The intensifying antagonism toward Israel among Western elites following October 7 has generated profound disappointment and worry. Many question how Israel will navigate a world where Western backing steadily diminishes. Josh Hammer, a Jewish-American attorney and political commentator, suggests reversing this perspective. “We are in the midst of a civilizational inflection point,” he explained, “and if the West seeks survival, it must reconnect with its origins, with the covenant established at Mount Sinai and its most tangible manifestation today – the State of Israel.” His central argument positions the West as equally dependent on Israel, not merely as a strategic Middle Eastern ally but as a wellspring of values, purpose, and moral foundation that Western societies increasingly abandon.
Hammer, 34, holds the position of opinion editor at the distinguished weekly Newsweek, functions as a syndicated columnist for major publications including the Los Angeles Times, serves as a research fellow with the conservative Edmund Burke Foundation, and moderates two widely-followed podcasts within conservative circles. His regular participation in conferences and public debates has established him as a representative voice for conservative positions in America’s ongoing culture wars. These activities have elevated him to prominence as one of the most influential Jewish voices in contemporary American conservatism.
Hammer currently visits Israel, with plans to appear Sunday for a book discussion at Jerusalem’s Center for Israeli Liberty offices. His religious commitment and its outward manifestations are immediately apparent. Multiple chains adorn his neck, including a small gold Star of David purchased in Safed, a “Shaddai” pendant inherited from his wife’s grandfather, and an Israeli military dog tag. His New Jersey office desk displays stones collected from Treblinka and Auschwitz concentration camps alongside a bottle containing soil from Jerusalem’s City of David, positioned near copies of his latest work, “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.”
The book documents his personal evolution toward conservative ideology and fervent Zionist philosophy, advocates for strengthening Jewish-Christian partnerships, and establishes Israel as both ideological foundation and moral compass for Western civilization’s trajectory. His recent public appearances featuring a black kippah reflect the religious awakening he has experienced over recent years.
“I was planning on writing a totally unrelated book, kind of like a young conservative manifesto type thing, and then October 7th happened and I decided to switch course,” Hammer explained. “This moment was bigger than me in my professional career, this moment is fundamentally a time that Jews are going to have to start coming out not just with their rifles as all the heroic members of the IDF are doing on a day-to-day basis but with the pen as well, and to defend that which has made our civilization great and frankly in many ways just to defend the Jewish people and Judaism itself.”
Hammer’s observations resonate with widespread Western concerns regarding cultural decline. National identities face erosion, excessive individualism prevails, immigration challenges intensify, and demographic trends show declining birth rates. October 7’s aftermath revealed troubling campus dynamics as elite university students demonstrated clear solidarity with Islamist organizations. Hammer attempts to identify these threats while proposing alternative directions.
Confronting three primary forces endangering Western civilization – Islamism, nihilistic secularism, and radical progressive leftist movements – requires renewed commitment to the biblical covenant and Jewish moral principles that originally constructed Western cultural foundations.
Equality’s foundation
“As a lawyer, I like to define terms,” Hammer says at the opening of our conversation. The West is not just a geographical location or lifestyle, he explained. “Everything that we call the West today begins with God’s world-altering revelation to Moses and the Israelites assembled at Mount Sinai.”
Young people growing up today in the West don’t understand how the Bible relates to the fundamental values of the society they live in, but this is the basis of so many things taken for granted in our culture.
“Take, for example, Genesis 1:27 – this is the single foundational ethical moral imperative for all of Western civilization. “So God created mankind in his own image,” – the entire basis of genuine moral human equality under law and politics can be traced to Genesis 1:27,” he explained, a principle that also appears at the beginning of the American Declaration of Independence. “But the relevant question is, are Jefferson and Locke actually just making this up in a vacuum? Well, they’re obviously getting this from somewhere; they’re getting it from Genesis 1:27.”
He also points to the moral foundations taught in secular education. “When I went to public school growing up, in kindergarten, the big thing I was taught was the golden rule: treat others as you like to be treated. Well, where does that come from? It’s right there in the book of Leviticus: ‘Treat your fellow as yourself.’
“When he was a child, this was still considered a basic moral principle. But today, when the West is losing the source context of its own values, it ultimately also loses the values themselves and the ability to defend them, and what remains is a vacuum filled by extremists.
“Jews and Christians alike need to look back to the origins of our civilization if we’re going to muster the fortitude, the courage, and the skill to ward off the very real and very serious threats that we face today.”
Q: Leo Strauss called Athens and Jerusalem “the two pillars of the West”. Some might argue that you’ve overlooked ancient Greece as a key foundation of the West.
