On April 15, 1962, Hannah Arendt sent a brief personal note to William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker, thanking him for some flowers he had sent. It had been a rough winter for the political philosopher: Her husband, Heinrich Blücher, was suffering from a brain aneurysm, and Arendt had developed a severe allergic reaction to antibiotics she was given to treat a cold. Then, in March, a truck had plowed into a taxi she was taking through Central Park, resulting in a concussion, hemorrhages in both eyes, broken teeth, and fractured ribs. Nevertheless, in her note three weeks later to Shawn—who had assigned her to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem a year before, and was still awaiting her copy—Arendt sounded almost chirpy. “I am much better,” she wrote, in her blue-ballpoint cursive, spidery and cramped on cream-colored stationery, “and on the point of going back to work.”

Five months later, she was done. On Sept. 19, a sheaf of onion-skin pages arrived at The New Yorker’s office at 25 West 43rd Street, with the title, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report.” The manuscript was sent over to the typing pool, where it was copied onto heavy yellow bond, double-spaced, and then returned to Shawn for editing.

Meanwhile, a carbon copy was delivered to Arendt’s publisher, Viking Press. A lightly edited version of her manuscript was published as a book in May 1963 under the same title she’d picked for the New Yorker articles that were published in February and March but with the dramatically enhanced subtitle “A Report on the Banality of Evil.” The book, with revisions, has remained in print since. But it never reflected Shawn’s changes to Arendt’s draft, which was serialized in five issues of the magazine. So while The New Yorker remains almost reflexively associated with “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” the text that most people have in mind when they talk about Arendt’s report is not, in fact, the one that appeared in the magazine.

The Shawn typescript, cluttered with pencil marks, is now held with the rest of The New Yorker archive at the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library. His major cuts and alterations to Arendt’s original are striking in their consistency: Almost all of them involve Arendt’s asides about the contemporary Jewish community and its handling of the trial. Many of the most controversial passages made it into the magazine intact, including her assertion that “if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between five and six million people.” But the final magazine text is in some ways less provocative, more streamlined, and—unsurprisingly, given the precision of The New Yorker’s legendary copy editor Eleanor Gould—more polished than what’s in the book.

In one sense, Shawn was simply exercising his preference for straightforward structure and well-modulated language: The sections cut from the magazine, especially near the beginning, are generally asides that distract the reader from the central focus of the Eichmann narrative. In some places, he reined Arendt in, softening her claim that Hitler was, in 1935, “admired everywhere as a great national statesman” with a judiciously placed “almost” before “everywhere.” But the cuts also reflect Shawn’s aversion to what Irving Howe, in his criticism of Arendt in Commentary, self-deprecatingly described as the “grubby” polemic of the little intellectual journals. (Ben Yagoda, in his New Yorker chronicle, About Town, noted that Arendt went to Shawn for the assignment on the advice of her friend Mary McCarthy only after Norman Podhoretz told her Commentary couldn’t afford to send her to Jerusalem; given that Podhoretz responded to Arendt’s finished piece with a scathing review subtitled “A Study in the Perversity of Brilliance,” one can only imagine that the final product would have been quite different had Arendt been writing for him.)

Arendt doesn’t appear to have fussed over the cuts. “She did not like to look at things, or go back to things,” explained Jerome Kohn, Arendt’s former research assistant and now her literary executor. “What she gave to Shawn she left in his hands, and what she sent to the publisher, she left in theirs.” She did, however, send in corrections, and requested multiple sets of galleys during editing. “It would make things easier for me,” she wrote to Shawn on Sept. 30, 1962. After the first installment of the series was published, the following February, she wrote to chastise Shawn for an error she had found in the text concerning the date of Yad Vashem’s establishment. “This is an error,” Arendt wrote, noting she had spoken to the fact-checker, William Honan, who went on to be a culture editor at the New York Times. “This is not very important but it confirms my conviction that no dates or facts provided by your checking department should be inserted unless they are checked and approved by me.”

The date of Yad Vashem’s founding turned out to be the least of it, of course. According to Arendt’s biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Shawn cabled Arendt on March 8 to advise her of the response to her piece: “People in town seem to be discussing little else.” A few days later, on March 13, she replied that she had begun receiving angry letters. “Now the Jews know that enemy No. 1 is not ‘the German’ and the Germans agree that enemy No. 1 is not ‘the Jew,’ it is me,” Arendt wrote, in a letter held at the Library of Congress. “This, to be sure, is an exaggeration and your checking department would not let me get away with it.”

• The six best Jewish cookbooks. [Saveur]

• Ruth Franklin weighs what it means to consider Anne Frank’s story a universal one, as opposed to a particularly Jewish one. [TNR]

• At a memorial for former Prime Minister Menachem Begin—the first Likud PM—Benjamin Netanyahu chastised West Bank settlers that harass Palestinians. [Haaretz]

• The latest This American Life, whose theme is gifts, has much of interest to Tablet Magazine readers, from the reading of an Etgar Keret short story to a tale of an Israeli marijuana sting. [TAL]

• Thirty Jewish Studies faculty members in the University of California system urged the Orange County prosecutor to drop charges against 11 Muslim students who interrupted Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren at Irvine last year. [JTA]

It occurred to me that two of the three Jewish intellectuals contributing editor Ruth R. Wisse wrote about this week are also two of the three Jewish intellectuals in Zelig’s opening.

The Pugilist

I eventually found him—though he did not, at first, meet my expectations.

***

From my early teens, discussions around our family table took off from articles in Commentary, the only publication read in common by my father, my brother Ben, and me, five years Ben’s junior. These discussions continued once Ben and I formed our own families and became independent subscribers.

In all that time, few essays ever got us more riled up than “My Negro Problem and Ours,” written in 1963, at the height of the American civil rights movement, and almost certainly intended to provoke the hundreds of letters it generated. In it, Commentary’s legendary editor-in-chief, Norman Podhoretz, pitted his experiences as a poor kid in Brooklyn who was stalked and bullied by bigger black boys against the prevalent notion that Jews were rich and Negroes persecuted. He unearthed in himself emotions like envy and hate and examined them in light of what increasingly militant blacks were saying about their treatment in America. Far from minimizing their grievances, Norman concluded that the tortured relations between blacks and whites should be dissolved. “I believe that the wholesale merging of the two races is the most desirable alternative for everyone concerned.” Intermarriage was the desired resolution. Were he asked whether he would like one of his daughters to “marry one,” he wrote, he would have to answer, no, he would not like it at all, but he would accept it as the man he had “a duty to be.” There was real import to this statement by a man with three daughters.

“Politically incorrect” hardly suffices to describe the tenor and substance of this article, which retains every iota of its disturbing power to this day. Norman’s mercilessly rational analysis falls like a searchlight on thoughts and feelings that might have benefited from softer illumination. But what troubled us in Montreal was less the treatment of race, which hardly resonated north of the border, than the author’s indifference to whether his daughter’s hypothetical black suitor was Jewish. So the boy was black—big deal. But how could the editor of a Jewish magazine so casually treat his daughter’s marriage to a gentile?

And then, almost as an aside, came this reflection: “In thinking about the Jews I have often wondered whether their survival as a distinct group was worth one hair on the head of a single infant,” Podhoretz wrote. “Did the Jews have to survive so that six million innocent people should one day be burned in the ovens of Auschwitz? It is a terrible question and no one, not God himself, could ever answer it to my satisfaction.”

Was the question terrible or simply off-key? Striving for ultimate honesty, it betrayed moral innocence without registering what Judaism had come to accomplish. Jews had forsworn human sacrifice. The Germans murdered because they were not Jews and did not follow God’s law. The genocide of the Jews was the consequence not of Jewish survival but of Nazism’s perverted search for the “fittest.” Surely the unspeakable crimes by enemies of the Jews ought to have prompted questions about the value of their existence.

***

It wasn’t until several months later that Norman received redemption in our family, which came as a result of his response to Hannah Arendt’s coverage for The New Yorker of the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann had been captured and brought by Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, from his hiding in Argentina to Jerusalem to stand trial for crimes against the Jewish people. This was the first such reckoning, as earlier trials of Nazi war criminals had charged them with crimes against humanity or against other nationals. Israeli leaders felt duty bound to try one of the chief organizers of the Final Solution for the genocide that had inspired the jurist Raphael Lemkin to coin that term. Arendt, by contrast, was bothered by what she considered legal gerrymandering in trying the SS officer in the court of a country that had not existed at the time of the massacres, by the prosecution’s emphasis on the national catastrophe rather than the narrow specifics of the case, and by its inadequate understanding of the Nazi mind. Author of a major study of totalitarianism, Arendt was convinced that the modern technocrat—Nazi or Soviet—was so regimented and brainwashed that he was not intellectually agile enough to try to save himself in a court of law. Eichmann was dull-witted, a pencil pusher: It was ridiculous to cast an efficient bureaucrat as arch-villain in so large a drama.

Of all the prominent European Jews who found refuge in America during the war, Arendt had, before this, been singled out for homage by the New York intellectuals, who were just coming to terms with the Jewish national experience they had until then mostly ignored. They had not realized that she was moving in the opposite direction, distancing herself from her earlier Zionist and Jewish sympathies. Although no one at the time suspected her liaison with her teacher Martin Heidegger, or the resumption of her correspondence with him despite his wartime association with the Nazi regime, the Americans felt betrayed by her account of the trial in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Saul Bellow ascribed his dislike to one of his characters, the Holocaust survivor Arthur Sammler, who protests that the Germans’ idea of making the century’s great crime look dull was not banal but an idea of genius: “Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abandon conscience. Is such a project trivial? Only if human life is trivial. This woman professor’s enemy is modern civilization itself.” The historian Jacob Robinson exposed Arendt’s many factual errors in a study called, after Isaiah, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight, and Arendt’s German-Jewish landsman Gershom Scholem called her tone “heartless, frequently almost sneering and malicious.” Citing Scholem, Irving Howe recalled that what struck them both—“struck like a blow—was the surging contempt with which she treated almost everyone and everything connected with the trial, the supreme assurance of the intellectual looking down upon those coarse Israelis.”

The debate over Arendt’s coverage of the Eichmann trial affected the American Jewish intelligentsia almost as powerfully as the trial shook Israelis.

Norman’s contribution telegraphed its verdict in the subtitle: “Hannah Arendt on Eichmann: A Study in the Perversity of Brilliance.” As if taking up her challenge to look at the universal aspects of what might otherwise seem merely a Jewish quarrel, he examined the symptomatic qualities of her reportage: Eichmann may or may not be a new type of modern man, but Arendt represented a new style of modern thinker. What she did, he noted incisively, was to “translate this story for the first time into the kind of terms that can appeal to a sophisticated modern sensibility. Thus, in place of the monstrous Nazi, she gives us the ‘banal’ Nazi; in place of the Jew as virtuous martyr, she gives us the Jew as accomplice in evil; and in place of the confrontation between guilt and innocence, she gives us the ‘collaboration’ of criminal and victim. It has all the appearance of ‘ruthless honesty,’ and all the marks of profundity—have we not been instructed that complexity, paradox, and ambiguity are the sign manifest of profundity?”

Norman identified the technique of postmodern inversion that destabilizes the moral order: preferring flawed originality to mere accuracy. Resentful of being a “young fogey,” he was by this point publishing articles as subversive as the work he was dissecting here. But the venerable Arendt was turning frivolous, and so he took on the task of undoing her mischief—a task that required a more patient pen and disciplined mind than the mischief-maker’s own. Distortion is to accuracy as snorting is to sobriety, but unlike the private vices that harm only their practitioner, the intellectual follies—to use Lionel Abel’s term—infect the body politic.

