Jewish practice and identity for too long to excise it without real ramifications. While a debate can be had as to whether it was healthy to make love for Israel such a central feature of American Jewish life, their mutual dependence is not something that can be reversed.

The key to establishing a more stable American Jewish relationship with Israel lies in acknowledging both that American Jews and Israel are deeply connected and that they travel different paths. This is a reflection of thousands of years of Jewish history and tradition. The last two millennia of Jewish practice were shaped by its Diaspora status, while at the same time Jewish belief never wavered in its connection to and memory of Zion. American Jewish practice and identity have developed in response to being a minority group without a homegrown political nationalist movement, living in a world power at peace with its immediate neighbors and with no established state religion. Nothing about this basic structure pertains to Israel, so there is nothing shocking about American Jews having difficulty understanding what drives their Israeli cousins and vice versa.

Disappointments and disapprovals on both sides will abound, and the appropriate response is neither to pretend that they don’t exist nor to cut ties entirely. It is to nod to these differences, and to figure out how to manage them in a way that both sides can live with.

American Jews who are struggling with Israel’s expressions of exclusionary nationalism and its occupation of the West Bank want Israel to be remade in their own image and adopt policies that reflect their own values. But this is not a reasonable expectation. Israelis live with threats that American Jews do not even dream about facing, and in the wider scope of history are still in the process of negotiating the proper balance between democracy and security and the role of various state institutions. When the United States turned 70, as Israel just did, it had experienced multiple constitutional crises and had not yet gotten to the Civil War. American Jews rightly feel a stake in Israel, but they want it to heed their directives even though they do not live, pay taxes, or perform mandatory military service there.

On the other side, Israel wants American Jews to support it uncritically and subsume their negative opinions to the larger project of a Jewish state. This is also not a reasonable expectation. There was a decades-long Israeli assumption that American Jews would support Israel no matter what, and that if they even bothered to express their concerns, they could be largely ignored. Israel has no obligation to conform its policies to the wishes of American Jewry—but the other side of that coin is that it should not depend on the old dynamic still reigning supreme. As a new generation of American Jews becomes more active and vocal, one that has no firsthand memory of large-scale Jewish persecution or of the euphoria that marked Israel’s founding, the difficulty that Israel now faces in maintaining its support is only going to increase.

The relationship between American Jews and Israel has been marked by tension from the outset, but the new tensions will override all unless both sides recalibrate their expectations, establish that their differences are not extraordinary but reasonable, and work harder to understand why it is that they will never travel in absolute lockstep.

It’s a damning critique of President Donald Trump that his own staffers treated his relatively muted response to a sexual-assault allegation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh as a minor miracle. CNN reported earlier this week that aides were “quietly stunned” that he managed to not directly criticize Christine Blasey Ford as her account roiled Washington. “Hopefully he can keep it together until Monday,” an unnamed White House official told Axios on Thursday. “That’s only, like, another 48 hours right?”

He didn’t even last that long. Trump opened Friday morning by aggressively casting doubt on Blasey’s account, questioning why she didn’t report her allegations to law enforcement in the early 1980s, immediately after the alleged assault.

“Judge Brett Kavanaugh is a fine man, with an impeccable reputation, who is under assault by radical left wing politicians who don’t want to know the answers, they just want to destroy and delay,” he wrote on Twitter. Trump then criticized Blasey for the first time. “I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local law enforcement authorities by either her or her loving parents,” he wrote. “I ask that she bring those filings forward so that we can learn date, time, and place!”

Trump knows full well that neither Blasey nor her parents filed charges or otherwise spoke to the police. She told The Washington Post that she didn’t share her account with anyone in detail until a therapy session with her husband in 2012. Trump’s goal is clear: to signal that she’s less credible because she didn’t turn to law enforcement at the time. But that’s the norm for crimes involving sexual violence. The Justice Department estimated in 2016 that only 23 percent of Americans who were raped or sexually assaulted that year reported it to police. Surveys attribute the low reporting rate to the trauma of sexual violence, the stigma that’s still widely attached to it, and the fear of retaliation and disbelief.

Those fears are well-founded. The Post’s Elizabeth Bruenig this week documented the story of Amber Wyatt, who in 2006 immediately reported her alleged rape by classmates when she was 16-years-old. She faced widespread social backlash for naming a popular soccer player as one of her assailants, and the investigation was incomplete at best. The Arlington, Texas police didn’t question either of her alleged attackers despite DNA evidence that linked one of them to the crime. Wyatt herself wasn’t even called to testify before the grand jury, which ultimately declined to indict the two boys. The #MeToo movement has made clear that Wyatt’s experience isn’t an isolated one.

Trump’s comments contribute to that problem. They also come as no surprise. The president routinely defends men accused of sexual misconduct and expresses disbelief towards the women who share their experiences with it. He described Roger Ailes as a “very, very good man” after the Fox News CEO stepped down after decades of sexually harassing dozens of women at the network. “I don’t think he did anything wrong,” Trump told reporters about Bill O’Reilly when the former Fox anchor’s multi-million-dollar sexual harassment settlements became public. After White House aide Rob Porter resigned after two of his ex-wives accused him of domestic violence, Trump highlighted Porter’s claim of innocence and wished him a “wonderful career.” He questioned why the women who said Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore sexually assaulted them hadn’t come forward sooner. “He says it didn’t happen,” Trump remarked. “And you know, you have to listen to him also.”

The only exception to this pattern is when one of Trump’s political adversaries is accused of wrongdoing. After the Access Hollywood tape surfaced during the 2016 election, he held a press conference with four women who had accused Bill Clinton of harassment and assault. He has also relished the downfalls of Democratic lawmakers like Anthony Weiner and Al Franken.

Even before his comments on Friday, when he was being praised simply for not attacking Ford, the president made clear where he stood by repeatedly expressing sympathy for Kavanaugh, and none for Ford. “I feel so badly that he’s going through this,” Trump remarked on Wednesday. “This is not a man that deserves this.” The president speaks from experience. At least 19 women have publicly accused him of sexual misconduct, from harassment to assault and rape. Their allegations are how he knows that women often don’t report sexual violence to the police, and why he views it as a barometer of innocence: None of his accusers ever did.

In my childhood, “American Jews” meant packages: Every couple of months I would go to the post office off Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Square to pick up the parcel with U.S. stamps on it. My mother’s best friend would send us the used clothes her son had outgrown, so I was one of the first children in Tel Aviv to wear blue jeans and checkered flannel shirts. Every few years they would come to Israel, and we’d visit them at the Tel Aviv Hilton. It was my first contact with wealth and prestige. We knew that they had gotten very rich in the steel business. We thought all American Jews were rich.

In high school civics class we held a debate: Whom could we more easily identify with, a Druze soldier from Daliyat al-Karmel who served in the Israeli army, or an ultra-Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn? Many chose the Druze man: He spoke our language and lived in our country, the students reasoned. Then, at 17, came a sponsored trip to a B’nai B’rith summer camp in Starlight, Pennsylvania. We fell in love, we sang “House of the Rising Sun” with a guitar by the lake. We were guests at the homes of American Jews in Bethesda, Maryland, in Philadelphia, and in Scarsdale, New York. It was three years after the miracle of the Six-Day War, and it felt as though Israel was admired everywhere, especially in the American Jewish community.

The roles, as I understood them as a child, were clear: They would make a lot of money and donate part of it to Israel; we would go to war and provide them with a shelter if things in America took a wrong turn. And we in Israel also believed that we were a source of pride for American Jews. But over the years these axioms have crumbled. Israel is no longer the safest place in the world for Jews, and many people around the world, including a minority inside Israel, no longer see it as a source of pride. Meanwhile, Israel is financially secure and no longer needs alms from abroad. Few Jews make aliyah, or immigrate, anymore, and Israel no longer needs the immigration as much as it used to. These changes have brought about a deep shift in the relationship between the two largest Jewish communities in the world. And both sides, at this point, desperately need to adjust to the new realities.

