Was it hard to return to Orthodox Judaism after all those years in which you called yourself a “freethinker”?

Well, don’t forget I was educated Jewishly, thank God, and I’ve never had trouble admitting I was wrong. Thank God for that, too, and that may be because I made so many mistakes. Thank God for all of them.

Was it a mistake going underground against the czar?

No, I don’t think so, though it was a mistake going against Judaism—or at least abandoning it for freethinking. It would have been better to have fought the czar and defended Judaism.

Who made you realize that?

Levinsky. David Levinsky. He was a fictional character, of course, my own creation. But it’s no coincidence that at the start of the novel and the end of it, Levinsky notes that all his worldly success meant nothing to him and he was still, in his innermost being, the same Yeshiva boy who had swayed over his prayers. I wrote that at the peak of my career, and it was the most important thing I ever wrote, and it just came out of me. And I began rethinking my whole life at that time.

When was that?

Well, I started writing The Rise of David Levinsky in 1912 for McClure’s. I’m not sure the magazine understood what it was getting in to. I finished it in 1917, and we brought it out just before the Bolshevik Revolution. I was 57 at the time. There were a lot of friends, including that young fellow Mencken, who wanted me to give up newspaper work and spend the last third of my life writing fiction. I rather liked Mencken, by the way, despite his attacks on the Jews; we used to lunch once in a while at the Algonquin, and I helped him with his Yiddish monograph. He later wrote of his disappointment that I couldn’t give up the “razzle dazzle” of the newspaper life.

Was that it, the razzle dazzle?

Well, there were serious matters. And not just World War I, which was one of our mistakes, and a serious one—the pacifism was a serious mistake, but not as bad a mistake as the cynicism about America and America’s motives. The fact is that even as we all came to America we underestimated her.

Someone once made a remark about the little speech in David Levinsky about how, for all the exploitation of Jewish garment workers by the bosses, the Americans were the best-dressed people in the world. The remark was that it signaled your understanding that maybe the labor unions themselves were too cynical.

While I was writing that chapter, the garment workers were outside the Forward building throwing stones at my office. That’s because I’d urged a settlement in the strike. It was a bitter time. I began to rethink a lot of things then.

Like Zionism.

That, too.

What was your error?

Arrogance. A lack of vision. I came to understand only later that no socialist, not one of them, could compete with Herzl in that department. He was just way ahead of us. And the people were with him.

Meyer London taught you that?

He was the first socialist ever elected to Congress, and he lost his seat over it because the voters, the workers, right here in the Lower East Side, the workers who had just elected a Socialist, they understood what it would mean to have a Jewish state. He was asked about the Balfour Declaration. He said: “Let us stop pretending about the Jewish past and let us stop making fools of ourselves about the Jewish future.” He promptly lost his seat. Looking back, we can see it was a kind of socialist arrogance. His own workers were ahead of him.

Can that be said of about your movement vis-à-vis the communists?

No, I think we adjusted to the facts sooner than most anyone. I declared my position in 1923 when I got back from the Soviet Union and said: “Russia has at present less freedom than it had in the earliest days of Romanov rule. … The world has never yet seen such a despotism.” It would have been impossible, illogical for me to go back to a literary career at that point. It was essential that we defeat the communists here, and that was what I gave it all up for. In the fight against the Soviet, we were not followers but we were in the lead. I gave up a lot for that fight. I think Mencken understood that better than most, believe it or not. I am like the son who gave up a literary life for business—only on my business everything depended, and I have sorrows, but no regrets.

You failed to lead on Zionism.

I met my match in Jabotinsky. It was an important error in my life, my denunciation of him after his speech at the Manhattan Opera House. That was 1940. He called then for the urgent evacuation of the Jews from Europe to Eretz Israel, and I turned around and belittled him in the pages of the Forward. I gave a whole page to it, and that’s when I wrote, “Six million is a pretty small state.” I was derisive, and I was wrong.

When did you realize that?

Immediately, and when Jabotinsky died a few weeks later—he lay down from fatigue at a right-wing camp in upstate New York where he was training young Jews to defend themselves, and his heart gave out as he was lying down—it was a terrible blow for all Jews. I was furious at the staff of the Forward, which refused to cover his funeral. So, I wrote the editorial that has been quoted ever since, saying that his death was, coming as it did at such a grim time for the Jewish people, “in the true sense of the word, a national catastrophe.” I predicted that he would be missed not only then, in the middle of the storm, but later, “when the storm is over and the time comes to heal the wounds and rebuild Jewish life on new foundations in a new time.”

New foundations—or old ones.

Hah! Alt-neu-foundations. How’s that?

Is that when you began to re-think religion?

Well, I’d been re-thinking it for a long time, as the beginning and end of The Rise of David Levinsky makes clear. It never left me. It was gnawing at me the whole time. But freethinking is a kind of addiction of its own. What started the dam to break was Sholem Asch. He came in and plopped his novel about Jesus on my desk, and it just came out. He was suggesting that Jews treat Jesus the way Christians view Jesus, and I threw him out. I told him to burn the novel. And when he resisted, I banned him from the Forward. And I wrote a whole book attacking him, and in that book I insisted that I wasn’t religious. And then the illogic of my position began to eat at me, and that is how it happened, and I worked my way back to the Torah and to Talmud and I made peace with the boy in the yeshiva, and I consider it my greatest achievement.

Did it destroy all that came before in your life?

[After a pause.] I would have to say it validates it. Remember that as Levinsky stood at the rail of the ship as it prepared to deposit him on American soil, he said a prayer, and it was that God would not hide his face from him in the new land. It was a promise as much as a prayer, and I tend to see my return to religion as a redemption of that promise.

This is an imaginary interview. So, what are we to make of it?

Read the record. It will show you where I was going. My great deputy at the Forward, David Shub, wrote long after I had passed away that what I lived for above all else was Russian literature, and it is true. It was my greatest love. But literature itself is something that can’t be proved and is a matter of faith and speculation. It doesn’t make it wrong.

Seth Lipsky is the founding editor of the English-language Forward. He is writing a biography of Abraham Cahan for Nextbook Press.

It happens that I have known Joseph for some decades, because during the years I was foreign editor at the Wall Street Journal he was a reporter in the paper’s New York bureau. One day he came to me in a mood of frustration; he had been wanting to write for a competing paper in favor of Haitian democracy and against the regime of the then-dictator, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier. The managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, a wonderful journalist in his own right, would have none of it, and so Ray had asked if he could have lunch with me.

When he explained his problem, I said, without a great deal of ceremony, that a reporter just had to do what the managing editor wanted. Rather than cut the lunch short, however, I asked Ray to tell me about his family. He told me that there was just he and his brother, Leo. I asked what Leo did, and Ray told me he was publisher of the Haiti Observateur. When I looked quizzical, Ray told me that it was the largest Haitian newspaper in the world—published in Brooklyn. When I asked who owned it, Ray replied: “I do.”

“What?” I exclaimed. “You own the largest Haitian newspaper in the world and you’re covering a business beat for the Wall Street Journal?”

To make a long story short, Ray Joseph quit the Wall Street Journal and went to edit his own paper, long a tribune for Haitian democracy. And when, a few months later, the Duvalier regime was finally ousted and the transition to democracy began, Ray was named Haiti’s charge d’affairs in Washington and its representative to the Organization of American States, where he signed the accord setting the stage for the first democratic elections. Ray resigned when the elections elevated Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the presidency. Ray confided to his friends that the elections were fair and democratic but had been won by a non-democrat. So Ray returned to editing the Observateur.

The next time I saw him was when Howell Raines, then editorial page editor of the New York Times, joined the editors of the Forward for dinner. I’d invited Ray, because I’d been in touch with him during the period when Aristide was trying to trade on the fact that he speaks Hebrew and had spent time in Israel to curry favor with the Jewish leadership in the city. After the dinner, Ray confided to me that he had resented me for years.

The grudge he’d nursed was that he’d thought I was being cynical—a cats-paw for the top editors at the Wall Street Journal—when I’d suggested he go work for his own paper. He hadn’t realized until I’d fetched up at the Forward that neither I nor anyone else had wanted him off the Journal and that I actually believed in the importance of not only the big newspapers like the Journal but also the smaller papers.

When we launched the New York Sun, Ray came on as a columnist. He was still editing the Observateur when Aristide was driven into exile and the Haitians became free to set up a new government. It was a Sunday, February 29, 2004, and I telephoned Ray to offer congratulations. He invited me to rush out to Brooklyn for a small reception with some of his friends. Speeding across the Brooklyn Bridge, I asked my driver to stop by the house where my wife and I live so that I could invite one of the children.

One of our boys, then 11 years old, piled into the car, and when he and I walked into the modest living room in which Ray had gathered his friends, we received a standing ovation—for the Sun’s support of the democratic movement in exile. Ray went around the room, introducing us to each of the two- or three-dozen guests. This one a future chief of staff of the army, that a future justice of the high court, the next an about-to-be government minister. The details escape me. What does not escape me is the inspiring nature of the idealism of those who had gathered around plates of petites four and coffee at a turning point toward Haitian democracy.

When we left, I leaned over to my son and said, “That’s what it’s like to start a country.”

Ray Joseph himself drew the assignment, again, of representing his government in Washington, where, in the years since, he has been doing an eloquent job in seasons of hard work and frustration. He would be among the first to acknowledge how much work yet needs to be done, even without an earthquake. Whether Robertson was trying to make a useful point about the importance of religion and culture in Haiti, I do not know. He certainly failed. But he set Ambassador Joseph up for a riposte that will be remembered.

Ray, himself a devout Christian, did not attack Robertson, or even name him. What he did say, on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show, was this: “I would like the whole world to know, America especially, that the independence of Haiti, when the slaves rose up against the French and defeated the French army, powerful army, the U.S. was able to gain the Louisiana territory for 15 million dollars, that’s three cents an acre, that’s 13 states west of the Mississippi, that the slaves’ revolt in Haiti provided America.

