Americans and Israelis have often thought that their nations were chosen, in perpetuity, to do God’s work. This belief in divine election is a potent, living force, one that has guided and shaped both peoples and nations throughout their history and continues to do so to this day. Through great adversity and despite serious challenges, Americans and Jews, leaders and followers, have repeatedly faced the world fortified by a sense that their nation has a providential destiny.
As Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibovitz argue in this original and provocative book, what unites the two allies in a “special friendship” is less common strategic interests than this deep-seated and lasting theological belief that they were chosen by God.
The United States and Israel each has understood itself as a nation placed on earth to deliver a singular message of enlightenment to a benighted world. Each has stumbled through history wrestling with this strange concept of chosenness, trying both to grasp the meaning of divine election and to bear the burden it placed them under. It was this idea that provided an indispensable justification when the Americans made a revolution against Britain, went to war with and expelled the Indians, expanded westward, built an overseas empire, and most recently waged war in Iraq. The equivalent idea gave rise to the Jewish people in the first place, sustained them in exodus and exile, and later animated the Zionist movement, inspiring the Israelis to vanquish their enemies and conquer the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Everywhere you look in American and Israeli history, the idea of chosenness is there.
The Chosen Peoples delivers a bold new take on both nations’ histories. It shows how deeply the idea of chosenness has affected not only their enthusiasts but also their antagonists. It digs deeply beneath the superficialities of headlines, the details of negotiations, the excuses and justifications that keep cropping up for both nations’ successes and failures. It shows how deeply ingrained is the idea of a chosen people in both nations’ histories—and yet how complicated that idea really is. And it offers interpretations of chosenness that both nations dearly need in confronting their present-day quandaries.
Weaving together history, theology, and politics, The Chosen Peoples vividly retells the dramatic story of two nations bound together by a wild and sacred idea, takes unorthodox perspectives on some of our time’s most searing conflicts, and offers an unexpected conclusion: only by taking the idea of chosenness seriously, wrestling with its meaning, and assuming its responsibilities can both nations thrive.
Gitlin is professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University; Leibovitz is an editor of Tablet, an online magazine dealing with Jewish political and cultural issues. They have tackled a controversial and emotional issue––the tight and supposedly “unbreakable” ties between the United States and Israel. This is a relationship that has recently been questioned and criticized in certain academic and political circles, so this is a timely, worthwhile examination. The authors assert that the nations are tied less by their common strategic interests and more by a shared sense of being “chosen” peoples. For Jews, the idea of being a divinely selected people has biblical roots. The authors acknowledge that the founders of modern Israel were staunch secularists; yet, they marshal evidence that suggests that the sense of a special destiny continues to exercise a hold on Israelis. The American Puritan heritage is permeated with a sense of divine mission, beginning with John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” declaration. Gitlin and Leibovitz make some interesting connections as well as some huge, questionable leaps, but this work will provide useful fodder for debate on a hot topic. --Jay Freeman
Review
Advance Praise for
The Chosen Peoples
“This is one of the finest books I have ever read about the ideas which drive modern nations. Eloquent and erudite, Gitlin and Leibovitz reveal the promise and the pitfalls of a mass temptation neither Americans nor Israelis have been able to resist. The Chosen Peoples is a necessary work for our perilous era.”
--Michael Kazin, author of A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan
“Americans’ deep sense of connection to Old Testament prophecy and providence dates back to the Puritans. In their provocative new book, Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibovitz explore that connection anew for modern times—and offer food for thought and rich argument about the historical as well as political experiences of both Israel and the United States.”
--Sean Wilentz, author of The Rise of American Democracy
“A perceptive comparison between Israel and the United States as Chosen Peoples of God. The authors synthesize history, Bible study, and current events with their own deeply moral analysis. They explore the analogy between the Israeli settlers on Palestinian lands and the white American settlers on Native American lands in ways profoundly enlightening.”
--Daniel Walker Howe, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848
“The Chosen Peoples invites readers to take with great seriousness and respect the idea that both Israel and the United States bear the burden of imagining themselves as chosen by God. In an extraordinarily sensitive exploration of the concept of being chosen, Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibovitz bring a fresh perspective to the history of Israel and America and to the complex linkages between them.”
--Joyce Appleby, professor emerita of history, UCLA, author of The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism
“Few alliances on the world stage are as complex and important as the Israeli-United States special relationship. Yet how best to understand it? In a book that is as refreshing as it is provocative, and timely too, The Chosen Peoples explores the fascinating consequences of both nations seeing themselves as chosen by God. Bravo to Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibovitz for their important contribution.”
--Jay Winik, author of April 1865 and The Great Upheaval
“The Chosen Peoples is a probing account of two powerful myths that have brought us to the brink of disaster, but that may still provide a fresh way forward. The authors’ case for more humane ideas of national destiny is lucid, compelling, and deeply necessary. No one who cares about the future of America--or Israel--can afford to ignore this timely and important book.”