The automatic, unquestioning support of Israel by the old establishment of American Jews has hurt both sides, and implicated the Jewish world in each one of Israel’s less defensible actions: each child shot and killed in Gaza, every detainee spending years without charges or trial in Israeli jails. And the law recently passed in the Israeli parliament, affirming that Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people, works in some ways to strengthen this associative bond—a bond that provides cover for the Israeli state’s questionable actions while exposing American Jews, and Jews around the world, to outbursts of anti-Semitism based on complaints about Israeli policy. These complaints can be legitimate, or they can be bigoted, but the fact remains that, as an empirical matter, there is no greater or more effective catalyst for anti-Semitism today than the crimes of Israel’s occupation. The United States is the country that enables the occupation to continue, and without whose support Israel would be vastly more tentative in its actions both foreign and domestic, and might therefore be a more just state today, and perhaps even a safer one.

In recent years, large swaths of American Jewry have become disappointed with Israel, although often for reasons tangential at best to the fundamental problem: the treatment of the Reform and Conservative communities, for example, or the Kotel compromise establishing prayer rights in the gender-segregated spaces of Jerusalem’s Western Wall, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s various controversial policies, and recently the Nation-State law.

Meanwhile, functional apartheid has existed in the occupied territories for quite some time; and as the Green Line marking the 1949 ceasefire grows ever blurrier and the occupation becomes a permanent thing that no one seriously intends to end, it is no longer possible to differentiate between Israel and the occupied territories. At some point, American Jews as well as Israelis will need to confront the fact that, under these conditions, Israel can no longer be considered a democracy by any measure. With almost three million Palestinians under Israeli control in the West Bank and almost two million more in Gaza who have lived under an inhumane siege for some twelve years, we can no longer speak of “the only democracy in the Middle East.” The occupied territories are no longer Israel’s backyard, but an inalienable part of the state itself, a true window into it. There is no democracy when millions of subjects have no rights.

Amidst this urgent moral crisis, only a few of our liberal Jewish brethren in America, some of whose parents marched shoulder-to-shoulder for human rights and equality with Martin Luther King Jr., have raised their voices in clear, incisive criticism. The rest prefer to disengage.

Israel needs these voices. Life in Israel is too good and the brainwashing—particularly the demonization and dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli media—is uniquely effective. In one poll in May, 83 percent of respondents “strongly support[ed]” firing on peaceful Gazan protesters. While some Israelis disagree strongly with their government’s policies, change at this point most likely must come from outside. And who can make a greater change than the Jews of the United States, who influence the policy of the U.S. administration?

Israelis like me are waiting for the moment that more Jews in America will bravely, loudly, and clearly tell their dear sister: “Something has gone fundamentally wrong with you. You cannot go on like this. You are becoming an apartheid state, which will make you a pariah state. We want no part in that Israel.” Those Israelis who dissent want American Jews to stop sending tens of thousands of youngsters on Birthright trips, where they are shown only Israel’s enlightened, propaganda facets. We don’t want the embarrassing, grotesque donation conferences for the wealthy Israeli army, which already has everything it could possibly want. We don’t want ceremonies to plant trees that no one needs, and we don’t want donations for synagogues. We don’t need packages with used blue jeans and flannel shirts. We’ve got our own. What we need is something else entirely.

Speak up with the clear voice of conscience about what has really happened to Israel. Speak up against the ongoing crime of the brutal occupation of another nation in the 21st century. Acknowledge that the occupation as currently administered is there to stay. Recognize that there are two nations living in the area known as the land of Israel and as Palestine, nations about equal in size, which should be equal in all rights. Acknowledge that right now, only members of one nation enjoy basic rights, while members of the other lack any. That will be the most honest expression of concern and the truest expression of friendship. Challenging, instead of either enabling or disengaging from, a wayward friend is the path toward change.

The growing divergence of American Jews from Israel is actually composed of two different phenomena: on the one hand, there is anger towards Israel among a set of American Jewish elites, especially young, highly engaged, and educated progressive activists; on the other, an apathy among the broader American Jewish population as it drifts from the demands of particularistic Jewish identity, in which for many decades reflexive attachment to Israel played a significant role. Conflating these two issues—anger and apathy—makes the predicament seem larger, hopelessly tangled, and insurmountable.

Political interests shape this problem as it is presented in media, punditry, and agenda-driven social science. Progressives characterize their disenchantment with Israel as shared by an entire generation, and believe that campaigning against the alliance of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu will push the American Jewish political consensus (which is already overwhelmingly anti-Trump) towards a harder line on Israel; and, also, that this process can help advance leftist domestic political goals. They portray the alienation of American Jews from Israel as more than a fringe phenomenon, and as the cause for this divide they tend to blame exclusively Israel’s policies and its government.

Conservatives, meanwhile, see the liberal American Jewish divide from Israel as leverage to get “serious” Jews—Jews who care about Jewish survival, Jewish peoplehood, and the state of Israel—to abandon their historic loyalties to the Democratic Party and effectively to choose Zionism over liberalism. This effort, too, requires a narrative that “distancing” is not a minor problem among highly engaged Jews but a major problem that can tilt the balance in the broader American relationship to Israel; and they attribute this distancing to ideological shifts in political liberalism that make it intolerant to Israel.

These simplistic narratives, and the political desires to exploit them, make it more difficult to see and address the longer-term and structural factors driving the communities apart. They also turn a complicated story into an inevitability, even as the silent majority of engaged American Jews, and virtually all of the centers of American Jewish power, are trying desperately to prevent the process of distancing from taking hold. We should instead understand this phenomenon as irreducible to single-issue explanations; the harder work, and the attendant opportunity, lie in mapping out the problem in its fullest.

First, these two communities increasingly have different ideas about what it means to be ethnically Jewish. American Jewish identity has radically transformed over the past two generations through intermarriage, shifts in standards and practices of conversion, and  the changing way Americans think about family and ancestry as drivers of identity. Family heritage now may play a role in one’s Jewish identity, but is certainly not universally determinative—a phenomenon that American Jewish sociologists describe as the emergence of “voluntary affiliational Jewish identity.” Controversies in different American Jewish denominations about the acceptance of intermarriage, the universality of conversion, the nature of membership, and how or whether Jewishness is transmitted from parent to child all attest to a culture in flux.

Accordingly, the mid-20th century notions of “Jewish peoplehood” that fueled attachment and loyalty to Israel—predicated on the idea of the Jewish people as a ‘family’ and reinforced by familial lines that remained intact through post-war dislocations—seem artificial to growing numbers of otherwise proudly identified and even affiliated Jews. In Jewish Peoplehood: An American Innovation, Noam Pianko argues that 20th century American Jews invented the rhetoric of “Jewish Peoplehood” as an ideological and political system to respond to their needs. As those needs have changed dramatically in the past two generations, commitment to this ideology that they generated has declined as well.

Israeli Jews have been facilitating their own transformations of ethnicity, especially through multicultural Jewish hybrids between Jews of diverse ethnic backgrounds, as well as through tinkering with the rules of Jewish belonging with its Law of Return. Israel’s prioritizing of immigration, and its need for demographic growth, make for an ethnic makeup and definitions of Jewishness in Israel that are largely unfamiliar to American Jews. And the cultural norms and practices of both Jewish civilizations make the two often unrecognizable to one another.

These active and passive processes of evolution in Jewish ethnicity in America and Israel eliminate the shortcuts to sustaining the relationships between Jewish communities separated by 7,000 miles. American Jews and Israeli Jews do not share a language, and they do not share most elements of culture. Now, if American Jews and Israeli Jews increasingly do not see themselves as part of the same peoplehood, it may be because they do not actually share the same people.

Political environments and attitudes are also pushing the communities apart. The right has held power in Israel for most of the past generation, and their policies on a wide set of issues—religious pluralism, the occupation, the status and treatment of Palestinians, and international alliances and allegiances—contribute to American Jewish alienation and anger. But it is also likely true that radical changes in Israeli policy on any of these fronts would do very little to stem the estrangement. Regime change in Israel would be welcomed by the small number of American Jews who are deeply engaged with Israel but hostile to its policies. Yet it offers little hope in bridging the divide with the majority of American Jews, who do not know enough about Israel to have their opinions of it shaped by its government’s policies.

