We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel

Send us Fan MailJews, especially American Jews, have never been of one mind about Israel and the United States’ support for it. Eric Alterman, Distinguished Professor of English, Brooklyn College, CUNY, joins the show to discuss his 2022 book We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel. He documents the ebbs and flows of American Jews’ relationship to Israel, from the more muted embrace following Israel’s establishment in 1948, to the tight embrace that followed the war in 1967 and the hegemony of the David and Goliath myth it spawned. After Israel’s destructive and disastrous war of choice in Lebanon that began in 1982, the gap between the myth of Israel as underdog and its reality as a settler-colonial regional hegemon began to disintegrate. In our discussion he traces this relationship up until the present, post-October 7 reality in which Israel is losing support across all fronts.