Let me quote Norman again: “The brilliance of Miss Arendt’s treatment of Eichmann could hardly be disputed by any disinterested reader. But at the same time, there could hardly be a more telling example … of the intellectual perversity that can result from the pursuit of brilliance by a mind infatuated with its own agility and bent on generating dazzle.” He was speaking here for almost all the New York Intellectuals, who had painfully outgrown their own misguided enthusiasms. One can hardly exaggerate how genuinely thinkers like Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Bell, and Irving Howe had come to value lucidity and intelligibility over other literary virtues. But attaining that clarity required filtering out pollutants, not once but repeatedly, in a society that embraced Arendt’s “perversity” as eagerly as France sanctified the criminal Jean Genet.

What no one foresaw, of course, was how quickly postmodern frivolity would engulf the elites and flood the humanities. Bellow would soon be savaged by the counterculture, and Howe by the New Left, the latter winning his way back into its good graces only once it had passed its faux-revolutionary phase. As for Norman, he cleaned the stables, earning the Homeric adjective that accompanied these labors.

Continue reading: Zionism, “our love for the State of Israel,” and being a soldier. Or view as a single page.

No one mastered these techniques of persuasion better than Kristol. You can follow the progress he describes in the pages of The Neoconservative Persuasion itself. The earliest pieces gathered here come from a tiny magazine Kristol launched in 1942, Enquiry: A Journal of Independent Radical Thought. The “independence” was from the official Communist line, and it signaled the anti-Communist direction his thinking would continue to take. It also suggests the quality that Kristol described, in An Autobiographical Memoir, as having “a ‘neo’ gene”: “I have been a neo-Marxist, a neo-Trotskyist, a neo-socialist, a neo-liberal, and finally a neoconservative. It seems that no ideology or philosophy has ever been able to encompass all of reality to my satisfaction. There was always a degree of detachment qualifying my commitment.”

That succession of “neos” can be mapped onto Kristol’s career as a writer and editor. In the 1940s and 1950s, he worked at Commentary and Encounter, both liberal anti-Communist journals. In the 1960s he launched The Public Interest, the original neoconservative magazine, dedicated to challenging the assumptions of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Finally he became a key voice on the very conservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, during the height of its influence in the Reagan years.

The irony, which Kristol relishes, is that his “Leninist” path carried him ever further to the right. It was to capture this evolution that he coined the term “neoconservative,” the ambiguous label with which Kristol became so closely identified. (This is the third of his books to use the word in the title.) To anyone who followed political and foreign policy debates during the George W. Bush years, however, that term took on an ominous coloration. To put it crudely, after September 11, 2001, “neoconservative” often became a code word meaning “Jewish warmongers.” It was common for critics of the Iraq War to blame it on a “cabal” of neoconservative advisers in the Bush Administration, all of whom happened to be Jewish—Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith were the most frequently named.

The idea that a secretive group of powerful, behind-the-scenes Jews were running American foreign policy became an article of faith to many on the American, and especially the European, left—people either indifferent to the anti-Semitic tropes in this discourse or those who positively relished them. A common corollary to this idea was the belief that the neoconservatives were acting under the influence of Leo Strauss, a German-Jewish political philosopher who fled the Nazis and spent his last decades teaching at the University of Chicago. Strauss, according to the caricature, was an elitist enemy of democracy, whose thought encouraged the “neocons” (some of whom, like Wolfowitz, had been his students) to lie the country into war.

It is not surprising that, in the wake of these developments, the label neoconservative has been abandoned by most of those who used to claim it. Naturally, readers will turn to The Neoconservative Persuasion for enlightenment: What did the “godfather” of neoconservatism think of the ugly turn the term took in the last few years? But while the subtitle of the book promises “Selected Essays, 1942-2009,” it turns out that very few of these pieces date from the last decade of Kristol’s life. Perhaps this is only to be expected—after all, Kristol was already in his eighties when George W. Bush became president.

The one place where Kristol indirectly addresses the connection of neoconservatism with the Iraq War is in the 2003 op-ed that gives the book its title. And his main reaction is, surprisingly enough, surprise that any connection has been drawn: “And then, of, course, there is foreign policy, the area of American politics where neoconservatism has recently been the focus of media attention. This is surprising since there is no set of neoconservative beliefs concerning foreign policy.” Instead, Kristol says, there are at most a few neoconservative principles or intuitions: that American power should not be subordinated to “world government” or “international institutions”; that America’s national interest requires global engagement, not isolationism; and that “the United States will always feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic nation under attack from non-democratic forces.”

It was a little disingenuous for Kristol to deny that there is such a thing as a neoconservative foreign policy. After all, one of the eight sections of The Neoconservative Persuasion is titled “Foreign Policy and Ideology.” All but one of the essays in that group, however, were written during the Cold War, and it is fair to say that if neoconservatism—or Kristol himself—had a diplomatic philosophy, it was one totally shaped by America’s rivalry with the Soviet Union, with only limited application to the post-Cold War world.

Essentially, Kristol believed that America’s struggle with the USSR was the criterion by which everything else had to be judged. Anything that could hurt the United States or benefit the USSR was wrong, no matter how right it might seem on the surface. Perhaps the most uncompromising essay in the book is “ ‘Human Rights’: The Hidden Agenda,” in which Kristol totally rejects the idea of making human rights an American foreign-policy priority, as Jimmy Carter had done. His reason is that, if regimes are judged by human rights standards alone, many American allies—he is thinking particularly of right-wing regimes in South America—would come out quite badly. Rather than pick our alliances based on moral purity, Kristol writes, America should look to the differences between “authoritarian governments” and “totalitarian regimes.” The first—like, say, Pinochet’s Chile—may eventually evolve into democracies, and they pose no threat to America. The latter, like the Soviet Union, are inherently dangerous and must be opposed at all costs.

It’s true, Kristol acknowledges, that a torture victim in Chile has suffered just as much as a torture victim in Russia. But, he writes, “the perspective of the victim, whether in war or peace, is the stuff of which poetry (or perhaps theology) is made, not politics, and certainly not foreign policy.” This is probably the single sentence in The Neoconservative Persuasion that best captures Kristol’s entire worldview. Concern for victims—of war, of torture, of poverty, and of racism—is all well and good, but finally Kristol regards it as sentimentality. What really matters is power, and it would be suicidal for Americans to give up power in the name of sentiment.

For Americans, and also for Jews, Kristol famously joked that a neoconservative was a liberal who got mugged by reality, and the trajectory of his own thought was always in the direction of disillusionment. Over the decades covered in The Neoconservative Persuasion, the reader sees Kristol losing patience with liberalism, modern art, the welfare state, blacks and the civil rights movement, feminism, and gay rights. In each case, his initial sympathy or at least respect gives way to a disgusted sense that all these movements have gone too far, until the word “liberal” itself became a kind of imprecation to Kristol (as it did in American politics generally). By the time he wrote the essay “The Way We Were,” in 1995, he had given in to simple nostalgia: In his childhood, Kristol writes, “the reason there were no ‘troubled’ schools is that ‘trouble’ was not tolerated.”

But nothing in The Neoconservative Persuasion makes Kristol lose patience like the Jews. You can see it happening even in the titles of his essays: “The Political Dilemma of American Jews” (1984) gives way to “Why Religion Is Good for the Jews” (1994) and finally “On the Political Stupidity of the Jews” (1999). The stupidity Kristol has in mind can be summed up in the question his fellow neoconservative Norman Podhoretz asked in the title of a recent book: Why Are Jews Liberals? For it is unmistakable that, in every one of the movements Kristol deplores—modern art, civil rights, feminism, and so on—Jews have been enthusiastic supporters.

Once upon a time, Kristol grants, it may have been sensible for Jews to support liberal and progressive causes, “given the historic attitude of the European Right toward Jews.” But the same calculus of power and interest that he employs in foreign policy leads Kristol to conclude that Jewish interests now lie with the right, especially the Christian Right. Evangelical Christians are strong supporters of Israel; yet Jews, he complains, continue to pointlessly antagonize them by insisting so strongly on the separation of Church and State. Conversely, he argued several times in the 1980s, Jews continue to sympathize politically with African-Americans, even as black anti-Semitism and anti-Zionsim rise. In short, Kristol finds it absurd that Jews refuse to ask whether “a given turn of events or policy is ‘good for the Jews’ ”: “to ask that question in the United States today in Jewish circles is to invite a mixture of ridicule and indignation.”

Here, as so often in The Neoconsevrative Persuasion, Kristol seems to me to be right in part and wrong in greater and more significant part. Yes, Jews should be confident and realistic enough to ask what is in their best interest—just as Americans should apply the same standard to domestic and world politics. In each of these areas, we should not be afraid to identify our enemies as enemies and to oppose institutions and policies that sound virtuous but are actually harmful—one of Kristol’s favorite examples is the United Nations. The single best essay in the book, “The Myth of the Supra-Human Jew,” demonstrates the dangers involved in imagining Judaism as “a divinely intoxicated form of liberalism.” (That essay was written in 1947, and it is notable that Kristol’s most sophisticated and penetrating work was written in the 1940s and 1950s, before he became settled in his beliefs and began to write mainly op-eds: Op-eds are interventions, not explorations.)

But is it true, as Kristol believes, that American Jews would be better off in a more conservative, more Christianized polity—or, at the very least, that, since such a polity is certain to come, we had better reconcile ourselves to it? Is it true that an American foreign policy committed to human rights is shackled and enfeebled? Is it true that black and Jewish aspirations are now opposed? In his essays of the 1980s and 1990s, Kristol said all these things quite confidently. Yet despite the red/blue divide, the Moral Majority has not become a majority in America. In fact, contrary to the central premise of Kristol’s social thought, the most religious parts of America are now the parts most afflicted by divorce and teen pregnancy, while the most secular parts of America are the least afflicted.

Many of Kristol’s other premises have also been proved wrong. After the fall of the USSR, the American commitment to human rights led not to self-doubt and paralysis but to a more vigorous and interventionist foreign policy—in Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, and even Iraq. (Not to mention the fact, slighted by Kristol, that the human rights movement played a major role in bringing down the Soviet empire.) In a 1984 essay, Kristol lamented that “Jesse Jackson [is] the political leader of American blacks,” and that Jackson “stands for black nationalism”—indeed, he writes about Jackson as if he were Louis Farrakhan.

But a quarter-century later, the political leader of American blacks is the political leader of America, Barack Obama, and the main charge against him from the left is that he is too committed to consensus-building. Finally, Kristol saw the gay-rights movement as a sign of American decadence, part of the Sixties assault on bourgeois values; today, the major gay-rights issues are the right to serve in the military and the right to get married. In each case, Kristol’s hard-headed realism turned out to be a poor guide to reality. Perhaps the inveterate Jewish tendency to care about “the perspective of the victim” has something to be said for it after all.

Although we’ve never met, I’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate you for your pending purchase of Newsweek magazine.

I’m not assuming you’re hearing much by way of congratulations these days. After all, everywhere you turn, you come across another report of the magazine industry’s nearing demise: Circulations are down, advertising is down, U.S. News & World Report has abandoned its print edition, 279 magazines folded in 2009 alone, and TV Guide—a magazine that once boasted the highest circulation in the country—was sold for $1, the same price you paid for Newsweek. And yet, you chose to enter the industry at this tough time, and I won’t be surprised if some in your circle tried to talk you out of the move.

