As so often in Israel, gallows humor explains something essential about the national temperament. In the case of TimeOut's cover, the relevant temperament is Israel's unity in supporting the war against Hezbollah, Iran's proxy in south Lebanon. Anyone who finds it surprising that 95 percent of Israelis endorse the aerial bombardment of Lebanon with its hundreds of civilian casualties, as a recent poll by the newspaper Maariv found, should consider the implicit punch line of TimeOut's visual joke. The battlefront in this war comprises a good deal of sovereign Israel. What might look to much of the outside world like "disproportionate" military action seems to the vast majority of Israelis like deterrence in the cause of self-defense.

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For the next five minutes and 19 seconds, Malloy wordlessly broadcast the noise of missiles shrieking, bombs exploding, antiaircraft fire rattling. He had taped the audio straight from CNN, but on radio the war was shorn of television's video game visuals, its safe distance from danger. This soundtrack thrust Malloy's listeners into a nocturnal Baghdad, reeling from concussions.

When the battle tape ended, Malloy switched to a sound bite of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at a press conference lauding the "careful, measured beginning" of the war. Then Malloy returned to the air, saying, "This is a dark day, this is a filthy day, this is a day for shame." And finally, heading into a commercial break, he wove together more combat racket with a madrigal-like song by Pink Floyd, "Goodbye, Blue Sky."

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For that picture, an Associated Press photographer named Nick Ut won the Pulitzer Prize for spot news in 1973. Far from being some disengaged voyeur, Ut had been wounded three times in the war and lost a brother to it. And in the United States, his photograph came to symbolize all that was ceaselessly tragic and senselessly destructive about the Vietnam War.

Throughout the pages of "Capture the Moment," in fact, I found many such photographs, all of them deemed worthy of journalism's highest award. There is Edward Adams' photo of a South Vietnamese general executing a Viet Cong lieutenant during the Tet Offensive of 1968. There is Greg Marinovich's shot of African National Congress fighters setting afire a spy from the rival Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party.

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Just then, right on time, the commuter bus pulled up, making its regular stop in Hebron. I boarded and found a seat amid off-duty soldiers, Russian immigrants in tank tops, and Orthodox mothers in calf-length skirts and the crocheted kerchiefs called snoods. Little more than an hour later, having gone through one cursory checkpoint to imply the passage between Israel and the Palestinian territories, the air-conditioned, bullet-proofed vehicle deposited me in central Jerusalem.

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Yet Shapiro in many ways embodied one of the most durable and admirable traits in the American Jewish character: universalism. His mother and father were New York teachers, part of the grand tradition of American Jewish commitment to public education. In an interview with the Forward, a Jewish weekly newspaper, Shapiro traced his commitment to the Palestinian cause to his studies of the Holocaust, with a protest against the Rwandan genocide a stop along the way.

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By Monday, its fifth day, the violence had killed at least 51 people and wounded more than 1,300. Naturally it has taken American Jews time to grasp the rapid escalation of violence, and yes, organized reaction requires some amount of planning. Yet the comparative public silence might best be understood as the sound of confoundment, at least for the vast number of American Jews who have supported the peace process in however passive and distant a way.

The minority that has long opposed the land-for-peace principle and mistrusted Yasir Arafat as a negotiating partner -- about one-third of American Jewry in most polls -- has of course been quicker to react. They found grim confirmation of their caution in the bloody battle. Because this right wing is the most mobilized segment of American Jewry on matters of Israel, it promises to be the first to make its case resoundingly heard.

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But much of American Jewish officialdom reacted as if the Inquisition were imminent. The Southern Baptists betrayed an ignorance that "these sorts of statements throughout history are associated with coercion, hatred and violence," declared Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, a Reform Jewish body. Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, contended the campaign "projects a message of spiritual narrowness that invites theological hatred."

