There followed a second message, this one from Janis Bellow, explaining that Saul had insisted on phoning us that morning. He was feeling a little better, as we could judge for ourselves if we wanted to come over to pay them a visit. When Len, my husband, and I stopped by later that week, we found Saul uncommonly serene. He sat in the hospital bed that had been set up for him, stroking Moosie the family cat and letting the conversation flow around him rather than through him (as had always been the case before). He was slow to respond when Len tried to engage him on familiar topics, like their native Montreal and family members whom we knew in common. As his message had signaled, Saul was now hors de combat. I realized that Janis was about to lose a husband, their daughter a father, and I—with humble respect for the differences—a comrade-in-arms.

Though Saul was disoriented during those last weeks of his life, his telephone message followed logically from conversations we had been having as long as we had known each other. Like most people, I had first gotten to know him as a reader, but thanks to his extended family in Montreal, he came often to the city where I grew up, and the brief contacts I had with him over the years allowed me to feel I knew him far better than I did. He was my favorite novelist, which meant that I occasionally sparred with him mentally the way his character Moses Herzog does in the letters he writes to Nietzsche and Heidegger. The sparring continued when we became friends, but by that time we were on the same side of every struggle that mattered. It was not surprising that he should have called to tell me he was about to exit the field of battle.

***

At the start of our friendship, I challenged Saul’s soldierly commitment. The first time was during a spectacular weekend in the spring of 1984 that was orchestrated by Guy Descary, the mayor of Lachine, a small city near Montreal, who had happened upon “Lachine” in a roster of Nobel Prize winners, and decided to name the new library of his suburb after its most famous native son. In a bid to attract full press coverage—he was considering a run for the Montreal mayoralty—Descary arranged a formal dedication of the Saul Bellow Library, to be followed by a celebratory luncheon at the Lachine waterfront. Montreal and its suburbs remain divided into fairly separate ethnic blocs, so that a special excitement accompanies events that draw its various communities together. Here was a French mayor honoring an English writer who made a point of staying in touch with his local Jewish family. Saul invoked Yiddish, English, and French during the ceremonies, demonstrating the mayor’s contention that “Saul Bellow never forgot his roots.”

I was one of many speakers at the luncheon in Saul’s honor, of which I best remember Elizabeth Spencer’s reminiscences about the time she met Saul in Paris in 1949, when he was there on a Guggenheim Fellowship. The breezy young man she described was still recognizably there as the guest of honor, enjoying the array of local notables, literati, and members of family paying tribute to his talent and charm. More than on the talks, however, my mind was fixed anxiously on the note I had slipped to Saul before we sat down to the meal, whose contents were quite at odds with the reverential tone of my public remarks. Although I knew he did not take kindly to criticism and feared that I might blow my chance of ever getting to know him better, I had felt compelled to share with him my disappointment about something he had recently done—or rather, undone.

My remonstrance had to do with his resignation from the Committee for the Free World—an organization Midge Decter had founded several years earlier “to conduct a battle of ideas in defense of Western values and institutions” by taking public positions for American victory against Soviet influence in the Cold War. To this end, she drew together thinkers from Europe and North America who recognized the danger of Communism, some because they had once been forcibly subject to Communist rule and others because they had at one time “said the blessing over poison”—the Canadian poet A. M. Klein’s description of those who had voluntarily joined the Party. Midge deemed that no less threatening to our democratic societies than Soviet missiles or OPEC cartels were the compatriots among our academic and cultural elites who “blamed America first,” to use the phrase made famous by Jeane Kirkpatrick at the 1984 Republican National Convention. The Committee’s monthly bulletin Contentions drew a bead on writers and columnists who argued that our political system was founded on oppression, that its freedoms were a sham, and that our prosperity depended on the exploitation of poorer nations. Saul Bellow was a charter member of the Committee’s international board, which also included Raymond Aron, William Barrett, Paul Johnson, Leszek Kolakowski, Tom Stoppard, and George Will.