American Jews act and behave politically like the broader American public. Research from Pew demonstrates that partisanship and polarization are at heights not seen in the past century, and that the biggest shift in American political attitudes has been in pushing the American left even further left. American Jewish voting patterns have remained largely consistently pro-Democrat, which now means something different than it used to; and Israel’s place as a core feature of American conservatism makes it susceptible to partisan rancor, especially during this divisive administration.

So as Israel pulls (or stays) right and American Jews pull left, then alienation and the anger are merely natural consequences of larger trends exhibited in the two societies. Blaming Bibi or the Israeli electorate for this divide is folly, as is the recurring neo-conservative attack on “liberal American Jewish values.” There are different prevailing Jewish political positions in the world, both authentic products of their environments, and both independent and viable reflections of sincere historical, theological, and intellectual processes. That the majority of Israeli Jews chose Netanyahu in a spat with Barack Obama, and the majority of American Jews chose Obama, is not because one of these communities or the other is causing the divide: it is that different political realities have produced different—and maybe incompatible—political ideologies. In this climate, the bipartisanship that defined late-20^th century American Jewish consensus attitudes to Israel is starting to come across to Jews on both sides of the political divide as bad politics, the abandonment of moral principles in a climate of urgency, and a bourgeois relic of a different era.

It is not just ethnicity and politics. The Jewish people relish in their history, and in the stories that shape their collective consciousness. The lived experience of the 20^th century fueled world Jewry’s loyalties to Israel. Mass dislocations detached Jews from their particular political loyalties and led them to prioritize belonging to the Jewish nation instead. The birth of a nascent state in a hostile region—desperate for philanthropic, political, and human capital—created clear obligations. The American Jewish community built an institutional infrastructure that was big on resources and low on meaning, and Israel proved a valuable totem at the center. And Jews came to believe that the Jewish people both needed a place to run to in crisis and the support of each other in hard times. These narratives thrived when the lived experience of American and Israeli Jewry bore them out. Less so today. No one doubts that Israel faces existential threats, but in facing those threats today Israel seems far less dependent on American Jews’ philanthropic or political resources. The “story” of Israel that shaped American Jewish identity for a long time does not match the reality of Israel, and this discovery is hard to ignore, and it is taking place awkwardly in public. The collective memory of the meaning of Israel for the Jewish people today is at best contested, and at worst absent.

And let’s be honest: Those very narratives that may have “worked”—what American Jews told themselves about Israel for a long time—were not always true. We are experiencing a reckoning with realities about Israel, Israelis, and Israeli society that many American Jews never fully understood to begin with.

American Jews grow distant from Israel and from Israeli Jews sometimes just because of the passage of time, and because of the actual distance between us. Jews longed for home for generations, and then suddenly by the end of the 20^th century found that home in two separate hospitable cultures and idioms that have allowed them to flourish independently. Flourishing is good; flourishing independently is more complicated. Real needs drove the relationship between these communities. But the passage of time, and the realities of geography, are mitigating those needs and offering an equally compelling alternative—the possibility of going at it alone, without the hassle of the judgmental, incomprehensible, semi-relatives across the water.

As of now, no educational approach seems capable of bridging the divide. American Jewish educational institutions do not adequately prepare students to either withstand the pressures facing the Israeli narrative, or to competently understand Israel and its challenges, or to sustain a relationship with a place and a people undergoing such significant changes, and for which they do not have any obvious and continuing need. Jewish education about Israel innovates more in the realm of how to teach Israel than in why, and often uses nostalgia, language education, dated culture, and the study of history as its primary commodities even though none of these address or close the growing gap, and even though it is increasingly difficult for a student today to reach the independent conclusion as to why Israel should matter to them and to their Jewish life.

And there is so much fear in the field. We know that real education requires some amount of faith in uncertain outcomes and trust in students to handle complicated subjects; and uncertain outcomes are viewed as politically threatening to consensus Jewish communal politics when they relate to Israel. The anxiety in the field makes it impossible to teach much-needed confidence.

The most effective large-scale program that teaches anything about Israel to young American Jews is Birthright Israel, whose mission is to strengthen Jewish identity using the instrument of Israeli travel, not to educate about Israel for its own sake. There is very little reason to believe that a short Israel trip will create a lifelong relationship with the Jewish civilization on the other side of the globe. Neither Birthright alone, nor a struggling educational system, have met the challenge of cultivating communities of curiosity, nuance, and knowledge, which could be the Jewish community’s best bet to rethink and make secure the meaning of this relationship.

Israeli Jews do not engage seriously with the needs and wants of American Jews in part because they know very little about them, or even about why they should. Even if a formal ideology of “negation of the exile” disappeared over time from Israeli polite company, the Zionism that still defines Israeli Judaism remains premised on the idea that there is but one home and homeland for the Jewish people. Absent formal responsibilities for continued philanthropy and support from afar, the continued presence and thriving of Jews outside the Land of Israel is broadly incomprehensible. Efforts are now underway to remedy this gap, but it is enormous: if a group’s very self-identity is defined by an ideology, and that ideology is critical to a group’s collective consciousness in the midst of prolonged conflict, tinkering with and supplementing that ideology with countercultural ideas is sensitive work. Ideas and initiatives in Israeli society that sound “Diasporic” can be doomed at the outset, and sometimes even seem seditious.

And anyway: Have we come up with really good reasons—comprehensible not just to elites, but to the general public—about why Diaspora Jewry and their idiosyncrasies and vicissitudes should really matter to Israeli Jews?

In the meantime, paradoxically, the business of Israel among American Jews is robust and growing. The AIPAC Policy Conference is easily the largest annual gathering of American Jews in in America, and locally it is far easier to attract a significant crowd for a lecture on Israel and Jewish politics than any other topic of Jewish concern. Multiple new or resurgent Israel-Palestine organizations are thriving—IfNotNow, Jewish Voice for Peace, Israel Policy Forum, Encounter, The Israel Project, and our own iEngage Project. Israel-related topics constitute the continued drumbeat of content in most Jewish media. If Israel is failing as an American Jewish cause, it seems to be failing up.

Where does this leave us?

One path forward is through reinvesting in ideas and ideologies that can weather these changes and divergences and can tolerate the diversity of the Jewish people, and that also have a political plausibility to define Israel’s character. Forcing these communities together inorganically or trying to homogenize across difference won’t work, and neither will dishonest education or making one community subordinate to the other. But what if we told a big enough and concrete enough story about what it means to live at this moment at Jewish history, and a story that could translate into a program for the Jewish people? Can narrative once again save Jewish peoplehood?

I identify as a liberal Zionist. The critics of this ideology believe it can no longer exist, perhaps because they measure the integrity of an ideology based on whether it is winning. Liberal Zionism is optimistic in spite of contemporary political trends, in part because it is rooted in a Zionist history of ideas that was always far more ambitious and optimistic than it should have been in light of its early implausibility and lack of popularity. Liberal Zionism advocates for liberal democracy and liberal values to define the character of the Jewish nation-state. This idea may not be winning right now, but to be a Jew in Jewish history is to work things out with rigor, and not to be distracted by short-term thinking.

Liberal Zionism offers both the most pragmatic and most morally serious grappling with the historical legacy of Jewish deterritorialization and its catastrophic consequences. It is also the political ideology best capable of grappling with the moral costs of the nationalism into which the Jewish people have been thrust and into which the Jewish people must opt. A serious American Jewish Zionism would also articulate twin meanings of home for American Jews (here) and homeland (there), unconvinced by the arguments that the one invalidates the other. The contemporary moment offers unparalleled possibilities for a rich Jewish future offered by two thriving Jewish civilizations, as well as the unique opportunity to improve on the legacy of the Jewish past. Neither abandoning the project of Israel, nor slavish loyalty to it, does service to who we are as morally, historically, or politically serious Jews.

Such an American Jewish liberal Zionism – and a corresponding movement among Israelis to connect with the American Jewish project – is not inevitable, and not intuitive, but it is necessary; and it is worth fighting for. The simultaneous births of the state of Israel and a thriving Diaspora may be the most interesting, possibly the most valuable transformation in Jewish history. Israel changes the very meaning of Judaism, for better or worse, and presents an opportunity to the Jewish people, not to be squandered, to shape that meaning.