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And simultaneously, if less visibly, Barak's power struggle with Shas underscores a deep controversy within the nation, one with ramifications for the fundamental nature of the Jewish state: the conflict between secular and religious forces in Israel.

Last month, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that an all-female group be allowed to conduct religious services at the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism and the most historically important in Israel. Because of twin claims on the massive brick rampart, one theological and the other nationalistic, the court's decision dramatically intensified an ongoing conflict over the balance between religion and the civil state in Israel.

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"Crimes of the Pope," cried one mailing. Another bore the title, "Convent Life Unveiled." A broad spectrum of American society joined in the assault. While the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan declared that Smith had to be defeated for "the Nordic stock ... to finish its destiny," the respected commentator William Allen White characterized Smith's race against Herbert Hoover as a challenge "to the whole Puritan civilization, which has built a sturdy, orderly nation."

When the last ballots had been counted in what remains the most bigoted presidential campaign in American history, Smith had been decimated. He carried eight states to Hoover's 40, won 87 electoral votes to Hoover's 444.

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Sarah's adulation told me I was in for an unforgettable week. From the start, the omens had been bad for this, our family vacation to Disney World. Back in July, when we'd first intended to come, wildfires and 100-degree heat had raged across Florida with biblical intensity. Instead of heeding the augury and canceling the trip altogether, we had rescheduled for Thanksgiving week. There were a thousand dollars' worth of non-refundable airplane tickets at stake, after all; there were several hundred more in theme-park passes bought at a reduced advance rate.

And there was the force of destiny. Every family with children of my acquaintance seemed to have made its pilgrimage to Disney World. Editors, photographers, pastors, attorneys -- people who should have known better -- submitted to their duty. One of them, mindful of Art Spiegelman's Holocaust comic book, called the place "Mauschwitz."

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Several months before Furrow's attack, and a similar assault on Orthodox Jews as well as other minorities in the Chicago area, the American Jewish Committee released some startling poll results. The survey found that 62 percent of American Jews named anti-Semitism their greatest danger. Intermarriage was a distant second, at 32 percent.

Such a finding seemed inexplicable in a nation where 34 Jews serve in Congress -- including both senators from Wisconsin, that overwhelmingly Christian and heavily German state, as well as from California, site of Furrow's rampage -- and where the rate of interfaith marriage hovers between one-third and one-half by various estimates. But the primal fears borne of two millennia of exile, culminating in the Holocaust, yield only begrudgingly to the reality of American tolerance -- some might say ardor -- for Jews.

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As Toby collapsed in a heap on the limestone plaza, a second bottle arrived. It, too, found an appropriate target, striking a congregant named Shira flush on the forehead, a few inches from her yarmulke. Shira recovered the bottle, this one containing orange soda provided by yeshivas to their students as part of a box lunch. Clutching it in her fist, she stalked to the barricades and began shouting at the nearest boys. "What are you doing with a yarmulke on?" one shot back in English.

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"If we give poor parents the same opportunity to make choices about their children's education that the richest and most affluent parents in New York have," the mayor said, "let's see if that doesn't work to really energize that school district and help to create another alternative and more competition."

Dressing the conservative faith in free markets in the liberal cloth of fighting inequality, the mayor's words typified the argument increasingly and effectively made for vouchers by an unlikely coalition of libertarians, the religious right and traditionally Democratic minorities. That the mayor would advocate the cause in a city once so renowned for its public schools only added to the impact and symbolism.

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In much of American Jewry, the resulting image would hardly have merited a second glance, for Rabbi Levy in his attire and attitude resembled not only much of the rabbinate but a large segment of Jewish laity, which wears the yarmulke and tallit for worship and after touching the Torah scrolls kisses the tzitzis.

For hundreds of thousands of Reform Jews, however, the picture of Rabbi Levy on the magazine arrived as an in-your-face provocation. More than a century earlier, the Reform movement had disavowed clerical garb and many of the accompanying rituals and beliefs as the remnants of an atavistic past, one unsuited to the science and reason of modern America. "Why are you destroying the religion I grew up with?" Rabbi Levy recalls one subscriber writing to him.