“Also the revolt of the rebels in Haiti allowed Latin America to be free. It was from Haiti that Simon Bolivar left with men, boats to go deliver Gran Columbia and the rest of South America. So what pact the Haitians made with the devil has helped the United States become what it is.”

It was a glimpse of a great newspaperman turned diplomat and a reminder, at a time of a crisis, of the history and sacrifices we share with the tragic nation to our south and of at least a part of the logic of the vast humanitarian response that we are witnessing today.

One feature, no doubt, was that Sharon was an includer, a welcoming figure. This didn’t comport easily with his image through much of his career as a hawk. But one could see it in various encounters, beginning with the way he and his wife, Lili, ran his breakfast table at his farm in the Negev desert, where an amazing array of local figures, including Arabs, national politicians, visiting dignitaries, journalists, artists, and intellectuals found themselves sitting down to a vast repast of eggs and cheeses and fish and fruits and pastries and wide-ranging, cheerful conversation that became a memorable event.

Sharon had no fear of meeting his critics in conversation. In the 1990s, he came by the offices of the Forward, which I then edited, in a season when the newspaper had so many figures who were hostile to him that they left the building to avoid having to greet him. But the journalists themselves stayed and ended up parsing the problems of the Middle East with Sharon for two hours, capping it off with the lighting of Hanukkah candles and the sharing of latkes. One of the journalists, David Twersky, found his view of Sharon changed forever.

Not that Twersky became a supporter, only that his view of Sharon was changed, improved. It must have happened tens of thousands of times during the active years of Sharon’s life. During the early months of the Clinton administration, Sharon was in New York and a Forward reporter and I went to see him at an office he was using in a midtown tower. We spent an hour or so with him, and as we were leaving, one of us asked him what he thought of the new president’s plan to permit gay soldiers to serve in the U.S. military.

I was curious on the point, because, after all, Sharon was, among other things, probably the greatest living field commander. The question brought a quizzical look to his face, and he turned to an aide and said, “What is our policy on gays in the military?” The aide shrugged to indicate that he didn’t know either. So the onetime defense minister of Israel turned back to his visitors and announced that he didn’t know, which I took to mean that he was not an excluder (a policy that was later formally codified in Israel).

Another time I saw this instinct was in the early 1980s, when I was nursing the notion that the right way to deal with the Palestinians who were registered with the United Nations as refugees would be to offer them American green cards. I put this idea to all sorts of people, from Yasser Arafat, who would have none of it, to a foreign minister in Beirut, who said he didn’t care where they went so long as it wasn’t Lebanon, to American Jewish officials, who thought it counterproductive, to American politicians, who were scandalized. But when I asked Sharon about it over breakfast at his farm, he looked at me and said, “Why can’t they stay here?”

On top of all this, Sharon understood the levers of government in a way that comes with experience. He was educated in law and of course had been a celebrated soldier. When he finally acceded as head of the government, he was one the most qualified premiers in the history of parliamentary democracy: the ministries he’d headed included agriculture, defense, industry and commerce, construction and housing, national infrastructure, and foreign affairs, and, while in uniform, he had held a major command (the southern).

The list, incidentally, excludes finance, and if Sharon had a weakness, this was it. His comprehension of political economy was not what one would call a model of supply-side, free-market thinking. The joke used to be that when asked about whether he was going to reform Israel’s system of state-owned industry, he would say something like, “Yes, we’re going to sell the big government-owned companies to private entrepreneurs.” And he would be asked, “What are you going to do with the money, general?” And he would reply: “We’re going to buy more efficient state-owned industries.” When he finally acceded as premier, however, he put in as finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had in that ministry what has been, at least so far, his finest hour.

It’s hard to to say what Sharon would do were he to awaken from his coma and survey the order of battle today. There is a camp, of which Jeffrey Goldberg is a member, that reckons his mistake in respect of Gaza was not in the withdrawing but in the unilateralism. My own sense is that the unilateralism of the maneuver was, in Sharon’s view, its premier virtue. How long he would have stood for the kind of violence that subsequently issued from Gaza, I have my doubts. My guess is that he would have gone back in sooner and stayed longer. Would he have already acted toward Iran, it’s impossible to say. But it wouldn’t surprise me if, privately, he would be telling newspapermen that, for all the threats coming out of Iran, the danger that concerned him most was from Egypt, with its military now trained and equipped by the United States. And he would have been working constantly to broaden his political connections, at home and abroad, over one jolly meal after another.

When I read her reply, I thought that it was wonderful. In the two generations in which I’ve been covering the Middle East debate, it was one of the few times a public figure gave in response to a question about the settlements an answer that I would call ideal. It seemed to me courageous, in that Palin was going against not only the administration but many in her own party and the gods of political correctness. There was no shilly-shallying about the Oslo process and the Quartet and the United Nations. Palin didn’t seem particularly worried one way or another about how she might be perceived. She is just on Israel’s side.

But it turns out that one of the shrewdest reporters on the Middle East beat, Jeffrey Goldberg, finds the governor’s language alarming. He put up a post on his Atlantic blog under the headline, “With Friends Like Sarah Palin…”—a phrase that one expects to be finished with the question, “…who needs enemies?” Goldberg wants to know who, exactly, she reckons is going to be flocking to Israel and whether her view grows from her analysis of Jewish demography. Or whether she anticipates a sudden upsurge in Zionist sentiment among American Jews, who are, he points out, the only sizable Jewish community outside Israel.

“Or,” Goldberg asks, “is this an indication that Palin buys into creepy End Times thinking, in which the ingathering of the Jews, and their mass death, presage the return of Christ?”

That is a vision in which Christians are to be gathered up in something called the Rapture. Goldberg was so determined to get to the bottom of the question that he called the executive director of the Pre-Trib Research Center at Liberty University, Thomas Rice, who heads what Goldberg calls “one of the pre-eminent evangelical institutions in this country arguing for the literal Bible prophecy.” Goldberg asked him whether he thought Palin’s statement on Jewish settlements was informed by the belief about a Jewish ingathering to Israel in advance of Armageddon.

Rice, Goldberg reports, said that he’d heard the governor “has been part of an apparently unique movement” whose pastor “believed based on some personal revelation he claims to have gotten from God” that during the Tribulation “the Jews would move to Alaska.” But Rice also expressed his “understanding” that Palin actually holds what he called “fairly typical Protestant Zionist beliefs, and one of those beliefs is the regathering of the Jews in Israel.” He suggested that Palin “may just have a general geopolitical belief that the world is going to be increasingly anti-Semitic.”

I’ve been reading Goldberg long enough to have developed an abiding regard for his reportorial instincts. It turns out that he’s not the only writer worrying about Palin and the Rapture. Frank Rich echoed Goldberg’s worries over the weekend. And last year Alexander Cockburn’s Counterpunch, which specializes in attacking Israel from the left, ran its own warning about the possibility that Palin believes in the Rapture. Its writer, Raymond J. Lawrence, expressed the fear that a “believer in the Rapture with his or her fingers on the nuclear trigger might even be tempted”—apparently in the hope of advancing the Second Coming—“to bring on the Rapture.”

Lawrence reckoned that while Americans were prepared to accept reassurances from John Kennedy that he wouldn’t be taking orders from Rome, it’s not so easy to get around what he sees as the danger of a president who believes in the Rapture. “The problem is both more simple and more worrisome. The public must presume that Palin believes in the Rapture, since it is one of the central doctrines of her church. Furthermore, the American people should assume that Palin’s personal religious beliefs will have consequences in her decision-making as a President.”

Continues Lawrence: “The press and much of the public seem reluctant to engage Palin on her religious views, considering them to be a personal matter. In certain respects that is admirable restraint. We do not want candidates for office grilled on their private religious views as long as those views do not impinge upon the public welfare…. However, a belief in the Rapture as an historic event toward which history is rapidly moving, is a belief with potentially catastrophic political implications. Do the American people want a believer in such a fantasy to hold in her hands the nuclear power to destroy civilization?”

In other words, what Lawrence has done is set up, even while suggesting he is loath to do so, a classic religious test.

Now I don’t believe for a moment that it is distaste for the Rapture that animates Counterpunch; rather, it’s distaste for Israel and the prospect that Jews might settle in Judea and Samaria. That Palin is prepared to leave to the judgment of Israel and its democratic government is what seems to animate the Counterpunch camp. The thing to remember is that if we start allowing religious tests in politics, such tests will eventually be used, as they so often have, against the Jews.

Goldberg’s blog post sent me to the bookstore, and I spent the weekend reading Going Rogue. It turns out to be a marvelous memoir by a very smart, high-spirited woman, who is handling the messiness of family life and the challenges of a public life in a way that is inspiring millions. She may not be a veteran of, say, the anti-communist battles of the free-trade union movement that made Ronald Reagan a sage on the biggest issue of his time, Soviet communism. But she has the kind of clarity of commitment on key themes that he had and the same kind of wholesome optimism—and she’s still young. I couldn’t find anything in the book that made me worry about the fact that even on the difficult issues she supports Israel.

That is a phrase I first read in Anne Applebaum’s book Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, which was published five years after the Wall came down. She likened Central Europe during communism to a lake frozen over by ice, and wrote of peering through the ice to see the countries and cultures that existed beneath the Soviet empire.

The person who taught me to see through the ice—or at least to try—was my wife and guide, Amity Shlaes. We had met on the foreign desk of the Wall Street Journal, where Amity’s assignment was to read the transcripts of broadcasts from behind the Iron Curtain issued daily by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, and to pick out from them newsworthy items for a weekly column.

In 1983, she spotted an item from Yugoslavia. It reported that something of a riot had occurred at a soccer game in Kosovo. The disturbance erupted after rowdies in the crowd began shouting “E-Ho, E-Ho.” They were rooting for the Maoist madman Enver Hoxa, the dictator of Albania. Amity told me that some analysts saw portents. “Yugoslavia can’t survive,” she said.

