Norman Podhoretz.
(Jon Naso / NY Each day Information Archive through Getty Photos)
Postwar Manhattan hosted a tight-knit, disputatious mental tradition formed closely by the sons (and occasionally the daughters) of shtetl-born immigrants. Making use of talmudic rigor to secular debates about literature and international affairs, they printed little magazines whose concepts unfold immediately from their pages to the very best political workplaces. Whereas traces of that tradition stay—The New York Assessment of Books, Dissent, and sure, Commentary are all nonetheless publishing, as are dozens of different small-circulation journals in the identical custom—its declare on the political zeitgeist has been displaced by a tradition that’s comparatively dumbed-down, post-literate, and rooted in petty grievances and low-cost provocation.
The singular determine who bridged these two sensibilities, Norman Podhoretz, is useless at 95. He was the final canonical New York mental, and the primary of a now-familiar breed of discourse demagogue.
A star scholar born and raised within the slums of Brownsville, Brooklyn, to a Yiddish-speaking milkman from Galicia, on the age of 16 Podhoretz took what he referred to as “the longest journey on this planet” to the rarefied salons of the Higher West Aspect, the place he studied underneath Lionel Trilling at Columbia and socialized with the likes of Hannah Arendt, Alfred Kazin, and Susan Sontag. His guide opinions, together with gutsy assaults on Saul Bellow and Jack Kerouac, earned him early notoriety, and by age 30, he was the editor of Commentary, printed since 1945 by the American Jewish Committee, following the suicide of founding editor Elliot Cohen. He held that job for 35 years earlier than handing it off to his like-minded deputy, Neal Kozodoy, who in flip handed it off to Podhoretz’s solely son, John.
On Norman Podhoretz’s watch, Commentary was remade twice: initially of the Sixties, from a considerably parochially Jewish communal journal to a classy signifier of countercultural sophistication, after which by the tip of the last decade into the neoconservative flagship that it stays at the moment. Because the runt of the New York mental “household” centered on contributors to Partisan Assessment—the idiosyncratic, anti-Stalinist left-wing literary journal based within the Thirties—the younger Podhoretz was wanting to throw off his elders’ tedious, decades-old ideological debates, which had peaked in relevance throughout his Melancholy-era childhood. He wished Commentary to interact with the current, to publish Norman Mailer in opposition to the Vietnam Battle and James Baldwin on the disaster of the interior metropolis. When the latter defected to The New Yorker for a better payment for the essay that turned The Fireplace Subsequent Time, Podhoretz responded by penning “My Negro Problem—and Ours,” an unfiltered reflection on his youthful terror of Black bullies that concluded with a reluctant endorsement of mass miscegenation. It was offensive in a number of methods, however it was additionally buzzy, and so was Podhoretz, who on the top of this period was throwing dinner events with the newly widowed Jackie Kennedy and ensuring everybody knew about it.
Podhoretz was by no means precisely a person of the left, regardless of what he would retroactively declare; a decade youthful than his Metropolis School–educated peer Irving Kristol, he by no means had a Trotskyist part in his youth, and whereas he dallied with the New Left early in his Commentary tenure, that was extra about producing consideration than any deeper conviction. By default, he was what would now be termed a “Chilly Battle liberal,” however politics was not his guiding motivation. What he sought, fairly overtly, was literary status and the attendant social clout.
In 1967, he printed his first unique guide (he had beforehand printed a set of essays), the memoir Making It, a shameless bid for greatness that backfired spectacularly. Podhoretz meant to inform his personal story as a juicy exposé of what he forged because the soiled little secret of the New York intellectuals—that America’s main literary critics, regardless of their high-minded pretense of alienation from grubby capitalism, have been truly obsessive about the standing hierarchy. To no matter extent that will have been true, insightful, and even prescient, it was additionally pure projection, and the discharge of Making It obtained Podhoretz laughed out of the precise scene he thought he had conquered. It was a vital and business flop, and lots of the pans got here from folks he thought have been his mates. (In hindsight, it’s a great read, if not exactly for the explanations he meant.) His appreciable ego by no means recovered.
