TABLET MAGAZINE
Between Two Promised Lands
by Ari Blaff
September 24, 2019

…In the book [We Stand Divided]’s most stimulating and provocative chapter, Gordis presents American and Israeli conceptions of democracy as being fundamentally at odds.  In the U.S., politics have been organized around the right to free and equal exchange in the public square, Gordis argues, and American Jews acculturated into this system have come to idealize a form of “naked” democracy, utterly stripped of all cultural symbols. Such “hypercivility,” as Gordis describes it, is incompatible with the Jewish particularism that is a founding mission of Israel, a nation created, after all, not to enshrine universal values but to ensure the survival of a single people. READ MORE