Jewish time deals in sevens. Think of the biblical account of Creation and its seven days that end with the Sabbath, when God rested. Think of the Bible’s Sabbatical Year, every seventh year when all fields lay fallow and all debts are forgiven. Think of the Bible’s Jubilee Year, the year after every seventh Sabbatical Year when the shofar is blown for the manumission of slaves. Think of the Bible itself: Ptolemy II, who hoped to undermine the divine authority of the Hebrew original, commissioned 72 Jewish scholars to translate it into Greek, but forced each to work independently; according to legend, however, each scholar miraculously produced the same identical Greek text, which was subsequently rounded down and given the Latin name Septuagint, meaning 70. That number is of especial importance to Judaism’s relationship to mortality. Traditionally, 70 years is taken to mean “the length of one generation,” and the prophetic writings invoke that length exactly seven times. According to the Psalms, 70 years is the average lifespan, yet that span is but “labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”

Seventy, then, is a deathly sum. It follows that Israel’s 70th birthday should be a reckoning.

And yet Israel has two birthdays, because of its dual calendar: the Hebrew lunar (used by religious Jews), and the Gregorian solar (used by everyone in Israel, including the religious). The modern state of Israel was founded on 5 Iyar 5708, which was May 14, 1948. If you do some basic calculations, or just search online, you’ll find that Israel’s 70th, 5 Iyar 5778, corresponded to April 20, 2018, which just happened to be the eve of the Sabbath (in calendars that count by the moon, the days begin and end with sunset). This means that Israel marked the septuagenary “platinum” anniversary of its independence a full 24 days before America and its other allies paid their respects, on May 14, 2018, the eve of the date memorialized by Palestinians as Nakba Day: the day that brought the destruction (Al Nakba) of their homeland.

This 24-day period is just about the longest drift that’s possible between anniversaries of the same event in the lunar and solar calendars. The fields of horology (the study of time) and chronology (the study of historical records to determine the dates of past events) have a term for this divergence: “secular difference.”

The term suggests a schism, a split; cycles out of sync, spheres obstinate in their incongruence. This is because it defines as a technical time-discrepancy what is better understood as a religio-political discrepancy, or as the artifact of immemorial attempts by solar-calendared empires to subjugate the lunar-calendared Jews and absorb them into their time frames, attempts which date back to at least the reign of Ptolemy III, the eldest son of Ptolemy II, who introduced the leap day to Egypt.

Today, that “secular difference” not only still exists, it’s become greater than ever. This might be the one fact that everyone, even Jews, can agree on.

In 5778/2018, another word for this period was spring.

The major official event of every Israeli Independence Day (Yom Haatzmaut) is the public lighting of a menorah, which is conducted up by the military cemetery on Mount Herzl. Though the biblical menorah was a seven-branched candelabra, modern Israel prefers to use the twelve-branched version, which dedicates a flame to each of the ancient Israelite tribes and gives the event’s organizers—a committee that includes Knesset members—more honors to distribute.

Each year, the committee invites twelve Israelis to perform an act that, to many American Jews, and even to many Israeli Jews, resembles nothing so much as a supersize bar-or-bat-mitzvah-candle-lighting-ceremony, in which F-16 flyovers have been substituted for cake. The honorees were called up, one at a time, to kindle a wick—in this case, to touch a torch to a gas jet—and, as they fumbled, their lives were described (the emcees for the occasion were Channel 2 news anchor Danny Kushmaro and movie actress Yaël Abecassis). As to be expected of state ceremonies in any democracy, even one exclusively made of, by, and for Jews, the cast of citizens chosen to participate keeps getting more diverse, and in this transformative year for global feminism (in which so many of the famous men accused of wrongdoing are Jews), there was a particular emphasis on women: the young, ultra-Orthodox tech mogul; the director general for the Asia-Pacific region in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; the Poland-born “First Lady” of the Israeli stage; the Morocco-born pioneer of the “nano-ghost,” which is a type of gene therapy, apparently. The aim, per Israeli custom, was to produce an event reflective of the country’s multiculturalism and respect for human rights (which is to say reflective of Jewish multiculturalism and respect for Jewish rights), and, above all, to keep the event apolitical.

Most politicians, regardless of nationality or party, still understand the “apolitical” not as an attainable mandate, but as an aspirational principle: a standard of decorum, an affirmation of norms. But then most politicians aren’t Benjamin Netanyahu—the Israeli prime minister who, like all masters of authoritarian-ish populism, takes an almost sinister pleasure in mocking genteel civic fictions, even while refusing to admit his own lies. Netanyahu entered this ostensibly joyous season not merely emboldened by Donald Trump but seemingly intent on matching the porn-star-struck, justice-obstructing American president scandal for ludicrous scandal. Israeli police had been investigating him for over a year, trying to figure out whether he and/or his family had traded favors for nearly one million shekels’ worth of ritzy gifts, including champagne (which Netanyahu’s team requested using the code word “pinks”), cigars (code word: “leaves”), and jewelry (Netanyahu’s team requested a necklace and bracelet set, and then complained when they only received the necklace), all of which were provided by Arnon Milchan, a former Israeli intelligence operative and Hollywood producer whose credits include The Big Short and 12 Years a Slave. Another case in which Netanyahu was implicated involved two Israeli newspapers, Yediot Ahronot and Israel Hayom. Prior to this investigation, Yediot Ahronot was generally regarded as a dependably independent “moderate” voice, with a habit of criticizing Netanyahu. Meanwhile, Israel Hayom was, and remains, a generally Netanyahu-friendly freebie tabloid, as trashy and garish as its owner, GOP-donor and casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. Recorded conversations were leaked to the Israeli press, however, in which Netanyahu can be heard telling financially embattled Yediot Ahronot publisher Arnon Mozes that he’d be willing to back legislation that would harm Israel Hayom (in the form of a bill that would limit the circulation of freebie tabloids), in exchange for Yediot Ahronot giving him and his party, Likud, more favorable coverage in advance of the 2015 elections. Here’s a choice excerpt of those recordings, in my translation:

Netanyahu: We’re just talking about moderation, about the media becoming more reasonable. The hostility level toward me has to be lowered from, say, a 9.5 to a 7.5.

Mozes: Sure. But the important thing is to make you prime minister.

Netanyahu: We have to consider what’s best for the country.

Mozes: If you want to put it that way, suit yourself. You’re the whackjob who wants to be prime minister.

Three other cases have entangled Netanyahu, but hadn’t yet implicated him personally that spring—one involving his cousin and personal lawyer David Shimron, in a convoluted scheme to bribe executives of the German company ThyssenKrupp, in order to profit off Israel’s purchase from them of three Dolphin-class submarines and four Sa’ar 6-class corvettes (warships); another pertaining to whether Netanyahu and/or his staff and/or his associates ensured a preferential regulatory environment for the Israeli telecommunications company Bezeq in exchange for profit and/or positive reporting about Netanyahu on the popular Bezeq-owned news site Walla!; and then yet another pertaining to Netanyahu’s former communications adviser offering the attorney generalship of Israel to a judge in return for the judge dismissing charges against Netanyahu’s wife, Sara, who lately has been struggling with some problems of her own. (She’s accused of misuse of state funds, for her swanky catering budget at the prime minister’s residence inter alia.)

The investigation and litigation of all this will continue well past the conclusion of Netanyahu’s present term, which, despite the wishes of some Knesset members of his own coalition, he insists won’t be his last—but the point is: spring. Just before the start of Israel’s birthday season, investigators gave Netanyahu’s opposition a shiny present when they recommended that the prime minister be indicted on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, in the booze/cigars/jewelry and newspaper cases, which the Ministry of Justice calls Cases 1000 and 2000, though I myself call them “Bibigate,” an inclusive term that spelled in Hebrew characters reads like Yiddish: “Bibi-Geyt,” meaning “Bibi Goes.”

And, indeed, Bibi went: With his political fortunes in peril, Netanyahu wasn’t going to skip the Yom Haatzmaut party, which, after all, would be broadcast live on Israel’s state-owned TV channels, and streamed online. Instead, he put on a happy face and a blue-and-white-striped tie and demanded to address the nation—something that no sitting prime minister had ever done, in accordance with the “apoliticality” of the occasion. Netanyahu’s attempt to break precedent and bask in menorah-light was met with resistance by the organizers and scorn on the Israeli street, but Netanyahu called in reinforcements in the form of that most formidable of global powers, Honduras.