As one who has devoted his life to writing for, editing, and publishing magazines—including 30 years as editor and then publisher of The Nation, and now as chairman of Columbia Journalism Review—let me try to put your mind at ease. Magazine journalism, Mr. Harman, isn’t busy dying, it’s struggling to be reborn. And now, as it was in the golden age of magazines, it would likely be us Jews who’ll revolutionize this essential industry.

Jews, after all, have always had a special place in their hearts for magazines. Even at this difficult moment, there is Nadine Epstein’s Moment (“the independent national Jewish magazine”), there is Commentary, there is Tikkun (the anti-Commentary), there is The Jewish Review of Books, there is Lilith (“the American-Jewish feminist magazine”), there is Jewish Frontier (for organized labor), and for young, Holocaust-mocking hipsters there is even Heeb, along with many, many others. If you’re reading this letter, you’re surely also aware of Tablet Magazine, which represents, along with jewcy.com and several other Web sites, innovative attempts to carry on the magazine tradition on a new technological platform.

As you walk into Newsweek’s offices, and as you wonder in which direction to lead a great American magazine, let me share with you a bit of good advice I once received from an unlikely source. Although I disagreed with the late Irving Kristol, the so-called godfather of neoconservatism, on many things, I think he was onto something almost existential when it comes to magazine publishing. “A lot of New York intellectuals”—which is to say, Jews—“have roots in Eastern Europe, where, unlike in England or France, there was no tradition of civility,” he told me once when I was interviewing him about intellectuals and magazines. “In England or France, you operate within a framework of existing institutions. In Eastern Europe, we wanted to change existing institutions, to improve them. The Cossack was the existing institution, so ideas were more important than institutions. That is why if you disagree with someone, you stop talking to him and start your own magazine.”

I would add that, whatever one thinks of the neoconservative movement, one must concede that, for better or worse, it would not have come into being had it not been for magazines like The Public Interest (co-edited by Kristol), which in effect launched it, and Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary (now edited by his son, John), which nourished it. Most likely, you have no designs to turn Newsweek into an ideological organ; but you would do well to heed Kristol’s advice, and perceive of your magazine not just as a source for news but also as an institution for the manufacturing and dissemination of ideas.

Having sat on the publisher’s chair for enough time myself, however, I can guarantee that if you go on talking about ideas, someone is going to try to tell you that magazines have no place in the Internet’s age of immediacy. Simply remind these gloomy folks that the year’s biggest political story—the fall of the general who wouldn’t shut up, Stanley McChrystal—was caused by a magazine, Rolling Stone, one of the few media organs that still permit reporters to hang out with sources for long periods of time, and that still allocate 7,500 words or more for a worthwhile story. I’d like to see a Web site, or even a newspaper, have this kind of patience.

I am tempted to end my letter by citing any number of examples from the past glories of American magazine journalism. I’m tempted to remind you of Ida Tarbell’s exposé of Standard Oil Co. in McClure’s at the turn of the last century, of John Hershey’s “Hiroshima,” Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” and Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem” in The New Yorker. But instead, allow me to end with an anecdote that neatly captures what magazines, at their best, can do, and why we need them now more than ever.

Some years ago, when I was helping to put together a group of small shareholders to invest in The Nation, I was making a pitch before a group of well-wishers assembled by my friend Stanley Sheinbaum in his Brentwood, Calif., living room, when a middle-aged woman raised her hand and said, “Count me in. I can’t not invest.” When asked to say more, she told her story. Her father, she said, used to go to shul every Saturday with his father. And his father would sit there with a copy of The Nation on his lap, reading while the rabbi spoke. Why, her then-9-year-old father asked her grandfather, are you reading while the rabbi is talking? “Because,” said her grandfather, “what he is saying up there, I already know, but what this magazine is telling me down here, I don’t know.”

This, Mr. Harman, is our past. It is up to you to make it our future, as well.

• Rep. Joe Sestak, the Democratic candidate for Pennsylvania’s Senate seat, angrily fires back at the Committee: “It is offensive and outrageous to suggest [Sestak] does not stand with Israel.” [Ben Smith]

• In the course of explaining the group, Pollak refers to the “international lynching of the Jewish state” and implicitly denies that J Street is pro-Israel. [Rosner’s Domain]

• Via Capital J, Tablet Magazine contributor Dan Luban finds that one of the group’s four principles, Rachel Abrams (wife of Elliott, stepdaughter of Norman Podhoretz), possesses a “strange obsession with (and apparent hostility to) homosexuality.” [Lobelog]

• James Besser argues that the group is less concerned about issue advocacy and more about steering election-year funds to the right places. [Political Insider]

Earlier: How Does Kristol Do It?

Additionally, the reviewer says, the novel might be considered a politically conservative one—it “takes aim at a lot of liberal pieties”—which presumably reflects Munson’s own beliefs: “The most interesting bit of Mr. Munson’s background is that the author worked as a researcher for CNBC host and devoted supply-sider Larry Kudlow and as an editor at Commentary magazine.”

Everyone ought to be judged on the basis of who he is and his own work. That said, given the novel’s politics, might “the most interesting bit of Mr. Munson’s background” not be that he worked for Commentary, but that he is, um, Norman Podhoretz’s grandson?

This is especially relevant because the description of Munson’s novel—which I have not read, but which frankly sounds pretty charming and like something I’d want to read—reminded me of a wonderful essay in which Franklin Foer, now the editor of The New Republic, argued that a conservative school of art and art criticism had cropped up, which, resembling nothing so much as 1930s-era Communist thinking, insisted on subsuming aesthetics into politics. Of The Weekly Standard, Foer wrote, “the magazine preaches aesthetic independence but often practices conservative political correctness of a remarkably crude sort.” That magazine’s deputy editor then, and Foer’s Exhibit A, was John Podhoretz—presumably, Munson’s uncle.

Which is not at all to say that The November Criminals deploys art in the service of politics! For all I know, the protagonist’s rants against “Diversity Outreach (‘just as horrifyingly inept as its name suggests’) [and] a history teacher who worships Wilson, Kennedy and FDR (‘that’s verbatim; she actually said holy trinity’)” are objective correlatives that gives us a fuller view of this character. No matter who his grandfather is, it is entirely possible that Munson has little but the highest aesthetic goals in mind (if I get around to reading the thing, I’ll get back to you).

The Journal’s reviewer certainly believes that to be the case: “Munson does this as a novelist and not as a pundit—he dramatizes his debates, keeps them entertaining and leaves them unresolved.” Okay. But if you’re gonna go there, then please at least mention what “the most interesting bit of Mr. Munson’s background” really is!

Dear Dean, How To Start? [WSJ]
Related: But Is It Art Criticism? [Slate]

I’ll defer to J.J. Goldberg for a summary of the findings:

Don’t count on those American Jewish blockheads to stand up for Israel: 11.
Well, they’d better / Hey, they just might: 7.
I’m hoping Obama will see the light and we won’t have to choose sides: 7.
Obama isn’t Israel’s enemy / This symposium is a right-wing set-up: 4.
Miscellaneous (Both sides are nuts / We haven’t properly taught Israel to our young’uns): 2.

Meanwhile, from the other half of Dysentery, Dissent posts an essay co-written by founding editor Irving Howe in the aftermath of the Six Day War. “Israelis should take a constructive and humane attitude toward the problem of the Arab refugees,” the 1967 essay argues, “who, even if exploited by the Arab governments, are suffering human beings and deserve more sympathy and active help than they have gotten from a nation itself comprised of refugees.”

Obama, Israel, and American Jews: The Challenge—A Symposium [Commentary]
‘Commentary’ Polls the Experts [J.J. Goldberg]
From the Archives: Irving Howe and Stanley Plastrik, ‘After the Mideast War’ [Arguing the World]

Reams and reams of articles and blog posts, yes, but no flotilla books quite yet. Don’t be surprised, though, if a future edition of Megan Stack’s Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (Doubleday, June) includes a few pages on the maritime fiasco and its fallout. Stack, a foreign correspondent for the L.A. Times, spends her time in more interesting places than her native Connecticut; the book recounts her years reporting from Israel, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, including a little anti-Semitism she observed in Yemen. Though currently working the Moscow beat, she visited Istanbul as recently as a few weeks ago, so it seems her article last week on the flotilla story’s Turkish angle probably won’t be her last word on the subject.

***

With hand-wringing and finger-pointing on all sides, now’s as good a time as any to consider how differently Zionism might have turned out as a political movement. Noam Pianko’s Zionism and the Roads Not Taken: Rawidowicz, Kaplan, Kohn (Indiana, May) focuses on three interwar intellectuals for whom the promise of Zionism as a political movement was as “an alternative to nation-sate nationalism”—as “an opportunity to redefine national membership … beyond the concrete borders of homeland and state”—rather than to establish a Jewish country that would be just like all the others.

***

In the midst of all the flotilla propaganda and counter-propaganda on YouTube and Twitter, who wouldn’t want to take a nostalgic trip back to a charmingly old-timey era when governments distributed propaganda through the publication of hardcovers and paperbacks? John B. Hench’s Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II (Cornell, June) details the collaborations between the American book industry and the U.S. military that aimed to shore up support for the Allied cause, often through publications of highly regarded modern German belles lettres—works by Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler, and so on—that had been deemed verboten by the Nazis. Many of the key players in these propaganda efforts were German- and American-born Jews, including Gottfried Bermann-Fischer, Kurt Enoch, Harold Guinzburg, Hans Sahl, and Fritz Landhoff. Hench argues that in addition to aiding the war effort, their projects transformed the book trade.

***

Decisions about what gets published during wars are often unusually consequential, particularly in setting legal precedents about freedom of speech. One perennial question is how a government should balance the public’s right to know about its war activities with the military’s need to keep its plans classified. Gabriel Schoenfeld, a former editor of Commentary and author of 2004’s The Return of Anti-Semitism, explores the history of this issue in Necessary Secrets: National Security, the Media, and the Rule of Law (Norton, May). For Schoenfeld, the New York Times’ 2005 revelations about NSA wiretapping handicapped military operations for the sake of a scoop. At the same time, he calls the investigation of AIPAC lobbyists for espionage the result of entrenched “anti-Semitism within the FBI.”

***

The new biography of a contemporary master propagandist, Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One (Sentinel, May), comes to us courtesy of an author, Zev Chafets, himself schooled in the art of political persuasion. Though he may be most familiar to Tablet’s readers for his contributions to the New York Times Magazine—see, for example, “Obama’s Rabbi” and “The Sy Empire”—as a young man the Michigan-born Chafets also served under Prime Minister Menachem Begin for five years as director of Israel’s Government Press Office. In fact, he credits Anwar Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem in 1977 as inspiring his recent, half-serious suggestion that Limbaugh and President Obama might be able to reconcile some of their ideological differences over a friendly round of golf.

***

When the Anti-Defamation League accused Limbaugh of anti-Semitism in January of this year, among his most vehement defenders was the iconic ex-editor of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz. That a publication that once printed Paul Goodman’s eager call for anarchist education now serves up justifications for Limbaugh’s sloppiness is a perfect symbol of the magazine’s incredible transformation. Benjamin Balint’s Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine that Transformed the Jewish Left Into the Neoconservative Right (Public Affairs, June) surveys the history of the journal that once upon a time set the standard for Jewish intellectual discourse in America.

