ABSTRACT
Is US policy and sentiment toward Israel a story about American Jews, or is it a story that transcends and even supersedes American Jews? Eric Alterman and Walter Russell Mead answer that question very differently in their respective voluminous books, We Are Not One and The Arc of a Covenant. Each challenges long-standing conventional wisdom and delves into specific historical inflection points as a way of demonstrating their thesis. But their divergence on the underlying question—is US policy toward Israel a Jewish story or not—is nevertheless striking, and which answer one finds more persuasive points to starkly different predictions for where the US may find itself, particularly in light of the revolutionary chaos currently engulfing Israeli politics and, by extension, American Jewish politics.