Rather, Saul had been a member. I had just heard that he resigned from the board in protest against an issue of Contentions criticizing certain of that year’s literary prizes for honoring the political rather than literary merits of the winners—two of whom were Bellow’s friends. Contentions called their work “snooty, mindless, and altogether conventional attitudinizing” (Gore Vidal) and evidence of the “exhaustion of serious fiction as a vehicle for significant comment about human affairs” (Stanley Elkin). As we now know from his published letters, Saul asked that his name be removed from the masthead not because he disagreed with these judgments but because the “reviews were in such bad taste that it depressed me to be associated with them.” He continued:

I have for some time been struggling with the growing realization that a problem exists: About Nicaragua we can agree well enough but as soon as you begin to speak of culture you give me the willies…. [Where] there are politics there are bedfellows, and where there are bedfellows there are likely to be fleas, so I scratched my bites in silence. Your Special Issue, however, is different. I can’t allow the editors of Confrontations (sic) to speak in my name, or with my tacit consent as board-member, about writers and literature. When there are enemies to be made I prefer to make them myself, on my own grounds and in my own language. Le mauvais gout mène aux crimes, said Stendhal, who was right of course but who didn’t realize how many criminals history was about to turn loose.

Had I seen the letter, its wit would not have charmed me. So he had “scratched his bites in silence” instead of appreciating the political energy Midge was organizing on our behalf! Weren’t those many criminals that history was about to turn loose reason enough to support the Committee’s work? Given that he understood what was at stake in the Cold War, I was dismayed that he quit the battlefield for what I considered a slight to his vanity.

***

If you are amused by this account of internecine conflict among intellectuals determined to bring down the Soviet Empire, don’t expect a self-mocking disclaimer from me in this quarrel long since resolved. Since I don’t write for The New Yorker, I don’t feel obliged to be ironic when speaking of the free world. Which is not to say that I fail to appreciate some ironies of this little episode: Saul was valuable to the Committee precisely because he insisted on the preeminence of the writer over the warrior. His idealization of the writer’s task was the bedrock of his literary ambition, and that ambition, fully realized in his work, made him far more precious to the Committee than lesser writers (like me) who soldiered better. Those most valuable to a cause may be least willing to submit to its discipline. On the other hand, Contentions had set out to depoliticize literature by highlighting political considerations that had determined literary awards. If the editors were right, Saul would have forfeited his chance of ever winning one of those prizes had he remained on the Contentions masthead. Thus, his political calculations may have run up against their commitment to purer aesthetic and literary judgment. Irony indeed.

Saul and I never did thrash this out. When Len and I joined him for dinner the following evening with the poet Louis Dudek, we talked for hours without mentioning my note. I sensed that Saul did not want to discuss it, and that our acquaintanceship would flourish on his terms or not at all. In agreeing to subordinate public to private objectives, I was making the same kind of calculation of which I was accusing him in quitting the Committee, but I hoped that it would someday allow me to take up the subject with him again.

There was only intermittent contact between Saul and me in the years that followed. That changed when he married Janis Freedman in 1989 and when they moved to Boston soon after Len and I did, in 1993. Their marriage, which was treated as a May-December curiosity—31-year-old student-assistant marries famous novelist-professor—seemed instead to be something entirely different to me: Saul’s homecoming, after a lifetime of search. To be sure, he had found in Janis a lovely young wife, but she also gave him the unconditional love of the mother he had never ceased to mourn. A fellow Canadian, Janis shared his passion for literature, his comfort in being Jewish, and his concern for Israel at a time when that was becoming more important to him. For these and many other reasons there was no couple in Boston with whom Len and I felt more at home. Often Saul and I slipped into Yiddish, which he could no longer speak with his brothers, by then deceased. We were all landsleit, a term I had always associated with immigrants from Europe, but one equally suited to the reunion of us Canadian Jews on American soil.