***

An excerpt from Balint’s book, here on Tablet, describes how, among other signal accomplishments, Commentary supported the authors who revolutionized American fiction in the 1950s and 1960s. Unlike many magazines of its vintage, Commentary continues to publish fiction today—a rather large percentage of which tends, in recent years, to be contributed by the essayist and all-purpose man of letters Joseph Epstein. His latest collection, The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff and Other Stories (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, June), includes 14 tales mostly about, as one character phrases it, “Jewish intellectuals who feel the world has screwed them in some vague, deep way.” While the magazine’s politics have almost completely reversed themselves, then, its fiction has simply diminished: Charming as Epstein’s fictions can at times be, they do not approach the power of the Malamud, Bellow, and Roth stories they consistently echo.

***

If you’re finding yourself overwhelmed by the selfishness and malice of all the political bickering lately, take solace in nature: Isn’t it fascinating that selfless generosity exists despite the evolutionary deck being so stacked against it? That’s the question that drives The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness (Norton, June), by the Israeli historian of science Oren Harman. The titular eccentric was a half-Jewish “Rain Man sort of character,” who taught chemistry at Harvard, contributed to the Manhattan Project, and later devised a mathematical explanation for why ants and bees sometimes act, altruistically, in others’ best interests. Tragic as Price’s own fate was—dismayed by what he had proved, he committed suicide after a conversion to Christianity—his story offers at least a little hope: After all, humans might one day emulate social insects and find a way to show one another some kindness.

It was not hard to find the common theme that connected all these allegations: A small group of Jews, working together and inspired by a sinister Jewish mastermind, had taken over the American government and was using its power to serve Jewish ends. In other words, the neocon myth—which began on the hard left but found subscribers on the isolationist right as well and became almost commonplace in Europe—was a 21st-century reprise of some old and very unpleasant ideas about Jewish power. It was not uncommon, five or six years ago, to hear warnings about the neoconservative “cabal”—a word with a long anti-Semitic history—or to find critics of the Bush Administration demonstratively making lists of its Jewish members.

There were many possible rebuttals to this kind of insinuation: for instance, that while there were prominent Jewish neoconservatives in the Bush Administration, the actual decision-makers—Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld—were neither neocons nor Jewish; or that many other leading neoconservatives were Catholic; or that the vast majority of American Jews are liberals who oppose the neoconservative agenda. But just as sunlight is the best disinfectant, so the best response to myths and rumors about neoconservatism is the truth about neoconservatism.

That is what Justin Vaïsse provides in his very intelligent and well-researched new book, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement (Harvard University Press). More than a few books have already been written on this subject, and parts of the neoconservative story have passed into legend. The reader who once again encounters, in Vaïsse’s opening pages, the cafeteria at City College in the 1930s, where the Trotskyists of Alcove 1 debated the Stalinists of Alcove 2, might well heave a sigh; and it is possible to be less than fascinated by the finely discriminated stages of the ideological evolution of Norman Podhoretz.

But these things turn out to play a smaller role in Vaïsse’s book than in many studies of neoconservatism, because he is not primarily interested in what he calls the “first age” of the movement. This period, starting in 1965, was when a recognizable neoconservative tendency began to split off from the larger group known as the New York intellectuals. Those intellectuals, from Lionel Trilling to Irving Howe to Irving Kristol, shared a common background—they were mostly poor, first-generation American Jews, born in Brooklyn and the Bronx, who came of age during the Great Depression. And they shared a common political trajectory, from their early Marxist radicalism, through disenchantment with Stalinism and the Communist Party, to the anti-Communist liberalism of the 1950s.

Neoconservatism of the first age, as expressed in the work of Kristol, Podhoretz, and others, can be seen as the New York intellectuals’ response to the upheavals of the 1960s. Originally, it focused on domestic issues—in particular, criticism of the New Left, the counterculture, the Great Society’s welfare programs, and affirmative action. As Vaïsse writes, “the original neoconservatism of the 1960s had nothing to do with the muscular assertion of American power or with the promotion of democracy. It even took no interest in questions of foreign policy.”

This neoconservatism marks an important chapter in both American and Jewish-American intellectual history. But it would hardly be of compelling interest to a European political scientist, or a European reading public (Vaïsse’s book was published in France in 2008; this edition is translated, very well, by Arthur Goldhammer). What brought Vaïsse to the subject was, rather, foreign policy, which moved to the front of the neoconservative agenda in the late 1970s and became its exclusive focus in the George W. Bush years. Essentially, Vaïsse is reading the history of neoconservatism backward from the Iraq War, on the principle that “Bush’s failure in Iraq was also the failure … of a certain version of neoconservatism.” To explain this failure, he tries to understand how neoconservative ideas and personnel became influential enough by 2003 to play an important role in American foreign policy.

That story begins in the 1970s with the so-called “Scoop Jackson Democrats,” whom Vaïsse identifies as “second age neoconservatives.” These were Democrats who had once been classic Cold War liberals, supporters of John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Hubert Humphrey in 1968. But the Democratic Party’s move to the left, under the pressure of the Vietnam War and the social changes of the 1960s, left them feeling stranded, especially after the Democrats nominated the dovish George McGovern in 1972. In response, many of them rallied around Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a liberal hawk who became a patron saint of neoconservatism. One month after McGovern was routed by Richard Nixon, these Jackson sympathizers founded the “Coalition for a Democratic Majority,” a small organization that bulks very large in Vaïsse’s book. He charts its career through the rest of the 1970s, as it tried and largely failed to convince the Democratic Party of the need for higher defense spending and a more confrontational policy toward the Soviet Union.

As Vaïsse makes clear, this was initially a battle within Democratic ranks. Many foreign-policy neoconservatives remained liberals on domestic policy; even at the time of the Iraq War, there were neo-liberals or liberal hawks who held this same combination of views. For another, in the 1970s the Republicans were the party of Nixon, Kissinger, and “detente,” which were anathema to the neoconservatives. It wasn’t until 1980, when the Republicans nominated Ronald Reagan, that most of the neoconservatives migrated into the Republican Party, with some former Democrats taking jobs in the Reagan Administration. By that time, the Coalition for a Democratic Majority had given way to the nonpartisan Committee on the Present Danger as the main neoconservative pressure group.

Yet Vaïsse argues, convincingly, that Reagan’s foreign policy was never strictly neoconservative. Yes, he raised defense spending and called the USSR “the evil empire.” But in his second term, he reached out to Mikhail Gorbachev and negotiated arms treaties, which the neoconservatives deplored. Was it Reagan’s toughness or his openness that helped bring about the fall of the USSR? That question would have huge implications after September 11, 2001, when the “third age” of neoconservatism came into its own.

By then, Vaïsse notes, the neoconservatives had long since lost their early connection to the Democratic Party. On domestic issues, they were mostly indistinguishable from other Republicans. This meant that an aggressive foreign policy was the main identifying characteristic of a neoconservative; neocon had almost become a synonym for hawk. But Vaïsse shows that something still separated neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle from more traditional hawks like Cheney and Rumsfeld, whom he calls simply “assertive nationalists.”

This was a belief, carried over from the Cold War, that the promotion of democracy was both in America’s national interest and an American duty. For ordinary hawks, invading Iraq was the right thing to do because it was necessary to disarm Saddam Hussein and stop him from spreading weapons of mass destruction (which almost all sources believed he possessed). For neoconservatives, invasion was necessary on these grounds, but it was also desirable on moral and ideological grounds: By replacing Saddam’s tyranny with a democracy, America could help spark a wave of democratic transformation in the Middle East. Just as in the Cold War, America was fighting for a freer world, which would also be a safer and more pro-American world. (A democratic Middle East would also, they presumed, be safer for Israel, a goal shared by both Jewish and non-Jewish neoconservatives.)

It is now pretty widely agreed that the invasion of Iraq was a failure and that this failure discredited the neoconservatives. But, as Vaïsse points out, neoconservatives themselves don’t necessarily see it that way. They had always argued that the invasion of Iraq would require massive forces and be followed by a long period of engagement. They were interested not just in victory but in democratic reconstruction. It was Rumsfeld, not Wolfowitz and Perle, who urged an invasion “on the cheap,” with the minimum number of American troops and with no post-invasion planning.

Vaïsse does not endorse this neoconservative defense. In the end, he is strongly critical of neoconservatives—for their hubris about American power, for their tendency to exaggerate threats and underestimate dangers, and for seeing states like Iraq as bigger threats than terrorist groups like al-Qaida. But unlike most critics, he sympathizes with neoconservative aspirations and anxieties. He recognizes that the neoconservatives—like liberals, realists, and other foreign-policy factions—are advocating what they believe to be the right and effective policy, not engaging in cynical or suspicious manipulation. And he is very tough on the canards that have grown up around the word “neoconservative”—in particular, the ludicrous overestimation of the influence of Strauss, which usually goes along with a malicious misreading of his work.

As a result, Vaïsse is perhaps even too careful to minimize the role of Jews, or at least of the Jewishness of Jews, in neoconservative thought. It is quite true, as he says, that it is not “ ‘in essence’ a Jewish movement”: not all neoconservatives are Jews, most Jews are not neoconservatives, and neoconservatives certainly do not place “Jewish interests” ahead of “American interests.” Still, I think that the appeal of neoconservatism to many Jews can be related to the lessons they draw from Jewish history. Neoconservatism can be defined as aggressive support for (classical) liberalism, and it is clear that the fate of the Jews has absolutely been connected to the fate of liberalism. Where free speech, the free market, individual rights, and tolerance flourish, Jews flourish; where they are destroyed, Jews are destroyed. This is one reason why American Jews tend to be truly patriotic, since America has the most durable and deep-rooted liberalism of any country in the world. The desire to defend and extend American freedoms is what leads many Jews to be left-liberals; a different interpretation of what that defense requires, and who freedom’s enemies really are, leads some Jews to be neoconservatives.

The Jew-as-character-of-fiction had fared not much better. American Jewish writing was a fiction of mawkish quaintness, what Irving Howe called Second Avenue tearjerkers, stuffed with sentimentalized stereotypes: the suffering schlemiel; the Lower East Side immigrant who peddles his way from rags to riches; the wise, pious patriarch struggling to accept the Americanized son; the son desperate to escape the old world who felt “too foreign in school and too American at home,” as Will Herberg put it. Even worse were Jewish characters written by non-Jews. The Jew appeared as the annoying stranger (Robert Cohn in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises); as rebellious young radical (Ben Compton in John Dos Passos’s U.S.A.); or as unscrupulous businessman (Harry Bogen in Jerome Weidman’s I Can Get It for You Wholesale). Abe Jones, in Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River, Irving Howe complained in Commentary, is “dreary, tortured, melancholy, dully intellectual, and joylessly poetic, his spirit gloomily engulfed in a great cloud of Yiddish murk.”

This state of affairs carried over into the 1940s. Writers in the extended Commentary circle—the ‘Family’ as future paterfamilias Norman Podhoretz would retrospectively call it—found nourishment in Herman Melville or Ralph Waldo Emerson, in English poets or Russian novelists—but not in Jewish texts. The motives of Jewish writers, managing editor Robert Warshow complained in 1946, “are almost never pure: they must dignify the Jews, or plead for them, or take revenge upon them, and the picture they create is correspondingly distorted by romanticism or sentimentality or vulgarity.” One Commentary writer, seeking in 1948 to find promising Jewish contributions to contemporary American literature, could point to only three minor talents: Harriet Lane Levy, William Manners, and Charles Angoff. American Jewish writing, Commentary reported the next year, lay fallow, “steeped in apologetics and in false provincial pride.”

