Any development involving Israel becomes a Rorschach test for many Americans, probably even for larger numbers of non-Jews than Jews. Israel’s recent elections lit up a spectrum of reactions that revealed more about the reactors’ own temperaments, ideologies, and even their feelings about Jews, than about what the elections themselves actually reflected and portend. At one end there is gloating, and at the other doom-saying, but to assess the situation intelligently, we need to look at it morally and politically — not moralistically or ideologically— or we will only exacerbate a politics of paroxysm that forecloses politics itself.