The Genizah

Ever since conquistadores claimed Taino land in the name of their Catholic God and New England Puritans formed their strictly Protestant “city on a hill,” religion has been central to American life. Even as some found religious freedom—Rhode Island welcomed the Quakers, Jews, and Baptists that Massachusetts expelled as dissenters—indigenous people and Africans forced into slavery struggled to protect their religious practices. With the constitutional separation of church and state, it fell to the American people to decide: would they sharpen religion’s formidable powers of division, or reimagine its creative possibilities? In A God-Shaped Nation, Brook Wilensky-Lanford follows this essential American tension from first contact through the 2024 election. This is an expansive history of extraordinary religious questions, told through the ordinary people who grappled with them. It is a story of defiance: Anne Hutchinson, preaching against Puritan clergy; Reform rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise serving soft-shell crab to his kosher guests at an 1883 banquet; and Wovoka, a Paiute man who envisioned the Ghost Dance movement, which persisted in the face of violent government repression at Wounded Knee. It is also a story of community: Millerites waiting together in vain for Jesus’s return on a rainy October night in 1844; Chinese immigrants bringing Daoist and Buddhist gods to their California temples; Mormons pushing westward to build their “new Zion” in Utah. And in the last fifty years, it has been a story of muscular political power, as the religious right has sought to shape the present and paint the past in its own image. At a moment when religion penetrates even the most secular aspects of American life, understanding its history is more essential than ever before. “It is in history that the very human work of religion happens,” Wilensky-Lanford shows us, “and in ordinary time that even the most carved-in-stone tenets can and do change.”

October 7th, 2023 was a truly horrific day—a day in which Israeli men, women, and children were slaughtered or kidnapped, in the most barbaric fashion possible by the Iran-backed, Gaza-based terrorist group Hamas. The attack set off a bloody war, with profound consequences for both Israelis and Palestinians. That much is well known. Less known is the propaganda campaign—the narrative war—that also began on that day. Like Hamas’ war on Israel, the narrative war had been in the works for a long time. It took, and continutes to take, planning, organization, and lots of money. Paid protestors. Professional organizers. Top-notch lobby efforts. NGOs, unions, and associations working together like a well-oiled machine. And, of course, messages designed to capture the support of legislators, voters, and the media. There is little, if anything, organic about this campaign, even if some of its own participants aren’t quite aware of it. Interestingly, Canada has become ground zero for this international effort, a result of shifting demographics, porous online and physical borders when it comes to foreign interference, lack of political will, and failure to enforce laws that could help prevent the spread of this type of hate. The numbers themselves are astounding, reflecting a growing tide of antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and general intolerance with a brazenness that has not been witnessed before. A country known for its historic support for the Jewish homeland and for Jews in general has become, since October 7th, a place where Jews live in fear, with skyrocketing incidents of vandalism, violence, threats, and intimidation. A highly successful political strategist, and legal advocate for victims of hate, Warren Kinsella deconstructs the inner workings of this campaign of hate, and pulls no punches as to what is at stake here: the further spread of antisemitism within society—especially amongst the younger generations but certainly not limited to that demographic—and how to offset it.