Commentary founder Elliot Cohen grasped that the Family’s discoveries of America could have literary reverberations, could release among the Family a great literary efflorescence that had only yesterday seemed an impossibility. By taking Jewish writing seriously, by refusing to disdain it as a parochialism, Cohen’s magazine planted the seeds of a generous literary fertility. Cohen had always demanded that Jewish writing of any kind conform to the highest standards. The future American Jewish culture “cannot be purely imitative,” he insisted. “As to Jewish culture,” he said, “the first question we should ask is not whether it is Jewish, but whether it is good. And ‘good’ means on a par with the best in the culture of society in general.” In literature as in all else, Cohen recoiled from apologetics, defensiveness, sectarianism, sentimentality, and self-congratulation. What lay fallow would grow in the 1950s into a jungled abundance that surprised even the presiding genius.

Several seasons passed before the new literary fruit showed itself. The first Commentary fiction was perfectly parochial. But very soon new Jewish writers, to borrow a phrase Philip Roth used in Commentary, launched “an imaginative assault upon the American experience.” Writing became for them a priestly calling, an instrument of upward mobility, a gateway for fighting their way into the great American beyond. It seemed to Cohen as though he were watching before his very eyes the passing of dominance from the southern school of William Faulkner to the urban Jewish school of Saul Bellow. A new kind of fiction, not intended to flatter the Jewish ego, was coaxed forth from the novelist branch of the Family, language obsessed writers seeking, in Irving Howe’s phrase, to shower the country with words. And what words! These scribes brought with them to the great culture rush the tones of Jewish speech and verbal performance: a street brashness and detached irony, an ability to careen between different registers and inflections, from high to low, from wide-ranging erudition to urban idiom.

Among the first fruits Commentary reaped was Bernard Malamud’s “The Prison,” a 1950 story that beautifully dilated upon the theme of Jewishness as confinement. The magazine would run eight more of Malamud’s stories (at $30 a page), including “Idiot’s First,” and five of the thirteen stories in The Magic Barrel, the collection that would earn Malamud a National Book Award. “Commentary gave him the perfect audience,” his friend Philip Roth said. In fact, young critic Norman Podhoretz made his Commentary debut in 1953 with a review of Malamud’s first novel, The Natural. “Well, you seem to know something about novels,” Cohen had told Podhoretz; “you know something about symbolism, you know something about Jews, and you know something about baseball. Here’s a symbolic novel by a Jewish writer about a baseball player. I guess you’re qualified to review it.”

What begins in the flat cadences of Malamud becomes visionary in Saul Bellow’s exuberance. In a review of Bellow’s second novel, The Victim, Commentary recognized with more than a little prescience what Bellow had done. That novel, Martin Greenberg (then an editor at Schocken Books) announced in the January 1948 issue, was “the first attempt in American literature to consider Jewishness not in its singularity, not as constitutive of a special world of experience, but as a quality that informs all of modern life.” Bellow animated the book’s hero, Asa Leventhal, with a feeling of somehow not belonging, a loneliness Greenberg called “the malaise of the megalopolis.” In a similar vein, Alfred Kazin hailed The Adventures of Augie March as Bellow’s “attempt to break down all possible fences between the Jew and this larger country.” The book’s famous first line announced a turn from alienation to affirmation: “I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.” Forging a passage from marginality to American literature writ large, Bellow’s own pieces for Commentary reprised the theme. In the February 1951 issue (a month before Cohen ran Bellow’s story “Looking for Mr. Green”), Bellow condemned the self-doubt that cramped other Jewish writers, a timidity about writing in a language their immigrant parents did not speak. “As long as American Jewish writers continue to write in this way,” Bellow said, “we will have to go elsewhere for superior being and beauty, and will thus continue to be foreigners.”

Philip Roth, to complete the triumvirate, made his Commentary debut in 1957, at age twenty-four, with a charming piece that Norman Podhoretz, then assistant editor and only three years older than the writer from Newark, had rescued from the slush pile. “You Can’t Tell a Man by the Song He Sings,” included two years later in Goodbye, Columbus, was Roth’s first published story. The magazine also ran “Eli, the Fanatic,” Roth’s brilliant story about the confrontation between assimilated Jews and ultra-Orthodox Holocaust refugees intent on setting up a yeshiva in their suburb. Roth had first come across Cohen’s magazine as an undergrad in the periodical room in the Bucknell University library in the early 1950s. “I was stunned,” he said. “So this is what it’s like to be Jewish.” By offering a sophisticated Jewishness, free of parochialism and apologetics, Commentary did for Roth what the Menorah Journal had done for Lionel Trilling three decades before. “Commentary furnished a whole education, a way of being Jewish and intelligent and American—all at once.”

By now Commentary fiction was consistently first rate. Cohen ran two parables by Henry Roth, his first publications since Call It Sleep in 1935, as well as stories by Delmore Schwartz, Nelson Algren, and Alison Lurie, who published her earliest story in Commentary when she was all of twenty. Cohen fertilized all of this with translations of Yiddish literature: stories by I. J. Singer, Zalman Shneour, Y.L. Peretz, and David Bergelson, and Chaim Grade’s first published story, “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner,” a powerful meditation on faith after the Holocaust. Most spectacularly, Commentary published Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” (translated by Marion Magid and Delmore Schwartz’s ex-wife, Elizabeth Pollet), first appeared there in English in September 1962, as did some of the vignettes that would make up In My Father’s Court (1966). “Commentary is one of the rare magazines in America which takes seriously both the writer and the reader,” the future Nobel laureate said. “I also have a personal feeling about Commentary: it was the first magazine which published me in English.”

Jewish writers, ex-alienated men, were in vogue. Norman Podhoretz used to joke about the Jewish writer who took the name Nathanael West that had he arrived in the 1950s rather than the 1930s, he would have changed his name back to Nathan Weinstein. After the American Jewish literary profusion had peaked, Edward Hoagland, the essayist married to Marion Magid, was grumbling (in Commentary itself ) that the Family’s writers had all but forged a new establishment, making it difficult for a WASP like him, who “could field no ancestor who had hawked tin pots in a Polish shtetl.”

In later years, some of these plaints would turn uglier. Gore Vidal complained that Jewish writers like Bellow, Roth, and Malamud “comprise a new, not quite American class, more closely connected with ideological, argumentative Europe (and talmudic studies) than with those of us whose ancestors killed Indians.” Truman Capote bitched in a 1968 Playboy interview about a Jewish literary cabal: “a clique of New York-oriented writers and critics who control much of the literary scene through the influence of the quarterlies and intellectual magazines. All these publications are Jewish-dominated and this particular coterie employs them to make or break writers by advancing or withholding attention. . . . Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and Isaac Bashevis Singer and Norman Mailer are all fine writers, but they’re not the only writers in the country, as the Jewish mafia would have us believe.” (Perhaps Capote’s line would have been softer had the Commentary review of his bestselling In Cold Blood not dissented so vigorously from the notion that the “competently though too mechanically told” book represented some kind of literary breakthrough.) But as boosters and detractors could agree, America’s new Jewish writers had come into their own.

Even as Cohen’s magazine helped forge a new literary temper, Commentary acted as a greenhouse for a new style of literary criticism, too, incubating the first generation of critics to grow from America’s working class. Before World War II, the upper reaches of American life had excluded Jews as much from the study of literature as from the creation of it. No matter how assiduously the Family’s critics may have schooled themselves in Walt Whitman’s 1871 Democratic Vistas or Van Wyck Brooks’s 1915 America’s Coming of Age, they were disqualified by heredity from the Republic of Letters. “Jews, it was often suggested, could not register the finer shadings of the Anglo-Saxon spirit as it shone through the poetry of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton,” Irving Howe recalled. “I wouldn’t recommend that you study English,” the head of Northwestern’s English Department had told Saul Bellow. “You weren’t born to it.” The Family could not help but notice that currents of anti-Semitism ran deep within the Anglo-American literary tradition itself—from William Shakespeare’s Shylock, to Charles Dickens’s Fagin, to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Meyer Wolfsheim. “We reexamine our literary heritage as Jewish writers and readers of English—and we wince!” Leslie Fiedler wrote in Commentary. “We enter into our supposed inheritance, only to find we are specifically excluded.”

The attraction to fascism exhibited by poets W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot didn’t help matters. The Library of Congress’s decision in 1948 to award the Bollingen Prize to Pound’s The Pisan Cantos vaulted Cohen into high indignation, and he dedicated Commentary’s first symposium to the question of literary anti-Semitism. The responses he received bespoke a newfound literary self-confidence. Some advocated a separation of wheat from chaff. Alfred Kazin replied, “If we were to read only those who love us, even among ourselves, our intellectual diet would be thin indeed.” Lionel Trilling commented, “Anti-Semitism is, as Nietzsche said, a vulgarity; it is indeed remarkable how often notable minds of our day can support their quanta of vulgarity; but it would be foolish not to take from them what they have to give.” Saul Bellow suggested that the direction of judgment had reversed: “Modern reality, with the gases of Auschwitz still circulating in the air of Europe, gives us an excellent opportunity to judge whether they [modern Jew-despising writers] are right or wrong.” So long to inferiority.

In the beginning, Commentary critics aimed at Jewish writers. Irving Howe, born and bred in the Bronx, would write for the magazine on, say, Daniel Fuchs, who had authored several novels about Jews in Williamsburg. Tellingly, the magazine’s first critical essay on a goyish writer was called “F. Scott Fitzgerald and Literary Anti-Semitism.” When the magazine examined Pearl Buck—as in a 1948 review of Peony—it was for her description of Judaism. But the more Family critics assimilated—and assimilated into—American literature, the more confidently did they put Jewish writers in the highest fraternity of Gentile company. Both outside the magazine and inside its pages, Jews began to write about American fiction under the assumption that it was their inheritance, too.34 And they wrote not just about fiction. The magazine’s poetry criticism included John Berryman on W. H. Auden and a consideration of Sylvia Plath, who had studied with Alfred Kazin at Smith.

Commentary critics, never afraid to contradict the prevailing estimate of a reputation, shared a contempt for middlebrow mushiness. James Gould Cozzens, Arthur Miller, Leon Uris, Herman Wouk—these were almost too gauche to bother with. The result was an urgent style that combined scholarly rigor with journalistic flair. The urgency came from the way the Family’s strenuous strivers took literature as a matter of high gravity, as a secular scripture, as if it should yield to moral, and not just aesthetic, judgments. Writing, as vocation and avocation both, became in their hands a kind of emancipation, a gesture of self-fashioning; it was everything. The Family’s rhapsodists of American literature met America through its writers, the highest manifestations of national feeling.

Alfred Kazin, who would write some twenty pieces for Commentary, was a case in point. Born in Brownsville, Brooklyn, a son of immigrants, Kazin came to City College at age sixteen. In 1942, at twenty-seven, he published On Native Grounds, a tellingly titled history of American prose from the 1890s through the 1930s. Like Philip Roth, Kazin acknowledged that his view of the possibilities of Jewish writing was indebted to Commentary:

I remember that as the first issues began to appear at the end of that pivotal year of 1945, I was vaguely surprised that it dealt with so many general issues in so subtly critical and detached a fashion, regularly gave a forum to non-Jewish writers as well as to Jewish ones. Like many Jewish intellectuals of my time and place, brought up to revere the universalism of the socialist ideal and of modern culture, I had equated “Jewish” magazines with a certain insularity of tone, subject matter, writers’ names—with mediocrity. To be a “Jewish” writer . . . was somehow to regress, to strike attitudes, to thwart the natural complexities of truth. . . . “Jewish” magazines were not where literature could be found, and certainly not the great world. “Jewish” magazines worried over the writer’s “negative” attitude toward his “Jewishness,” nagged you like an old immigrant uncle who did not know how much resentment lay behind his “Jewishness.” But Commentary, to the grief of many intellectual guardians of the “Jewish” world, marked an end to that.