One of the few subjects Saul and I continued to disagree on was anti-Semitism. As a teenager in Chicago he had heard the anti-Jewish diatribes of Father Coughlan, also a former Canadian, and Saul was convinced that the same hostility still festered in America under a civil surface. I was confident that American democracy was by now too substantial to allow any politician to win office on a platform of anti-Semitism—which was my criterion for code red. My apprehension was trained wholly on the threat from Arab and Muslim aggressors and secondarily on their deputies among our academic elites. In worrying about America, I thought, Saul was mistaking prejudice, which was nasty but not necessarily lethal, for the murderous politics of Jew-blame that leaders used to manipulate restive populations. He, in turn, thought me naïve to discount the potential of plain old Jew-hatred in our midst.

Saul’s political hard-headedness on these issues made me wonder how, during World War II and into the 1950s, he could have ignored the Jewish struggle for survival in Europe and Palestine. When I put the question to him in 1991, he said, “America was not a country to us. It was the world.” I took this to mean that while he and his friends were being drafted into the army, becoming writers, getting married, and trying to earn a living in the throes of the Depression, they were fully absorbed with the challenges of their lives, not with the lives and deaths of co-religionists overseas. I could not imagine this kind of detachment until it occurred to me that his Jewish counterparts in pre-war Europe—say, at the Lublin Yeshiva (founded in 1930) or Vilna’s YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (founded in 1929)—likewise felt that “Poland is not a country to us. It is the world.” And Jewish Trotskyists, of whom he had been one, were probably equally delusional on both continents.

Ruth Wisse with Saul Bellow at Bellow’s home, 2001.

Janis Bellow

But why belabor this? By the time he moved to Boston Saul had long since made up for the lapses of his youth. He grasped political realities as clearly as anyone I knew, even as he did not care to be a political player. Blessed with genius that came from beyond the summons of the will, he trusted the realm of the spirit more than us plodders who make do with what wisdom and knowledge we wring from mere experience. I once told him that he was the only adult I knew who spoke seriously about the “soul.” This seemed to surprise him coming from someone who kept a kosher home and blessed the Sabbath, but it is possible to obey God and thank God without hankering for the afterlife—as Saul did—and without leaving politics to an unseen agency. I think that Saul held with his eponymous Mr. Sammler that a good man meets the terms of his contract, “terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As we all know. For that is the truth of it—that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know.” I happen to love that homespun kaddish at the conclusion of one of my favorite novels, but its sentiment is not mine. My view is rather that in their hearts most people don’t know, and because we don’t know, the Torah was given, reportedly, through Moses at Sinai, so that we may learn good from evil from a legal tradition scrupulously studied and painstakingly transmitted.

***

Though I am tracking here only the part of our friendship that prompted Saul’s parting message to me, I can’t leave out the joy of most of our time together. Every time I taught his work, I invited him to be a guest of the class, and he always came—even when he eventually needed an aide to help him into the building. The students were curious and deferential. He flinched only from questions that pried into the mysteries of composition, but otherwise enjoyed telling about himself, people he knew, and books he liked. He loved to recall his childhood in Lachine, where the kids spoke French, Ukrainian, Yiddish, and the English they were beginning to pick up in the street. His protestations about being called an American Jewish writer seemed irrelevant when he described putting on the ritual fringes that were part of his childhood morning routine or studying parts of Genesis he learned in cheder. “What else but a Jew could I be?” he would say to students who asked about being a Jewish writer. It was the impulse to classify rather than the label itself that bothered him. He didn’t fit any classification.

I had no trouble imagining the fun he and Isaac Rosenfeld had in their teens doing translations of T.S. Eliot and Milton, singing macaronic Yiddish and English songs, and playing verbal chess. Sometimes at the dinner table he would ask Janis to join him in a raunchy Yiddish ditty he had taught her. In Saul’s rendition of “Der Rebbe Elimelekh” (itself the Yiddish adaptation of “Old King Cole”), the merry rabbi at the conclusion of the Sabbath sends not for the fiddlers and drummers with whom he fiddles and drums, but for the shikselekh with whom he shiksels. He had the rabbi frolicking with gentile girls in a verbal construction of his own making. When he’d finish the song, Saul would throw back his head and have us all laughing with him.