I suggested she write it up for the next day’s paper. She thought it was an awfully long reach to make on the basis of some football fans in Kosovo. When I pressed, she remonstrated, “You right-wingers are all the same.” But it was newspaper work, and she wrote the column. The clipping that resulted became, once Yugoslavia disintegrated, a memorable item in her scrapbook.

By the late 1980s, we were married and living in Brussels, on assignment to cover the climactic years of the Cold War. One day Amity came into my office and closed the door, looked at me, and announced, “It’s over.” I thought, “What have I done?” Before I could actually say anything, she said, “The division of Europe, it’s over.” This was in July of 1988. The Russians and our side still had intermediate-range nuclear missiles pointed at each other all over the place. The ice looked frozen solid.

It turns out that she’d just read a piece in one of the provincial German newspapers saying that the Soviet party boss, Mikhail Gorbachev, was going to permit the Volga Germans, who had been living in Russia since the time of Catherine the Great, to leave. Not only was Gorbachev prepared to let them leave, Amity told me, but they were going to go not to Communist East Germany but to West Germany. A receiving center was being set up for them at Friedland. She told me it was an astounding development, one that meant that the Kremlin had concluded the division of Europe could not be sustained.

“It’s over,” she repeated several times. “It’s over.”

Amity left immediately for Friedland, from which she cabled a dispatch about the refugees and what she called the “provocative way their arrival posed the question of reunification.”

Then things entered a quiescent phase, and by November 1989, I was back in the United States, working on the agreement to bring out the Forward in English.

On November 9, I boarded a plane to visit Amity in Brussels. When I got there, I found my secretary had left on my desk a message Amity had dictated by phone. “Remaining Berlin, Hotel Kempinski.” I rushed back to the airport and caught a flight to Dusseldorf, thence another into Berlin’s Tegel Airport, reaching the Kempinski’s lobby just in time to find Amity dashing for a bus for Checkpoint Charlie, a transit point between the free and the Communist side.

The evening before, at a live press conference, an East Berlin party functionary, Günter Schabowski, had been trying to explain some changes in the rules for exit visas. One description of it is contained in a piece last month by the Wall Street Journal. It describes how questioning by a German tabloid reporter and an Italian foreign correspondent got the hapless Schabowski flustered. My own viewing of the press conference suggests the key moment came when Daniel Johnson, then of the London Daily Telegraph and now the editor of Standpoint, asked what I have called the most consequential question ever asked at a press conference.

It was ten words: “Herr Schabowski, was wird mit der Berliner Mauer jetzt geschehen?” [“Mr. Schabowski, what will happen to the Berlin Wall now?”] Johnson’s account of the “Seven Minutes That Shook the World” is here. Poor Schabowski waffled. And because his waffling was being broadcast live, East Germans by the thousands and thousands began pouring out of their homes and heading for freedom. By the end of the evening, the division of Europe had, in the practical sense, ended.

When I found Amity at the Kempinski, it was 9 p.m. on November 10. We crossed over to the East side and spent the evening with dissident, pro-democracy East Germans. The enormity of what was happening hadn’t sunk in, and they were still pleading for photocopying machines and other tools of the democratic struggle. It was after midnight when we crossed back into Free Berlin, only to discover the crowds had swelled. Tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands were now in the streets, many holding tools and streaming toward the Wall. Someone gave us a rock-climbing hammer, and we spent the small hours of the morning chipping away at it like everyone else.

When we left Berlin that Sunday, we held hands in the taxi and talked of how it was the right moment to leave Europe to the Europeans and return to America. A piece that we’d chipped from the Berlin Wall is now embedded in the stone retaining wall of our garden in New York. Within a few years, the Soviet Union itself would be gone and Germany united—a reunification the prospect of which a resurgent Forward greeted with what it called “mixed emotions.”

Not that there was any lack of joy at the liberation of Eastern Europe and the breakup of the Soviet empire. But the Zheleznovodsk summit, where the German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, and the Soviet party boss, Gorbachev, cut the deal that would lead to formal unification, proved to be an uneasy moment. Kohl was too bland, and Gorbachev lacked a democratic mandate to speak for Russia. When we think of what happened to the Jews of Europe, the Forward concluded, “the labors of our leaders will always look small.”

When the final papers were drawn up, there was one eloquent cri de coeur reflecting what so many of us were thinking. It came from Heinz Galinski, who after the war rebuilt the Jewish center in Fasanenstrasse and embedded within its walls parts of the famed synagogue. He protested the wording of the unification treaty. He wanted the documentation to contain, as it was characterized in the Forward, a “clearer expression of historical responsibility for Nazi war crimes.” He got nowhere, and when he went public at a press conference, Reuters described him as “visibly angry,” saying the chancellor had not even given him the dignity of an answer. Galinski died in 1992.

A few years ago, Amity and I took our children to Berlin, and one afternoon, we visited the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. It includes—aside from the typewriter on which Charter 77 was written—several exhibits of the methods East Germans used to try to escape Communism by going over, under, or through the Wall. One is a flying contraption. Another is a car in which visitors are challenged to find a full-sized mannequin that has been secreted therein. A white booth that stood on our side of Checkpoint Charlie is now perched a few yards from the museum, in the middle of a street that bustles with commerce. I walked one of the boys over to show him the hut where GIs on duty kept warm as they guarded the entrance to the American sector and the plaza where, under the muzzles the guns of the Warsaw Pact, I had courted his mother. I tried to reassure him that in his time there would be new struggles in which he no doubt would throw himself. It happened to be an unforgettably cold day, and I pulled his collar up around his ears when I got to the part about the importance of not taking history for granted and remembering to look beneath the ice.

I’ve been thinking about that historical moment again in the wake of the death earlier this month of Marek Edelman. It was Edelman who, after the death of Mordechai Anielewicz, acceded as leader of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. He led the fight that some have said saved Jewish honor, though he would repudiate the sentiment. He understood that nearly all Jews dealt with certain death in myriad honorable ways that none can second-guess. Edelman survived and lived out his life in Poland, where he made his career as a physician. He hewed throughout his life to the Bund.

It happens that the first time I thought much about the Bund, I was living in Europe on assignment to cover the climactic years of the Cold War for the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. I was having dinner with my wife at our home in Brussels, when the phone rang and an operator came on the line and asked me to hold for the deputy foreign minister of Israel. I didn’t know Benjamin Netanyahu well, but I’d been defending his policies. He was calling to ask whether he could mention my name to the new proprietors of the Jerusalem Post as a possible editor of the paper. I was touched, but had to tell him that I was planning to return to America to become editor of the Forward.

There was an awkward silence, and he finally said—in amazement—“the Bundist newspaper?”

I told him that it was a bit more complicated, that there’d been no more anti-communist paper in all of American history. Netanyahu was exceptionally gracious, under the circumstances, and we rang off. In fact, the Forward was never a Bundist paper, and, I learned in due course, the relationship between its editor, Abraham Cahan, and the Bund was decidedly rocky. But history has a way of playing tricks on all of us, and in my years at the Forward, I personally caused to be hung in its editorial rooms a portrait of the Bundist martyr Henryk Erhlich, who, with the outbreak of the war, had moved, with Victor Alter, east into the Soviet zone only to be murdered by Stalin.

Edelman was nearly 40 years younger than Erlich. He joined the Bund youth movement in the late 1930s, and ended up confined in the ghetto in Warsaw, where he helped organize the Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or Jewish Combat Organization, which stunned the Nazis when the attack on the ghetto began. When Anielewicz was trapped, and committed suicide, Edelman became commander. After he and his comrades put up the fight that astonished the world, Edelman managed to escape through the sewers and, in 1944, to participate in the uprising against the Nazis by the Free Polish forces.

That was the battle that saw the betrayal of the Free Poles by the Red Army, which sat on its guns on the East side of the Vistula and exposed the communist camarilla in its full cynicism. After the war, Edelman stayed in Poland and in the Bund, though he opposed the Bund’s absorption into the Polish communist party. He emerged in harness with the Free Labor Movement when it began to organize in Poland, creating, in Solidarity, the institution that would crack Soviet rule and begin the end of the communist tyranny in the East bloc.

In the 1970s, the writer Hanna Krall had a long conversation with Edelman that was brought out as a book called Shielding the Flame. It included, at the end, a letter Krall wrote to the translators. In the season of the 40th anniversary of the uprising Edelman led, she had been with him in his home, where he was held under house arrest by General Jaruzelski’s communist regime. It had wanted him to participate in the official commemoration, but he’d refused. Solidarity promptly mounted its own commemoration and wanted—even needed—him in its ranks. So, Krall wrote, the Jewish path and the Polish path had merged again.

Not that Edelman was immune from mistakes. He’d issued earlier this decade a statement likening the Palestinian Arab “resistance” to the fight that he and his comrades had waged more than half a century ago, a statement that galled the Israelis. All the greater the irony of the bond that was established between Edelman and Moshe Arens, who, after Edelman’s death, wrote one of the loveliest tributes to him in Haaretz. Arens, a follower of Jabotinsky, had once gone to meet with Edelman and, apparently, formed an admiration for him, and he wrote that it was not only Edelman who was buried that day.

“The Bund, which commanded his loyalty to his dying days, was also laid to rest,” he wrote. He noted that Edelman’s coffin had been draped with the red banner of the Bund, with the words “Bund—Yidisher Sozialistisher Farband.” He called it “a farewell to a great movement, which had a massive following among Polish Jewry before the war, and had led all other Jewish parties in the last Polish municipal elections held before the war.” He noted that the Bund believed that “a Socialist Poland would be built” and “there the Jews of Poland, maintaining the Yiddish culture and the Yiddish language, would find their rightful place.”