Present Difficulty
As he drank away this humiliation—his first huge failure made a long-standing downside worse—he additionally started to course of the tumult of the late Sixties. As soon as a skeptic relating to Israel (in a letter to Trilling following a 1951 go to, he wrote, “They’re, regardless of their actually extraordinary accomplishments, a really unattractive folks, the Israelis. They’re gratuitously surly and boorish.… They’re too conceited and too anxious to turn into an actual honest-to-goodness New York of the East”), within the wake of the 1967 Six-Day Battle Podhoretz turned one of many Jewish state’s staunchest partisans, seeing it as a manly various to the allegedly feminized and neurotic tradition of his fellow diaspora Jews. This put him at odds with the rising Black Energy motion, which forcefully criticized Zionism. Black Energy activists have been additionally extremely seen throughout the monthslong 1968 public faculty strike in Podhoretz’s native Brownsville, a low level in Black-Jewish relations. Commentary more and more turned fixated on these alleged betrayals, with Podhoretz fulminating in opposition to what he deemed the ingratitude of Black America.
Within the useless of winter in 1970, alone and depressing in a dilapidated farmhouse he’d bought in upstate New York with half of a guide advance, Podhoretz had a divine revelation—he realized, as he later instructed his biographer, “that Judaism was true,” and that he was sure to an historical covenant that transcended the secular world the place he had sought materials success. He decided that he would henceforth dwell his life in accordance with a culturally conservative learn on Jewish regulation as he understood it. Coming back from an extended paid depart, newly sober and with a reinvigorated sense of mission, he rededicated Commentary to battle in opposition to the left and every little thing it stood for. His signature editorial tone more and more prioritized invective and overstatement over rigor and precision and ruthlessly focused not solely African Individuals and Palestinians but in addition feminists, LGBT folks, scholar radicals, and liberals of all stripes.
Inside a number of years, he was being disparaged by Michael Harrington and others on the left as a “neoconservative” together with friends like Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell who had recoiled from New Left demonstrations on school campuses. Not like Bell, Podhoretz and Kristol embraced the epithet and made it their very own, with Kristol articulating a fuller model of the idea as skeptical of Nice Society welfare applications, hostile to the counterculture, and muscular in international coverage. In 1972, they each endorsed Richard Nixon for president over George McGovern. In 1975, Podhoretz helped draft the speech that his good friend US Ambassador to the United Nations Daniel Patrick Moynihan delivered earlier than the Basic Meeting during which he denounced a decision equating Zionism and racism; the speech made Moynihan a hero to many New York Jews and helped propel him to the Senate a yr later, when he defeated feminist firebrand Bella Abzug within the Democratic main.
Although Podhoretz spent the Nineteen Seventies making an attempt to roll the Democrats again to the Kennedy period through the failed presidential campaigns of Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, his 1979 memoir Breaking Ranks formally declared him a person of the proper. By the 1980 election, Podhoretz and his spouse, fellow neoconservative Midge Decter—at the least as gleeful a left-baiter as her husband, and with a specific disdain for the New Left’s sexual proclivities—have been ensconced within the Republican camp. Together with Kristol, they’d mentored a big mind belief that will occupy many workplaces within the Reagan administration—notably together with their son-in-law, Elliott Abrams, who narrowly dodged jail for his position within the Iran-contra scandal and implicated himself in what’s now understood as a genocide in Guatemala.
Podhoretz’s cantankerous persona and zeal for battle ultimately put him at odds with the Reagan White Home; when the once-hawkish president turned to diplomacy with Mikhail Gorbachev that in the end led to the peaceable finish of the Chilly Battle, Commentary cried appeasement and warned that America risked being changed into a passive, impartial Finland as a resurgent Soviet Union conquered the world. Podhoretz was improper, in fact, however that didn’t cease him from declaring victory for neoconservatism as he stepped down from his editorship in 1995. He additionally declared neoconservatism over, having absolutely transitioned from an basically liberal mental critique of the New Left into an integral a part of the mainstream conservative motion.
He was at the least partly improper about that, too; neoconservatism would show to be very a lot a dwelling ideology just some years later. After the 9/11 assaults, the international policy-centric neoconservatism represented by The Weekly Customary, cofounded by Kristol’s and Podhoretz’s sons, performed a central position in shaping George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s response, with catastrophic outcomes for Iraq and for the US’s world stature. It might have been even worse, although—Podhoretz, who forged the Battle on Terror as a sweeping campaign he referred to as World Battle IV (the Chilly Battle was World Battle III), personally suggested Bush and Karl Rove to assault Iran as properly, however they demurred.
