Amr Bargisi

In addition to checking the news and checking in with friends and family over the last three months, we have found ourselves rethinking many of our convictions and assumptions. So we began asking distinguished friends, contributors, and editorial board members a simple question: What did you believe before October 7 that you no longer believe? Here are some of their responses.

Yale University Press 176 pp., $30 History didn’t end after the fall of the Soviet Union, but liberal democracy did emerge triumphant. Whether borne by Bill Clinton’s “third-way” neoliberalism, George W. Bush’s neoconservative internationalism, or Barack Obama’s hopeful pragmatism, liberalism was the West’s permanent governing philosophy. Or so it seemed. Liberalism is everywhere under siege now.

I spent the summer of 2000 traveling the battlefields of Israel, which meant road and hiking trips in the Sinai, Negev, and Golan with my friend Michael Kovner. Michael is the son of Abba and Vitka Kovner, the Zionist firebrands who led the Vilna Ghetto underground. He had been a member of Sayaret Matkal, the famed Israeli commando unit, so he knows something about war and the meaning of Jews fighting for their own nation.