In their new book, The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election (Simon & Schuster), Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibovitz argue that the idea of chosenness—"a claim to heaven-sent entitlement"—is the cornerstone of Jewish, Israeli, and American identities.
America and Israel, Gitlin and Leibovitz write, experience chosenness as "inspiration, consolation, and reward all at once, and each has been guided, saddled, and haunted by it—even as many citizens of these nations have disputed their claim to chosenness." Gitlin is a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University (and a contributor to The Chronicle Review). Leibovitz was a Ph.D. student at Columbia and is now an now an editor at Tablet, an online magazine of Jewish life. "Since Liel is an Israeli emigrant and Todd a worried American Jew, and we share a lot of interests, we started talking," they told me. I reached both authors by e-mail to ask about the book.
Q: Why chosenness?
A: The wild idea that the master of the universe played favorites by designating the descendents of Sarah and Abraham as His chosen people is the foundation of Jewish identity as well as the American project. Like it or not, however weird, inspiring, dangerous, mysterious, obnoxious, or historically dubious, it's at the root of their entire histories—and so problematically that the mysteries themselves have been productive of the most vigorous debates in both Jewish and American histories.
Q: Your initial intention, you write, was to "put out the fires of chosenness." This book reaffirms its centrality. What happened?
A: We started out impressed, most of all, by the dangers, which have been amply demonstrated in history. But we couldn't convince ourselves that the last few millennia could be retracted. There's no "Restart" button in history, and least of all can foundations be rebuilt while the building is standing. Moreover, through extended reading and conversation, we found a richness in the traditions that offers some promise of a collective wising up, as well as exhortations to compassion, peace and justice. We choose, as it were, to go with the promises of divine election rather than its threats.
Q: Isn't a belief in divine election an unambiguously dangerous idea? As you show, chosenness has been interpreted as license to commit great violence in the name of God, fueling holy wars. Can chosenness really be redefined as a positive idea?
A: We do our best. In Israel, particularly, the political quagmire strikes us as resting on the absence of a position. There are religious zealots who identify with the West Bank as part of Eternal Israel, and the secular left that wants Israel to be a normal nation. The religious position that would see the Jewish state as called to a higher purpose than either land acquisition or messianic settlement is sorely missing and deeply necessary.
Q: Among American political figures, who has most successfully enlisted the idea of chosenness to serve his or her own ends?
A: Lincoln, without doubt, though he did so with his wonderful, characteristic delicacy—"this almost chosen people." We riff on what we think he meant, namely that America had a perpetual obligation to prove itself worthy of its exceptional status.
Q: John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have argued that America's close ties with Israel are the result of a powerful lobby that leans on Congress and dominates public discourse about the Middle East. Your book argues that the relationship stems from a shared sense of chosenness. Make your case.
A: No lobby—not even the Elders of Zion if they existed to stalk the halls of Congress—could have engendered the enormous affection for Israel that lives in the United States, throughout all the political conflicts—nor, of course, the affinity that many Israelis, again despite policy differences, feel for America. There weren't enough Jews in all of the United States to have spurred Harry Truman to be the first world leader to recognize Israel in 1948. There still aren't enough. If global strategy were at the root of the alliance, isn't it deeply counter-strategic, in fact, for the US to have affiliated so closely with Israel—at the cost of the enmity of the petroleum-soaked Arab nations? So explaining the sense of affinity at the American end requires a more profound—we think cultural and religious—level of explanation.—Evan R. Goldstein
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