--Jackson Lears, Rutgers University, author of Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920
“Intriguing. . . . Brisk and entertaining. . . . A valuable addition to the public discussion of religion and politics (or religion in politics).”
--Gordon Haber, Forward
“A thought-provoking book that deserves much attention and debate. . . . In addition to the catholicity of its approach and its truly bold—actually totally chutzpah—scope, I was most attracted to it because it gives a fine framework wherein to situate anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism.”
--Andrei S. Markovits, Huffingtonpost.com
“Gitlin and Leibovitz shed light on the strong messianic impulses in the history of both ‘chosen’ nations.”
--Chuck Leddy, The Christian Science Monitor
“An ambitious religio-political meditation on American and Israeli history. . . . The theme of chosenness yields an insightful reading of the Israeli national project, which is explicitly linked to ancient religious imperatives.”
--Publishers Weekly
Product Details
Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster; First Edition edition (September 14, 2010)
I've published fifteen books, including, most recently, Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street; The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election (with Liel Leibovitz); The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recovery of American Ideals; other titles include The Intellectuals and the Flag; Letters to a Young Activist; Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives; The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars; The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage; Inside Prime Time; The Whole World Is Watching; Uptown: Poor Whites in Chicago (co-author); three novels, Undying, Sacrifice and The Murder of Albert Einstein; and a book of poetry, Busy Being Born. These books have been translated into Japanese, Korean, Chinese, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. I also edited Watching Television and Campfires of the Resistance.
I've contributed to many books and published widely in general periodicals (The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, Boston Globe, Dissent, The New Republic, The Nation, Wilson Quarterly, Harper's, American Journalism Review, Columbia Journalism Review, New York Observer, The American Prospect, et al.), online magazines (salon.com, tnr.com, prospect.org, openDemocracy.net, foreignpolicy.com), as well as scholarly journals. I'm on the editorial board of Dissent.
In 2000, Sacrifice won the Harold U. Ribalow Prize for books on Jewish themes. The Sixties and The Twilight of Common Dreams were Notable Books in the New York Times Book Review. Inside Prime Time received the nonfiction award of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association; The Sixties was a finalist for that award and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.
I hold degrees from Harvard University (B. A., mathematics), the University of Michigan (M. S., political science), and the University of California, Berkeley (Ph. D., sociology). I was the third president of Students for a Democratic Society, in 1963-64, and coordinator of the SDS Peace Research and Education Project in 1964-65, during which time he helped organize the first national demonstration against the Vietnam War and the first American demonstrations against corporate aid to the apartheid regime in South Africa. During 1968-69, I was an editor and writer for the San Francisco Express Times, and through 1970 wrote widely for the underground press. In 2003-06, I was a member of the Board of Directors of Greenpeace USA.
I'm a professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the Ph. D. program in Communications at Columbia University. Earlier, I was for sixteen years a professor of sociology and director of the mass communications program at the University of California, Berkeley, and then for seven years a professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University. During 1994-95, I held the chair in American Civilization at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. I've been a resident at the Bellagio Study Center in Italy and the Djerassi Foundation in Woodside, California, a Bosch Fellow at the American Academy of Berlin, a fellow at the Media Studies Center in New York, and a visiting professor at Yale University, the University of Oslo, the University of Toronto, East China Normal University in Shanghai, the Institut Supérieur des Langues de Tunis in Tunisia, and the Université de Neuchatel in Switzerland.
I lecture frequently on culture and politics in the United States and abroad (Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Russia, Greece, Turkey, India, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Canada, Mexico, Morocco, Switzerland). I've appeared on many National Public Radio programs including Fresh Air as well as PBS, ABC, CBS and CNN. I lives in New York City with my wife, Laurel Cook.
In my humble opinion, this book is a failure if the goal was to shed any light on the question of divine calling of Israel and the United States. The author is intelligent, but nevertheless misses the point of the subject entirely. This book is a mere accumulation of historical research, political discussion and intellectual thought. The author set out to investigate about a divine idea that was initially reported thousands of years ago. This idea refers to a purely divine question. No divine question can be grasped and ever understood by a merely intellectual approach. This divine question can only be observed by a spiritual approach to even arrive at the slightest glimpse of a revelation. The intellectual approach becomes a boasting of knowledge and intellect and accomplishes nothing in truly reflecting on this divine idea. As much as the different and deep investigations into political facts and history may excite the minds of the readers, after reading the book the readers remain just as much in the dark about that divine idea and what it means as prior to reading the book. Even though the term awakening is used frequently, it is not referred to as a spiritual awakening in its most pure essence, instead it is just being used to illustrate the author's intellectual understanding of historic and political events.
