The relationship between Christianity and the Jewish tradition is vital to Western culture, Eric Cohen said during a lecture in Christ Chapel on “The Jewish Spirit of the West.”

“As go the Jews, so goes the West,” Cohen said in the semester’s first Drummond lecture.

Cohen is a renowned Jewish activist, founder and editor-at-large of the New Atlantis, and director of the Tikvah Fund. 

“Now more than ever, we need to rekindle the spirit of liberty so that Jews and Christians together can save the West from sabotaging itself beyond repair,” he said.  

As Western culture descends into despair and decadence, Cohen said the solution can be found in the Jewish conceptions of the family and nation state. 

“The meaning of a family and nation, I believe, are some of the great remedies of our modern disorders,” he said. 

The significance of these concepts are inherent in the Christian tradition as well as the Jewish people, Cohen said. 

“If our purpose as Jews is to bring these ideas to the world,” Cohen said, “your purpose as Christians is to ensure these ideas are victorious in history, and standing together we can renew our precious inheritance. It is your sacred task as American Christians ring the liberty bell loudly throughout the land.”

Cohen said the mission of Hillsdale College is effective in communicating this task to the future generations. 

“The meaning of reason, faith, politics taught as it should be,” he said. “It is here that our future leaders will be found and nurtured.”

Speakers in the Drummond Lecture Series address faith and learning. Previous speakers have included former vice president Mike Pence and former secretary of education Betsy DeVos.

“I thought the talk was especially interesting given Mr. Cohen’s Jewish background,” junior John Schaefer said. “Students spend a lot of time contemplating the Christo-Greco-Roman traditions, but Judaism does not typically take as prominent of a role.”

The lecture came at an appropriate time as the ongoing conflict between Hamas and Israel remains unresolved, Schaefer said. 

“Given the current tensions in the Middle East and Israel’s place at the center of those conflicts, it seemed very timely to bring in a Jewish public policy thinker,” he said. 

Touching on the Middle Eastern conflict and the startling rise of antisemitism, Cohen said the need for unity between Jews and Christians is imperative.

“The living Jewish nation of Israel has become the progressives’ favorite pariah,” he said, referencing the debate over the ownership of the land. 

Yet the history of the Jewish people is full of hardships and the Jewish nation continues to survive these conflicts. 

“The lecture was very informative from a prominent Jewish thinker who has studied western thought extensively,” junior Makayla Babcock said. “It is apparent that he works closely with some of the most important Christian intellectuals writing today.”

Cohen echoed that the hopefulness of the shared Western tradition embedded in both the Jewish nation and American Christians is pivotal in saving Western culture.

 “I hope in a small way that this adds Jewish insight to your own culture and aids us in saving the West,” he said, “as it is indeed worth saving.”