For Kazin, literary criticism was “the great American lay philosophy.” He and the other Family generalists who came to command the literary heights—Trilling, Rosenfeld, Howe—wrote not to advance an academic point, not to advise the author, guide the book buyer, or impress the professional specialist, but to assess the larger meaning of a work. (The adjective “academic” was for them always a pejorative, a synonym of “pedantic” and antonym of intellectual audacity.) They considered criticism a branch of literature itself, a rival form of imagination. Unlike the New Critics who treated literature as something hermetically self-contained, the Family critics believed that writing was a political act; they read a work with an eye for what it said about its cultural environment. They practiced literary criticism as social criticism. These inebriates of literature wrote in a way, Kazin said, “that pure logic would never approve and pure scholarship would never understand.”

Before too long, by pursuing things unattempted yet in the precincts of American Jewish writing, Elliot Cohen was beginning to feel that his magazine was changing the world. Before Commentary (to paraphrase Leon Trotsky on Russian writer Nikolay Gogol), American Jewish literature in English, stuck in imitation, merely tried to exist. After Commentary, it existed.

Benjamin Balint is a writer living in Jerusalem and fellow at the Hudson Institute. The preceding is excerpted from Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine That Transformed the Jewish Left Into the Neoconservative Right.

Compared to the other notorious sins committed recently by American Jews, Eliot Spitzer’s paying women to sleep with him seems like a rather minor offense: He’s a hypocrite and a bit freaky between the sheets, sure, but unlike Bernie Madoff, the only family he managed to damage through his misdeeds was his own. Two new books, Lloyd Constantine’s Journal of the Plague Year (Kaplan, April) and Peter Elkind’s Rough Justice: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer (Portfolio, April), run down the details of Spitzer’s dramatic story, from his moralistic crusading as Attorney General to the $100,000 tab he racked up with about 10 of the women employed by the good folks of Emperor’s Club V.I.P. Constantine, a former adviser to Spitzer, offers an account of the turmoil within Spitzer’s office as the scandal broke, while Elkind—Fortune editor and, as co-author of The Smartest Guys in the Room, a practiced hand at this sort of “rise-and-fall” page-turner—surveys the scandal’s sordid details and raises the key question of what exactly piqued the Justice Department’s interest in a minor prostitution ring with a single influential client.

***

Spitzer isn’t the first Jewish political leader to have disappointed his followers, of course. Norman Gelb’s Kings of the Jews: The Origins of the Jewish Nation (JPS, April) introduces the 52 monarchs who ruled during the millennium that ran from 1020 BCE to 70 CE, including Menahem, the ruler of whose kingdom the prophet Hosea wrote, “There is no honesty and no goodness and no obedience in the land,” naming “adultery” as one of the particular signs of the social decay. Gelb recounts the histories of such lesser-known ancient kings, and queens, as Ahaz, Asa, and Athaliah: great material for Biblical novelists eyeing a piece of that sweet Red Tent market.

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This spring is a healthy one for dark comedy. Sam Munson’s debut novel, The November Criminals (Doubleday, April), follows a D.C. high school pot dealer with a taste for Holocaust humor as he investigates the murder of a classmate. The novel takes the form of this stoner’s personal essay for his application to the University of Chicago. Like some college applications, the novel has perhaps benefited from its author’s “legacy” status: Munson is the grandson of the neoconservative kingpin Norman Podhoretz, and he got his precocious start as a book reviewer at the moment of his college graduation, writing for Commentary—that formerly great Jewish magazine that has come to resemble a monthly newsletter for Munson’s extended family: His mother and father have contributed frequently, and the current editor is his uncle.

Witz: The Story of the Last Jew on Earth (Dalkey Archive, May), by Tablet’s critic-at-large Joshua Cohen arrives with no such pedigree, but it has been highly anticipated nonetheless. An impressive brick of fiction totaling upwards of 800 pages, Cohen’s novel—in which all the world’s Jews but one have died of a mysterious plague—brims with allegory, irreverence, and the wordplay in which Cohen has proven himself an adept. Whether or not it earns itself a place on the shelf of gargantuan postmodern epics, the novel possesses at least one quality too rarely seen in the contemporary fiction written by and for American Jews: genuine literary ambition.

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No one tells jokes about the murder of Europe’s Jews—or about racism or abortion or pedophilia, for that matter—with quite the verve and intelligence of Sarah Silverman. In a memoir, The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee (Harper, May), Silverman recounts her childhood in New Hampshire and her twisting path to celebrity, including as much humor as she can while also demonstrating her self-consciousness about the persona she has developed and how it allows her to be political without getting preachy.

***

Silverman started using obscenity for laughs early—at 3, when her grandmother offered her brownies, she told the old lady to “shove ’em up your ass”—but, fortunately for her, she was never prodded into becoming a child performer. Not so lucky is Bethany Rabinowitz, the preteen pressed by her ambitious mother into showbiz in Diane Hammond’s novel Seeing Stars (Harper, April). To make Bethany irresistible to casting directors, her manager changes her name from Rabinowitz to Roosevelt—even though in Hollywood, the disadvantages of ethnicity are hardly clear. “I can be Jewish,” Bethany explains at one point, “I just can’t be, you know, Jewish.”

***

As a Beverly Hills pediatrician, Dr. Scott W. Cohen probably encounters his fair share of Bethany Roosevelts, not to mention all the aspiring Shirley Temples and Macaulay Culkins. Cohen wrote Eat Sleep Poop: A Common Sense Guide to Your Baby’s First Year (Scribner, April) during his daughter’s first 12 months of life. While the book targets a general readership, he does come out mostly in support of the one practice through which a pediatrician can define a child’s Jewish identity (“Although the data are divided, I feel that there are some legitimate benefits to circumcision, and I would consider it for my own son”). New Jewish parents seeking advice tailored more directly to them can consult Secrets of a Jewish Mother (Dutton, April), co-written by Jill Zarin, one of The Real Housewives of New York with her sister Lisa Wexler, along with their mother—though the real classic in that particular field is Dan Greenburg’s How to Be a Jewish Mother.

***

Dr. Cohen is only the latest in a long line of American Jewish doctors; a few of his influential predecessors figure in Ira Rutkow’s Seeking the Cure: A History of Medicine in America (Scribner, April). Himself a surgeon and a medical historian, Rutkow offers insights into the development of contemporary medical practices, including in his narrative the interventions made by Abraham Flexner and Morris Fishbein, among many others. The son of German Jewish immigrants who settled in Kentucky after losing their wholesale hat business in the panic of 1873, Flexner studied education and revolutionized the teaching of medicine, while Fishbein—“a short, portly man with an unmistakable Hoosier twang”—grew up in Indianapolis, where his father retailed glassware and later set the course of the medical profession for over 20 years as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association. While modernizing medicine and refining the standards for health care in the United States and around the world, these men, at the same time, helped give Jewish mothers everywhere an ideal to dream about: a doctor in the family.

And so, it was perhaps not the best time for reports to emerge that Petraeus had blamed Israeli intransigence toward the Palestinians for endangering the lives of American servicemen in the Middle East—at a reported Pentagon briefing early in March and again in congressional testimony on March 16. Jewish conservatives—including Max Boot—quickly scampered to defend Obama’s top Middle East commander.

This is a grand miscalculation, I believe, on the part of the American Jewish community’s conservative wing: While the Obama Administration works to prevent Israel from attacking Iran’s nuclear capacity, Jewish conservatives are battling over whether they were right in 2005, when they urged the United States to take responsibility for Iraq’s political future.

Foreign Policy blogger Mark Perry, a former adviser to Yasser Arafat, reported on March 13 that Petraeus prepared a briefing for Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen warning “that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM’s mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, [and] that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region.” Before a Senate committee on March 16, Petraeus said, “Clearly the tensions on these issues [with Israel] have enormous effect on the strategic context in which we operate in the Central Command’s area of responsibility.”

Perry’s report provoked a cagey half-denial by Petraeus to The American Spectator on March 25. “There’s a 56-page document that we submitted that has a statement in it that describes various factors that influence the strategic context in which we operate and among those we listed the Mideast peace process,” the general said. “We noted in there that there was a perception at times that America sides with Israel and so forth. And I mean, that is a perception. It is there. I don’t think that’s disputable. But I think people inferred from what that said and then repeated it a couple of times and bloggers picked it up and spun it. And I think that has been unhelpful, frankly.”

Yet as the Washington Times’s Diana West observed on March 25, the paragraph supposedly taken out of context by “bloggers” says substantially what Perry and others said it did:

Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large scale armed confrontations. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile Al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizbollah and Hamas.

Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League blasted Petraeus’s Senate testimony as “dangerous and counterproductive.” He added, “Whenever the Israeli-Arab conflict is made a focal point, Israel comes to be seen as the problem. If only Israel would stop settlements, if only Israel would talk with Hamas, if only Israel would make concessions on refugees, if only it would share Jerusalem, everything in the region would then fall into line.”

It is one of the stranger man-bites-dog stories in the recent history of Jewish politics in the United States: Abe Foxman, a strident liberal and erstwhile Obama supporter, denounces a Pentagon official for putting Israel on the spot, while Obama’s neoconservative detractors insist that the incident never happened. Some of Petraeus’s admirers in the conservative Jewish camp excuse his remarks on the grounds that he has no choice but to repeat the Administration’s position. That would seem to provide all the more grounds to attack him.

Of course what Petraeus actually said or didn’t say is much less damaging to both U.S. and Israeli interests than the undisputed fact that the 100,000 American troops in Iraq have been tasked with the mission of supporting a government that may soon be headed by an overt ally of Iran, Ahmad Chalabi. “We are proposing the creation of a regional alliance among Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran,” the onetime neoconservative favorite wrote in The Wall Street Journal on March 5. As Joshua Muravchik, an erstwhile Chalabi supporter, wrote in a mea culpa on the World Affairs blog, “An alliance of this kind is designed to push the United States from the region and pave the way for Iranian and/or Islamist hegemony.”

Iran has gained political ascendancy in Iraq through intensive subversion efforts. According to senior military sources cited by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius on February 25, “The Iranians allegedly are pumping $9 million a month in covert aid to the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a Shiite party that has the most seats in the Iraqi parliament, and $8 million a month to the militant Shiite movement headed by Moqtada al-Sadr.”

Petraeus’s opinions about the Middle East carry less weight than those of his boss, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen, who has been warning against an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear capability for the past year. In a March 16, 2009, interview with Charlie Rose, Mullen said: “What I worry about in terms of an attack on Iran is, in addition to the immediate effect, the effect of the attack, it’s the unintended consequences. It’s the further destabilization in the region. It’s how they would respond. We have lots of Americans who live in that region who are under the threat envelope right now [because of the] capability that Iran has across the Gulf. So, I worry about their responses and I worry about it escalating in ways that we couldn’t predict.”

A rough translation of Mullen’s remarks into civilian political language is that the quixotic notion of building democracy in the Middle East led the United States into an Iranian trap.

“I met [Chalabi] around the time of the first Gulf war,” Joshua Muravchik recounts, “and I gave him a copy of my recently published book, Exporting Democracy: Fulfilling America’s Destiny. When I saw him next, maybe five years later, he said: ‘I read your book, but I don’t think your government has.’ I was of course flattered and amused. And I was enchanted by this articulate man from that other-planet of Baathist Iraq who professed the very same democratic beliefs central to my worldview.”

