Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be – and that’s no joke. So what was it once and what is it now? We should care because it explains the West Bank Settlers in Israel, White Christian Nationalists in America, the right-wing successes of Europe, and even the American Supreme Court.
The expert on nostalgia was Svetlana Boym, a Jewish émigré from the former Soviet Union, who taught at Harvard, and died too young (just 56 years old). As Boym tells the story,[i] the word “nostalgia” was coined by a Swiss physician, Johannes Hofer, in 1688. He considered it a disease treatable by leeches (OMG), opium (worse), and restful vacations in the Alps (better).
“Nostalgia” was his second choice for a name. At first, he tried philopatridomania, which (unsurprisingly) didn’t catch on but which translates as something like “an overly developed love of home.” “Nostalgia” derives from the Greek, algos (“pain, longing”) and nostos (a word denoting a mythic hero’s homecoming). The German Heimweh (“home pain”) captures it exactly.
So nostalgia used to be a personal yearning to return home to a better time or place. Centuries of diasporan “exile” made Jews the prototypically nostalgic people: for a place (Lashanah haba’ah birushalayim, “Next year in Jerusalem”) and a time (chadesh yameinu k’kedem, “Renew our days as of old”).
This sort of nostalgia is overall harmless: just the practice of sugar-coating selective reminiscences of the way we think we were: “a romance with one’s own fantasies” says Boym, or (at worst) “hypochondria of the heart.” She labels it “reflective.” It is what nostalgia used to be. But all over the world, nostalgia has now morphed into a different and distinctly dangerous variety that Boym labels “restorative.” Historian Marc Lilla prefers calling it “militant.”[ii]
Restorative/militant nostalgia seeks not just to reflect on what is lost, but to recover it. It fantasizes conspiracies by enemies who are destroying the old and the good for their own nefarious purposes. Hitler’s Germany is the best example. Putin’s Russia is not far behind.
Like pretty much every empire throughout time, restorationists thrive on uniting the power of the state with the ideology of religion. David and Solomon needed their priesthood. Constantine empowered early Christianity. Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne. Henry VIII founded his own Church of England. Putin works closely with the Russian Orthodox Patriarch. The racist claim to keeping America white justifies itself because it will be a white Christian nationalism.
Both church and state, however, draw heavily on the glue of ethnicity, the good old days when it is imagined that we were all “authentically” the same: minorities are, at best, sidelined; at worst, demonized and victimized. There is little room in Modi’s India for Muslims. Arab Muslims in northern Sudan are even now eradicating non-Arab Muslims in the south. A militant settler movement in Israel cites the Bible to justify expelling West Bank Arabs.
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Restorative nostalgia is part of a larger picture: a centuries-long struggle between head and heart, reason (on one hand) and romanticism (on the other).
The Age of Reason (17th-18th centuries) celebrated the head, with a claim that as much as people may look different on the outside, we are all creatures of reason on the inside — all the same, that is. It gave birth to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) whose philosophy assumes universal human reason and arrives at equally universal human duty. Or, earlier (1685-1750), Johann Sebastian Bach, whose fugues are mathematically precise and appealing to both ear and mind.
This dependence on reason was behind the French Revolution’s call for universalist values of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”; and its mission to end the unreasonable differences in privilege that marked the old order. Napoleon’s intended breakup of that order was a logical extension. Unsurprisingly, the European aristocracies who were threatened by that breakup exchanged head for heart: not universal reason but a romance with ethnic/nationalist tribalism. Germany for Germans; France for the French. Instead of Kant, we got Hegel, who thought the spirit of history was inexorably evolving into its preordained end, the superior German state. Instead of Bach, we got Wagner (1813-1883), whose operas glorify Germanic myths of origin.
World War I was the natural outgrowth of this romanticized particularism, where each of the warring nations distrusted all the others. And Germany of World War II is a textbook case of restorative nostalgia militarized.
When WW II ended, the seesaw of head and heart resumed. At first, reasoned universalism made its comeback. The American variety stressed worldwide democracy and open-market capitalism; the Soviet alternative underscored the interests of the international proletariat. Both sought to remake the world in their own version of a universalist tomorrow.
When the Iron Curtain fell, only the American variety survived, and with it, a strengthened European union, globalism unbound, free trade, and capitalism unleashed: all of it, the new gospel for liberal intellectuals.
But Jobs migrated to Asia; computers replaced people; the wealth gap widened; and religion was sidelined. A deluge of immigrants and the reality of a black president threatened the white ethnics who blamed the liberal universalist era for passing them by. So in 2016, romanticism returned with restorative nostalgia. Unsurprisingly, adherents of MAGA (Make America great again) denounce universal scientific reasoning behind vaccines and masks.
American restorationists today romanticize the good old days of the 1950s, where (they imagine) America was mostly white and Protestant. The Supreme Court’s fetish with “originalism” is itself rooted in the assumption that the guiding wisdom of our founding fathers will overturn the liberal universalist order and reproduce the golden years when America was already great (never mind the extermination of Native Indians and an economy dependent on black slaves).
Unlike the right, the woke left has no delusions about returning to yesteryear. But the same return to romanticism informs its claim that aggrieved minorities must hunker down behind “our own kind.” Men cannot understand women; whites cannot comprehend blacks. Hence the rise of anti-Semitism on the right and on the left, both of them romanticized, tribalized, and militant enemies of the universalists’ love affair with reason and the way we are all the same.
I love being a Jew; I think the Jewish People matters – but as part of a divine mission where all peoples draw upon their specificities to make their own unique contributions to a better world for all. That makes me an unrepentant universalist. Restorationist nostalgia on the right and romantic tribalism on the left will eventually end, I know. In the meantime, I write letters like this and practice having patience.
[i] Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 3.
[ii] Mark Lilla, “The Tower and the Sewer,” New York Review of Books, June 20, 2024, p. 14.
Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, Ph.D. 
And so history repeats, and repeats itself with different names. Yet, we never seem to learn.