Summary
Editor of Commentary, a founder of the neoconservative movement, who in Perceptions of Palestine’s account was an unapologetic propagandist for Israel, advocated of the position that no U.S. Jew should ever criticize Israel, and author of the 1982 article “J’Accuse”, a blistering attack on Israel’s critics during and after the Lebanon invasion that concluded: “Hostility toward Israel is a sure sign of failing faith in and support for the virtues and values of Western civilization in general and of America in particular” (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 2316-2331).
Details
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Podhoretz observed in the mid-1980s that although journals like his had small circulation, the ideas that “run government or are a part of public debate” originated precisely in these small journals of opinion — probably no exaggeration for the Reagan administration, Christison writes (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 2316-2321).
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Feldman treats Podhoretz across the conjuncture: his anger at Baldwin’s submitting “Down at the Cross” to the New Yorker rather than Commentary produced “My Negro Problem—and Ours” (Commentary, February 1963), which Feldman reads as a preface to neoconservatism fashioning the tough Jew; his February 1974 New York Times Magazine essay diagnosed a mass “instant Zionism” among American Jews after 1967 and 1973; he promoted Moynihan’s “The United States in Opposition,” supplied the opening and closing language of Moynihan’s 1975 UN speech, and synthesised Bernard Lewis’s views for it; and his 1971 account of two traumas — 1967 and Ocean Hill-Brownsville — called for permanent hypervigilant Jewish resistance (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 93-95, 609-611, 619-639, 321).
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Feldman’s Epilogue of A Shadow over Palestine centres Podhoretz’s World War IV: The Long Struggle against Islamofascism (2007), which took its title phrase from Bernard Lewis by way of James Woolsey and Eliot Cohen and cited George Kennan’s 1947 “Sources of Soviet Conduct” at length: “Substitute ‘Islamofascism’ for ‘Russian-American relations,’ and every other word of this magnificent statement applies to us as a nation today”; Podhoretz dates World War IV’s beginning before 9/11, holding that 9/11 “actually represented the culmination of a long series of attacks” (p.25) (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 1235-1245). See Islamofascism.
Related pages
Neoconservatism, Ronald Reagan, George Shultz, Antisemitism, A Shadow over Palestine