This was preposterous. After Trump announced his plan to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem at the end of his first year in office, other countries fell in line: Guatemala, Paraguay (Romania and the Czech Republic are still considering). Honduras, though, was one of the first of the second-string to declare its intention to relocate, and Netanyahu decided to honor its president, Juan Orlando Hernández, a 1992 graduate of a diplomatic course held by Israel’s Foreign Ministry who in spring 2018 had just begun his second term in office, after he’d appointed Supreme Court judges who changed his country’s constitution to allow two-term presidencies, and he’d won what was almost certainly a fraudulent election.

Netanyahu’s thinking went like this: It’s established diplomatic protocol in Israel, as it is in most countries, that when the sitting head of another state visits as an official guest and makes a public appearance, the sitting head of state of the host country must join him. Ergo, if Netanyahu invited the Honduran president to ignite a menorah-branch, then Netanyahu himself would have to be there, and, as long as he was there, why not give a speech, too? Wouldn’t that only be polite? The Israeli press was dumbstruck: It was business as usual for Netanyahu to manufacture a controversy, but it was novel and almost un-Israeli of him to argue his position by invoking proper etiquette and statecraft. Meanwhile, the Honduran invitation had already been extended. Negotiations among Netanyahu, Speaker of the Knesset Yuli Edelstein, Culture and Sport Minister Miri Regev—whose nicknames include “the Israeli Trump” and “Trump in high heels”—and Honduran officials resulted in a compromise: Hernández would cancel his visit (he cited scheduling conflicts), and Netanyahu would be permitted to address the ceremony for no more than five minutes, though his remarks had to remain—again, whatever this means—“apolitical.”

He ended up speaking for about 14 minutes—opening with a dubious anecdote about a trip he’d once taken to Rome, where he’d toured the Arch of Titus, whose entablature contains a relief depicting the looting of the original menorah from the Second Temple during Titus’s re-conquest of Jerusalem in, yes, 70 C.E. According to Netanyahu’s account—which, as it went on, took on the grizzled repetitiousness of a Jewish joke—he visited the site (presumably with aides and a gargantuan security contingent) only to find himself beset by groups of “Japanese and Scandinavian tourists,” who, apparently, kept pointing at the Arch’s menorah and suddenly erupted into a chant, “Israel, Israel, Israel.” This spontaneous clamor, Netanyahu said, served as proof that the menorah was, is, and will always be universally recognized as a Jewish symbol, which is an assertion that, unlike Netanyahu’s sanity, no one has ever seriously doubted. “In the year 70, the menorah’s light went out,” he said. “But today, in Israel’s 70th year since Independence, the menorah is the symbol of our nation, and its light is stronger than ever.” Rallied by the applause, Netanyahu took the opportunity to exceed his remit: “Even today some seek to extinguish the menorah, to extinguish the light that erupts from Zion.” He then half-turned at the podium, as if issuing a threat to Tehran: “I assure you, this will not happen. It will not happen because our light will always overcome their darkness.” At that moment of the state broadcast, the chyron flashed: NETANYAHU: NOBODY WILL TURN OUR LIGHTS OFF AGAIN.

When Netanyahu finished his speech, it was still 26 days until the May 14 dedication of the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, but only 24 days until the May 12 deadline for the United States’ recertification of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, commonly referred to as the Iran Deal, which—contrary to every statement ever made by Netanyahu and Trump both—made the Ayatollah’s regime accountable to international atomic energy inspections and prevented it from developing a nuclear arsenal. Netanyahu had spent much of Barack Obama’s second term campaigning against the agreement—remember that obnoxious, GOP-sponsored address to a joint session of Congress in 2015?—but from the moment Trump arrived in the Oval Office, his lobbying for America’s withdrawal had been relentless, with rhetoric that grew more ominous even as his domestic scandals grew more gross. Iran couldn’t be trusted, he insisted; the U.N. Security Council, whose permanent members had authorized the pact, would be complicit, and were colluding, in Israel’s destruction. Nonetheless, what Netanyahu certainly knew at the time of his Yom Haatzmaut speech, but didn’t mention, was that the issue of recertification had been rendered at least temporarily moot by Iran’s interference in Syria, alongside Russia. As Russia busied itself mobilizing its largest military presence in the region since the Cold War, Israelis came to fear that the Islamic Republic wouldn’t have to develop any nukes of its own: My Israeli social-media feeds were rife with warnings of Russian nuclear material falling into Iranian hands, through negligence, or theft, or on purpose.

This impasse was the backdrop for the Israeli actions of the next three-weeks-and-change; not that many Americans were cognizant of it, given that most of the U.S. media coverage of “The Middle East” was preoccupied with Trump’s latest reality show—The Apprentice: Recertified? “Will the president tell the mullahs ‘you’re fired’?”—and the fact that, on April 26, the gutted U.S. State Department finally got a replacement secretary, Mike Pompeo, who three days after being sworn in made his first official trip, to Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and yes, Israel.

On April 30, Netanyahu took his anti-Iran appeal online, in a clumsily stage-managed English-language press conference, in which he stood alongside a utilitarian metal bookcase full of bindered documents that he claimed the Mossad had exfiltrated from Iran. According to Netanyahu, these documents demonstrated that Iran’s pursuit of nuclearization had not merely been for energy purposes, as Iranian officials had insisted, but rather for the purposes of obtaining a bomb. This was a fact that everyone was already aware of—a fact that even Trump was already aware of—but that only Netanyahu was desperate enough to repeat as if new and act shocked by (along with Fox News and about half of CNN).

Later that same day came the explanation of the press-conference charade, though hardly any U.S. news outlets carried it prominently: Israel bombed a storage base in Syria where Iran was keeping munitions, in an attack that killed at least 16. On May 1, a law was passed by the Knesset that allowed the prime minister and defense minister to declare war without cabinet approval; on May 7, Israeli Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz issued a warning that if Iran attacked Israel from Syria, Israel would assassinate Syrian President Assad; on May 8, Netanyahu ordered a missile-strike against a weapons depot south of Damascus in an attack that caused the deaths of at least eight members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and other foreign pro-regime fighters; that same day, Trump formally withdrew the United States from the Iran Deal, four days in advance of its deadline, and that evening U.S.-time, the next morning Israel-time, Netanyahu flew to Moscow to meet President Putin to discuss the future of Russia’s involvement in Syria, in particular Russia’s reported plan to equip the Assad regime with S-300 surface-to-air missiles, which might significantly degrade Israel’s air superiority in the region.

Within his first year, Trump didn’t just set in motion the fulfillment of his campaign promise to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, he also officially recognized Jerusalem as the undivided capital of the Jewish State. He did so, it must be said, not merely to please Israelis, and not merely to please American Jews, but mostly to please American evangelical Christians for whom Jerusalem is not a city but an eschaton. Now, like Trump, and like Netanyahu, I’m all for cutting through bullshit—Jerusalem is Israel’s capital if only because Israel says it is and won’t give it up and isn’t about to move the Knesset—but there’s no point in cutting through bullshit if, in the next moment, you’re just going to go and step in it. Which, of course, is precisely what Trump did. It was the pomp-and-circumstantial grotesquerie of the doing that was maddening. What transpired on May 14 wasn’t an embassy opening—it wasn’t even the opening of a Trump casino—it was more like the opening of a semifinished block of shoddy time-share condos backed onto the side of a for-profit Baptist church (discounts available for members). Stars of David and the Stars and Stripes were projected against the forbearant stones of the Old City’s walls, as the notables of the day assembled: Trump’s former bankruptcy attorney/U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, former Goldman Sachs stooge/U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Jared Kushner (who was smirking throughout, perhaps enjoying his day-off from preparing his oft-touted, but, as of this writing, yet-to-be-presented “Peace Plan”), and Ivanka Trump (who appeared so nervous that when the curtain was tugged to reveal the embassy’s seal, she welcomed everybody to the newest outpost of “the United States on America”).

