The recent passing of Carlo Ginzburg, the great Italian Jewish scholar who survived the war in hiding as a child, is an occasion for reflection. As a historian, I have long taken inspiration from Ginzburg’s historical method and his classic text, The Cheese and the Worms. Ginzburg was a master of “microhistory”—the art of taking a seemingly isolated, forgotten fragment of human experience and using it to uncover the hidden mental universe of an entire era. He famously reconstructed the worldview of a sixteenth-century northern Italian miller named Menocchio who defied the Roman Inquisition, looking at the cosmos and seeing God hidden in the rot of cheese.

Ginzburg’s historical philosophy hinged on the belief that the grand, sweeping vectors of statecraft and political power are encoded within highly specific, intensely localized anomalies. The macro-historical truths of an age, as his groundbreaking work illustrated, can thus be understood by interrogating micro-historical fragments. Drawing on Aristotle, Ginzburg also posited that the country or community one belongs to is often defined not by the easy rhetoric of blind love, but by a “bond of shame”—the visceral passion that hits us when we realize our collective culture has fallen short of its own standards.

For me, the micro-historical fragment that unlocks today’s painful intersection of history and identity is a vivid memory from nearly fifty years ago. Every Fourth of July, I am pulled back to a circle of tree stumps at a socialist Zionist summer camp in Idyllwild, California, where, as a fourteen-year-old, I spent the holiday locked in a fierce, binary debate with my peers. The provocative question before us was heavy. The daring rescue of hijacked Israeli hostages in Uganda had taken place one year earlier, on July 4, 1976. Which milestone demanded our primary allegiance—the democratic promise of the United States, or the raw, sovereign necessity of Israel? To our idealistic, teenage minds, choosing which event to elevate felt like a declaration of primary identity. Were we Americans first, or Jews first?

Reflecting today on the monumental collision of the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of American independence and the fiftieth anniversary of the Entebbe rescue, the romantic heroism we celebrated as teenagers feels like an artifact from a distant era. In fact, we did not really choose; we embraced our plural loyalties. When we gathered in the mornings and evenings to raise and lower the American and Israeli flags, we sang a mix of patriotic songs by Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Phil Ochs, followed by Israel’s national anthem, “Hatikvah” (The Hope), and Israeli folk songs like “Shir Hashomer” (The Song of the Guard) and the Peace Now declaration, “Shir Lashalom” (Song of Peace). I realize now that our young voices were not just debating politics and expressing our idealism in song; we were communing with the ghosts of the two distinct heroic projects that anchor modern Jewish history: America and Israel.

To this day, my humanity remains fundamentally shaped by the triple chord plucked at Habonim camp: I am a Jew, an American, and a Zionist. These are not separate compartments of my soul, but a singular, unified worldview through which I understand justice, human dignity, and being in the world. I do not believe this is a naïve hangover from my youth, but rather a core truth about Jewish peoplehood past, present, and future. It is through this lens that I also view the sickness at the center of our current political moment, where a profound polarization has turned questions of identity and values into an existential vise.

In the shadow of the horrific October 7, 2023 attacks—the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust—and the devastating regional wars that have followed, American Jews are being forced into rigid, artificial ideological lanes. We are told by progressives and conservatives alike that we must choose between our universal liberal values and our affinity for Israel. On the far left, Israel is routinely vilified as an unredeemable colonial project and American Jewish attachments to Zionism are derided as parochial and obscurantist. On the far right, conservative forces openly flirt with antisemitic canards and conjure fantasies of Jewish conspiracies. Donald Trump himself repeatedly weaponizes these forces, asserting that “any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat” show “great disloyalty” and “hates their religion.” This political squeeze is compounded by a tangible, frightening surge of........

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