The neoconservatives never appear to have noticed that the Iranian leadership was just as keen on building democracy in Iraq as they were. When the American occupation forces held the constitutional referendum in late 2005 that is the putative foundation of Iraqi democracy, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei hailed it as “a great and blessed job” in an October 21, 2005, sermon. “The next important step in Iraq after the referendum is the general elections on which the occupiers are planning right now,” he said. Khamenei called for a truce in the sectarian war between Shi’ites and Sunnis, intoning, “These elements [extremists] are neither Sunni nor Shi’ite but are the enemies of both and Islam.”

Iran retained the capacity to inflict high levels of casualties on the United States throughout the Iraqi democratization campaign but chose not to use it. Instead, it withdrew some of its most exposed and volatile assets, including Muqtada al-Sadr, to Iran. The Iranians counted on the fact that the Americans would soon be gone—and that their proximity, staying power, and affinity with Iraq’s Shi’ite majority would allow the Islamic Republic to emerge as the dominant player in the country.

Were the United States, or anyone else, to bomb Iran’s nuclear bomb-making capacity, Iran has the capacity to retaliate in any number of ways—suicide bombs against U.S. servicemen, Silkworm missiles aimed at tankers in the Persian Gulf, rocket fire against Israeli cities. The consequences against which Mullen warned certainly would include Jewish lives; they might include American lives as well. Bombing Iran also might expose the weakness of an unpopular regime and make its overthrow more probable. Instability might enhance rather than detract from American influence in the region provided the United States had a government that knew how to navigate it.

Unlike the neoconservatives, who persuaded themselves that the warring tribes of a country invented by British cartographers would embrace U.S.-style democracy and become strong enough to repel the political advances of their powerful neighbor, the so-called realists prepared to accommodate Iranian hegemony over what U.S. strategists had once hopefully called the Arabian Gulf. In 2004, Robert Gates, now the secretary of Defense, and former Carter national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski chaired a Council on Foreign Relations panel on the future of Iran. They concluded:

From the perspective of U.S. interests, one particular issue area appears particularly ripe for U.S.-Iranian engagement: the future of Iraq and Afghanistan. The United States has a direct and compelling interest in ensuring both countries’ security and the success of their post-conflict governments. Iran has demonstrated its ability and readiness to use its influence constructively in these two countries, but also its capacity for making trouble. The United States should work with Tehran to capitalize on Iran’s influence to advance the stability and consolidation of its neighbors.

Gates and Brzezinski also showed understanding for Iran’s drive to acquire nuclear weapons: “Given its history and its turbulent neighborhood, Iran’s nuclear ambitions do not reflect a wholly irrational set of strategic calculations.”

This is the context in which to understand recent remarks by Mullen and Petraeus—professional soldiers handed a miserable mission by civilian authorities inspired by delusional democracy-promoting public intellectuals. They understand as well as Gates and Brzezinski did in 2004 that, given the U.S. posture in Iraq and Afghanistan, a nuclear Iran is the American exit strategy. An attack on Iran’s nuclear installations would tear down the whole Potemkin village of supposed democratization and lead to “unforeseen consequences.” The civilian leadership does not want these consequences; the public intellectuals have not begun to consider them; and in any case these consequences would lead to American casualties and ruin prominent reputations. It might be better for the world to take out Iran’s nuclear capability now—most Americans and most Israelis have told pollsters they think so—but it would not necessarily be better for Mullen.

One alternative to such nasty consequences is to encourage Iran to exercise its ambitions for regional hegemony “responsibly” and to tread lightly around its nuclear weapons program—trading the short-term appearance of stability for the prospect of a catastrophe in the medium term. This outcome was foreseeable from the beginning; the foreign policy establishment as represented by Brzezinski and Gates embraced it in 2004. “I do not believe any formal understanding is in place, but the probable outcome is that Washington will refrain from military action to forestall Iranian nuclear arms developments, while Tehran will refrain from disrupting Washington’s constitutional Potemkin Village in Iraq,” I wrote in Asia Times Online in 2005.

Meanwhile, Commentary bloggers cling to Petraeus for dear life. When the Washington Times’s Diana West dug out the noteworthy fact that Petraeus’s faculty adviser for a Princeton thesis in 1987 was Stephen Walt, of Israel Lobby fame, Max Boot shot back from his perch at Commentary, “I await West’s correction and apology for the numerous calumnies she has lodged against the most distinguished American military commander since Eisenhower.”

The Petraeus Affair has helped neutralize Jewish conservatives as a political force for the electoral season. The missteps of the Jewish right are a source of comfort to the White House. A prominent New York rabbi mused the other day that former Secretary of State James Baker said, “Screw the Jews, they don’t vote for us” while Obama says, “Screw the Jews, they’ll vote for us anyway.”

Some liberal Jewish leaders, though, are not as docile as the White House thinks they are. The ADL’s Foxman told Haaretz on March 20 that Obama’s mistreatment of Israel “might become a political football,” that is, a reason to ditch already beleaguered Democratic candidates in the November elections. “The majority of the American Jewish community is not happy with settlements,” Foxman explained. “But it also isn’t happy when the U.S. president tells the Israeli prime minister what to do. I think that in the beginning the president received advice that if you take the settlements issue public you don’t have anything to lose, because the American Jews don’t like settlements, and the Israelis as well, and this is a win-win. But the American Jews don’t like the American administration dictating to Israel what it should or shouldn’t do.”

It is clear to the mainstream Jewish leadership that they have profound differences with the Obama Administration and that they may have to choose between support for Israel’s security and their traditional liberal agenda in domestic politics. But the fight over Obama’s Israel policy will be fought out within the Jewish liberal mainstream because the politically conservative wing of the Jewish community has painted itself into a corner. There it sits, nursing its wounded reputation. The menu for the American Enterprise Institute’s dinner for Petraeus hasn’t been announced. I recommend crow.

David P. Goldman is a senior editor at First Things and writes the “Spengler” column for the Asia Times.

Ruth R. Wisse: Seventeen years ago I published If I Am Not For Myself, a book on the “liberal betrayal of the Jews,” which addresses Norman Podhoretz’s question, arriving at similar conclusions by a different route. It is often assumed that Jews are “liberal” out of compassion for the poor, sympathy for the downtrodden, and other generous impulses rooted in the Jewish commitment to tikkun olam, or, repairing the world. I have never accepted this self-congratulatory idea. In my experience, when Jews interpret their Judaism as liberalism it is because, to paraphrase Sholem Aleichem, “It is harder to be a Jew.” Those who substitute “liberal” for “Jew” as the basis of self-definition often fail to protect the rights of their own people, or worse, condone the aggression of their adversaries in the name of promoting peace.

To be sure, as Podhoretz amply illustrates, there are strong liberal features within Jewish tradition that define and sustain the Jewish way of life. These include a politics of self-accountability, respect for the individual and rule of law, and toleration of other religions and cultures. Herzl’s Zionism was at once a plan to create a liberal Jewish society and to save European liberalism from anti-Semitism. But paradoxically, the liberalizing elements in Judaism have contributed to making Jews an irresistible target of anti-liberals. This often forces a choice between Jewishness, which is liberal, and liberalism, which sacrifices the Jews to its vision of universal brotherhood.

The demographer Sergio Della Pergola estimates that were it not for the destruction of European Jewry, there could now be as many as 32 million Jews in the world rather than the several million fewer than there were in 1939. A demographically stronger people would discourage aggression and make Jews a less attractive political foil. Can one count on liberals to take the lead in strengthening, defending, and celebrating the Jewish people and its homeland? I don’t think so. May they prove me wrong.

Ruth R. Wisse is Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Her latest book, Jews and Power was published by Nextbook Press.

Morris Dickstein: As immigrant groups gain success in America, as their children and grandchildren climb the economic ladder, their politics usually follows their pocketbooks. With some exceptions, Jews have not kept to this pattern, confounding the received wisdom of sociologists and the fervent hopes of neoconservatives, who have repeatedly promised to deliver the Jewish vote to an ever more conservative Republican Party. Why?

Most Jews have remained liberals because they are, well, Jews. Their social conscience dates back to the laws of Moses and the moral injunctions of the Hebrew prophets. Their word for charity, tsedakah, is virtually the same as their word justice, tsedek, and their word for a righteous man, tsadik. Their fathers and grandfathers grew up poor. Strangely, they remember where they came from, and even more strangely, they empathize with others who are still struggling. Their subliminal memories go back not only to the ghetto and the tenement but to the condition of being despised outsiders, humiliated, persecuted, even killed.

This memory of oppression is built into their DNA, like the adjuration in the Torah and the Haggadah never to forget that they were once slaves in Egypt. But there are real memories as well. As a child in the Ukraine, my mother recalled being hidden under piles of hay when local pogroms broke out, and she remembered hearing bloodcurdling stories of much larger pogroms that took place hundreds of years earlier. The Holocaust renewed such memories, if they needed renewing. They enabled American Jews, living in moderate comfort, to identify with the plight of poor blacks, as they still encourage liberal Israelis to sympathize with the condition of Palestinians, so long as they are not actively killing Jews.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews and Jewish nationalists have a different reading of this history of persecution. They turn inward, circling the wagons. But this same history transformed most secular Jews into ethical universalists. Imperfectly, since they are human beings, they learned to live by Kant’s categorical imperative, essentially a version of the Golden Rule. My teacher, Sidney Morgenbesser, following Hillel, once formulated this as “Do not unto others as you would not have others do unto you.”

In short, Jews bought into the historical forces that liberated them: the Enlightenment, with its faith in universal human rights, and the French Revolution, with its insistence on equality, a career open to talents. Without these developments, Western Jews would still be locked in ghettos, deprived of all economic and political rights. The United States, with its unparalleled freedoms, would simply never have happened. Many Jews also invested their hopes in socialism, as a fulfillment of this egalitarian vision, and especially in labor unions as its concrete realization. The New Deal was their charter of economic freedom, their coming of age. In remarkable numbers they sought higher education for their children, which liberalized them further by enlarging their sense of history.

Even when this romance with the left disappointed them, when the movement seemed to betray its original ideals, those values themselves have kept their hold on ordinary Jews, including those living privileged lives in circumstances freer than any that Jews have ever enjoyed. This is a minor miracle, one still to be celebrated.

Morris Dickstein’s new book, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, has just been published by W. W. Norton.

Jonah Goldberg: Why are Jews liberal? In all its various forms, there is probably no question I get asked more. I have not yet had the pleasure of being edified by Norman Podhoretz’s take, which I’m told is a great read, so let me offer a sliver of my own answer to the question.

The liberalism of American Jews is, I believe, what social scientists would call an over-determined phenomenon. Some of it has to do with broader social trends that Jews are not immune to. The over-educated often drift toward liberalism out of the arrogance that they’re smart enough to have all the answers. The wealthy, contrary to much liberal propaganda, are trending more liberal every day, particularly among “idea worker” types. Secularism is one of the most reliable indices of liberalism and many Jews seem to think that secularism is a religious imperative.

Then there are the various and sundry factors derived from the unique history of the Jews. In Old Europe, Jews were often a special class who looked to the throne for protection from the anti-Semitic rabble and the pogroms (“If only the Czar knew!”). This gives Jews a long heritage of viewing statism as a survival strategy. The big wave of Jews who came to the United States at the beginning of the 20th century brought the thriving fad of socialism with them and they saw an America that seemed to confirm the need for leftwing reform.

Anti-Semitism was long associated with institutions that seemed more Republican and conservative (the reverse is closer to the truth today). Harry Truman was a midwife to Israel’s birth.

