Israel is different. In Israel the great temptation of modernity – assimilation – simply does not exist. Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity. It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago. You dig the soil and you find pottery from Davidic times, coins from Bar Kokhba, and 2,000-year-old scrolls written in a script remarkably like the one that today advertises ice cream at the corner candy store.

Essay, May 11, 1998, originally published in The Weekly Standard, "At Last, Zion: Israel and the Fate of the Jews" at freeman.org.