Ruth R. Wisse, the author of the Nextbook Press book Jews and Power, is Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and a professor of comparative literature at Harvard.

Norman Podhoretz has edited and written for Commentary for more than half a century, transforming it over time from a leading national forum for discussions of culture and politics, one of the finest and most influential Jewish magazines ever published, into a rather predictable party organ of American neoconservatism. In Why Are Jews Liberals? (Doubleday, September), he ponders a favored question of social scientists (and of his fellow conservative pundit Dennis Prager): why is it that most American Jews still stubbornly vote for Democrats, as so many of their grandparents did, when the Republicans support Israel and offer tax cuts to the wealthy? Podhoretz proposes that centuries of anti-Semitism turned Jews into liberals, and that more recently a loss of faith has allowed liberalism to supplant Judaism as their religion.

Even Podhoretz would admit, though, that neither the Chmielniki massacres nor the widespread consumption of pork by American Jews quite explains why a whopping 77% of them voted for President Obama last year. To understand that phenomenon, see Sam Tanenhaus’s The Death of Conservatism (Random House, September). Best known as editor of the New York Times Book Review, Tanenhaus has been described as “an old-fashioned anti-communist Jewish liberal intellectual who still gets excited about Saul Bellow.” Though he produced a widely praised biography of Whittaker Chambers, and will write the authorized life of conservative stalwart William F. Buckley, Jr., Tanenhaus perceived little loyalty in the Bush administration to the ideas of Edmund Burke and Benjamin Disraeli, his great exemplars of classic conservatism. Nor does he admire Podhoretz’s baby: “It’s so rare to see somebody who’s actually making a reasoned argument” in Commentary and the other leading neocon magazines, he told an interviewer from New York. “Who is not just labeling, name-calling.”

* * *

Of all the liberal Jews in America, Congressman Barney Frank may come closest to representing Podhoretz’s most terrifying nightmare. A proud homosexual with a delightful, curmudgeonly wit—as demonstrated at a recent town hall meeting—Frank does not exactly fit the profile of a veteran politician. As he has said, “I’m a left-handed gay Jew. I’ve never felt, automatically, the member of any majority.” Five years in the making, Stuart Weisberg’s biography of the New Jersey native, Barney Frank: The Story of America’s Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman (University of Massachusetts Press, September), draws upon scores of interviews, including dozens of hours with Frank himself, to offer an extensive, admiring portrait of an extraordinary liberal.

* * *

Another explanation for American Jews’ embrace of liberalism: members of a 3,000-year-old tribe know better than anyone else that without frequent innovation, the conservation of culture becomes oppressively boring. Erica Brown, scholar-in-residence at the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, goes so far in Spiritual Boredom: Rediscovering the Wonder of Judaism (Jewish Lights, September) as to suggest that the future of Judaism depends on the boredom inevitably experienced by Jews in their classrooms, synagogues, and community centers—and on their engaged, creative responses to it.

* * *

Not all the yawns on a typical Shabbat result from stultifying sermons or endless Haftorah readings. Some of them, particularly in the afternoon, can be blamed on chulent, a soporific stew the popularity of which makes electric slow cookers ubiquitous fixtures in Orthodox homes. Loaded up and set to a low temperature on Friday evening, such cookers yield a pot full of meaty mush by lunchtime on Saturday without transgressing the prohibition of lighting fires on the Sabbath. Yet the “Shabbat miracle machine” can do much more, proclaims chef Laura Frankel of Shallots Bistro in Skokie, Illinois, in Jewish Slow Cooker Recipes (Wiley, August): Senegalese Peanut Soup! Kreplach! Duck Confit!

