Ernesto “Che” Guevara once wrote, in a moment of revolutionary bravado, “Better to die standing than to live on one’s knees.” Twenty-five centuries earlier, a different kind of revolutionary—Mordechai ha-Yehudi, the first Jew in history to be called simply “the Jew”—refused to bow before Haman. Jews bow only before God. In our liturgy, whether in Bar’chu or Aleinu, bending the knee is an act of faith, not subservience. For centuries, however, our ancestors lived at the mercy of Christian princes, Muslim caliphs, popes, and European czars; humility often meant survival rather than devotion.

Modern Zionism wanted to reverse that historic posture. It insisted that the Jew would stand upright again. In classical halakhic language, the Jew should walk in the streets with the head down, not as an act of humility but as an account of the self-humiliation that the Jew had to endure as a persecuted minority. In political life, however, the Zionist dream was the opposite: no more bowed heads before the whims of rulers, mobs, kings or “enlightened” opinion-makers. Menachem Begin, in a line widely attributed to him and faithful to his spirit, captured this shift: “We are no longer Jews with trembling knees.”

Except, of course, that some still are. And that brings us to Peter Beinart— well educated, eloquent, deeply Jewish, widely known, and, in the eyes of many in today’s progressive West, the last good Jew.

Beinart’s biography is familiar: American, highly educated, deeply engaged in Jewish........

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