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But while Rabbi Gerald Zelizer has presided over this ceremony with perhaps 250 young men and women, only 50 or so have ever put the gift certificate to use. In his congregation and so many others across America, the day of bar or bat mitzvah often marks not a deepening of religious or communal commitments, but liberation from them. And Israel, far from being the unifying talisman for American Jews, contributes mightily to the tensions renting them.

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Some in the delegation had been similarly persuaded on visits to Cleveland and Milwaukee, the only cities now using public funds to underwrite private-school tuition for poor children. The uncommitted still wondered why Flake would break with his party and the Congressional Black Caucus to cosponsor a voucher bill in Congress and champion a voucher program using private moneys in New York City.

"When a white person kills a black person, we all go out in the street to protest," Flake told his listeners, explaining his heresy. "But our children are being educationally killed everyday in public schools and nobody says a thing."

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Lukas recounted this particular feat of research with typical modesty. He was attending a family reunion of Steunenberg's descendants when one heir ambled up to him and asked, "Would you be interested in seeing a box of old letters I have?" Lukas lifted his brows, parted his lips, and murmured, "Would I." Before long, he had the keys to the man's home and free run of the Steunenberg correspondence.

During that same appearance before the class, however, Lukas hinted at the toll his epic efforts and lofty standards often exacted. "I was sitting at home in the dark, with a glass of Jack Daniel's, as is my wont," he said of one especially bleak evening, "and then Linda came in and said, 'Oh, Tony.'"

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Through the entire barrage, however, one facet of Clinton's character has enjoyed nearly uniform admiration. As a child of the Jim Crow South who transcended its dogma of segregation, he is perceived as the ideal healer of America's continuing racial rift. The ease and camaraderie he displays in the pulpits of black churches is genuine.

Just days ago in Salon, Clinton's fellow Southerner and former handler James Carville hailed him as "without doubt the wisest and bravest white man I've ever known" on matters of race.

Now, more than halfway through a presidency undefined by any single achievement, Clinton seeks to seal his place in history by reconciling the races through honest, engaged dialogue. This campaign for posterity's favor -- orchestrated out of the White House -- began with Clinton's speech at the Shea Stadium ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's first game in the major leagues. Noting in his address that "we've been trying to catch up ever since," the president served notice he would be returning to the topic of race frequently.

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I, and a few other New York expatriates, erupted into laughter. None of us could forget the image of Albert Shanker that was seared into our consciousness during the virtual civil war over community control of public schools that traumatized New York in the late 1960s.

Shanker, as president of the city teachers union, filled our television screens nightly, denouncing the black leaders who had ousted white teachers and principals from a Brooklyn district experimenting with community control and leading three citywide teachers' strikes in protest. Bullhorn in hand, Shanker pilloried his opponents as union-busters, bigots and anti-Semites, becoming a hero to the city's white-ethnic middle class, but also contributing to a rupture between African-Americans and Jews in New York that has never truly healed.

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The church's timing seemed, on first inspection, not only odd and contrary, but self-defeating. Saint Paul's worshipers are working people, many of them employed in the public sector, and instead of being able to honor Dr. King on a paid day off from work, they had to spend precious vacation time on the effort.

It happens, however, that January 15 is the actual birthday of Dr. King. And in summoning the faithful on this day, the pastor of Saint Paul, Rev. Johnny Ray Youngblood, is trying to rescue the real man from the increasingly inaccurate facsimile.

Marking Dr. King's birthday on the third Monday in January, rather than on its true date, is the least of the revisionism. Both the left and the right in America have misrepresented Dr. King for their own purposes -- liberals by ignoring the centrality of religion in his civil rights crusade, and conservatives by portraying a political radical as an apologist for racial inequality.

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