And afterwards? Maybe a little piece of cake, bubbeleh? That’s what Rose Levy Beranbaum would recommend. Raised mostly by a grandmother from Czarist Russia, Beranbaum wrote her master’s thesis on flour sifting in cake preparation, which led naturally to a career as a dessert guru. Judging by the Amazon.com customer reviews of her classic book, The Cake Bible (1988), Beranbaum has attracted her share of true believers, as well as a few skeptics. She expands her sugary theology with Rose’s Heavenly Cakes (Wiley, September), a lavishly full-color New Testament.

* * *

When he wasn’t designing art museums for Yale or the celebrated National Assembly Building of Bangladesh, the famed American architect Louis I. Kahn—

born Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky in Estonia—could be convinced to dream up a Jewish Community Center or even a synagogue on occasion. Susan G. Solomon’s Louis I. Kahn’s Jewish Architecture: Mikveh Israel and the Midcentury American Synagogue (Brandeis, August) tells the tale of how one of the oldest Sephardic Orthodox congregations in the United States hired Kahn at the height of the postwar boom. Though the shul was never built, Solomon argues that his design blazed a new trail in the aesthetics of Jewish worship.

Another Kahn, this one fictional and a chutzpahdik fraud, stars in a new graphic novel. Neil Kleid’s anticipated follow-up to the acclaimed Brownsville, The Big Kahn (NBM, September) concerns a New Jersey rabbi who turns out, posthumously, not to have been Jewish. Similar conceits have been used before as a means of pondering the nature of Jewish identity—see, particularly, Eileen Pollack’s “The Bris” in The Best American Short Stories 2007—but Kleid’s tale, drawn by Nicholas Cinquegrani, may resonate more powerfully with recent headlines of duplicitous New Jersey rabbis. Like Kahn’s, the children of Saul Kassin may flounder, not knowing how to account for his mistakes.

In 1985, John Barnes was finishing up his yearlong tenure as a legman for the Evans-Novak Political Report. Barnes was an Israel supporter, and he wondered why Evans and Novak heldsuch an antagonistic position toward the Jewish state. “I always thought it was an issue best not to bring up,” Barnes said in a recent interview. But his curiosity finally got the best of him. During their last dinner together in Washington, Barnes finally asked. Novak “put it on Evans,” as Barnes recalls. The pair had not written much about foreign policy after starting their column in 1963, but that changed when Evans traveled to the Middle East to cover the Six Day War in 1967. Two days after a ceasefire took effect, Evans found himself on the Jordanian side of the Jordan River with an Arab army regiment, when an Israeli fighter jet “appeared out of nowhere and strafed them.” According to Barnes, Novak said that the “relationship between Rowley and Israel was downhill ever since.”

Evans had always been a moderate establishment Republican. But the post-ceasefire strafing incident, Barnes said, changed his view. When Barnes later asked Evans about the Middle East, “he basically made the point that he thought that the Islamic world was enormous and big and important,” and that America’s close relationship with Israel put the United States at risk of enraging Muslims. That stance, Barnes added, rubbed off on Novak. “I think they had a bit of a deal to some extent, that they would indulge each others’ hobby horses,” Barnes said. “Evans with Novak’s supply-side economics; Novak with Evans’s views on the Middle East.”

“We ran hundreds of columns critical of Israel,” Novak said in a 2007 interview with Charlie Rose, “all of them written by Rowley Evans,” who was “very committed on the issue.” This explanation was confirmed by Evans’s widow. “Rowley brought Bob around to his point of view on the Middle East,” she said in a 2003 profile of Novak for Washingtonian magazine. “It cost them a lot. They lost some papers because of pressure from the Israeli government and certain Jewish organizations. But Bob never complained.”

Still, while an unfortunate brush with the Israeli military might have provided Evans with a reason for viewing Israel with a skeptical eye—and his partner with an amusing anecdote—it doesn’t sufficiently explain how a man like Novak, someone with strong opinions about everything, came to see the Middle East in the way that he did. Indeed, heard today after his death, it sounds like just what it was meant to be at the time: an excuse. After all, Evans retired from the column in 1993 and passed away in 2001. And it was over the past 15 years that Novak’s writing on American Jewry and Israel—unaffected by Evans’s presence—took on its most controversial form.

