Todd Gitlin thought he knew American history. The Columbia University professor had always viewed the nation’s origins through the filter of the Enlightenment and its edified pantheon: Jefferson, Madison, Franklin.
He now views America as a nation founded on a bedrock of religious zeal, its citizens believing themselves to be a chosen people.
Sound familiar?
It should to most Jews, for whom chosenness lies at the core of Judaism. The American-born Gitlin and his friend, Israeli journalist Liel Leibovitz, wondered whether their two societies shared similar understandings about this curious notion.
The result is their book, “The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election.” It’s a lengthy compare-and-contrast essay, with the authors ultimately concluding that for both Israel and the United States, chosenness is here to stay, like it or not.
“We started with the assumption that the idea of chosenness on the part of the Jews was a very risky presumption,” said Gitlin, recently in the Bay Area as part of a book tour. “Jews have been troubled by what this means.”
Maybe so, but it also further stiffened the necks of the stiff-necked people. Thanks to chosenness, Gitlin said, the Jewish people survived centuries of persecution, as well as developing monotheism and the modern Zionist dream.
Similarly, Americans early on viewed their nation as blessed –– the “city on a hill,” as Puritan leader John Winthrop put it. American-style chosenness fueled the growth of the country (see: Manifest Destiny), yet it also invoked the wrath of other nations, indignant over what they saw as America’s smug superiority.
“The way in which America thinks of itself as exceptional is different from the way [others] think of themselves as exceptional,” Gitlin, 67, adds. “We have attachment to a mission. The original formulation of the mission was religious, and remained religious. People chose to be here –– except for the slaves and the Native Americans –– out of some sense that this was a luminous country.”
Gitlin, the author of 12 books, spent 16 years at U.C. Berkeley in the 1980s and ’90s, as a sociology professor and mass communications department head, achieving a certain celebrity, you’ve-got-to-take-one-of-his-classes status.
In his latest book, he posits that Americans and Jews retained their sense of chosenness, while most other societies have shed it because either “it’s been knocked out of them by defeat, or it’s been successfully resisted by secularized forces.”
This mutual sense of chosenness “can’t be understood simply as a calculus of self-interest,” he says. “In many ways it’s been costly to the U.S. to be so closely aligned with Israel. The sense of attachment has withstood considerable political oscillations.”
The Bronx native says he enjoyed a typical Jewish upbringing, with an extra dose of tradition from his Orthodox grandparents. Thanks in part to his father, a high school history teacher, he absorbed America’s chosenness narrative when he was young.
But it didn’t stick. During his ’60s college days, he was an activist with the Students for a Democratic Society. The radicalism didn’t stick, either, and he eventually became a college professor. He lived in the Bay Area for many years, working as a reporter with the old San Francisco Express Times, a counterculture tabloid that lasted for 15 months. Today, Gitlin chairs the doctoral program in communications at Columbia University.
While the notion of American exceptionalism continues to spark heated debate in this country, few believe the United States faces a dire threat because of the sense of chosenness. That’s not true in Israel, which lives with mortal threats all the time, but Gitlin thinks Israel, even with its secular majority, embraces chosenness no matter what the risk.
“We argue there’s an allure, of the primal religious idea as it is attached to land,” he says of Zionism. “The territorial definition of Zionism becomes central to the project.”
While Gitlin doesn’t fully buy into divine chosenness for Jews, he does acknowledge the animating power of this idea throughout Jewish history, power that time has not diminished.
“This not simply a party favor,” he says of chosenness. “[Jews] owe their identity to this strange idea. If you attach to that tradition, take it seriously.”
“The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election” by Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibovitz (272 pages, Simon & Schuster, $26).