In style
“swipe left beneath to view extra authors”Swipe →
Not like basically each different main contributor to Partisan Assessment, Podhoretz lived lengthy sufficient to see Donald Trump take over the GOP, and in contrast to second-generation neoconservatives like Invoice Kristol, Robert Kagan, and David Frum, he got here to welcome it—at first with reservations, however later with actual enthusiasm. “His virtues are the virtues of the road youngsters of Brooklyn,” he told the right-wing Claremont Assessment of Books in 2019. “You don’t again away from a struggle and also you struggle to win. That’s one of many issues that the Individuals who love him, love him for—that he’s prepared to struggle, not prepared however wanting to struggle.” The place the youthful Kristol noticed Trump’s boorish conduct as an affront to republican advantage, the elder Podhoretz noticed a kindred spirit.
It’s becoming, then, that Podhoretz’s final piece of writing, printed this April, landed at The Free Press, Bari Weiss’s latter-day neocon web site. It was a valedictory, one final retelling of the heroic Brooklyn-to-Manhattan journey that had already shaped the premise of 4 memoirs and a certified, hagiographic biography. There was little new within the textual content itself, however its venue signaled that Podhoretz’s pressure of neoconservatism stays alive despite being pronounced useless many occasions over. Simply months earlier than Podhoretz’s dying, one of many wealthiest households in historical past bought The Free Press for $150 million after which put in Weiss on the helm of CBS Information, with the obvious purpose of profitable favor from Trump. In the meantime, Podhoretz’s son-in-law, Elliott Abrams, is now the chairman of the right-wing Zionist Tikvah Fund, which just received a record-setting $10 million grant from the Trump-controlled Nationwide Endowment for the Humanities.
One should think about Norman Podhoretz glad.
Over the previous yr you’ve learn Nation writers like Elie Mystal, Kaveh Akbar, John Nichols, Joan Walsh, Bryce Covert, Dave Zirin, Jeet Heer, Michael T. Klare, Katha Pollitt, Amy Littlefield, Gregg Gonsalves, and Sasha Abramsky tackle the Trump household’s corruption, set the report straight about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s catastrophic Make America Wholesome Once more motion, survey the fallout and human price of the DOGE wrecking ball, anticipate the Supreme Court docket’s harmful antidemocratic rulings, and amplify profitable techniques of resistance on the streets and in Congress.
We publish these tales as a result of when members of our communities are being kidnapped, family debt is climbing, and AI information facilities are inflicting water and electrical energy shortages, we’ve got an obligation as journalists to do all we are able to to tell the general public.
In 2026, our purpose is to do greater than ever earlier than—however we want your assist to make that occur.
By way of December 31, a beneficiant donor will match all donations as much as $75,000. That implies that your contribution will probably be doubled, greenback for greenback. If we hit the total match, we’ll be beginning 2026 with $150,000 to spend money on the tales that impression actual folks’s lives—the sorts of tales that billionaire-owned, corporate-backed retailers aren’t protecting.
Together with your assist, our workforce will publish main tales that the president and his allies gained’t need you to learn. We’ll cowl the rising military-tech industrial complicated and issues of battle, peace, and surveillance, in addition to the affordability disaster, starvation, housing, healthcare, the setting, assaults on reproductive rights, and rather more. On the identical time, we’ll think about alternate options to Trumpian rule and uplift efforts to create a greater world, right here and now.
Whereas your present has twice the impression, I’m asking you to support The Nation with a donation at the moment. You’ll empower the journalists, editors, and fact-checkers greatest outfitted to carry this authoritarian administration to account.
I hope you gained’t miss this second—donate to The Nation at the moment.
Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and writer, The Nation
Extra from The Nation
The passage of the Epstein Recordsdata Transparency Act is a giant step—however its champions are holding the stress on.
Twenty years after Katrina, the cultural staff who saved New Orleans alive are demanding to not be pushed apart.
How the late-Twentieth-century battles over race and policing in Los Angeles foreshadowed the Trump period.
WNBA gamers obtain round 10 % of league income, whereas the NBA provides 51 %. With their bargaining settlement expiring in January, gamers wish to share within the progress….
