I must have signed up without remembering for a subscription to the Jewish quarterly journal Sapir, which comes in a spiffy thick version on quality paper and nice formatting. (You can sign up too for free, or access it online.) Sapir is edited by NYT op-ed writer Bret Stephens, who has an article on “A Lesson in Resilience for America” in the latest issue, whose them is “Fixing America”. Click the screenshot below to access all the articles
In Hebrew, by the way, “Sapir” means “sapphire,” but can refer to anything precious and shiny.
Here’s the table of contents for this issue:
I’ve read three of the articles so far, the ones by Stephens, Caroline Bryk, and Yasha Mounk. Unlike the other themed journals I get for free (like Dadalus, which I recycle as soon as it arrives), it looks as if this quarterly is worth getting. It’s a pleasure to hold in your hands given the quality of production, and at least some of the articles are good. I’ll excerpt a bit from Stephens’s piece after I expatiate a bit (click below to read):
Stephens’s point is that Americans, by and large, want an end to the war with Iran, while Israelis don’t. He sees Israelis as being more rational in this belief, even though America isn’t as threatened by Iran as is Israel. But we are threatened, of course, for Iran spreads terror throughout the world, and some of that not only endangers America, but works to turn some misguided “progressives” towards the side of the IRGC and Hamas. The Democratic Party is becoming infused with antisemitism.
This difference, argues Stephens, is that America has lost its resilience to fight for what is right: we’ve grown soft, unwilling to take on long-term projects that require individual sacrifice, and self-interested as a nation, even if our American principles of freedom are under attack in our democratic allies. He prescribes American “unlearning”—unlearning of the mantra that our country was born mired sin and bigotry and unlearning of our self-interest and the notion that “our ideals count for nothing against our material needs or commercial advantages.” We should also relearn rhe real founding principles of America: equality, freedom, universalism, and the rule of law. That does not, he asserts, mean forgetting the bad parts of America’s past, but remembering the ideals on which America is founded. To Stephens, Israel serves as an exemplar of resilience as it still walks the walk, embracing the ideals on which a nation is founded. (This does not of course mean that Israel is perfect!)
This may seem like a lecture from your grandfather, but we’re supposed to be celebrating the 250th anniversary of America’s founding. Stephens’s words remind me of a bit of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
. . . . The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Here are a few quotes from Stephens’s article:
Maybe it’s to be expected that Israelis, for whom the threat from Iran and its proxies is immediate and existential, should be willing to sacrifice so much for the sake of prospective security. Maybe it’s to be expected, too, that Americans see the threat from Iran as distant and notional, even among those who know that Tehran is responsible for the death of hundreds of U.S. citizens. That sense of distance is surely compounded by the bitter memory of two Mideast wars that cost thousands of American lives without delivering on their promises.
But there’s something deeper at work. Israelis — by necessity, circumstance, and self-selection — largely tend to be tenacious, self-disciplined, resilient people. Americans — through good fortune and a penchant for ease and convenience — tend not to be. That is a long-term threat to America’s safety and well-being. We could stand to take a lesson or two on it from our Israeli friends.
He notes the changes in America since WWII:
Scores of books have been written about how that culture fell by the wayside. Reserve gave way to self-revelation. The old virtue of delaying gratification was replaced by the habit of demanding and getting it — immediately. Material plenty led to an expectation of physical comfort, which later morphed into a demand for emotional cossetting. The word parent went from noun to verb, from a role to an activity, infantilizing adults while coddling children. Safety became a legal requirement; risk-taking, a legal liability; “safetyism,” a state of mind. The status of victim was valorized, and often monetized, at the expense of moral responsibility and personal agency. Ideas such as “microaggressions” and “unconscious bias” took hold; instead of trying to make our skins a little thicker, we discovered new ways to take offense. When things went poorly, we no longer asked, self-reproachingly, “Where did we go wrong?” Instead, we looked, conspiratorially, for a culprit: “Who did this to us?” And while fierce individualism has always been a part of America’s character and creed, we now have a kind of cancerous and metastatic individualism that cannot recognize occasions in national life that call for collective sacrifice.
. . .Now turn to Israel.
Israeli resilience is proverbial — so much so that the idea of it is sometimes resented. “No country should be expected to live indefinitely in a state of managed danger,” writes Joshua Hoffman in his excellent Substack newsletter, Future of Jewish. “When that reality is reframed as ‘resilience,’ something deeply dangerous happens: The abnormal begins to be framed or at least is expected to be normal.”
Hoffman is right that what Israelis must endure just to live should not be normalized to the point of being forgotten. But resilience is a virtue, however one comes by it. And it’s a mistake to ascribe Israeli resilience solely to the forms of adversity that it faces. It also comes from the purposes for which the state was created in the first place.