Arens acknowledged that Zionism and emigration to Palestine were “anathema” to the Bund and that the Bund “reserved a special hatred” for Jabotinsky, who had called on the Jews to flee Poland. “The Bund’s lofty ideals took precedence over reality,” Arens wrote. “And cruel reality put an end to the Bund.” In the end, he wrote, “Zionism prevailed over the Bund.” But that, he added, “was not because most Polish Jews deemed its ideology superior, but because the human base of the Bund was exterminated, along with the rest of Polish Jewry, by the Germans during World War II.” Then Arens wrote: “Those very few who survived, like Edelman, remained fiercely loyal to the Bund, an organization that had ceased to exist, a loyalty that sustained them during the war years, and gave them the courage to heroically fight the Germans along with other Jewish fighters, outnumbered and outgunned, in the Warsaw ghetto uprising.”

* * *

What a concluding chapter that would make to the novel 1897—an aging Revisionist defense minister of Israel, weeping, if figuratively and from a distance, over the Bundist-bier of Marek Edelman. Let us ask what would prompt a hero like Arens to make this kind of bow to a hero at the other end of the ideological spectrum. We have come through a period marked by a vanishing Bund and an American Jewry in a crisis of intermarriage and assimilation. So it is a haunting question. No doubt Arens knows that we are in a time as dangerous for the Zionist enterprise—and so for all Jews—as any in history. We are in a period in which, if we are not careful, the dream of Herzl and the millions whose lives Zionism saved and inspired could be dealt a fate as cruel as that which was dealt to the socialists and to the Bund. It’s a moment when the example of a man like Marek Edelman towers over the generations.

Certainly there was plenty of concern about what Iraq was up to, but the long public debate, the hand-wringing, the threats, the counter-threats, the journalistic chorus about what a terrible thing a pre-emptive attack would be, how dangerous, none of this happened. One day Iraq had a nuclear reactor. The next day it didn’t. The attack was met with the usual outrage, but then a funny thing happened, and the tide began to turn in Israel’s favor, in part because Menachem Begin had no apologies.

At the time, I was in Philadelphia, visiting a family friend with my father. Both he and his friend, Dr. Teplick, were then in their late sixties. Both were liberal Democrats. We were having breakfast, going through the newspapers and talking about the astounding news, when Teplick encountered the editorial in The New York Times. It characterized Israel’s action as a “sneak attack” and called it an act of “inexcusable and shortsighted aggression.” As the editorial was read aloud at the table, I remember the chagrin of these two men, ardent liberals for whom the Times had long been at the center of their universe. They received the editorial as a betrayal.

My own reaction was to pick up the phone and call the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, where I was then working. I reached a colleague, Adam Meyerson, and asked him to relay to George Melloan, who was Robert Bartley’s deputy and managed the editorial page, my own two cents, which was that the Journal shouldn’t do what the New York Times had just done. Adam asked me to hold the line for a moment. He came back on a few minutes later and said that he’d spoken with the magnificent Melloan, who had replied, “When have we ever done what the New York Times did?”

The editorial that Melloan and Bartley were planning ran the next day, on June 10, 1981, under the headline “Mourning the Bomb.” It began: “An atom bomb for Iraq, we have learned in the last 24 hours, has become the latest great cause célèbre of world opiniondom. Various governments, including our own, and a lot of pundits have been busily condemning Israel’s raid on Iraq’s nuclear reactor. Our own reaction is that it’s nice to know that in Israel we have at least one nation left that still lives in the world of reality.”

The editorial went on to speak of the incongruity of Iraq, “awash in cheap crude oil,” wanting a
big nuclear reactor. It noted that Baghdad had rebuffed “French suggestions to give up the original design and substitute one that does not need weapons-grade uranium.” The Journal was particularly exercised over the way “world opinion” was taking comfort in the fact that Iraq had signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It said: “This kind of silliness has a mysterious power to blind most who man foreign ministries, think tanks and editorial sanctums. Of course Iraq was building a bomb. Of course its intended target was Israel. Of course, given the Iraqi reputation for political nuttiness reaffirmed again in its starting a war with Iran, its atom bomb would also have been a danger to all its neighbors.”

Then the famous sentence: “We all ought to get together and send the Israelis a vote of thanks.”

The Journal recognized that Israel “was not acting out of some abstract concern with nonproliferation.” It presumed that Israel was “pursuing its own interest” and conceded the timing of the raid was “no doubt” in Begin’s “political interest in the impending elections.” But the Journal reckoned that the strong medicine of the pre-emptive attack “would not have been necessary” had “the reality that marked the Israeli decision been present in the United States’ nonproliferation policy this last decade or so.” It cited not only France’s sales to Iraq but India’s atomic program.

A point was made to give, as the Journal put it, “the worriers about Israel their due.” It noted that “there is always reason to be concerned that any military act could prove to be the spark in the tinderbox of the Middle East. “ But, it said, “we have been under the impression that the Middle East wasn’t a very peaceful place even before” the attack on Osirak. It concluded by noting that being “concerned about the peace of the Middle East does not make it necessary to be deceived about the necessary components for peace.”

What the Journal was supporting then was not Zionism, per se, nor, for that matter, any other ideological line of right or left but rather a certain hard-headedness, an honesty, about America’s, and other nations’, interests. It proved merciless in criticizing those, including its great friend Jeane Kirkpatrick, who was then President Reagan’s envoy at the United Nations, who’d drawn the unfortunate assignment to coauthor, with an envoy of Iraq, a resolution condemning Israel’s raid. It provoked in the Journal a fierce editorial called “Andy Kirkpatrick,” which likened the hawkish, pro-Israel Kirkpatrick to President Carter’s permanent representative at the world body, Andrew Young.

It later came out that Reagan was less worried about the attack privately than his envoys had to be publicly. His national security adviser, Richard Allen, informed his boss of the Israeli raid by asking him something roughly like this: “Mr. President, you know those F-16s we provided Israel? Guess what they have done with them? They’ve bombed a nuclear reactor in downtown Baghdad.” Reagan is said to have stammered: “They did what?” When Allen repeated the facts, Reagan shook his head, uttering the famous line, “Well, boys will be boys.”

Today, everyone is more tense. The amount of debate, in and out of government, and diplomacy on the matter stands in sharp contrast to the earlier time. All the leaders of the West—not just President Obama—have stood up and pronounced an Iranian A-bomb unacceptable. The question is whether they are going to conduct themselves in a way that is consonant with that conclusion. Surely Iran is a more difficult military mission than Iraq was, though our weapons systems are also more advanced. But surely Iran is further along the road to a bomb-making capacity than Iraq was. Menachem Begin refrained from debating any of this in public before he made his attack, and then one day there was no reactor in Iraq—a fact that eventually came to be viewed with a great deal of relief by the rest of the world.

Timerman had brought out his book just as the President Ronald Reagan was assembling his new administration. The Argentinean newspaper publisher was seized upon by, or offered himself to, the left and was used to testify against Reagan’s choice for assistant secretary of state for human rights, Ernest Lefever. The left feared that Lefever would focus more on totalitarian communist regimes than the authoritarian regimes on the right that, for all their sins, at least allowed the practice of religion and travel and the owning of private property—and sided with the United States against the Soviet Union. Timerman’s testimony helped convince the Senate Foreign Relations committee to reject Lefever.

At around this time, an invitation to have lunch with Timerman went around editorial page of the Journal, where I picked it up. I’d been newspapering in the Third World for much of the past decade, and the struggle for press freedom there interested me. At the lunch, hosted by Robert Bernstein of Random House, I found myself seated between a lady and a gentleman who were having a conversation across my plate. I was trying to follow it when one of them said to the other that Timerman’s financial partner in his newspaper was David Graiver. “What?” I exclaimed. “Timerman was David Graiver’s business partner?” When she allowed again that he was, I said, “No wonder he was being tortured.”

I didn’t mean to suggest he deserved torture, which I am against. I meant that it was not surprising for authorities anywhere to be interested in a business partner of Graiver, who was one of the most notorious figures in Latin America and was being probed by American prosecutors for financial wrongdoing. When the lunch was over I went back to the newspaper and telephoned Timerman’s publisher, Alfred Knopf. I said I wanted to ask about some disturbing things I’d heard and invited Timerman to breakfast. An appointment was set up promptly for breakfast a day or two hence at the Carlyle. On the afternoon before the meeting, I mentioned to the editorial meeting, “Anybody want to join me for breakfast tomorrow with Jacobo Timerman.” Journal editor Robert Bartley’s eyebrows shot up. “You’re having breakfast with Timerman? Have you seen what Irving Kristol has just sent in?”

In fact I had not, and Bartley rushed over to his desk and returned with the foolscap of Kristol’s next column, a devastating dispatch that questioned Timerman’s bona fides on almost every level and situated the affair in the context of the global struggle with the Soviet Union. Kristol began with a reprise of the distinction between totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. “A major intellectual and propaganda campaign is now being mounted by the left and liberal-left against this distinction,” Kristol wrote. “Some of the active participants are simply human rights pundits. But there can be little doubt that the driving force behind this campaign is supplied by those who have more sophisticated political intentions.”

“They understand very well,” Kristol wrote, “that once the distinction between totalitarian and authoritarian nations is eliminated, most of our attention and energy are bound to be directed toward the latter, since in fact our State Department has more influence, however limited, on the governments of Argentina or Guatemala than on Cuba or Vietnam.” He drew a contrast between the different attitudes of human rights activists toward Timerman, on the one hand, and the Cuban democratic socialist, Huber Matos, who was held in one of Castro’s dungeons, and mistreated there, for nearly two decades.

Then he dug into Timerman himself, particularly for his failure to disclose in his book key facts. “The name David Graiver does not appear in Mr. Timerman’s book,” Kristol observed. He called it an “extraordinary omission” and stated flat out that Graiver was the “immediate cause of Mr. Timerman’s arrest and imprisonment.” He sketched Graiver’s responsibility in the collapse of two American banks, from which, Kristol wrote, investigators suspected he looted as much as $40 million. He reminded readers that even though a private plane in which Graiver was supposedly a passenger had crashed into a mountain in Mexico in August of 1976, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau suspected that Graiver might still be alive.