“Leo Strauss famously did argue that Western civilization is a kind of DNA-like strand of reason and revelation. I’m not downplaying reason. What I am saying is that without something else, reason is counterproductive, bordering on potentially catastrophic. Unless you are tethering reason to something, unless you have an exogenous worldview, a predetermined worldview, and then you use reason as an analytical tool within that structure,” Hammer replied.
He gestures toward the small stones from Auschwitz and Treblinka. “The perpetrators of those very atrocities thought that they were acting according to reason… acting according to the prevailing eugenicist doctrines and dogmas of the day. They thought that this was all rational and reasonable. Some of the most brutal, horrific atrocities in human history have been done in the name of untrammeled reason…there’s a lot of other examples in history, from the Enlightenment and French Revolution to Communism.
“Political and moral discourse cannot be conducted in a vacuum. Look at some of the forces seeking to overthrow Western civilization – there is ‘wokeism’, there is Islamism, simply kind of resorting to saying ‘just use reason’ is not going to work,” he stated. Instead, confronting these threats requires a more substantial foundation. “You actually need something substantive to stand on in order to ward back, and I cannot think of anything that is better suited than the very substance that founded this entire civilization in the first place.” His solution is clear: “It’s to double down on the Bible because it’s actually all in there.” This approach, he contended, also explains the crucial importance of the partnership between Jews and Christians, and why only people who believe in the Bible as a sacred text can preserve Western culture.
Hammer cites Maimonides as exemplifying proper reason-faith balance within Jewish tradition. “In his ‘Guide for the Perplexed,’ Maimonides is not saying we go to this Rawlsian veil of ignorance… reason can be used within a construct. What is that construct? The Bible.” This approach recognizes that reason requires a normative framework and anchor, which the Bible and the revelation at Sinai provide.
Q: Contemporary conservatives frequently warn that Western survival necessitates religious renewal and Christian restoration, yet you additionally argue that they must acknowledge the Jewish foundations from which Christianity emerged. What drives this emphasis?
“We live in interesting political times. Here in the United States, the Republican party has been in kind of a state of flux for a long time now, especially in the aftermath of Donald Trump. A lot of conservatives have been grappling for a long time with how to reconcile individual dignity with this notion of the common good. A lot of people, even on the purported nominal rights, had gone too far down the rabbit hole for decades of exalting individualism at the expense of any notion of the union of the general welfare of the common good,” Hammer explained.
“There is so much in [the Talmud] that should be a template for how we think about these matters today. Think about the revelation at Mount Sinai. God [wasn’t saying] I will make each and every one of you individually holy, you’re going to be a kingdom of priests, a holy nation. He’s talking here about this idea of the collective.”
Hammer provides specific Talmudic examples. “In tractate Shabbat [it says] if there is a moral sin that is going to be done in your community, and you individually have the power to stop it and you do not act, then you will be held responsible for the sin. That is a very different reconciliation of individual dignity with the common good than John Stuart Mill, the enlightenment thinker, with his well-known so-called ‘harm theory’ which essentially says that if I don’t physically harm you, it’s not my business.
“At the same time, Jewish ethics are not communist. They respect private property and personal freedom. Socialism would violate at least two of the ten commandments – ‘thou shalt not steal’, ‘thou shalt not covet.’ Therefore, I argue that if the Western right seeks renewed equilibrium, it must reconnect with biblical teachings and reexamine Jewish tradition alongside the ethical foundations underlying halakhic reasoning.”
Confronting the Twin Towers’ devastation
Josh Hammer’s upbringing lacked conservative influences. The Twin Towers’ destruction on September 11, 2001, became pivotal in forming his worldview. “I was 12 years old when September 11th happened, and I grew up on the Hudson River, 25 miles or so north of New York City. It was a formative moment in my life, a very real concrete visual realization that evil exists. Once you accept the reality that there is this moral dichotomy, that there is evil and there is good, you’re basically a conservative before you know it because you’ve already rejected the liberal utopianism, the notion ‘let’s hold hands and sing Kumbaya,” he recounted.
A subsequent transformative experience occurred eight years later during his Birthright Israel journey. “I remember standing there in Sderot looking out into Gaza, and I remember thinking, ‘wow, this is the exact same fight that America has been fighting against al-Qaida.'”
This past year, Hammer returned to Jerusalem as a featured speaker at the Sovereignty Movement conference, addressing “A Gaza Wake-Up Call – Terminating the Two-State Paradigm.” His presentation highlighted disengagement failures while advocating Gush Katif reestablishment. “Although the chance that Israel will return to settle in Gaza in the near term is slim, there is always room for hope,” he notes in his book.