You can read for yourself about the founding principles of Israel (which were not, by the way, to drive out the Arabs). Stephens ends this way:
Finally, we could stand to learn something from Israel.
That isn’t much in evidence today. On the contrary, polling data show that more Americans are souring on the Jewish state. It would be easy to read that as a bad omen for Israelis, and perhaps it is. But it would be much wiser to see it as a warning sign about us — about our diminished capacity for critical thinking and moral reasoning. How have we in the United States managed to confuse perpetrator and victim in this war? When did we lose the capacity to use the word terrorist? Why have we so easily fallen for the baldest and most blatantly dishonest Palestinian propaganda? Why are we so beguiled by conspiracy theories plainly rooted in antisemitism? And since when do we malign an immensely capable and brave ally that fights by our side?
Most important, how do we fail to see in Israel a model of what a democratic people, which for 78 years has been battling for survival while still managing to thrive, can be capable of achieving through self-belief and the ability to recover its strength after taking blow after blow? Americans cannot hope to regain our old resilience unless we know what resilient looks like. The sooner we learn from the Israelis, the faster we might save ourselves from what, increasingly, we risk becoming.
Without doubt I’ll be called a Zionist—or even a promoter of genocide—for singling out Sapir and this article. Too bad. In my view, America is being weakened not only by the autocracy and mendacity of Trump, but by the “safteyism”, victimhood mentality, antisemitism, and sacralization of theocracy from the Left (see the new Free Press article, “How the Left abandoned the Jews“) . No wonder many of us, including but not limited to Jews, feel that we have no political home.
Thank you for sharing this note about Bret Stephens. Once again, he has offered a clear and succinct analysis, as well as a worthy call to action.
I signed up several weeks ago—on purpose—and received the first journal the other day. It’s quite good. Yes. It has a nice smooth cover and is nice to hold. Some articles are better than others, some have more depth than others. But I read the whole thing and it’s worth reading. Definitely read Jonathan Sarna’s article. Sarna’s book, American Judaism: A History, is considered to be the best currently available.
I downloaded the entire archive and will work my way through the many issues.
BTW: If you can read the Hebrew text inside the back cover, you can figure out that Sapir means Sapphire in Hebrew. That’s how I did it, as I couldn’t figure out what it meant any other way.
I subscribe to Sapir and agree it is worthwhile, and I will also add it is amazing that it is free.
Sapir indeeds mean sapphire, but I suggest that it is the root that is important here, SPR, which is the root for all things having to do with counting (lispor is “to count”) as well as for words such as “book” (sepher). One could easily expand.
Forgive me for restating what might be obvious, but the current pop-Left package —victimhood mentality, cliches from postmodernism and Fanon/Marcuse/Said—descends from the reaction to the US intervention in Vietnam. That notorious mistake, with its reliance on draftees and ~58,000 fatal casualties—set the stage for the current set of attitudes. The pity is that, according to reliable testimony, Pres. John Kennedy planned to ease the US out of Vietnam after the 1964 election.
Yes, for sure Vietnam Jon, but I have some other theories about how this mess germinated.
(my own article, syndicated, unpaywalled here)
https://democracychronicles.org/why-is-the-media-and-mob-so-anti-israel/
D.A.
NYC
I didn’t know there was a print version of Sapir, I’ll probably sign up – it’d be my only paper subscription though I used to get The Economist and Foreign Affairs.
I think Sapir is pretty much Bret’s show, there’s a lot of youtube interviews he does for it which I routinely watch.
D.A.
NYC 🗽
The ultimate test of a civilization is not whether its values are true, its systems just, its economy affluent, or its creations beautiful. It succeeds or fails to the degree it reproduces itself. This doesn’t mean stasis any more than it means that the son is the same as the father, but it does mean that a culture must build, preserve, procreate, adapt, and defend—not simply critique, consume, tear down, and placate. The Jewish people have done this. Islamic cultures have done this, even if in ways not to our liking. Christian cultures did, too, for nearly two millennia. India, China, Rome, Persia, and many others have had long lives.
It is far from clear that liberalism as it has evolved in the contemporary West has the staying power of any of these. Indeed, its greatest challenges might come from within.
Thanks for the heads up on the journal. I wasn’t aware one could get hard copies for free.
This comment reminded me of the chapter in Suetonius where Augustus gave a speech in the Forum to the young men of Rome, admonishing them to get off their lazy affluent pleasure-seeking butts and marry and raise the next generations of Romans as their fathers and grandfathers did – otherwise Roman civilization would not endure. Ironically, it was Augustus’s own reforms that generated the affluence that led to laziness on the part of the younger generation.