The two men who sermonized at the embassy dedication are rich and famous and thoroughly odious, and yet, they might be the only Christian figures in America more familiar to Israelis than to American Jews. Dr. Robert Jeffress heads the 13,000-member First Baptist Dallas, and hosts a weekly TV ministry that reaches 28 countries, and a daily radio ministry that reaches 195 countries. He’s also had a lot to say over the years about homosexuality, and Mormonism, and Islam, but let’s skip over all of that and, because he was in Israel, get straight to Jews, whom he believes are destined for damnation: “You can’t be saved being a Jew; you know who said that by the way, the three greatest Jews in the New Testament, Peter, Paul, and Jesus Christ, they all said Judaism won’t do it, it’s faith in Jesus Christ.” The other ecclesiast who spoke—the more dangerous member of the cute couple, in my opinion—was Pastor John Hagee, another televangelist/radio-evangelist, the leader of the San Antonio-based Cornerstone Church, and the founder and leader of the Christian-Zionist organization Christians United for Israel. Pastor Hagee, like Dr. Jeffress, has many beliefs, but perhaps most salient to his pilgrimage to Jerusalem was his assertion that God let the Holocaust happen to ensure that “the Jews” returned to Israel (whenever a pastor, or anyone, opens his mouth, note whether he says “Jews” or “the Jews”—old-school Marxist anti-Semites and new-school evangelical Christian philo-Semites always choose the latter).

Both men praised Christ, God, and Trump, roughly in that order, and Dr. Jeffress even did so on behalf of the audience, the bulk of which was presumably security personnel and journalists: “I believe, Father, I speak for every one of us when we say we thank you every day that you have given us a president who boldly stands on the right side of history, but more importantly, stands on the right side of you, oh God, when it comes to Israel [Izzz-real].” Pastor Hagee, in his homily, showed that though he knew his “Old Testament” chapter and verse, he didn’t seem to know that the mighty cadences of his modified King James aren’t quite impressive—are, in fact, quite confusing—to those who speak the language of the original: “Let the word go forth from Jerusalem today that Israel lives—shout it from the housetops that Israel lives. Let every Islamic terrorist hear this message—Israel lives. Let it be heard in the halls of the United Nations—Israel lives. Let it echo down the marble halls of the Presidential Palace in Iran—Israel lives.” The cowboy cleric doth protest too much, I thought. And the more he did, the more I worried: Was “Izzz-real” dying?

To understand what these hucksters were up to, you’d have to understand their faith, and so, Yahweh forgive me, here’s a summary: Both Dr. Jeffress and Pastor Hagee subscribe to versions of “Dispensationalism,” which maintains that the history of the world is divided into—wouldn’t you know it?—seven “dispensations,” each of which is another epoch or stage of existence that brings “the Jews” closer to their ultimate conversion to Christianity, and so brings all of humanity closer to Armageddon’s End of Time. (It should be said that Armageddon, an archaeological site that Israelis call Megiddo, is about an hour and 30-minute ride in a tourist van due north from Jerusalem, adjacent to the site of some of the country’s most notorious prisons.) The First Dispensation was that of innocence, which covered the age before Adam’s Fall; the Second was the dispensation of conscience, when humanity was tested and found wanting and punished with the Flood, from which only Noah’s family survived; the Third was the Dispensation of governance, which covered Noah’s rule through Abraham’s founding of monotheism; the Fourth and middle Dispensation was that of patriarchy, which culminated with the creation of “the Jews,” through Moses receiving the commandments at Mount Sinai; the Fifth was that of the Mosaic Law, which consolidated “the Jews” as a people; the Sixth—the one we’re all currently dragging through and paying taxes in—is that of the church, which began with Christ’s martyrdom and will end, in the Seventh Dispensation, with his return to earth to establish the Eternal Kingdom, whose capital will be Jerusalem. Don’t take my word for it; take Pastor Hagee’s, from a May 11 interview with Breitbart News in promotion of his embassy appearance:

“Christians believe that Jerusalem will be the capital city in the Eternal Kingdom, ruled by Jesus Christ.… Outside the city of Jerusalem, Jesus Christ was crucified, resurrected from the dead, and when he returns the second time, is going to put his foot on the Mount of Olives in the city of Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the future of the world.”

I want to be clear that whatever animus I have for these two unctuous philo-Semites is nothing compared to the contempt I have for the Jewish anti-Semites who invited them: The deeper hatred is always for one’s own. The evangelical presence in Jerusalem only confirmed what, over the course of the spring, I had been sensing as a conscious shift or pivot—a political realignment that I’m going to call “the Dispensation of the Jews,” by which I mean Israel’s dispensing with, or betraying, its own people. The ingathering of that people was the prime mission of the Zionist movement generations before the existence of modern Israel. The country was conceived as a refuge for the resettlement of persecuted Jews from throughout Christendom and the Ummah, and each wave of emigration to crash upon its shores brought with it with its own character. European aliyah peaked, obviously, with the Holocaust generation, after which Mizrahim, or Jews from Arab lands, began arriving, fleeing a perennial anti-Semitism exacerbated by Israeli Independence. Jews from Morocco, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and elsewhere—the victims of anti-Jewish legislation, property seizures, and pogroms—came throughout the 1950s and 1960s; Jews were expelled from Egypt in 1956; Iranian Jews came throughout the ’50s, and then in another onslaught during the Islamic Revolution in 1979; Ethiopian Jews, whose religion was banned by the Communist Derg government, arrived in the 1980s, and finally Soviet Jews arrived after the collapse of the USSR, which, in terms of Israel’s Jewish demography, might as well be considered the end of history: There are not that many exiles left to ingather, and fewer than ever after a recent influx of Jews escaping the ruin of the Venezuelan economy, and a trickle of Europeans who—spooked by a rise in Islamic and neo-Nazi anti-Semitism— haven’t surrendered their EU passports, but merely purchased second homes on the Mediterranean. It seems, then, that the last major Jewish Diaspora that remains for Israel’s absorption is America’s: a Diaspora far too entrenched and unendangered to trade L.A. for Haifa just yet.

There’s no need for me, or for anyone, to describe the out-size influence that American Jewry has had on American foreign policy: The Israeli government has already spent decades exaggerating that influence for me, and vain American Jewry has never challenged that assertion. It’s perhaps due to this hyperbole-campaign, not to mention America’s formal Soviet-containment and informal anti-Arab stances, that U.S. politicians found it expedient to enshrine American Jewry’s support of Israel (mostly individual and community philanthropy) as American policy (alliances, arms agreements, aid packages, and loans). During Israel’s War of Independence, official U.S. support was lackluster, but flash-forward 20 or so years to the Six-Day War, and especially the Yom Kippur War, and America was already becoming what it remains: Israel’s stalwart defender. To Jewish boomers, who were born into Zionism, Israel was a multiethnic/multiracial democracy that respected women’s rights; a self-made paradise that realized the socialist dreams that’d been deferred at home, and a righteous victim perpetually called upon to defend itself from Arab aggressors; whereas America was a capitalist behemoth that fought not for its existence, but in Vietnam, and persecuted the citizens whose ancestors it had once enslaved. Jewish millennials, by contrast, take their parents’ youthful critique of America for granted but treat Israel with ambivalence if not disdain. The BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement has found considerable support on U.S. campuses, where prevailing “discourse” dictates that a Jew cannot, for example, condemn American racial discrimination and also be a Zionist.

Netanyahu is mindful of this and has done some simple math—even simpler than the math that converts the calendars: There are about six million Jews in America, but, given the 56 percent intermarriage rate, that number is expected to shrink, in what ultra-Orthodox Knesset member Israel Eichler has called “a silent Holocaust”; millennials earn less money than boomers, and so also give less to charity, and those who brand Israel a rogue state and apartheid regime will give nothing. There are, however, approximately 83 million evangelical Christians in America, well more than half of whom claim to support Israel, and well more than three-quarters of whom claim to give money to charity. The evangelicals are obviously the stronger bloc—so why not bring them into the tent? Why not break bread with them and make them allies? Netanyahu’s maneuvering would make unimpeachable sense were he the prime minister of any other country. Instead, he’s the prime minister of a country whose people his new allies want to convert, and whose capital they want to repurpose into the throne and footstool of immortal Christendom. I can only wonder whether Netanyahu would’ve made the same bargain were the evangelical movement to come into possession of a multibranched military with a nuclear program.

