Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

by Timothy Snyder

The United States of today resembles Poland in the 1930s in the sense that more Christians are active supporters of the Zionist idea than are Jews. Some of Israel’s American political allies—evangelical Christians—tend to deny the reality of climate change while supporting hydrocarbon policies that accelerate it. Among these American evangelicals are millions of dispensationalists, who support Israel because they believe that disasters there herald the second coming of Jesus Christ. In the 1940s, dispensationalists maintained that the Holocaust was the work of God because it forced Jews to reconsider their errors and move to the Promised Land. Although such a sharp substitution of politics by apocalypse is a minority view, a displacement of the political history of the State of Israel within a story of the end times is common in American society.