(UNDATED) Today’s anxious Americans could use a strong dose of the courageous realism not seen since Margo Channing in 1950’s “All About Eve,” and the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah. A strange combination, you say? Not at all.

Channing and Jeremiah are both compelling models as we attempt to overcome our numerous internal and external problems: the current economic recession; corporate and personal bankruptcies; housing foreclosures; high unemployment; domestic and international terrorists who murder opponents with pathological fury; nuclear ambitions in Iran and North Korea; Iraq and Afghanistan … need I go on?

Every movie buff knows the famous scene from “All About Eve”: Channing, a proud powerful Broadway superstar brilliantly portrayed by Bette Davis, gauges the serious challenges threatening her personal life and professional career. “Fasten your seat belts,” she says. “It’s going to be a bumpy night!”

Ever since the film’s release, some critics have mistakenly seen Channing’s words as a pessimistic response to a difficult situation. By the end of the movie, Channing fully understood what she needed to do in order to survive: she triumphed over potential disaster by summoning her extraordinary grit, intelligence and audacity.

The tough-minded but optimistic Channing teaches us that earning the respect of both friends and adversaries is far better than simply being liked. It would be worse, she teaches us now, to be intimidated by those who hate us and our remarkable diversity as a people and our principles of liberty and freedom.

Some 2,600 years before “All About Eve,” Jeremiah delivered a similar message to his fellow Jews when they faced the physical destruction of the beloved Jerusalem at the hands of King Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonian army.

Indeed, the book of Jeremiah contains 52 chapters of lamentations and predictions so gloomy that a variation of his name — jeremiad — has come to mean a long recitation of mournful complaints. No other prophet has achieved such linguistic distinction, and like the cinematic Channing, the real-life Jeremiah has often been falsely labeled as “pessimistic.”

But Jeremiah also triumphs, even though he is imprisoned by his own people for expressing a grim, but realistic, assessment of his nation’s dire situation. After witnessing the destruction of Judea, the prophet faced the choice of joining the exiled captives in victorious Babylon (modern-day Iraq) or remaining in the defeated biblical homeland. He chose the latter and did not flee.

As an act of stubborn defiance and daring optimism in the midst of destruction and desolation, Jeremiah purchased a parcel of land near Jerusalem — an act demonstrating his strong belief that Judea’s acute problems did not mean the permanent end of national sovereignty.

Amidst horrific problems, he provided realistic hope that still has meaning today: “Refrain your voice from weeping …for your work will be rewarded … and they (the exiles) shall come back from the land of your enemy. And there is hope for the future … your children shall return to their own border.”

Jeremiah offered words of advice that still resonate in an America torn by internal division and even self-doubt. “Build houses, and dwell in them, and plant gardens,” he said. “Take wives, and have both children … and grandchildren. Seek the welfare and peace of the city where God has placed you … for if your city is peaceful, you will also have peace.”

If, in some miraculous way, Channing and Jeremiah could speak to us today, what hopeful yet realistic advice would they have for deeply apprehensive Americans?

“I’ll admit I may have seen better days,” Channing said once, and would say again, “but I’m still not to be had for the price of a cocktail like a salted peanut.”

“Let not your heart be faint,” Jeremiah would add, “and do not fear.”

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)