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Arc: The Podcast

Every other week, Arc Magazine's editor-in-chief, Mark Oppenheimer, is joined by guests to talk religion, politics, et cetera.

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Eminent Americans

Eminent Americans is a weekly podcast about the writers and public intellectuals who either are key players in the American intellectual scene or who typify an important aspect of it.

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Kahane Nation?

By Shaul Magid
My book Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (2021) examined the political career of Meir Kahane (1932-1990) as an American Jewish radical. A Hebrew edition with Am Oved Press is set to appear in early 2027, and I wrote a new introduction, giving me an opportunity to rethink some of the arguments made in the book almost a decade ago. One of the things that always interested me about Kahane as a public figure was how he was so reviled and yet at the same time so admired, especially in his formative years,…

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Blake Smith: How does Christianity help us mediate, as you suggest, between the worst sort of collectivism and the worst sort of individualism? Or perhaps mediate is the wrong word, since these two “worsts” do so often go together! Let’s say, transcend?
Julius Krein: I don’t think it’s anything more complicated than Christianity’s consciousness of the division between the City of God and the City of Man, “render unto Caesar,” and so on. But this distinguishes Christianity from the other monotheistic religions as well as ancient paganism and, I would argue, “rational” philosophy. This distance allows for another dimension or perspective from which to approach the relationship between the individual and the collective.