Josh Hammer’s new book, “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West” will be available on March 18, 2025. Preorder it: HERE.

The question, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” has never been more poignant than at a time when both Europe and Israel are the canaries in the coal mines of a civilizational war.

That war, cultural, spiritual and material, and its antithesis in Athens and Jerusalem, are at the center of Josh Hammer’s new book, ‘Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West’. Hammer, a writer, lawyer and thinker whose world spans everything from the First Liberty Institute to Jews Against Soros, evocatively captures that crisis.

Beginning with Oct 7 and the western response which ran the gamut from horror to enthusiasm, on both the left and the alt-right, Hammer turns to the roots of the biblical truths of the Judeo-Christian consensus that is now under attack from all sides to rebuild a new unity.

The Left rejects both Athens and Jerusalem, choosing a crude pantheistic paganism, devoid of both reason and faith, in which hedonistic cults, exotic sexualties, and public manias are to liberate us from the confines of a civilization created by ‘dead cishet white male slave owners.’ The ‘altists’ on the Right reject not only the idea that Athens has anything to do with Jerusalem, but seek to tear out Jewish influences on the West which, depending on their varied credos can include anything from Christianity itself to the Enlightenment or even the very idea of monotheism, They long to return to an old paganism, a bronze age of barbarism devoid of divine morality and religious consciousness making way for bloodshed, slavery and eugenics.

Neither idea is new. Europe flirted with both beginning with the French Revolution and climaxing catastrophically with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. But many of the influencers of a new generation are returning to the same old follies and that is why ‘Israel and Civilization’ is so vital.

Hammer not only rebuts many of the antisemitic obsessions of the influencer caste by delving into the actual history of Judaism, but he asserts the centrality of the Bible and its teachings within the West and more specifically in the founding of the United States of America, tracing the origins of the Mayflower Compact, Thanksgiving and the debates over the Constitution to religious ideas and values emerging out of Judaism.

While the idea of a Judeo-Christian code came to be mentioned much more frequently after the rebirth of Israel, Hammer shows that even Founding Fathers like John Adams anticipated a return of Israel alongside that of the newborn United States. To them, Washington D.C. needed both an ‘Athens’ and a ‘Jerusalem’ to thrive and take root in the mind and heart of a new nation.

“I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize Men than any other Nation. If I were an Atheist and believed in blind eternal Fate, I should Still believe that Fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential Instrument for civilizing the Nations,” John Adams wrote.

“The state and progress of the Jews, from their earliest history to the present time, has been so entirely out of the ordinary course of human affairs, is it not then a fair conclusion, that the cause also is an extraordinary one—in other words, that it is the effect of some great providential plan?” Hammer quotes Hamilton.

This was not some merely altruistic admiration. America had been founded on the conviction, expressed much later by another political leader, that “God Is not indifferent to America”. America’s conviction of a special destiny rested on the Bible. The idea that God had chosen America emerged from the original idea that God had chosen Israel. And this conviction was not a replacement, but an ‘alliance of chosenness’ that required the return and rebirth of Israel.

It is no coincidence that those on the Left and Right who oppose Israel increasingly tend to be hostile to America, seeing it as a corrupt and immoral society, one that terrorizes the world, and admire hostile foreign nations in the Muslim world. Their hostility to Israel stems from their hostility to America and the root cause of both is their hostility to these religious impulses.

As Hammer sums up, “the Founders saw the legal and moral frameworks of Judaism as foundational to the biblical and English common law traditions that, perhaps more than any other political and intellectual inheritances, shaped the burgeoning American republic.”

Today we see all too well what the West is becoming without those codes of faith and reasons, cheering on Andrew Tate, worshiping wokeness and dismissing every religious virtue.

In “Israel and Civilization”, Hammer painstakingly intertwines the stories of both through their origins and present crises. An Israel and America unable to make the moral case for standing up to Islamic terrorism and and defying the forces of weakness and wokeness are doomed. And when people fail to make the religious case for nationhood, others will make the anti-case.

As Hammer writes, those on the right “who are so ardently opposed to ever-evolving conceptions of ‘egalitarianism’ —as that term has indeed been horribly corrupted and bastardized, for example, in the service of faddish left-wing ideologies such as transgenderism and critical race theory—that they go significantly further and question divinely ordained human equality” as described in the Book of Genesis. Without rooting humanity in divinity, the endless tribal wars of mass destruction that govern life in much of the world become the only paradigm in human affairs. And as America teeters on the brink of leaving religion for tribalism and hedonism, Hammer offers a return to a ‘religious backbone’ in “Israel and Civilization.”

In “Israel and Civilization,” Hammer warns that “wokesters”, just like the alt-right, “just like countless anti-Semites throughout history, view the Jews as a convenient stepping stone to be utilized as a beachhead in a far broader and more systemic civilizational assault.”

That civilizational assault is all around it. And the only ultimate counter to it must be the rebuilding of a moral society founded on the virtues that had once built America.

What is at stake in the debate is more than Israel or the Jews, Hammer warns is civilization.

While there will always be a Jerusalem in the hearts of men, no matter how few they may be, it is the United States of America, as the lightbearer of western civilization will determine whether there will be an Athens and whether it will be a West that still remembers Jerusalem.