[November 10, 2026] Adam Bellow has spent forty years in publishing. In the September 13, 2026 issue of SAPIR, he makes a hard claim. America is in trouble, and the trouble started on a bookshelf.
He is very blunt about what’s happening. A radical socialist movement is winning elections. Hatred of Jews and of Israel has turned vicious. Political violence is being treated as normal.
Bellow says none of this came out of thin air. Elite universities spent years teaching anti-Western, anti-capitalist, and anti-American ideas, and those ideas have now left the campus and entered the country. His idea here is worth considering, because it is true: books got us into this mess, and only books can get us out.
The title, “A New Battle of the Books,” comes from a satire Jonathan Swift wrote in 1704. In that story, old books and new books come alive in a king’s library and fight, and Swift never says who won. Bellow’s point is that the fight never ended.
In the 1980s, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind opened what people called the Canon Wars. A canon is the short list of books a culture says every educated person should read. Bloom defended the great books of the West. A free country, he said, needs citizens who know where their laws and liberties came from. The other side answered that those books were mostly weapons of white male power, and that the reading list should be built on group identity instead of a shared inheritance.
The radicals won. They did not win by accident. They won because they captured the books.
For a long time, Americans were taught a civic creed. You belonged here not by blood, but because you accepted a set of ideas drawn from the European Enlightenment and the Judeo-Christian heritage. The country was not perfect. The creed still said it was founded on rights, and that it could be judged by those rights.
That story has been thrown out in a lot of classrooms. The replacement is simple and harsh. America was born bad. Slavery, stolen land, and genocide are not failures inside the story. They are the whole story. Everything Western is treated as guilty, and everything outside the West is treated as innocent. In 2017, David Brooks warned that if you throw out the old story, you should not be surprised when the political center collapses.
Will and Ariel Durant spent decades on The Story of Civilization. It left things out, but it was confident, and it treated law, rights, and free speech as real achievements. On many campuses that kind of book lost its place. One set of books came off the table. Another set was put down. Then people wondered why the country no longer shared a mind.
Here is the part of the essay that matters most. The old list of great books was not a gift from the past. People built it.
In 1918, with American troops about to fight in Europe, the Army built a course called War Issues. The idea was plain: a soldier should know what he is fighting for. After the war, another course tried to prepare men who had lived in the trenches for life back home. In 1919, Columbia University turned that work into Contemporary Civilization. The University of Chicago pushed a Great Books plan, and other colleges followed.
Publishers then put those books into ordinary hands. Many of them were Jewish immigrants who could not get hired by the old Protestant firms. Emanuel Haldeman-Julius printed the Little Blue Books and sold them for a nickel. Farmers and mechanics bought them by mail and at newsstands. He published about two thousand titles and sold more than one hundred million copies, and he got Will Durant into print.
Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer took over the Modern Library and later founded Random House. These men were not pushing a narrow party line. They were pushing tolerance, free speech, fair trials, and civil rights, because that liberal order gave Jews a place in the American story. They knew it, and they worked to keep it.
A shared culture can be built on purpose. Teachers and publishers did it once, because they believed the books were true enough to stake a country on.
Bellow says the defenders of the old books are losing again. He also says something sharp about his own trade. After a century inside American publishing, Jews are being pushed out. Jewish books go unpublished, unreviewed, and undistributed, while anti-Zionist books fill the tables. He does not treat this as a side issue.
Since October 7, he writes, anti-Zionism has shown itself as more than an argument about a far-off war. He calls it a knife in the liberal tradition: the oldest hatred in the West, dressed up as progress. For him, defending Israel and defending the West are the same job.
He does not tell publishers to complain. He gives them five jobs.
First, take the anti-Western books apart. Do not ban them. A ban is a confession that you lost the argument. Read them, teach them, and then answer them with the same force they used on the books they inherited. He gives one example. In 2020, a single book called In Defense of Looting helped make looting look like a respectable protest within months. That is how fast a book can move a culture. Answer it in print.
Second, put the foundations back. Bloom warned that if you give up on truth, you do not get kindness. You get emptiness, and then a taste for violence. The repair is a set of ideas: truth, a real world that does not bend to your feelings, a human nature that fashion cannot rewrite, and the rights of the person set above the demands of the state. It also means teaching plain economics and civics, and making fascism, socialism, capitalism, and democracy mean something again. If those words are only insults, every debate is noise. Bellow adds a hard fact about hatred of Jews. You cannot reason a person out of a belief that reason never put there.
Third, tell the American story again. This is the nation’s 250th year. The claim worth defending is simple. America was not founded on blood and soil. It was founded on ideas any person can take up. Tell the failures. Slavery happened. Conquest happened. Leave them in the story, but do not let them become the only fact. A country that teaches its children to despise it should not expect those children to defend it.
Fourth, break the pipeline that produces the same opinion in every publishing house. The same schools, the same city, the same prizes, and often one New York newspaper decide what counts as a serious book. Bellow wants prize committees to judge the pages without knowing who wrote them. He also wants the country’s regional voices back. A national culture run only from the coasts is not a national culture.
Fifth, make people read. Movies and phones have their uses. They do not build the attention a free mind needs. A hard book forces you to stay with an argument you dislike until you can answer it. A free country dies when its people can no longer do that. The Army understood this in 1918. It did not want robots. It wanted men who knew why they were fighting.
Bellow admits the repair may take a generation. He may be optimistic. A dark age of people who will not read is possible. He still says start now. A book’s real power is not that it shoves one opinion into a skull. It is powerful because it can crack a party line and force a person to think.
Now the judgment.
He is right about the cause. A country does not learn to hate its own foundations by accident. It learns that by assigning different books for decades and calling the swap “inclusion.” He is also right about the method. Do not burn the other side’s books. That makes you the thing you claim to fight. Argue, print, and sell the better book cheap enough that a working person can buy it. A nickel pamphlet once beat the opposition. It can do it again.
He is incomplete on the cure. “Only books can get us out” is a publisher in love with his own tools. Books matter, but they are not the whole making of a people. A family that tells the truth, a church that demands character, a school that refuses to lie, a law that treats each citizen as a person, and the daily habit of work all shape a nation. A reading list cannot stand in for those things. It can only help carry them.
He moves too fast when he promises a new American story “we can all fall in love with.” Serious people will not love a cartoon. Hide the sins, and the new books will fail the way a cleaned-up history always fails. Dwell on the sins and sneer at the achievements, and you have the campus sermon with a flag on the cover. “Warts and all” means both the greatness and the guilt. Leave either one out and you are writing propaganda.
One last point, and it should be said straight. Bellow asks Jewish publishers to lead this fight, and they do have a stake in it. Liberal order is what made Jewish life in America possible, and the people tearing that order down are not subtle about Jews.
But the job is not theirs alone. Anyone who wants a free country has the same duty. Print the better books. Tell the true story. Refuse the lie that the West is nothing but a crime scene.
Civilizations keep the stories they bother to print. Somebody is going to print the next set. The only question is who.
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Please read my books:
Very interesting perspectives on how good books might just change the direction that most societies are headed …. headed down the Marxist route that always ends one way.
“Americans who wonder how this movement emerged seemingly out of nowhere have since learned that its roots lie in a farrago of anti-Western, anti-capitalist, anti-American ideas that have been taught for years in elite universities and are now being exported to society at large.” — Adam Bellow. Yep, and while most of us are smart enough to realize it, there are too many dumb people who love free stuff and are outright lazy, both physically and mentally. All they want to do is play video games and riot to destroy (and steal stuff). Who are they? Well, we know.
Let us hope that good books will help, but in the smart phone, iPad era, I don’t think so.