Hammer’s upbringing occurred within a secular Jewish household in suburban New Jersey. “We lit Hanukkah candles, but without any deep knowledge. I don’t think I had a Shabbat dinner until I was well into my teenage years. It wasn’t complete disconnection from Judaism, but certainly Judaism emptied of content.”
Subsequently, exposure to conservative intellectuals, including Edmund Burke and Roger Scruton, prompted a deeper examination of his Jewish heritage. “If this idea of intergenerational passing down tradition is so important, what is my tradition? I mean, I come from the oldest continually existing people on this earth. All the other nations that existed in the time of the patriarchs are all gone.”
These contemplations initiated a transformative journey toward religious observance and Orthodox Jewish identity adoption. Currently wearing a black kippah, he selected “Matityahu” as his Hebrew middle name, honoring the Hasmonean commander. He perceives the Maccabees beyond historical context as exemplars of spiritual leadership and Jewish engagement. In his view, Hanukkah represents a call for every Jew to become a modern Maccabee and defend the Jewish people against hostile accusations. He is married to an Israeli woman and recently became a father. “We had our first daughter three months ago, her name is Esther,” he shared, noting the fitting timing as they celebrated their daughter’s first Purim holiday.
During campus visits and student interactions, Hammer confronts intense Israeli opposition absent a decade earlier. He attributes this shift partly to younger Americans, particularly Generation Z, lacking the September 11 experience. “They don’t remember the smoke from the towers and don’t understand the magnitude of the threat against us. Many see our support for Israel as part of the failed foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, which were indeed misguided attempts from the start to build nations from scratch and spread democracy in the Arab world.
But this represents gross distortion, according to Hammer’s analysis. He argues that Israel functions as America’s strategic partner rather than a military adventure in the Middle East. In his view, Israel prevents American conflicts rather than creating them. He contends that Israel repeatedly performs difficult tasks for America, including eliminating terrorists, exposing nuclear programs, and stopping weapons convoys, with Western intelligence agencies learning from these operations.
When Israel acts against Iran, Hamas, or the Houthis, Hammer argues it effectively defends American soldiers and interests while supporting the Western order against jihadist chaos. He emphasizes that Israel remains the region’s only democracy with authentic Western value connections and nearly complete interest alignment with the West.
Unapologetic nationalism
Israel’s significance extends beyond geopolitical dimensions, Hammer continued. “Take, for example, your unapologetic nationalism – modern Israel continues to preserve an ancient element from biblical times: the idea of the nation-state. Unlike the West, where national identity is increasingly dissolving, in Israel, it is still alive and present, through mandatory military service in the IDF that connects different sectors; memorial days when the entire state stops; the language, the calendar, and the importance of family. To you, as Israelis, this may seem obvious, but people in the West live without all of this. These are not just symbols but what is needed to keep a nation alive – elements that many Western countries have simply forgotten.”
Israeli birth rates are approaching three children per woman, nearly double American figures. “While religion and family weaken in the West, Israel presents a unique model of Western democracy with a living national-religious identity, and that’s exactly what we need.”
Q: Your book criticizes church-state separation concepts in both Israel and America, advocating that Israel should incorporate additional halakhic principles into civil legislation. Such messages may generate anxiety among secular Israelis.
“Israel is a Jewish state, and the law should reflect this practically as much as possible. The modern separation between religion and state doesn’t exist in Scripture. The idea that God and politics are separate is ridiculous to me. This is a liberal myth that many American Jews sanctify as part of their ‘civic religion,’ but if we return to the Bibl,e it has no roots there. On the contrary, the entire biblical political system is built on God’s sovereignty as stated at Mount Sinai, ‘a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.'”
Q: Your enthusiastic judicial reform support sparked profound Israeli controversy, including debates with Professor Alan Dershowitz. Following nearly two years of war and internal divisions, should Israel continue pursuing judicial system modifications?
“It would be a disaster if Israel abandons the changes proposed in the reform. I’ve told numerous members of the Knesset – the moment the war ends, the issue must not be buried. Israel cannot continue to function as a ‘juristocracy.’ It’s completely unreasonable that elected officials make decisions, and then any citizen can petition the High Court even without standing, and cancel them. As an American constitutional law guy, who keeps his constitution right here on the desk, as someone who clerked on a federal court of appeals, I’ve spoken at Harvard Law School, at Yale Law School, and I’m telling you your system is absolutely bonkers. A sovereign state must govern, not be subordinate to an unelected judicial elite.”