It was some eight months after Graiver’s death that Argentine authorities, as Kristol put it, “disclosed that Mr. Graiver had been, among other things, the money manager for the Montoneros, the left-wing urban terrorists, who had accumulated a known $60 million in ransom money and who felt that it was a shame that so much capital should not be yielding revolutionary returns.” And, Kristol reported, it had also been disclosed that “Graiver owned a 50% interest in Mr. Timerman’s paper, La Opinion.” He pointed out that it was after those allegations were made public that Timerman was arrested, “along with members of the Graiver family.”

Kristol observed that Graiver’s own motives were unclear, since he was not particularly political. Graiver had been forced to pay ransom for a family member, and maybe his own services to the Montoneros were less than voluntary. Kristol also pointed out that there was no evidence that Timerman knew what Graiver was up to. But he argued that the absence of such evidence made Timerman’s “silence on the Graiver affair all the more inexplicable”—unless it were that Timerman was less interested in human rights and more interested in indicting the regime in Argentina and our own government in Washington.

Kristol then went into a review of Timerman’s own relations—or lack of them—with the Jewish community in Argentina. Kristol didn’t deny, indeed straightforwardly acknowledged, the problem of anti-Semitism in Argentina. But he pointed out that the man to whom Timerman dedicated his book, Rabbi Marshall Meyer, whom Kristol called “a distinguished fighter for human rights,” was building a major rabbinical seminary in Argentina. And the Jewish community, for all its serious troubles, was not fleeing the country, though it was largely keeping its distance from Timerman.

From this Kristol concluded that the Jewish community was “implicitly vindicating the Reagan administration’s prudent policy on human rights”—which involved using its influence to try to move the regime toward greater liberalization. He called the outlook “far from hopeless” and warned that were we to “write off” Argentina entirely the “more extreme right-wing elements in the Armed forces—the ones who illegally arrested and tortured Mr. Timerman—would surely take power.” And he suggested that there were those on the left who would like to see such a thing happen in order to provoke a crisis that would create for them an opportunity.

It was one powerful column. Bartley, who was nothing if not an editor who liked to stay on the edge of a story, remade that night’s editorial page and put Irving’s piece in the paper a day early. He didn’t want Timerman to get the first word in. And so it was that I personally hand-carried the edition containing Kristol’s attack on Timerman up to the Carlyle and handed it to Timerman over breakfast. After a cursory glance, Timerman tossed it aside. When I pressed him about David Graiver, he confirmed they were partners but complained about the interview. “The questions you are asking me,” he said, “these are the questions they were asking me when I was tortured.” To which Mark Falcoff, in a reprise of the Timerman case issued by Commentary magazine six months later, remarked: “Just so.”

Timerman eventually settled in Tel Aviv. A few months later, while on a visit to Israel, I had a cup of coffee with the scoundrel. Looking back, Timerman had one reaction to Kristol’s piece, which is that it had done wonders for the sale of his prison memoir. He had written a new book, attacking Israel for the war in Lebanon, and hoped that Kristol or the Journal would attack that volume, too. As I walked away from the coffee shop, I found myself marveling at how right Kristol had been—at what a magnificent newspaper columnist he was, a profound thinker and scoop artist all in one. On the great political confrontations of his time, he had x-ray vision. And I can’t help thinking how much America could use him today as a new president enters a new and equally dangerous era needing all the seichel he can get.

All of which I mention to underscore the fact that it was with the anticipation of a certain amount of self-discovery, among other things, that I picked up Norman Podhoretz’s latest book, Why Are Jews Liberals? In the substantive sense, I’d abandoned liberalism long before I changed my party registration—and over essentially the same issues that had prompted most neoconservatives to part company with the party that marched off after Sen. George McGovern in 1972. But for me it was something of a long goodbye that included 10 years at the Forward, an institution that had seemed to pitch rightward with each crisis that came upon the Jewish people but had yet to reach a conservative shore.

Podhoretz doesn’t disappoint. He starts his story with the birth of Christianity. In the first several chapters he takes us through the expulsion from Spain into the ghettos of the Middle Ages. He sketches Jewish achievement under terrible conditions. But he notes that Jews emerged from the Middle Ages “knowing for a certainty that—individual exceptions duly noted— the worst enemy they had in the world was Christianity.” Podhoretz reckons it “was a knowledge that Jewish experience in the ages to come would do very little, if indeed anything at all, to help future generations to forget.”

Podhoretz explores several mysteries, and he does not fail to put them in a way calculated to touch on the exposed nerves. One example: if the Jews “never took it as a mark of friendship that under Christian rule they could escape the disabilities and dangers of being Jewish simply by ceasing to be Jewish, why did they fail to recognize that the Enlightenment was offering them the same bargain in modern dress? Why were they unable to see that the French philosophes and their counterparts in other countries were in their own way no less an enemy to them as Jews than the early Fathers of the Church?”

A second mystery he investigates in a chapter on the Marxists and other radicals, including some on the right. He puts it this way: “The question thus arises of why the Jews who joined the radical camp were not put off by the egregious anti-Semitism of Marx or that of several other major figures of the socialist movement, including Charles Fourier (to whom the Jews were the ‘the leprosy and the run of the body politic’) and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (to whom the Jews were ‘the race which poisons everything [and] the enemy of the human race’).” Podhoretz has mined the literature for choice nuggets, such as Rosa Luxembourg (“Why do you come with your special Jewish sorrows?”) and Marx, who was baptized and had a flirtation with Christianity before moving to materialism. (“What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.”)

Podhoretz sees America as different. Even in early days Jews here were far freer than in Europe. Podhoretz reprises the American anti-Semites. He does not flinch from what he calls the “upshot”—that it was the conservative upholders of the old order who were hostile to the Jews, whether they were rich or poor and whether they had immigrated from Germany or Eastern Europe. And as he brings the story forward he sees the emergence of the Jews as loyalists to the Democratic Party as related to the fact that F.D.R. was clearly, despite protestations to the contrary, trying to get America into the war against Hitler. Not even the “immensely popular” Eisenhower, Podhoretz notes, was able to “break up the Jewish love affair with the party of Roosevelt.”

Up to that point, Podhoretz argues, the loyalty of Jews to the Democratic Party was “in harmony with their interests as Jews.” In the second half of the book, the focus is shifted to a different question, namely “why the Jews are still liberals.” This covers an era in which Jewish interests and Jewish politics became, at least in Podhoretz’s view (and my own), far less harmonious and even fell into disharmony. Podhoretz gives this discord a rich telling, in which—with his typical courage—he doesn’t spare the leaders he supported, such as Reagan, on the occasions when he thought they were wrong. Nor does Podhoretz pace the widow’s walk, searching the horizon in hopes that the Jewish move to the right will appear in the distance.

What he does conclude is that modern progressive politics have become a substitute religion—the “Torah of Liberalism,” he calls it at one point. Early in the book he quotes a passage from I.J. Singer’s novel The Brother’s Ashkenazi about Nissan, the son of a rabbi who becomes a disciple of “the prophet Marx” and who, as Singer puts it, “never let his copy of Das Kapital out of his sight and carried it everywhere, as his father had carried his prayer shawl and phylacteries.” Podhoretz comes back to this theme toward the end, quoting G.K. Chesterton as observing: “When men stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.” That was not true of the Jewish immigrants who came to America, Podhoretz writes. “Almost all the young intellectuals and political leaders among them had stopped believing in the God of Judaism, but it was not ‘anything’ they now believed, it was Marxism.” And when Marxism failed, Podhoretz writes, the “same process that had made social democracy into an acceptable refuge from orthodox Marxism now began making liberalism into an acceptable refuge from social democracy.”

Is all lost? It happens that I read Podhoretz’s book as I was at work on a short biography of the founding editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, Abraham Cahan, and I was struck at how closely the trajectory Podhoretz describes followed that traversed by Cahan. It turns out that the bitterest feud of Cahan’s life was not that with the Orthodox Jews of his hometown in Lithuania, nor the monarchists he plotted against in Russia, nor the capitalists he railed against in America, nor the Zionists he slighted for years, nor the Communists he turned against in the 1920s. Those feuds certainly were epic. But his bitterest moment erupted in the late 1930s, when his star writer, Sholem Asch, wrote a novel, The Nazarene, suggesting Jesus should be regarded by Jews as he was regarded by Christians. Then, even while protesting that he was not religious, Cahan went into a final frenzy, denouncing Asch as a traitor and a destroyed person. He wouldn’t let up, turning out articles, speeches and even a book until, alas, he was silenced by a stroke and leaving to the next generations the search for that line in liberalism that they just won’t cross.

It is a moment when Obama might want to read a short opinion handed down in 1992 by the Supreme Court in a case called United States v. Alvarez-Machain. It involves a citizen of Mexico, Humberto Alvarez Machain, who was indicted for participating in the kidnapping and murder of a special agent of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, Enrique Camarena Salazar, and a pilot working with him. Alvarez, a medical doctor, allegedly aided in that crime by, as former Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist put it, “prolonging agent Camarena’s life so that others could further torture and interrogate him.”

On April 2, 1990, Alvarez was, Rehnquist wrote, “forcibly kidnapped from his medical office in Guadalajara, Mexico, to be flown by private plane to El Paso, Texas, where he was arrested by DEA officials.” A United States district court, Rehnquist noted, “concluded that DEA agents were responsible for respondent’s abduction, although they were not personally involved in it.” Alvarez then tried to dismiss the indictment, claiming, as Rehnquist characterized it, “that his abduction constituted outrageous governmental conduct.”

That argument was rejected by the district court, which nevertheless reckoned that his abduction violated America’s extradition treaty with Mexico. It ordered that Alvarez be sent back to Mexico. The riders of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit turned out to be of a similarly delicate mind. They may have been moved by letters of protest from the Mexican government to the American government. But when the matter got to the Supreme Court, it turned out that the justices were made of sterner stuff.

One of the cases Rehnquist cited was United States v. Rauscher, in which the court prohibited the prosecution of a defendant brought to America from England for a crime not covered in the extradition treaty between the two countries. It decided that Rauscher could be tried only for one of the offenses described in the treaty. It seems that once an extradition treaty is followed, the government’s hands are bound by the terms of the treaty.