A couple of centuries later, another emperor opened the borders to all – eventually leading to the downfall of the Western Empire.
The US was once the quintessential “can do” country. Examples abound. The Transcontinental railway, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State Building, Hoover Dam, etc. Now the US is a “can not do” country. For example, China has 31K+ miles of HSR. The US has zero. My favorite statement about this is “China is good at building dams, the US is good at enforcing PC, which system will prevail in the 21st century”.
It’s not just the US. All western countries are afflicted with this “can’t do”-virus to some extent. Some western european countries are even worse than the US, having reached the state “can’t do at all, don’t even try”.
(This post was sent from the Federal Wokepublic of DEI-istan)
For some reason, that I do not understand, English-speaking countries are the worst afflicted (at least with respect to construction). See “The Most Expensive Mile of Subway Track on Earth” (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html). One theory is that English-speaking countries have a common-law tradition that drives up costs in a spectacular way. For example, the Governor of NY, Cathy Hochul (no criticism of her implied) killed the AirTrain project because of exploding costs.
The Mario M. Cuomo (nee Tappan Zee) bridge is a good/bad example of US problems. The original bridge was build around 1950 at a cost of $81 million ($1.08 billion in 2024 dollars). The replacement bridge was around $5 billion. Even allowing for inflation, that’s a huge cost increase.
Then you haven’t been to Germany in recent years. Here, you can stall or block almost any project by legal means. If it’s not some local NIMBY then it’s usually one of the numerous environmentalist orgs like Greenpeace, DUH, NABU, BUND, etc. that will take you to court or will find a reason why you can’t continue with you project as planned.
Then there’s the almost byzantine bureaucracy (that only has gotten worse within the last two decades) which is like sand or rather gravel in the gearbox and can turn anything into a Sisyphean endeavor.
So, all this taken together will explode the time and especially the costs for your projects. The Berlin airport and the new train station Stuttgart 21 (which will probably become Stuttgart 31) are just the more prominent examples.
And of course, whatever harebrained idea is cooked up in some “progressive” American universities, the German left will gleefully pick it up and crank it up to eleven.
Many time when I’m out and about, looking at the number of zombified people staring at their phones looking at nonsense, dressed extremely casually (as in pajamas), and significantly overweight, I wonder what we are still capable of as a society.
It’s especially problematic seeing young people like this…when you are 19 you should be lean and mean, with a restlessness in your eyes and a bit of spark about you. So many young people look and act like Eloi.
What defines Zionism? Is it simply the belief that Jews are not only a religious identity but also a national identity? Which presupposes the relatively modern notion of nationalisms and nation states? If restricted to that, it is not inherent in Zionism that Palestinian nationalism must be supplanted. But if in reality Zionism requires a Jewish majority nation state in Palestine, then ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians becomes a necessity. It cannot be avoided. The two nationalisms are at odds with each other. I accept Israel’s right to exist, but I also accept Palestine’s right to exist. Do you say the same? Does Netanyahu?
“A Jewish majority state in Palestine”? Do you think Israel is on Palestinian territory? I reject that premise so I won’t deal with the rest of your questions. Right now a “two state solution” is not viable so it’s not time for a Palestinian state. And remember that the Palestinians have rejected the possibility of having their own state about five or six time.
You needn’t reply to this; I am not up for a discussion based on false premises.
“This difference, argues Stephens, is that America has lost its resilience to fight for what is right: we’ve grown soft, unwilling to take on long-term projects that require individual sacrifice, and self-interested as a nation, even if our American principles of freedom are under attack in our democratic allies.”
I think that as individuals, we have become more pragmatic. Over my career, I’ve switched jobs and even industries, which was considered very strange by my silent generation father (he worked at the same place for the entirety of his career, and retired with a nice pension). But as I explained to him, and as he now understands, I am an “at will” employee whose job is by no means guaranteed, even by good performance. I have seen great employees fired, I have been through mergers and reorganizations that come out of nowhere, and I’ve seen people end up in dire financial situations. If I need to switch jobs to get out of the way of the falling boulder, I’ll do it.
My retirement is almost entirely self-funded, and heavily dependent on the market. I have no health insurance unless I am employed. Even in my 50s, I now am furiously working to upskill in AI, as failure to do this will render me unemployable. In fact, we’ve already started a Plan B if we are unable to work as long as we planned.
So, given this level of instability, as a private citizen I am primarily concerned with my survival and that of my family. This is usually all I think about. Concepts like “duty” and “honor” to serve a national interest seem naïve, and I have no time or inclination to sacrifice for the “greater good” and support grand, abstract national projects.