In If You Will It: Rebuilding Jewish Peoplehood for the 21st Century (Wicked Son, 288 pp., $28.99), Elliott Abrams, a longtime contributor to National Review, considers the past, present, and future of American Jews. The October 7, 2023, attack on Israel revealed that the situation of Jews in America was changing. With rising antisemitism, the unraveling of bipartisan political support for Israel, and a weakening of Jewish identity due in part to assimilation and intermarriage, the prospects for American Jewry are uncertain. “Will our children have the knowledge and the will to defend Israel and defend our own community here?” Abrams asks. He writes perceptively about the state of Jewish life in America, and the evolving relationship of American Jews with Zionism and of the United States with Israel. For Abrams, the most important measure of the strength of the Jewish community is not religious practice but whether individual Jews feel that they are part of the Jewish people, which reaches back millennia and encompasses the Jewish state and the global diaspora. The means to forge this connection are knowledge of the Hebrew language and Jewish history, a relationship to the State of Israel, and intentional participation in a Jewish community. Abrams lays out concrete and practical ways to achieve these goals, in the spirit of Theodor Herzl’s promise that “if you will it, it is no dream.”

Justin M. Jacobs is a historian of antiquities and archaeology who is fed up with “simplistic bedtime stories” about how museums assembled their collections. He objects to the prevailing discourse that regards Western museums as illegitimate repositories of the spoils of empire. In Plunder? How Museums Got Their Treasures (Reaktion Books, 240 pp., $25), he shows how that notion is historically inaccurate and imposes a modern ideology — of seeing certain ancient artifacts as priceless national treasures — on people in the past who would have found it alien. Plunder? is a scholarly work, but it is the opposite of dry: Jacobs mounts his argument with verve and a relish in dismantling fashionable dogmas. He acknowledges that some objects in Western museums are in fact plunder: They were taken by soldiers during military campaigns. The vast majority of acquisitions, however, came from diplomatic gifts (notably, the Elgin Marbles), via dealers of antiquities, or from archaeological digs. In all these cases, transactions that benefited both sides were conducted openly: Natives who participated were not dupes of imperialists. Only when elites in countries such as Egypt and Turkey became Westernized did they begin to adopt the Western conception of antiquities as priceless art and to put restrictions on their removal. Ironically, in this sense, “Western scholars dug their own archaeological grave.”

In the introduction to his new book, Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age (Zondervan, 288 pp., $29.99), Rod Dreher quotes a friend: “The world is not what we think it is.” We think we are living in a materialistic, rationalistic universe governed only by the laws of science, but we are not, Dreher argues. There exist order, purpose, mystery, miracles, and means of connecting to the transcendent. Dreher, an Orthodox Christian, makes his case through a mixture of cultural analysis, reporting, and personal testimony. What he calls “re-enchantment” requires learning to see, to pay attention, and to adopt different “ways of knowing” than intellection — through experiences of beauty and the practice of prayer, worship, and spiritual disciplines. Dreher thinks we are entering a post-Christian age molded by technology (“digital life is the new Tower of Babel”), a vacuum in which new forms of religion will spread: neo-paganism, the occult, the pursuit of transcendence through psychedelics, belief in UFOs, the worship of artificial intelligence. He asks Christians to take more seriously their professed belief in angels, demons, and spiritual warfare and provides several discomfiting accounts of possessions, exorcisms, and the like. Dreher is aware that much of his subject matter sounds “crazy” or “woo.” But then again, we are living through a time of “general madness.”