But Rehnquist then cited another case, Ker v. Illinois, involving a thief named Frederick Ker, who had been convicted in an Illinois court for larceny but was hiding out in Peru. Ker’s “presence before the court,” as Rehnquist so delicately put it, “was procured by means of forcible abduction from Peru.” Precisely because Ker wasn’t brought back via an extradition process, the court decided, Ker’s claims to rights under extradition law could be, and were, rejected.

The court later cited “Ker” in upholding the right of Michigan to try a man named Shirley Collins, whom it had allegedly seized, “blackjacked,” and brought back to the Wolverine state. “This Court,” wrote Justice Hugo Black, “has never departed from the rule announced in [“Ker”] that the power of a court to try a person for crime is not impaired by the fact that he had been brought within the court’s jurisdiction by reason of a ‘forcible abduction.’”

Rehnquist and most of his colleagues took such a view in the Mexican case. They rejected claims that the mere existence of an extradition treaty ruled out the use of other means than extradition to bring a fugitive to justice here. Rehnquist went through a scholarly explication. He noted that Alvarez and others who filed briefs in his case “may be correct that respondent’s abduction was ‘shocking,’” as it was put in oral arguments. But he concluded that the fact of Alvarez’s “forcible abduction does not therefore prohibit his trial in a court in the United States for violations of the criminal laws of the United States.”

Charges against Alvarez here were eventually dismissed for lack of evidence, and he was sent home. But his case suggests that if Obama can, without breaking other Americans laws, find a way to use covert means to bring al-Megrahi to America and to put him on trial here, the Supreme Court itself is unlikely to be over-punctilious about the fact that a formal extradition process wasn’t used. So it becomes a test of how serious the president, his secretary of state, and the director of the FBI were when they expressed their outrage over Scotland’s decision to let the killer go home, ostensibly on “humanitarian” grounds.

If Obama were to act, no doubt the Libyans would be fit to be tied, as would, for that matter, the British and the Scots. But the British and the Scots have been thoroughly discredited in this case, as has the United Nations. So much so that bringing al-Megrahi to a prison here to serve out the remainder of his term would support the cause of justice—and serve notice on the world that America will not be trifled with by foreign courts in cases in which acts of war and murder have been committed against our citizens and our carriers.

And imagine what wonders such an action would do for Obama’s standing in the polls. One of his predecessors, Ronald Reagan, discovered this when he held the air traffic controllers to account. They are not comparable to al-Megrahi by any means, but Reagan signaled his view that the law is the law, and it needs to be enforced and to be seen as being enforced. Obama is apparently prepared to take action even against our own intelligence agents whom he deems to have broken the law during interrogations. What would stop him from using all the precedent the Supreme Court has provided him in pursuing a terrorist who killed 270 persons in one of the most infamous crimes in history?

The slaughter that took place in 1929 was part of a series of attacks on Jews. On August 17 in Jerusalem, in what was later seen as a portent, a Jewish boy had been stabbed to death. The killings in Hebron were particularly barbaric, with Arabs wielding hatchets against yeshiva students and women and babies. Before the affrays—to use the word the New York Sun used in its editorial of the time—had passed, scores had been slaughtered.

The story is retold in gruesome detail in a just-published book, Hebron Jews, by a professor of history at Wellesley, Jerold Auerbach. I have known Auerbach for years, as our mothers were cousins, and have admired his work on both labor and Jewish subjects. He uses the skills of a long-tenured professor to remind us not only of the importance of the Hebron story, from Abraham’s original contract on a burial site for Sarah to the return of the Hebron Jews of our generation, but also of its ironies.

Back in 1929 the Jews who called themselves “settlers” were the relatively secular Zionists who lived on the Mediterranean coast and in northern Eretz Israel. The Jews of Hebron had dwelled there intermittently for thousands of years and continuously since the expulsion from Spain in 1492. In the 1920s there was an influx of young scholars from a Lithuanian yeshiva, Knessett Israel. Their arrival coincided with rising tensions throughout Palestine. By August, trouble was sensed by the one British police officer in the town, Raymond Cafferata. He was told by both Arabs and Jews in Hebron that “any trouble” was “out of the question.”

Yet that same week a Jewish teacher named Haim Bagayo was warned, “This time we are going to butcher you all.” Earlier that day, there had been clashes in Jerusalem, in which three Arabs and three Jews died. The Jews of Hebron, Auerbach writes, “refused to believe that their Arab neighbors, with whom they had lived in relatively peaceful coexistence for four centuries, meant them harm.” Cafferata noted that in Hebron “everything appeared normal.” But before the day was out, Arabs began to attack Jews with clubs, and Jewish shops were quickly shuttered.

The first to die was a student, Shmuel Rosenhaltz, who was set upon as he studied, alone, in the main yeshiva. The Jews were warned to stay inside their homes. Early the next morning, Arabs, screaming “Allah akbar” and “Itbach al Yahud,” or “kill the Jews,” began surging through the streets. Two Jewish youths were stoned to death outside the house of the Heichel family. Some 70 Jews sought refuge inside a relatively large house, owned by Eliezer Dan Slonim. Almost the whole family of Slonim—his wife, Hannah, and their son, his father-in-law, who was the chief rabbi of Zichron Yaakov, and his wife—were among 22 persons who were clubbed or stabbed to death and, in some cases, disemboweled. The Slonim’s one-year son survived, having been hidden under dying Jews.

Rabbi Hanoch Hasson was murdered, along with his family. A pharmacist, Ben-Zion Gershon, who’d served both Arabs and Jews, “had his eyes gouged out before he was stabbed to death,” Auerbach relates. His wife’s hands were cut off before she and their daughter were killed. Mr. Goldshmidt was tortured, his head held over a kerosene flame, before he, his wife, and one of their daughters were killed. Twenty-three corpses were discovered in the Anglo Palestine Bank, where women were raped on a floor covered with thick pools of congealing blood. Rabbis Meir Kastel and Tzvi Dabkin and five of their students were tortured and castrated before being murdered. The killings went on for two hours, and the final death toll reached 67.

In the aftermath, the left tended to support the Arabs. The Forward, a pro-labor paper, broke sharply with the comrades, siding instead with the religious Jews and praising those, albeit those few, who were reported to have fought back. One American writer, Maurice Samuel, who’d been visiting Eretz Israel at the time, wrote a book about the event titled, What Happened in Palestine? Like a number of other Zionists, he focused blame on the Mandatory authorities, while insisting relations between Jews and Arabs were broadly amicable. The sheik who incited the slaughter served a month in prison. Any moral standing of the Mandate, if it had ever existed, drained away.

In the years after the establishment of the Jewish state, when Jordan ruled Hebron, the vestiges of Jewish presence were obliterated. The ruins of the Avraham Avinu synagogue were razed and its site given over to an animal pen. Houses of Jewish learning were converted to Arab schools. The ancient Jewish cemetery was torn up. Jews did not return until 1967, when the chief rabbi of the Israeli Army, Shlomo Goren, commandeered a jeep and, carrying a Torah scroll, Israeli flag, and shofar, raced to Machpelah, becoming the first Jew to enter the burial place of the patriarchs and matriarchs in 700 years.

In 1968, a group of Jews, lead by Rabbi Moshe Levinger and his family and animated by Zionist fundamentals and reverence for the patriarchs, moved back to Hebron and have been there ever since, often, it seems, to the consternation not only of the diplomats and the Arabs but even of many Israelis, some of the Jewish institutions, and of the current administration in Washington. The date on which Levinger and his followers mark the anniversary of the massacre is known by the acronym Tarpat, for the Hebrew date, which has just passed. Their community has posted to the internet a group of photos of some of those who perished and of the desecration of religious objects. A lot of things have been said about the Hebron Jews. But one thing that cannot be said is that they are prepared to abandon Hebron in the face of the kinds of danger that overwhelmed their forebears 80 years ago.

I met Aquino only once, but I will never forget it. Her husband, Senator Benigno Aquino, known as Ninoy, had been, since 1980, in exile, which he was then spending at Harvard. Foreign editor of The Wall Street Journal at the time, I had invited three friends to meet the Aquinos over dinner at an Italian restaurant in the north end of Boston. Although I had met the senator once or twice, we were all strangers to him. Yet he talked openly of his eagerness to end his exile and return to his country.

At one point, he looked at us and asked, “What would you say if I were to throw in with the violent factions?” Before I could stammer a question about whether he was serious, his wife cut him off, slapping the table with a sharp thwack, and said, “Ninoy, don’t even think about it.” She clearly had, even then, her own sense of how to carry their common cause. It was a memorable glimpse of her judgment in a long dinner filled with the telling of the senator’s story.

Not long thereafter, on August 13, 1983, Sen. Aquino flew home from exile, reaching Manila, after several stops, on August 21. When the plane came to a halt on the apron, a military detail boarded. Its members escorted him off. As he stepped onto the tarmac, he was slain by a single shot to the head. In all my years as a newspaper editor, I cannot recall pulling from the Teletype a more astounding piece of news.

As the pictures of Aquino lying on the tarmac flashed around the globe, any legitimacy that the Marcos regime might persist in claiming drained away like the blood from Aquino himself. Marcos would suggest the Communists ordered the assassination, but it no longer mattered what Marcos said. The peaceful revolution that followed is one of the most remarkable chapters in all the story of democracy. It was never more eloquently told than by his widow herself, when, six months after having been finally swept into power in February1986, she came to Washington.

On YouTube one can see and hear the prim stateswoman relate how the task had fallen on her shoulders “to continue offering the democratic alternative” to the Philippine people. She quoted Archibald MacLeish as saying that democracy “must be defended by arms when it is attacked by arms and by truth when it is attacked by lies.” When she decided to participate in the Philippine election of 1984, she said, she’d been warned by her own side’s lawyers “that I ran the grave risk of legitimizing the forgone results of an election that were clearly going to be fraudulent.”

