Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibovitz: Chosen
[Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibovitz are the authors of The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election. They’ll be speaking at the 92nd St Y on Monday, September 27, with Tablet’s editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse and contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg.]
Two years ago, when we set out to write a book about Israel, America, and the ways in which the nations saw themselves as having been singled out by God to shine their light on a benighted world, we had little doubt about what kind of book we wanted to write.
Following the great thinkers of the Enlightenment—Kant, Voltaire, Bob Dylan—we thought that the notion of God being on any one particular nation’s side was wild or, worse, dangerous, the sort of Manichean delusion that could only drive people to hatred and violence. As longtime advocates of progressive causes—Todd as president of Students for a Democratic Society in the early 1960s, Liel as an activist in Israel’s peace camp in the 1990s—we preferred the porous and inclusive conceits of universal humanism.
And then we sat down to study....
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Two years ago, when we set out to write a book about Israel, America, and the ways in which the nations saw themselves as having been singled out by God to shine their light on a benighted world, we had little doubt about what kind of book we wanted to write.
Following the great thinkers of the Enlightenment—Kant, Voltaire, Bob Dylan—we thought that the notion of God being on any one particular nation’s side was wild or, worse, dangerous, the sort of Manichean delusion that could only drive people to hatred and violence. As longtime advocates of progressive causes—Todd as president of Students for a Democratic Society in the early 1960s, Liel as an activist in Israel’s peace camp in the 1990s—we preferred the porous and inclusive conceits of universal humanism.
And then we sat down to study....