And that introduces the Holocaust. The impact of the Holocaust cuts deep and long. But one result has been a tendency among American Jews to think that fighting for a progressive, statist, vision of “social justice” is a moral, even definitional, imperative for Jews today.

There’s also the simple fact that people tend to share the views of their parents. Contrary to the cultural mythology of children rebelling from their parents, the vast majority of people inherit their politics, just like their eye color, from their Mom and Dad. Perhaps, because Jews mix politics and religion so thoroughly, this tendency is even stronger among members of the tribe.

The knot of Jewish liberalism is large, old and has many strands. It will take a long time to untie it.

Jonah Goldberg is a nationally syndicated columnist and the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.

Todd Gitlin: Among all ethnicities, Jews voted for Barack Obama in proportions second only to African-Americans. A population who do not strictly vote their pocketbooks! This sounds like some kind of scandal, if not an act of unaccountable blindness or even self-hatred. But if there is a scandal, it is one with a lineage. The liberalism of American Jews is not a new story.

Or could it be that Jews are not violating their self-interest at all? That they’re actually so smart as to realize that it’s in their class interest to elect Democrats because, whatever their rhetoric of equal rights, Democrats are in practice kinder to citizens who make their money the way Jews make their money—from the professions, disproportionately? I suppose someone could crunch the numbers and confirm or deny that Jews are secret, or unconscious, self-seekers after all. But I suspect that, in the end, it would turn out that Jews benefited materially from Ronald Reagan’s and George Bush’s picnics-for-the-prosperous more than they have under Democratic presidents. The anomaly of the Jews’ political counterintuitive allegiance would remain.

It might be supposed, then, that Judaism itself—something about its doctrines and observances—accounts for the violation of material self-interest. After all, while its doctrinal history is tangled and frequently self-contradictory, Judaism speaks of justice. It doesn’t speak only of justice, but it speaks of moral obligations both to members and strangers.

But there are strong justice motifs in other religions as well, and Jews who do not practice Judaism are no less liberal than those who do. Are we talking, then, about a different relation to the religion one professes? Are American Jews more devout—more sincere, in some sense—than other Americans? I do not know just what would constitute evidence for a yes.

Is it that Democratic presidents have satisfied Jews’ feelings for Israel better than Republicans? That seems implausible.

I know no better hypothesis that the following: Jews pride themselves on defying self-interest. They rejoice in the anomaly. This is in no small part because the theological foundation of Judaism is the belief that one’s people were chosen to carry out a unique relation to divine purpose. Jews may not be more devout than others, but somehow—and I do not understand quite how—we relish the opportunity to answer the question, “If I am for myself alone, what do I amount to?” with liberalism’s great appeal, which is to self-transcendence.

Todd Gitlin, a onetime president of Students for a Democratic Society who teaches at Columbia University, is the author of 12 books, including The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage.

Ron Radosh: To understand why Jews in America today are overwhelmingly liberal, one has to start with their history in this country, beginning with their mass immigration from Eastern Europe and Russia from the 1880’s through the 1920’s. This group of first generation immigrants were escaping from oppressive anti-Semitism, which limited their horizons in every conceivable way, to a society that held out the promise of a life lived in freedom. And when they got here it was the Democrats, organized in the big city machines, who more or less welcomed them and who became familiar figures.

By the 1930s, many of those who were first attracted to union militancy and socialism left the ranks of these movements, and aligned with Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, whose programs gave them union recognition (through the Wagner Act) which meant an entrée into the middle class. The New Deal also gave them Social Security. Most American Jews revered F.D.R. and loyalty to the New Deal and the Democratic Party became a matter of faith.

Some Zionist leaders around the time of Israel’s founding, especially Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, argued that Jews should not be beholden to one political party and sought bi-partisan support for the creation of a Jewish State. But despite the crucial support of many Republicans, Silver’s pleas fell on deaf ears among most of his brethren who continued to be loyal Democrats.

Today’s Jews are in a far different position than their ancestors. They no longer face what was once rampant anti-Semitism. They hold leading positions in all walks of life. Their children no longer face a Jewish quota in the elite colleges and universities. Yet, despite the reality of their situation, they still hold to the liberalism that has become a sine qua non of what it means to be Jewish. They act as if God would strike them dead should they pull the lever on Election Day for a Republican candidate.

Then there is the matter of religion. As they assimilated, many Jews became secular. For a time, Israel became a substitute for organized Judaism and the synagogue. But as time moved on, the identification with Israel subsided, leaving many Jews either hyper-critical of Israel, removed from identifying with the Jewish State, or as Jeff Jacoby wrote in the Commentary forum on this question, “secular and universalist.” Their liberalism is symbolized in a most extreme form by the “Judaism” advocated by Rabbi Michael Lerner, who preaches in his “Tikkun community” and journal, Tikkun, that to be Jewish means to favor a left-wing agenda at home and an emphasis on being critical of Israel while apologizing for Palestinian intransigence. This, he argues, is what flows from the ethics of the Torah and the teachings of Judaism.

The election of Barack Obama has served to reinforce the tendency of American Jews to remain liberal. One can argue till one is blue in the face that Obama’s policies are harmful to both Jews at home and Israel abroad, that his so-called outreach to the Muslim world is dangerous, and that his decision to avoid dealing with the threat of a nuclear Iran is likely to destabilize the entire Middle East. It will be to no avail. Jews were actively involved in the first phase of the civil rights movement in the 50’s and 60’s, and as the playwright Carol Gould writes, “the ascension of Barack Obama symbolizes a dream fulfilled to a generation of Jewish Americans who were at the forefront of black liberation and to younger voters who saw him as a symbol of total change.” Were her activist parents still alive, she says, they would be “kvelling over the election of Obama.”

Ron Radosh is the co-author of A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel.

All of which I mention to underscore the fact that it was with the anticipation of a certain amount of self-discovery, among other things, that I picked up Norman Podhoretz’s latest book, Why Are Jews Liberals? In the substantive sense, I’d abandoned liberalism long before I changed my party registration—and over essentially the same issues that had prompted most neoconservatives to part company with the party that marched off after Sen. George McGovern in 1972. But for me it was something of a long goodbye that included 10 years at the Forward, an institution that had seemed to pitch rightward with each crisis that came upon the Jewish people but had yet to reach a conservative shore.

Podhoretz doesn’t disappoint. He starts his story with the birth of Christianity. In the first several chapters he takes us through the expulsion from Spain into the ghettos of the Middle Ages. He sketches Jewish achievement under terrible conditions. But he notes that Jews emerged from the Middle Ages “knowing for a certainty that—individual exceptions duly noted— the worst enemy they had in the world was Christianity.” Podhoretz reckons it “was a knowledge that Jewish experience in the ages to come would do very little, if indeed anything at all, to help future generations to forget.”

Podhoretz explores several mysteries, and he does not fail to put them in a way calculated to touch on the exposed nerves. One example: if the Jews “never took it as a mark of friendship that under Christian rule they could escape the disabilities and dangers of being Jewish simply by ceasing to be Jewish, why did they fail to recognize that the Enlightenment was offering them the same bargain in modern dress? Why were they unable to see that the French philosophes and their counterparts in other countries were in their own way no less an enemy to them as Jews than the early Fathers of the Church?”

A second mystery he investigates in a chapter on the Marxists and other radicals, including some on the right. He puts it this way: “The question thus arises of why the Jews who joined the radical camp were not put off by the egregious anti-Semitism of Marx or that of several other major figures of the socialist movement, including Charles Fourier (to whom the Jews were the ‘the leprosy and the run of the body politic’) and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (to whom the Jews were ‘the race which poisons everything [and] the enemy of the human race’).” Podhoretz has mined the literature for choice nuggets, such as Rosa Luxembourg (“Why do you come with your special Jewish sorrows?”) and Marx, who was baptized and had a flirtation with Christianity before moving to materialism. (“What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.”)

Podhoretz sees America as different. Even in early days Jews here were far freer than in Europe. Podhoretz reprises the American anti-Semites. He does not flinch from what he calls the “upshot”—that it was the conservative upholders of the old order who were hostile to the Jews, whether they were rich or poor and whether they had immigrated from Germany or Eastern Europe. And as he brings the story forward he sees the emergence of the Jews as loyalists to the Democratic Party as related to the fact that F.D.R. was clearly, despite protestations to the contrary, trying to get America into the war against Hitler. Not even the “immensely popular” Eisenhower, Podhoretz notes, was able to “break up the Jewish love affair with the party of Roosevelt.”

Up to that point, Podhoretz argues, the loyalty of Jews to the Democratic Party was “in harmony with their interests as Jews.” In the second half of the book, the focus is shifted to a different question, namely “why the Jews are still liberals.” This covers an era in which Jewish interests and Jewish politics became, at least in Podhoretz’s view (and my own), far less harmonious and even fell into disharmony. Podhoretz gives this discord a rich telling, in which—with his typical courage—he doesn’t spare the leaders he supported, such as Reagan, on the occasions when he thought they were wrong. Nor does Podhoretz pace the widow’s walk, searching the horizon in hopes that the Jewish move to the right will appear in the distance.

What he does conclude is that modern progressive politics have become a substitute religion—the “Torah of Liberalism,” he calls it at one point. Early in the book he quotes a passage from I.J. Singer’s novel The Brother’s Ashkenazi about Nissan, the son of a rabbi who becomes a disciple of “the prophet Marx” and who, as Singer puts it, “never let his copy of Das Kapital out of his sight and carried it everywhere, as his father had carried his prayer shawl and phylacteries.” Podhoretz comes back to this theme toward the end, quoting G.K. Chesterton as observing: “When men stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.” That was not true of the Jewish immigrants who came to America, Podhoretz writes. “Almost all the young intellectuals and political leaders among them had stopped believing in the God of Judaism, but it was not ‘anything’ they now believed, it was Marxism.” And when Marxism failed, Podhoretz writes, the “same process that had made social democracy into an acceptable refuge from orthodox Marxism now began making liberalism into an acceptable refuge from social democracy.”

Is all lost? It happens that I read Podhoretz’s book as I was at work on a short biography of the founding editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, Abraham Cahan, and I was struck at how closely the trajectory Podhoretz describes followed that traversed by Cahan. It turns out that the bitterest feud of Cahan’s life was not that with the Orthodox Jews of his hometown in Lithuania, nor the monarchists he plotted against in Russia, nor the capitalists he railed against in America, nor the Zionists he slighted for years, nor the Communists he turned against in the 1920s. Those feuds certainly were epic. But his bitterest moment erupted in the late 1930s, when his star writer, Sholem Asch, wrote a novel, The Nazarene, suggesting Jesus should be regarded by Jews as he was regarded by Christians. Then, even while protesting that he was not religious, Cahan went into a final frenzy, denouncing Asch as a traitor and a destroyed person. He wouldn’t let up, turning out articles, speeches and even a book until, alas, he was silenced by a stroke and leaving to the next generations the search for that line in liberalism that they just won’t cross.

Why Are Jews Liberals? A Symposium [Commentary]

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.

Still, Sanneh argues that underneath all the bluster Savage is still just a neurotic New York Jew: one who peppers his show with references to shaygitzes and Shabbes goys; who flinches when remembering the time his car backfired in front of a shul on Yom Kippur, and who used to drop by Chabad services; who is preoccupied with his father’s early death and his own mortality. So what’s the difference between Savage and his Jewish neocon comrades? In the podcast that accompanies the story, Sanneh says it’s simple: “He stayed weird.”

Party of One [The New Yorker (subscribers only)]
Alternative Conservative [TNY podcast]