fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

The Forward on Neoconservatism

It was Podhoretz, however, who gave neoconservatism its most explicitly Jewish cast. The August 1968 issue of Commentary featured Emil Fackenheim’s famous essay, “Jewish Faith and the Holocaust: A Fragment,” which included Fackenheim’s contention that afàer Auschwitz, Jews had a moral responsibility to defend Jewish interests so as not to hand Hitler a “posthumous vic-tory.” […]

It was Podhoretz, however, who gave neoconservatism its most explicitly Jewish cast. The August 1968 issue of Commentary featured Emil Fackenheim’s famous essay, “Jewish Faith and the Holocaust: A Fragment,” which included Fackenheim’s contention that afàer Auschwitz, Jews had a moral responsibility to defend Jewish interests so as not to hand Hitler a “posthumous vic-tory.” By February 1972, Podhoretz himself wrote a piece titled, without irony, “Is It Good for the Jews?”

Holocaust consciousness was growing in the 1970s, as was a renewed sense of threat to Jews and a feeling that, as Podhoretz put it, the postwar “statute of limitations” on anitisemitism had run out. Israel’s security, threatened in the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War — both events that gave Jews existential pause — suddenly became a top American Jewish concern. Podhoretz came to identify more and more with the defense of Jews, and by the 1980s, half his articles on international affairs focused on Israel and threats to the Jewish people.

This sense of threat, both historically informed and contemporary, gave a very particular tint to the fierce anti-communism professed by neoconservatives. Hannah Arendt had already drawn a moral equation between communism and Nazism, writing in her “The Origins of Totalitarianism” that both represented “absolute evil,” just two sides of the same totalitarian coin. And that was where Podhoretz and his friends picked up in the mid-1970s. Unlike the Irish-Catholic anti-communism of Joe McCarthy and William Buckley, whose hatred of the Soviet Union came out of an almost religious opposition to Soviet godlessness, this Jewish anti-communism was born out of a kind of historical analogy, filled with a moralistic fury against another totalitarianism whose ideology and power threatened the world.

As Ruth Wisse points out in her contribution to the Commentary collection, neoconservatives projected the threat they instinctively understood as Jews onto America as a whole, and it sharpened their sense that only an aggressive defense of the country and its values was appropriate and that any appeasement was criminal. Or as former neocon Michael Lind recently wrote: For neoconservatives, “it is always 1939.” ~Gal Beckerman, The Forward

Strangely absent from Friedman’s books [The Neoconservative Revolution, Commentary in American Life] is any discussion of the latest and certainly riskiest manifestation of the “neoconservative revolution”: the push to unilaterally invade and democratize Iraq. It’s a strange oversight for a book published two years after the start of the war. Friedman wouldn’t have needed even to introduce new characters. Among the war’s most passionate supporters, after all, were Norman Podhoretz and William Kristol (son of Irving).

The omission is glaring. Not just because Iraq is the next chapter in the neoconservative story, but because it is in Iraq that neoconservatism will be either vindicated or buried forever. Maybe even more than Reagan’s Cold War policies, the Iraq War was the most dramatic embodiment of two key Podhoretz tenets, the “aggressive” side that would keep America on the initiative, and the “idealistic” that dreams of making theworld safer by remaking it in our image.

Mr. Beckerman’s review is well worth reading, even for those who are familiar with the neoconservative story.

Advertisement

Comments

The American Conservative Memberships
Become a Member today for a growing stake in the conservative movement.
Join here!
Join here