To be sure, Netanyahu feels as betrayed by American Jewry as American Jewry feels betrayed by him, and it’s difficult to tell to what degree these feelings have been motivated by disgust and spite (Netanyahu hating American Jewish naivete, American Jews hating Netanyahu’s cronyism and violence), and to what degree they’ve been motivated by opportunism and self-interest (Netanyahu wanting the evangelical money and political cover, American Jews wanting to shore up their credentials on the identitarian left).

American Jews affiliated with the Reform and Conservative movements tend to experience their current rejection by Israel as merely the politicization, or nationalization, of an Orthodoxy-privileging process that originated with Israel’s rabbinates, in their refusal to recognize non-Orthodox Jews as Jews and their prohibition of women from full participation in Jewish ritual life. This, however, is a misperception, a classically liberal American failure to understand how Israel has elevated national loyalty into an acceptable substitute for religious observance. For evidence of this, American Jews—or the roughly 13 percent of whom who can read Hebrew—would do well to peruse the report released this spring by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs (which is headed by Naftali Bennett, who is also minister of education, head of the archconservative Jewish Home party, and the son of Israeli olim—immigrants—from San Francisco). This outstandingly cynical and hypocritical document—which is perhaps the defining document of Israel’s rejection of American Jewry—forgoes the political reckoning that would encourage aliyah from the United States, and instead purports to identify approximately 60 million people from around the world (many of them the white descendants of Inquisition-era forced converts in Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, and Latin America) who have what are characterized as “affinities” for Judaism and Israel, and who might profitably be brought to Israel and converted, so as to provide an ideologically reliable bulwark against the higher population numbers of Palestinians.

Zionism’s primal achievement was not the Israeli state, but rather the fact that it created, or re-created, a people out of an almost baffling array of humanity. It was only as a by-product of this miraculous act that “the Jewish people” could lay claim to their biblical antecedents, and so could lay claim to their biblical lands. This idea of peoplehood didn’t merely come from ancient texts—it came from the reading of ancient texts by the newly liberated Jews of Ashkenaz, or Jewish Europe. Ashkenazim dominated early Zionist discourse as they dominated early Israeli society: They comprised the governmental and economic and cultural elite, while at the opposite extreme of the caste system were Mizrahim, Jews from Arab lands who were tasked with putting Ashkenazi theories into practice through labor. Mizrahim rightfully came to resent this discrimination, along with their impoverishment and lack of political representation, and, as Israel’s survivalist wars gave way to ongoing conflict with Palestinians, they voiced their dissent through accusing their Ashkenazi leaders of weakness: Ashkenazim were liberal humanists unwilling, or unable, to protect them. Leaders of Shas, the main Mizrahi party now in a coalition with Likud, have given hard-line speeches about how Ashkenazim don’t understand Palestinians, having never lived among Arabs themselves. Mizrahim had—they had extensive experience with Arabs, and so knew how harshly they had to be dealt with. If Israel continued to engage Palestinians in the Ashkenazi way, it would be driven into the sea: Ashkenazi became a metonymy for compromise, concession, impotence. Mizrahi antipathy for Israel’s neighbors, informed by cruel acculturation to Arab rule, but fomented by resentment of Ashkenazi power, was transmuted into policy in proportion with the changing demographics of the country: It was only in this generation that Mizrahim were due to have supplanted Ashkenazim as the majority Jewish ethnicity in Israel. (Israel does not collect comprehensive statistics on this aspect of Jewish ethnicity.)

Some Mizrahim might be put off by my articulation of their attitudes, and some Ashkenazim might find my conclusions shameful or out of date. But then I don’t take my cues from Israeli sensitivities. Besides, I’m an American Jew, and so regardless of my level of Jewish education, or of Jewish observance, whatever I come up with can be discounted. Nevertheless: It is my opinion that Israeli mistrust of the Ashkenazi spirit is intensifying, due both to the increased influence of Mizrahim in Israeli life and to Ashkenazim’s own—fairly well-chronicled— inclinations toward self-hatred. I take this phenomenon of mistrust as indicative of a revisionist desire—namely, the desire to forget the fact that the construction of Israeli identity was an Ashkenazi ideal and so that the biblical lands promised by God were only obtained through the dreaming, or the will, of assimilated Jews from nation-state Europe. To press my argument even further into European territory, I will say that this desire to eradicate origins is an unconscious desire, a Freudian compulsion to rid the country of its Ashkenazi “father.” After all, how can “we,” Israelis, expect Ashkenazim to defend “us,” when so many of “them” so complacently went off to “their” slaughter in the Holocaust? How can “we” ever trust “them” with “our” survival? Israel is now trying to purge “itself” of this Ashkenazi “them”—this puny desexualized sect that delegitimates the country by reminding it of its paternity. To complete the purge, however, Israel must rid itself of its Ashkenazi legacy not just from within, but also from without, and wherever this legacy is found—and it just so happens that, today, the most prominent embodiment of this Ashkenazi “them” is American Jewry, whose population is roughly equivalent to that of Israeli Jewry but is of overwhelmingly European descent and still believes in peace and the rule of law. As long as this secular humanist spirit continues to exist in the world’s last major Jewish Diaspora, Israel must work against it. Only once it ceases to exist can Israel be definitively Israeli.

Perhaps the most contentious and unabating debate within “the Arab world” concerns “the Arab spring”—rather, it concerns whether most Arab countries even have four seasons, and not three (flooding, growing, and harvesting), or two (flood and drought). The only consensus might be that April and May are the months of the khamsin—not a Western wind of change, but an Eastern wind of heat and dust, which the Koran explains as a “scorching fire”; it’s no wonder that the phrase, “the Arab Spring,” was coined by American academics. That non-season lasted from 2010 to 2012, in the middle of which, hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets to protest a lack of affordable housing. It took about five minutes before the Israeli press called the protests a movement, and perhaps another five minutes before they dubbed it, with varying degrees of crassness, “the Israeli Spring.” This was the largest protest movement in Israeli history, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with Palestinians.

Seven springs later, Palestinians in Gaza prepared for the approach of the 70th anniversary of their statelessness by erecting a tent city near the border-fence. The usual protests succumbed to the unusual—to the desperate—call, for Gazans to storm the fence, and enter Israel, and reclaim the land that’d been seized from them by force. More than 100 were killed, and thousands were wounded, in what can only be described as an act of mass-martyrdom. Over the period of “secular difference” alone: April 20, four killed; April 27, four killed; April 29, three killed; May 5, six killed; May 6, three killed; May 11, one killed; then May 14, when 59 were killed and at least 2,700 wounded only 60 or so miles as the dove flies from where Jared, Ivanka, and the messianists from Texas were preaching in Jerusalem.

The official Israeli government spin was especially halfhearted: It began and ended with the insistence that Israel must defend its borders. If Gazans attempted to breach the border, with and even without the stated intent to do harm to citizens and/or property, Israel had no choice but to stop them. From there, the arguments turned to pointing out how all, or most, Palestinians killed had been members of Hamas (not true), before switching to non-sequitur claims about how few protests there’d been in the West Bank (Palestine), and assertions that this putatively muted response was because a significant faction of Palestinians in the West Bank (Palestine), and in Israel, supported the embassy move: Those who had families in the United States now had easier access to applying for a visa (not true).

A less parochial spin technique followed from this fragmentation of Palestinians into good Palestinians (West Bank/Palestine) and bad Palestinians (Gaza). It involved the partitioning of Palestinians, as a whole, from every other Arab nation and cause. Israeli government officials, and journalists, kept mentioning how friendly Israel had become with its neighbors since the advent of the Islamic State and its spread to Syria and the Sinai. Israel was buddies with the House of Saud! Israel had never been cozier with Jordan and Egypt! Everyone gets together and shares intelligence! We even have mutual flyover rights—sometimes!

The implication in all this was that even Israel’s former adversaries were in agreement: Palestinians were the exception. They were the holdouts, recalcitrant and irremediable. If they wanted to be left rotting atop history’s dung heap, so be it.