But she reasoned that such a gamble was “the only way I knew by which we could measure our power.” Following the vote, the regime sought to relegate but a third of the parliament to the opposition. “Now I knew our power,” she told the Congress. The regime then blundered, calling a second, snap election. A million signatures were then proffered to place Corazon Aquino in contention. When “armed goons crashed the polling places,” she said, weeping women “tied themselves to the ballot boxes.”

This time Aquino acted before a fraudulent result could be confected. She declared “the people’s victory.” As our own Congress sat in rapt attention she vowed: “As I came to power peacefully, so shall I keep it. That is my contract with my people and my commitment to God. He had willed that the blood drawn with the lash should not in my country be paid by blood drawn by the sword but by the tearful joy of reconciliation.”

Then she issued a famous warning—that neither would she “stand by and allow an insurgent leadership to spurn our offer of peace and kill our young soldiers and threaten our new freedom.” Here is how she put it: “I must explore the path of peace to the utmost for at its end whatever disappointment I meet there is the moral basis for laying down the olive branch of peace and taking up the sword of war.”

* * *

In the event, Aquino did pick up the sword against enemies that even today target the Philippine democracy—and our own. She explained her decision in remarks to graduating military cadets. “The answer to the terrorism of the left and the right is not social and economic reform, but police and military action,” she was quoted as saying by The New York Times’ Seth Mydans, who had covered the Philippines for years. Mydans called her decision “one of the most striking retreats of her presidency.” Others will see it as but one of the courageous moves that marked the career of a giant.

President Obama spoke over the weekend of how Corazon Aquino’s leadership is an inspiration. Yet it has to be said that she challenged and defeated, in Ferdinand Marcos, a dictator who was prepared to use the kind of thuggery typical of the tyrants with whom Obama is prepared to parley and in whose affairs he has been loath to meddle. Things might have gone either way during the nearly three years that it took Aquino’s movement to triumph over a dictator. When she came to the Congress it was to thank those Americans who, in the current parlance, meddled in favor of democracy precisely when freedom was in the balance.

According to one report, in the Australian, Lieberman intended to counter the American argument that Israel should not allow a 20-apartment development on the site of a former hotel previously owned by the family of the mufti who had sat with Hitler. The site, in the eastern part of Israel’s capital city, was purchased by a Jewish group that is seeking to extend Jewish ownership in the quarter through private acquisition.

“Crude and diversionary” is how Lieberman’s line of thinking is described by the Guardian newspaper’s Middle East editor, Ian Black, who reports that the demarche is “directly related” to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “insistence that he will not give in to international demands to freeze Israeli settlement activity.” The Middle East correspondent of the Australian, John Lyons, quotes one source as telling the newspaper that inside Israel’s own foreign ministry the instruction was met with “laughter, skepticism and a sense of misplaced communication that this doesn’t help one bit the real argument.”

Maybe he should have asked the diplomats’ mothers. Certainly the fact that the Palestinian Arabs hewed to Hitler was understood by an earlier generation as fundamental. It was marked over and over again by such great liberal institutions as the Forward newspaper. The error of the Arabs was compounded as they refused—in sharp contradistinction to, say, the Germans—to make an effort to educate their people to the facts of what happened under Hitler and what it all meant. It seems they wanted the world not to regret but to forget.

The mufti whose picture Lieberman wants circulated was born in 1893, as political Zionism was being organized. I last wrote about him for the Wall Street Journal’s website, when, in August 2001, the German foreign minister was trying to organize a Mideast peace powwow in Berlin. I suggested that such a conference would be haunted by el-Husseini. The mufti didn’t just pass through Berlin during the war. He was in Berlin for three years between 1941 and 1945. Hitler, in the meeting that Lieberman wants people to remember, reassured the mufti that after dealing with the Jews the Germans would turn their attention to liberating the Arabs.

As one of the mufti’s biographers, Joseph Schechtman, tells the story, the mufti went on to build up “a truly world-wide network of anti-Allied activities,” including broadcasting propaganda against the Jews, England, and America. He maneuvered furiously to block the ability of Jews to escape Hitler by going to Palestine. After the war, the mufti ended up in France and was eventually allowed to escape to Cairo.

Sympathetic biographers have tried to suggest that the mufti’s maneuvering in Berlin fell somewhat short of outright collaboration. One, Phillip Mattar, has suggested the Zionists were so eager to prove the mufti guilty of collaboration and war crimes that they exaggerated his connections to the Nazis. But he acknowledges that “the Mufti and other Arabs were so busy justifying his statements and actions in the Axis countries that they ignored the obvious and overwhelming fact that the Mufti had cooperated with the most barbaric regime in modern times.”

Jeffrey Goldberg, in a dispatch issued by The New York Times in January 2008, considered the question of how the anti-Jewish ideas being used by Iranian agencies such as Hezbollah were able to “work their way into modern-day Islamist discourse.” He reasons that they were imported from Europe, and quoted a German scholar, Matthias Küntzel, as warning of their seriousness. Küntzel, Goldberg noted, “makes a bold and consequential argument: the dissemination of European models of anti-Semitism among Muslims was not haphazard, but an actual project of the Nazi Party, meant to turn Muslims against Jews and Zionism.”

Küntzel was quoted by Goldberg as saying that the mufti and the “Egyptian proto-Islamist” Hassan al-Banna “willingly and knowingly carried Nazi ideology directly to the Muslim masses.” Goldberg reckons that Hassan al-Banna “did not embrace Nazism in the same uncomplicated manner” as the mufti, but he quotes Küntzel as saying his movement was subsidized with German funds that enabled it to, among other things, distribute Arabic translations of, among other tomes, Mein Kampf. He quoted Küntzel as writing that across the Arab world, “Nazi methods and ideology whipped up anti-Zionist fervor, and the effects of this concerted campaign are still being felt today.”

Goldberg offered a caveat, saying that “one doesn’t have to be soft on Germany to believe it was organic Muslim ideas as well as Nazi ideas that led to the spread of anti-Semitism in the Middle East.” But he concluded that Küntzel was “right to state that we are witnessing a terrible explosion of anti-Jewish hatred in the Middle East.” Goldberg quoted his own interview with a former leader of Hamas, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, who said: “The question is not what the Germans did to the Jews, but what the Jews did to the Germans.” Goldberg ended by quoting Küntzel as arguing that we should see men like Rantisi for what they are: heirs to the mufti, and heirs to the Nazis.

In other words, the more one gets into it, the more it is plain that Avigdor Lieberman knows just what he is doing—and is doing it for good reason.

Seth Lipsky is a columnist for Tablet. He can be reached at slipsky@tabletmag.com.

The president did a fine job in the interview, according to the participants. He was friendly and relaxed, re-avowing his commitment to the existence of the Jewish state but also insistent on America’s right to have differences with Israel. Two aides, David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel, were with the president, who spent the hour mostly on Israel’s relations with the Palestinians, the wider issues in the Arab world, and Iran.

The headline question was put to Obama by the vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, Malcolm Hoenlein. A lively account of it was up on Jeffrey Goldberg’s Web log within minutes of the meeting. It quoted Jeremy Ben Ami of J-Street paraphrasing Hoenlein, who suggested that “history shows that progress is made on the peace front when Israel and the U.S. are in lockstep and there’s no daylight between them on their position publicly.”

The president disagreed. “For eight years under the prior administration,” Ben Ami quoted the president saying, “there was no daylight between the two sides and there was no progress on the peace front, and no hard decisions were confronted, no progress was made.”

In other words, it’s George W. Bush’s fault. It’s not that one is shocked, shocked to find political jibes being uttered in the White House, and not even I would argue that Israel and America need to be in lock-step. My own view has long been that, if peace is the goal, then the right policy for America is to shadow whatever government Israelis elect a bit to the hawkish side, so that we are never caught between Israel and her enemies. But it’s startling that he got so little, if any, pushback when he suggested that no hard decisions were confronted. We’ve just come through a period, after all, when the government in Jerusalem decided, to the cheers of the peace camp, to uproot forcibly the Jews who’d settled in Gaza and to impose wrenching retreat—only to be met with yet more war.

To at least one participant it seemed as if there was a kind of unstated assumption in the conversation—that the settlements were, in the main, not a good thing and were even part of the problem. Rabbi Eric Yoffie, a friend to whom I often turn when trying to fathom liberal thinking, told me after the meeting, which he attended, that the major institutions within his movement, which he characterizes as the largest grass roots movement in American Jewry, are against the settlements.

So I asked Rabbi Yoffie about the “accounting of the soul” that he had gone through after the rejection of Camp David II and the launch of the Second Intifada. The phrase was from a speech he delivered at Cleveland in 2001. I’d written about it in on the Wall Street Journal’s Website at the time. Back then Rabbi Yoffie said the crisis in Israel had led him to re-examine his most fundamental assumptions about the Middle East. He had gone so far as to review all that he had said and written during the past five years as well as all the resolutions of the board and assembly of what was then called the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the umbrella group for Reform Judaism.

“With that review complete,” the rabbi said back then, “I share with you my feeling that we have been wrong about some very important things. We have been wrong not so much in what we have said, but rather in what we have not said. We have been wrong in not understanding the full complexity of the threat that Israel faces.” First and foremost, he said, “we have been wrong about Palestinian intentions. We believed, along with our allies in the peace camp, that if an Israeli prime minister would be brave enough to say that Israel must choose peace over territories, the Palestinian Authority would also choose peace.”

That was at the start of another administration. Now Rabbi Yoffie says simply that it is one thing to be skeptical about the prospects for peace (he still is) and another to countenance actions, like building settlements, that preclude peace. Which seems to be the logic of the peace camp—and the administration—as we approach the 80th anniversary of August 1929, when the Jews were driven out of Hebron. The one leader in the Conference of Presidents who might have been counted on to speak up for the Jews who have returned to Hebron and other settlements, Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America, wasn’t at the meeting with President Obama.