In 1997, Novak wrote a series of columns attempting to resuscitate the reputation of Louis Farrakhan, encouraging Republicans to give a hearing to the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam Leader, who, he wrote, was “knocking on the GOP’s door.” The brainchild of this effort was Novak’s friend Jude Wanniski, the Reaganite supply-side guru who later became a crank, penning screeds denying Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds and promoting political cultist Lyndon Larouche. Novak believed that a Republican alliance with Farrakhan could have “vast future implications,” fruitful ones. For a man now lauded as one of the most perspicacious political commentators of his era, this was a curious, if not dangerous, assessment.

But Novak’s real provocation of American Jewry waited until after the September 11 attacks, which he blamed on America’s support for Israel. Two days after the attacks, he wrote that “the hatred toward the United States today by the terrorists is an extension of [their] hatred of Israel” and that “the United States and Israel are brought ever closer in a way that cannot improve long-term U.S. policy objectives.” Was this neo-isolationism, befitting of the paleoconservative right to which Novak had a close ideological kinship?  If so, he took it a step further when, the following month, he referred to senior Hamas terrorist Mahmoud Abu Hanoud as a “freedom fighter” on CNN.

Novak was also a major voice in propagating the notion that the Iraq War was ultimately a war fought for Israel. In December 2002, in a column titled “Sharon’s War?” he wrote that then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon “leaves no doubt that the greatest U.S. assistance to Israel would be to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime. That view is widely shared inside the Bush administration, and is a major reason U.S. forces today are assembling for war.” One of the officials Novak later implicated in this plot was David Frum, who worked in the Bush administration as a speechwriter in 2001 and 2002. In a review of Frum’s White House memoir, The Right Man, Novak wrote in The American Conservative:

While Frum calls himself “a not especially observant Jew,” he repeatedly refers to his Jewishness. It is hard to recall any previous presidential aide so engrossed with his own ethnic roots. Frum is more uncompromising in support of Israel than any other issue, raising the inescapable question of whether this was the real reason he entered the White House.

When not accusing others of being fifth columnists for Israel, Novak was making contentious historical analogies. In a 2007 column datelined Bethlehem, “Worse than Apartheid,” Novak asserted that “the separation barrier in most places is a big, ugly and intimidating wall, not merely a fence,” and that Palestinians in the West Bank were in a sorrier state than black South Africans under white rule. That same year, Novak endorsed Ron Paul for president, a candidate who has flirted with anti-Semitism and questioned America’s relationship with Israel.

In light of this fraught relationship with American Jewry and Zionism, it’s difficult to believe that an incident on the Israeli-Jordanian border really accounted for Novak’s worldview. It’s fair, then, to consider what role his own alienation from Judaism and late-in-life adoption of Roman Catholicism might have played.

Novak was born into what he described as a “not very observant” Jewish family in Joliet, Illinois, in 1931. While his father was not bar mitzvahed and his grandfather was “not a very good Jew,” Novak was bar mitzvahed and joined a Jewish fraternity at the University of Illinois. Aside from these affiliations, he remained non-observant, and detached from Judaism, for the rest of his life.

It was not just Judaism, however, that turned off Novak, but religion in general. His first marriage in 1957 was rough from the start after he refused a demand by his father-in-law that a Presbyterian pastor deliver a blessing at the ceremony. For Novak, getting married at a Unitarian church was compromise enough. The marriage lasted a year, and when Novak married for the second—and final—time in 1962, the ceremony was held at an Episcopal church on Capitol Hill. In his memoir, The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington, Novak writes that he attended infrequently and stopped altogether as he was “repelled by the pastor’s political (liberal) sermons.” Yet it wasn’t just the lefty preaching of the clergyman that annoyed him. “In retrospect I believe I really was uncomfortable with the Christian liturgy,” he wrote.