Underlying this propaganda was the sense that Israel was exasperated: It was inevitable that Gazans would charge the fence, and inevitable that Israel would shoot them. It was inevitable that videos and photos of the carnage would go online, and inevitable that the world would be outraged. But only Gazans are trapped in this life of no-choice, alternately neglected and manipulated by fellow Arabs, and prey to the death-drives provoked by total deprivation. Israel, however, had a season’s warning to prepare for all this, and to develop a plan to avoid or mitigate its traumas. Instead, it decided not to. Worse, it decided that it did not have to. Trump and his evangelicals would raise no cry, and it was their America, not Jewish America, that counted. This spring brought with it new definitions of “dispensation”: “exemption,” “immunity,” “impunity”—inaugurating a sort of shameless Sabbatical or Jubilee Year, as free of hope as it is of moral action.

My relationship with Israel started before I can remember. Growing up Orthodox, I started learning to read Hebrew at roughly the same time I started learning to read English, although my Hebrew had a decidedly Biblical vocabulary. Gamal (camel), ohel (tent), and elohim (God) are among the first words I learned to read in that curvaceous, inky print. Zionism was inextricable from the Jewish studies curriculum that took up half my school day. We learned the story of God promising Abraham a land and we prayed facing Jerusalem, for the preservation of Israel against its enemies.

Every year, I tramped up Fifth Avenue with my schoolmates in the Salute to Israel parade, carrying homespun, glitter-adorned banners. My awareness of the Holocaust—the great cataclysm that had bit branches off so many of our family trees—was from my earliest school days wrapped in the story of the establishment of the Jewish state. My school hewed to the Israeli calendar, which ties the agony of genocide to the ecstasy of self-rule by placing Holocaust Memorial Day and Israeli Independence Day in close proximity. Solemn slide shows of emaciated bodies, and then, days later, joyous, gender-segregated hora dancing in the gym, punctuated every spring. In August we mourned the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. I went to a summer camp so ardently Zionist we lined up each Friday and stood at ease or attention when camp officials barked IDF commands in Hebrew. One year, counselors created a mini-golf course decorated with papier-mâché Israeli landmarks.

Israel wasn’t just a story in Genesis or a lovingly evoked and distant land; my family visited frequently, nearly every year, most often for Passover. Our visits didn’t resemble the sterile, highly coordinated theater of Birthright trips, but they were gentle on us children. I remember the bright colors of the souk in Jerusalem, running my hands over hot limestone, scribbling notes in childish script to insert in the mossy cracks of the Wailing Wall. I moved through the end of high school in this cocoon, a Zionist and politically conservative milieu so comprehensive and homogenous it lulled me into complacency. I grew up thinking The New York Times was, for reasons I couldn’t understand, far too rough on Israel.

It’s only in retrospect that I see the glimmers of violence that managed to pierce even the thick carapace of this idealized Zion. At the Salute to Israel parade, one year, a wild-eyed man with our group shouted: “Shechem—is Israel! Hebron—is Israel! Ramallah—is Israel!” We echoed his chants. I don’t recall how old I was, who he was, but I remember my shiver of discomfort: Even then, I knew Ramallah was where Palestinians lived. In school “the conflict” was occasionally referenced; once, we watched a propaganda film commemorating the death of an Israeli infant, ten-month-old Shalhevet Pass, whose family had been part of a militant settler enclave in Hebron. Accompanied by a swelling orchestral score, the film condemned Palestinian terrorism. One year my family had an unusually luxurious suite in Jerusalem for Passover: Even the grand foreigner-friendly hotels were mostly empty, at the height of the intifada in 2003.

But generally what I knew were ripe pomegranates and chopped salad, shawarma wrapped in warm lafa, a whole country that—just like me— ritualistically avoided bread for eight days in spring.

Then I moved there.

Like many Orthodox teenagers, I went to Israel for a year between high school and college; we were sent to the Holy Land in droves, with the hopes of shoring up our religious educations against the coming erosive forces of secular colleges. I went to a small, primarily Israeli seminary in the dry and searing Beit Shean Valley, two hours north of Jerusalem; it occupied a few modest dormitories and trailers on a religious kibbutz. I was meant to learn Torah for twelve hours a day, with brief breaks to eat. In practice, I found my zeal for religious study rapidly exhausted, and spent considerable time in bed.

But living in Israel afforded me more than the quick glimpses I could gain on family vacations. I rode Egged buses with Uzi-toting soldiers, and hitchhiked through checkpoints on my own. The Palestinian cars were checked thoroughly; the young soldiers waved through the Jews I rode with without a second glance. The boys I met at the kibbutz’s watering hole were studying Torah as a brief reprieve before donning the same uniform.

The most important experience I had was participating in a program called Encounter, which seeks to connect young Jews and future clergy with Palestinian citizens and activists. It took me up close to the border barrier between Israel and the West Bank—and across it. I saw the graffiti—calls for peace in a Babel of languages—and met Palestinian activists who were willing to lecture a group of sheepish, nerdy Jews; I saw a humble backyard bisected by the cruel gray expanse of the wall. Most significantly, I stayed overnight with a Palestinian family. Somehow, we wound up watching Seinfeld—my host liked George Costanza best—and laughing together. In the morning I had spiced labne and jam with their toddler Hassan. And when the bus took us back over, I saw a seemingly endless line of Palestinian workers, travel documents in hand, ready to pass through a checkpoint bristling with guns.

There are very few moments in life when a whole mesh of illusions is stripped from you at once. I remember this one very clearly. I realized all of a sudden that the word “Palestinian” had been wrapped very deliberately in layers of hatred all my life. I remembered the racial slurs I’d heard uttered about Arabs in high school, all before I met a single one. I realized I had been taught to view all Palestinians as violent—that it was a shock to find them human, to sit beside them on a couch, to watch TV, break bread and play with their child. I had been taught to see all Palestinians as willing to murder me, to murder a baby, with no provocation, an inferior race of fire-eyed zealots. I had been taught that what was theirs was mine by right. I had not been taught about the violence of the occupation, and that omission was as deliberate as anything else. I had been taught a sequence of beautiful myths, the swelling myths of nationalism, but they were lies—lies of omission, pretty stories with venom at the heart.

It felt like being stabbed, to know the people who taught me had deceived me so thoroughly, and had kept me ignorant, on purpose, of so much history.

I wish I could say that since then I have evolved significantly, or joined some of my Jewish brethren on the knife’s edge of pro-Palestinian activism. I wish I could tell you I am no longer complacent, that I’ve left all nationalist sentiment behind.

But it’s not that simple. For one thing, my twin sister, who joined me in that dusty seminary, moved to Israel six years ago. She lives there with her baby and husband and in-laws; my other sister’s husband is Israeli, too, and his parents live just around the corner from my twin. I still remember the taste of pomegranates, schawarma, lafa from the souk on Ben Yehuda Street. I still speak Hebrew, even if I don’t pray in it any longer. In America, to be a Jew is always to be an “other”; in Israel, it’s thrillingly unremarkable. I’m still steeped in the culture that taught me Palestinian history wasn’t worth learning; I love my family, and the rosy stones of Jerusalem, and I remember the clear pool on the kibbutz where the figs hung low on the water.

All I can tell you is that I live uneasily now where Israel is concerned. That I watch Bibi Netanyahu speak in his smooth baritone and I hear the same hate I was raised with; it doesn’t surprise me that he has found kinship with Orban, and with Trump, whose supremacy is based on historical elision and present brutality. I feel compelled to speak out when Israeli strikes murder Gazan civilians. I try to see clearly when just criticism of Israel and Zionism veers into something murkier and more sinister, the ugly rhetoric of anti-Semitism. I wince when the white supremacists I study for a living bring up the Israeli “ethnostate” as proof that their own desires are healthy. And in the face of the new nation-state law in Israel—which limits the “right to national-self determination” in Israel to “the Jewish people,” encourages “Jewish settlement,” and demotes the status of Arabic from an official language—I struggle to refute this argument completely.

Life in this seam of unease isn’t simple; I avoid discussion of “the conflict” with my family too often, and with my leftist friends I omit discussions of my Zionist past and my present ambiguities as often as possible. But I have found it is better to live in the pain of not-knowing than to live in a certainty held together by zealous self-righteousness. It is better to live gasping, in my own fretful inadequacy, than sealed off forever in an airless myth.