Refusing silence
Approximately one month ago, Mike Huckabee assumed America’s Israeli ambassadorial position. Huckabee, an Oklahoma Baptist minister, demonstrates unwavering Israeli support, frequently expressing belief in Genesis 12:3: “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse.” Hammer said he believes that Huckabee is “on firm ground for that, not just because it’s the word of God that says so, but because history plays this out. I literally cannot think of a single instance in human history where a society that has cursed or discriminated against the Jews has been better off because of that. Antisemitism or hatred of Jews is symptomatic of a broader societal, cultural, and civilizational rot.”
Q: Huckabee represents older evangelical Christian generations whose Israeli support seemed automatic. However, recent polling indicates declining support among younger Americans, including evangelicals. Does this concern you?
“Absolutely,” Hammer responded. He emphasized the critical importance of maintaining the Jewish-Christian alliance. “We’re called to be a light unto the nations, it means to try our best to fulfill the terms of the reciprocal two-way covenant with God, by making him king, by fulfilling the mitzvot. But we’re also called to be a light unto the nations in a slightly more abstract way because Western civilization starts with the Jews. If you are a Jew who cares about Western civilization, you care more broadly about the entire tradition that our people have given the world; you have an obligation to do that.
“I’m not saying that Jews should go about trying actively to persuade non-Jews to convert, but we do have an obligation to explain what our tradition is and what our religion is at a time when that religion is under such siege. Only the truth can prevail over these lies and falsehoods. Just sitting back and taking it, that’s never worked out particularly well.”
Hammer actively engages in these battles. Since October 7, he monitors concerning developments beyond leftist antisemitism, including disturbing American right-wing trends. His book targets two primary figures – television host Tucker Carlson, a recently Fox News network’s prominent star commanding millions of social media followers; and Candace Owens, a conservative network influencer expressing harsh Israeli opposition.
“I used to be a big fan of Tucker Carlson’s. I was a former guest on his Fox News show. I usually said that he’s not antisemitic, that he just happens to not care about the Middle East. I was obviously wrong. The cat has been fully let out of the bag since Tucker Carlson got fired by Fox News and since he went independent. He does play his hand much closer to the vest. He hides his hand a little bit better than Candace Owens does.”
Owens advanced significantly further, disseminating traditional antisemitic conspiracy theories. “Candace Owens is out there liking tweets promoting the medieval blood libel that Jews used the blood of Christians to bake their Passover matzah.”
Q: Your book labels this phenomenon “the Nietzschean right.” What precisely does this characterize?
“There’s been the rise of this whole influencer cabal on the right that fundamentally rejects the Bible, they reject the idea that we all have genuine moral equal dignity in favor of some neopagan ideas, that we can tell someone’s capacity not by his ideas or his intellect, but by brute strength a concept which is completely rejected out of hand in the book of psalms, where it very clearly says that you are not judged by your strength. They’re trying to resuscitate a lot of these pre-biblical or anti-biblical ideas.”
Q: From the Jewish side, many would hesitate to align too closely with Christians, given historical tensions between the faiths and concerns about blurred religious boundaries.
“There’s probably a slight difference here between an American and an Israeli mentality. I am an American, I’m a student of the American founding, and you go back and you look at what some of the American founders had to say about the Jewish people, whether it’s George Washington, John Adams, or Alexander Hamilton, they were just genuine admirers of the Jewish people. Hamilton basically has this quote that the proof of God’s existence is that the Jewish people are still alive today. John Adams says that the Jews are the most magnificent civilization that has ever existed.
“Are there large theological differences between Judaism and Christianity? Obviously. But we have a lot of overlap. More than 50% of their Bible is also our Bible. The other point is that we are the two religions that are in the crosshairs of the exact same enemies: Wokeism, Islamism, and global neoliberalism. The enemies of the Jews are never actually ultimately interested in coming after the Jews; it’s a stepping stone towards something greater than that. Hamas itself would be a good example. Hamas is pretty clear in its founding charter from 1987: they’re interested in all of whom they describe as ‘infidels.’ The Iranian regime is not just chanting ‘death to Israel’, they’re chanting ‘death to America’ because America is this great moral Christian beacon in Western civilization.
“Therefore, I say – it doesn’t matter how many differences there are between us – in practice, we’re in the same boat fighting the same demons. One can argue whether the expression ‘Jewish-Christian tradition’ is accurate; for me, it’s a useful term and it works. The covenant between us is a condition for the West’s survival.”