Both he and his wife, Geraldine, had long harbored a “spiritual hunger,” and that seeking was encouraged by a small circle of devout Catholic friends, most prominently Jeffrey Bell, a former Reagan aide and himself a convert to Catholicism, who provided his friend with some Catholic literature after Novak fell ill with spinal meningitis in 1982. “I thought Bell was wasting his time if he expected me to become a Catholic,” Novak wrote. A decade later, Bell introduced Novak to Father C. John McCloskey, who could boast of a series of high-profile conversions, ranging from the abortion doctor-turned-anti-abortion activist Bernard Nathanson to television personality Lawrence Kudlow (two men who were also born Jewish). Though Novak credits Bell and McCloskey, as well as his wife’s search for a church where she could feel at home, with bringing him into Catholicism, the event that ultimately convinced him to make the leap of faith occurred at Syracuse University in 1996. Novak was preparing to deliver a speech to a group of college Republicans when a female student wearing a cross around her neck turned to him and said, “Mr. Novak, life is short, but eternity is forever.” Novak returned to Washington and began attending mass more frequently. He was baptized on May 22, 1998. After he converted, Novak wrote that he “heard nothing from my many Jewish relatives.”

Meanwhile, much of the Jewish pundit class has treated news of Novak’s passing delicately. While noting that Novak had Jewish “issues,” Commentary editor John Podhoretz eulogized him as “a difficult man in many ways, but I always found him interesting, lively, and friendly.” My colleague John Judis at The New Republic was even more nostalgic: “I miss Novak as a columnist, and miss the kind of columnist he was, who wasn’t content to air his hallowed opinion of facts that were already drearily familiar to readers.” According to Barnes, Novak’s polemical and charged attitude toward Israel and his embrace of less-than-philo-Semitic figures at home wasn’t enough to alienate him from all of American Jewry. While working at The Boston Herald in the late 1980s, Barnes befriended some conservative students at Brandeis University. “They asked me if Novak would come speak at Brandeis, of all places,” Barnes said. “And he did! I thought it was pretty gutsy. Most of the students there were Jewish and though I didn’t take notes of what he said that night, I remember him talking about the Middle East. By and large, he was civilly received. There was no guerrilla theater. Imagine that.”

James Kirchick is an assistant editor at The New Republic.

What made Britain’s first and only Jewish prime minister so prescient? Adam Kirsch, fresh off his absorbing biography of Disraeli, observed that what his subject and Obama have most in common is literary origin. Both men used their writing as a “laboratory” in which to test to the same question that would mark their political careers: “is it possible to genuinely belong to, and even lead, a society that shuns people like you?” Yet while Obama is no doubt the elegant yield of an evolved zeitgeist, it remains to be seen if he can precipitate the next stage in that zeitgeist’s evolution. Disraeli’s great virtue was to understand that the world of the 19th century, of which he was that paradoxical oddity—a romantic conservative, a baptized Jew—was changing under the dual engines of industrial capitalism and colonial expansion, and that the Tories must also change or perish. Rather than remain fixed in some curmudgeonly idyll for a feudal past, responsive only to cooked-up resentments against so-called “elites” (he proudly was one), he fashioned a pragmatic materialism that set about to answer what Thomas Carlyle called the “condition-of-England question.” Acting out of a mixture of principle and expediency, Disraeli pioneered the Third Way, avant la lettre.

Following Edmund Burke, he believed that the customs and institutions that were already in place in England, and had been for centuries, could be harnessed to lessen the plight of the working-class, who might otherwise threaten those customs and institutions with violent revolution. This philosophy used to guide the thinking American Right in its heyday—the 1950s—so much so that up until Richard Nixon, some of the most sweeping civil rights and healthcare initiatives were undertaken by Republican presidents. Whittaker Chambers, once a revered sage on the National Review masthead—not least because he was the most famous ex-Communist in existence—termed his own brand of activist conservatism “Beaconsfieldism,” after the peer title Disraeli was given in 1876, and luxuriated in until his death a few years later.

