Excerpted from Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West, out today by Josh Hammer (© 2025). Used with permission from Radius Book Group, a division of Diversion Publishing.
If the West is going to survive as a semi-concrete entity and not either be subsumed into an amorphous global neoliberal blob or be conquered by wokeism and Islamism, it is imperative that its core constituent parts all stand boldly together. Specifically, Western Jews and Christians must stand shoulder-to-shoulder like never before. Immense theological and eschatological differences that will not be bridged any time soon must be put aside in favor of a focus on Jews’ and Christians’ overwhelming moral and civilizational-historical overlap as the two preservers of our biblical inheritance, on the one hand, and the urgent practical necessity of forging a united front.
The Judeo-Christian tradition, which began with God’s world-transforming revelation to the incipient Israelite nation at Mount Sinai, birthed Western civilization and has nourished it over the course of thousands of years. The West’s manifold gifts to the world all directly or indirectly flow from this great patrimony. If Western civilization is now going to prevail as a distinct entity and resist the existential challenges posed by stifling globalism, metastasizing wokeism, and subjugating Islamism, it is going to require the West to rededicate itself to that very inherited Judeo-Christian tradition.
Both Jews and Christians have distinct and indispensable roles to play.
For Christians, adherents of the West’s dominant religion, it is imperative to internalize the basic truth that the civilization they were so instrumental in building and developing is largely predicated upon values and principles derived from the Hebrew Bible. And it is not just the Hebrew Bible—and the Talmud—that has been so central to the formation of Western civilization as a unique strand of the human experience. Rather, it is also the Jews themselves—the original preservers of our biblical inheritance, who introduced monotheism to the world—who have always been foundational to the entire construct.
As Eric Hoffer, known as the “longshoreman philosopher,” wrote in a 1968 essay, “I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish, the holocaust will be upon us.” Hoffer was referring to the State of Israel, writing in the aftermath of the Jewish state’s miraculous victory in the Six Day War one year prior. But his sentiment holds true not only for the specific State of Israel, but also for the broader nation of Israel—the Jewish people.
Through the centuries, those who have sought to physically or intellectually conquer the West have taken a peculiar interest in targeting the Jews. There are reasons for this focus. The Jew is an enduring testimony of God’s existence, His Kingdom, and His Divine Will. The Jew is a living, breathing testament to the fact that God has affirmative expectations of us, and expects us to think, act, and more generally live our lives within certain moral parameters. Jewish life—including, but hardly limited to, the perpetuation and thriving of the modern State of Israel—is thus an incessant nagging weight on the World’s collective moral conscience.
Thus, Jew-hatred is pervasive, diffuse, and supra-rational. Jew-hatred affects Jews of all levels of observance (fully assimilated, fully Torah-observant, or somewhere in between)—because the Jew represents more than himself as an individual person. The fact that he is a Jew, no matter how secular or assimilated his station in life or how lowly his behavior, recalls that there is such a thing as a “Jew”—and a distinct, particularist Jewish people. That Jewish people, in turn, has a specific heritage of God’s covenant, His promising them the Land of Israel, His liberating them from Egyptian bondage, His giving them His Torah, His protecting them in the wilderness, and His settling them in the Land of Israel wherein they established a kingdom and built a permanent home for Him in that kingdom’s united capital, Jerusalem.
The stifling centripetal forces of globalism despise the defiant particularism of the Jewish nation and the modern Jewish state. The globalists’ impulse is to homogenize and stamp out all underlying differences, in line with the insidious message of John Lennon’s well-known song, “Imagine.” For the intellectual and geopolitical homogenizer, there can be no greater foe than the Jewish people, bound as they are by the particularist Mosaic Law and inextricably intertwined with the particular Land of Israel promised to them thousands of years ago.
To celebrate human variation and resist forced conformity means supporting the eternal symbol of the particularist refusal to assimilate into the masses: the Jew. Christians who want to safeguard their own traditions from the globalist and neoliberal imperialists in the lions’ dens of Turtle Bay, Brussels, and so forth will find no better allies than the Jews. The Jews’ entire existence, to say nothing of their flourishing, necessarily hinges on successfully thwarting the centripetal force of modern global neoliberalism.
But it is not merely the hegemonic globalists and intellectual conformists who have a rather large bone to pick with the Jews. It is also atheists, reprobates, and all those who seek to rupture and ultimately sever Western civilization from its underlying monotheistic moral basis—and thus destroy the West itself as a concrete entity.
Christianity, after all, derives from Judaism. The Second Vatican Council’s official Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions (“Nostra Aetate“), promulgated in 1965, officially affirmed the “common patrimony” and “spiritual bond” that unites Christians and Jews. Quoting the New Testament, Nostra Aetate also referred to the Jewish people as the “good olive branch onto which has been grafted the wild shoot, the Gentiles.” Pope John Paul II elaborated further in 1986 during his visit to the Great Synagogue of Rome, where he famously declared: “The Jewish religion is not extrinsic to us, but in a certain way is intrinsic to our own religion. With Judaism we have a relationship we do not have with any other religion. You are our dearly beloved brothers, and in a certain way our elder brothers.” Decades earlier, as looming war gripped the European Continent in 1938, John Paul II’s predecessor, Pius XI, declared that anti-Semitism is “incompatible” with Christianity and ought to be “inadmissible,” since Christians “are all spiritually Semites.”
Josh Hammer is Newsweek senior editor-at-large, host of “The Josh Hammer Show,” and author of the new book, Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West (Radius Book Group, March 18). Subscribe here for “The Josh Hammer Report,” a Newsweek newsletter. X: @josh_hammer.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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