When I asked Rabbi Yoffie about that, I didn’t detect a lot of regret. There was a time, though, when a leading figure in Reform Judaism, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, was head of the ZOA. It is something to read from this remove Silver’s speech at Madison Square Garden, where, in 1955, he thundered about the folly of what we now call land for peace. As his rage grew over the next two years, Silver dressed down the American administration mercilessly for pressuring Israel—going so far as to say at one point that some of its members had become afflicted with “the same blindness which formerly afflicted the Mandatory Power in its dealings with the Arabs and Jews.”

So what, in fact, have we learned? I telephoned Klein and asked him why he wasn’t at the meeting. He said he’d been told by his friends in Washington that one can’t criticize a president with the harshness Klein has used in respect to Obama and expect to get invited to the president’s house. Fair enough. Bergson never got in to see the president, either, though the treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, did step up. Bergson ended up organizing a protest of 400 Orthodox rabbis outside the White House, which helped throw the situation into sharp relief. It’s a reminder that, from the long perspective of history, there are times when it’s not the worst thing in the world to be on the outside looking in.

Seth Lipsky’s column for Tablet runs every other Wednesday. He can be reached at slipsky@tabletmag.com.

Now there would be an illuminating witness at the Sotomayor hearing. Guinier was a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania when Clinton, at the start of his presidency, nominated her to be assistant attorney general for civil rights. The nomination was greeted by a front-page dispatch in the Forward, of which I was then editor, quoting articles she’d written arguing that civil-rights law required the election of minorities.

Quite a tumult followed that story, particularly after The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed piece under the headline “Quota Queen.” It resonated because the new administration was being tested in respect of first principles. Word soon went out from the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was headed by then-senator Joe Biden and included Senator Patrick Leahy, now the committee’s chair, that Guinier was too controversial. Clinton withdrew the nomination, saying he’d been reading her writings and found them troubling.

At the Forward, we’d been troubled by her writings, too, though we favored giving her a hearing. I often wondered what the professor would have said had the Senate had the decency to give her one. Then, in 2004, I sat down to review a collection of political essays by Hendrik Hertzberg, an editor at The New Yorker. The volume contained several pieces that touched on the Guinier affair, and it advanced one of the ideas that caused her so much trouble—proportional representation.

This is a system in which a winning party doesn’t take all. Instead a legislature is divvied up proportionally among parties. Proportional representation is in use in various parts of Europe and in Israel. It hasn’t won a lot of admirers here in America, though it was tried in New York City in the 1930s and 1940s. Its “main result,” I noted in a review of the Hertzberg collection, had been the admission of a communist faction onto the City Council. When proportional representation was repealed in New York in the late 1940s, the original New York Sun called it the communists’ worst defeat since they took over the American Labor Party.

Hertzberg promptly sent me a note expressing doubt that the elevation of the communists had been the main result of proportional representation in New York. “My impression,” Hertzberg wrote, “is that its results also included representation for other political minorities.” He mentioned, among others, Republicans. Hertzberg’s note, I wrote in a rejoinder, “caused me to sit up a bit straighter in my chair and stroke my chin, smiling at the thought of proportional representation as a way to elevate more Republicans to a City Council that is dominated by the left.”

Eventually I received an email from Guinier herself. My review had mentioned that the American Labor Party had followed up on the era of proportional representation by running Ewart Guinier, Lani Guinier’s father, for borough president of Manhattan. Lani Guinier wrote to tell me that proportional representation was not something she had discussed with her father, who had died in 1990 after a long bout with Alzheimer’s. In fact, she had not started writing about it until her father was well along in the disease.

Her interest in proportional representation, she wrote, was an outgrowth “of my concerns, after litigating cases in the South, that the single member districting strategy was not fulfilling its promise.” She said that when she became an academic, she “returned to explore further the questions that had haunted me from my litigating days. I also recalled learning about forms of PR in my corporations course at Yale Law School (since it is the way many corporations elect their board of directors).” She said that proportional representation had once been called by the head of the Citizens Union, Henry Stern—no leftist—the “golden age” of the City Council.

So one day I traveled to Cambridge and called on Guinier in her office at the law school. I was eager to ask her, among other things, about Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s campaign for non-partisan elections. I didn’t share the mayor’s annoyance with parties, and The New York Sun, now revived under my editorship, campaigned against his scheme, which the voters defeated. But I was troubled that the Republicans had been for so long been unable to gain but a toehold in the New York City Council, not to mention the State Assembly in Albany.

Guinier’s replies to me were off the record, but I don’t think it would be a violation of the ground rules to say that she struck me as not only exceptionally gracious but also extremely smart. I subsequently wrote a column in the Sun reprising all this and suggesting that Bloomberg invite her to lunch as he considered the next approach to charter revision in the city. And I invited Henry Stern of the Citizen’s Union to write a piece endorsing the possibility of proportional representation as a route to reform in the city.

Which leads me back to Sotomayor. She has just been overruled by the Supreme Court in the case of the New Haven firefighters, and we may be at the end of the era of affirmative action of the kind New Haven was using. But that doesn’t mean that the problems of racial bigotry—and other forms of exclusion—have been solved in our society. Not even conservatives like myself believe that. Guinier herself was quoted in The New York Times the other day as saying that the debate over Sotomayor’s nomination was, as the Times characterized it, “an opportunity for civil rights advocates to push back against the kind of criticism that had thwarted her own nomination.” I, for one, would be in a mood to hear what she has to say.

Bush spoke on May 15, 2008. He began by quoting Ben Gurion’s proclamation, declaring that Israel possessed a “natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate.” The president of the United States called it “the redemption of an ancient promise given to Abraham and Moses and David—a homeland for the chosen people: Eretz Yisrael.” He recalled how America recognized the Jewish state 11 minutes after the declaration. He characterized the “alliance between our governments” as “unbreakable” but he asserted that the “source of our friendship runs deeper than any treaty.” He spoke of the “bonds of the Book” and the “ties of the soul.”

The president recalled that when William Bradford stepped off the Mayflower, he quoted the words of Jeremiah: “Come let us declare in Zion the word of God.” He spoke of how the founders of America “saw a new promised land” and gave their towns names like Bethlehem and New Canaan. His words were those of a man who has read and thought about how the idea of Israel was intertwined with the idea of America going back to James Madison, say, or Samuel Adams and of why, as he put it to the Knesset, “many Americans became passionate advocates for a Jewish state.”

Bush also spoke of the “suffering and sacrifice [that] would pass before the dream was fulfilled.” He spoke of the “soulless men” who perpetrated the Holocaust, and he quoted Elie Wiesel. He described the joyous tears of a “fearless woman raised in Wisconsin,” Golda Meir, when the dream of a state was fulfilled. He spoke of touching the Western Wall, seeing the sun reflected in the Sea of Galilee, of praying at Yad Vashem and visiting Masada and he swore the oath that Israeli soldiers swear: “Masada shall never fall again.”

Then the president turned to the principles that guide American policy—“shared convictions,” he called them, “rooted in moral clarity and un-swayed by popularity polls or the shifting opinions of international elites.” That led to an articulation of democracy as “the only way to ensure human rights,” and he spoke of how the United Nations has singled out Israel as a target of its human rights resolutions and declared that Americans consider it “a source of shame.”

He expressed the belief that George Washington had spoken of more than two centuries previously—that, as Mr. Bush put it, “religious liberty is fundamental to a civilized society.” He declared that Americans “condemn anti-Semitism in all forms—whether by those who openly question Israel’s right to exist, or by others who quietly excuse them.” He disputed that terrorists acting in the name of religion are religious men. “No one who prays to the God of Abraham could strap a suicide vest to an innocent child, or blow up guiltless guests at a Passover Seder, or fly planes into office buildings filled with unsuspecting workers,” he said. “They accept no God before themselves.”

He spoke specifically of Hezbollah, Hamas and the Iranians and of calls for Israel to be wiped off the map. “There are good and decent people who cannot fathom the darkness in these men and try to explain away their words.” He called such reactions “natural” but “deadly wrong.” He remarked on how “[s]ome seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.” Then he quoted the American senator who, in 1939, declared, “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.”

This is where he warned of the “false comfort of appeasement.” He rejected the suggestions of some that “if the United States would just break ties with Israel, all our problems in the Middle East would go away.” He argued that permitting “the world’s leading sponsor of terror to possess the world’s deadliest weapons would be an unforgivable betrayal for future generations.” Then he marked the point that was so prescient in respect of what is happening on the streets of Tehran today.

“Leaders who are accountable to their people will not pursue endless confrontation and bloodshed,” he said. “Young people with a place in their society and a voice in their future are less likely to search for meaning in radicalism. Societies where citizens can express their conscience and worship their God will not export violence; they will be partners in peace. The fundamental insight, that freedom yields peace, is the great lesson of the 20th century. Now our task is to apply it to the 21st.”

So the president declared that America “must stand with the reformers working to break the old patterns of tyranny and despair” and “give voice to millions of ordinary people who dream for a better life in a free society.” He warned of “violent resistance.” But said with faith in our ideals he could imagine “Israel celebrating the 120th anniversary as one of the world’s great democracies, a secure and flourishing homeland for the Jewish people.” And he foresaw the rest of the Middle East as having been transformed, the terrorists defeated, and the region entering “a new period of tolerance and integration.”

Bush’s remarks were greeted by derision and controversy in the Arab press. One website that tracks foreign press reports ran a headline calling the speech an “act of lunacy” and quoted the chairman of Egypt’s Al-Ahram newspaper as complaining that the president’s remarks “appeared to have been lifted almost word-for-word from the Torah.” When reporters asked Senator Joseph Biden about Mr. Bush’s speech, the then-Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee reacted by swearing, according to the New York Times. The Democrats were apparently under the impression that Bush was talking about President-to-be Obama. But now blood is running in the streets of Tehran and a new American president is debating whether to speak in a way that might be construed as meddling. One way to judge whatever he says would be to compare it to the standard President Bush set a year ago in Jerusalem.