Of course, to hold the current mealy crop of GOP leaders and tacticians to the standard of Beaconsfieldism is to be laughably disappointed. It is impossible, for instance, to imagine Queen Victoria’s favorite politician, who was a student of the blue book and the dark, Satanic mill, calling England a “nation of whiners,” as Senator Phil Gramm did in reacting to the financial market crisis last year. Nor can one envision Disraeli kowtowing to crass demagogues such as Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin, who today burble on overpriced airwaves that any and all attempts to expand the role of government is “socialism.” Disraeli would have looked at his watch or sighed extravagantly in the face of such witless bloviation. He was by no means a socialist, but nor was he afraid of heeding the warnings of his radical opponents in order to undermine their revolutionary goals with gradualist measures. He was one of 5 MPs to vote for leniency for the leaders of 1830′s Chartism, probably because he sympathized with their chief plaint for universal male suffrage, which is why, three decades on, he railroaded the Second Reform Bill of 1867 through parliament despite party pressure not to do so (the Tories were then in opposition).

Indeed, a full hundred and fifty years before John Edwards coined the phrase “Two Americas”—itself borrowed from Michael Harrington’s seminal work The Other America—there was Disraeli’s concept of “Two Nations,” consisting of the rich and poor. In his novel Sybil, which was subtitled “The Two Nations,” Disraeli explained that these two binary constituencies were “as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones; or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by different breeding, are fed by different foods, are ordered by different manners, and are governed by the same laws.” Everything that informed the sentimental fiction of Dickens and the hard-nosed non-fiction of Orwell is captured in that diagnosis, and it’s a wonder, knowing the man who ventured it, that Engels could write to Marx in 1867, a year that saw industrial workers vote overwhelmingly Conservative, “Once again the English working class has disgraced itself.” Had it?

During his second term as prime minister, beginning in 1874, Disraeli passed a whole tranche of progressive legislation that caused Alexander Macdonald, one of the first Labor MPs, to conclude that “the Conservative party have done more for the working classes in five years than the Liberals have in fifty.” These bills included the Artisans Dwellings Act, which mandated slum-clearing and public housing works; the Employers and Workmen Act, which made it legal for trade unions to strike; the Rivers Pollution Act, which regulated the disposal of waste; the Sale of Food and Drugs Acts, which established standards of safety and purity; and the Factory Act, which limited the work hours of women and children. “Tory men and Whig measures” was how one of the characters in Sybil satirized such an approach to governance. (Today, anyone on the right who advocated similar policies would be sneeringly called a “RINO,” Republican in Name Only, by a pundit or blogger determined to keep the GOP out of power for the foreseeable future.) All told, however, this list of accomplishments was more than what Disraeli’s career-long rival Gladstone could ever boast in terms of social welfare reform.

There aren’t many Disraelian figures dotting the landscape at present, although the Canadian David Frum, who has become a preeminent gadfly of movement conservatism, has done his part to uphold a kind of Beaconsfieldism modified for the 21st century. In a Newsweek cover essay he wrote last March, directed primarily against Limbaugh, Frum argued that the Republican Party was about thirty years out of date and almost autistically out of touch with popular demands. Instead of placing free market healthcare reform at the top of the economic agenda, the call of the hour was for more tax cuts. Instead of acknowledging that the rising generation of voters was quite comfortable with gay rights and incorporating new immigrant groups, the response was to drum up populist hysteria about a liberal assault on American “values.” (Disraeli also understood how minorities should be conscripted, not alienated by the right. “[T]he persecution of the Jewish race,” he wrote, “had deprived European society of an important conservative element and added to the destructive party an influential ally.”)

In the face of a seemingly unstoppable Democratic majority, what conservatives need most, according to Frum, is “every resource of mind and heart, every good argument, every creative alternative and every bit of compassionate sympathy for the distress that is pushing Americans in the wrong direction.” What they need, in other words, is a refresher course on the most eminent of Victorians.