Norman Podhoretz’s intellectual journey and the fate of American Jewry

The “Commentary” editor’s career epitomized both the success of 20th-century Jews and an awakening to the peril posed by the moral collapse of political liberalism.

There are those who insist that no one person, let alone a journal of opinion, can be said to have changed the world. Yet this was true of Norman Podhoretz and Commentary magazine. The man and his magazine helped win the Cold War, while awakening Americans to the moral bankruptcy of modern political liberalism and the threat it posed to the two countries that he loved: America and Israel.

The longtime editor of Commentary, who died on Dec. 15 at the age of 95, was more than a seminal figure among Jewish intellectuals of his era. He was that rare man of letters whose work transcended the worlds of literature, Jewish life and journalism in which he labored for many decades. To take a deep dive into his many essays, the 12 books he authored—not to mention the volumes of issues of the monthly magazine he edited from 1960 to 1995—is to take a journey through the history of the last century.

The remarkable thing about so much of Norman Podhoretz’s writing is how relevant it is to contemporary political battles. That’s especially true for this work concerning the defense of America and the Jewish people, causes to which he remained devoted throughout his life. In this way, even though the volume of his writing diminished in the last decade and a half of his life, the body of work he created remains fresh and vital to the struggles he engaged in so ardently.

Take, for example, one piece he wrote for the New York Post in May 1986 (prior to that newspaper’s archive being digitized), a clipping of which fell out of one of his books in my personal library when I opened it while preparing to write about him. Titled “Anti-Semitism in the ‘Nation,’” it discussed that left-wing magazine’s decision to publish an openly antisemitic essay by author Gore Vidal in which he referred to Jews as “Israeli fifth columnists,” nothing more than guests in the United States who should shut up about “the politics of the host country.”

FROM THE ARTICLE:
“But as he later wrote, it was during his two years of Army service, in which he encountered the people and the culture outside of New York, that he began to understand the greatness of America and its people. And it was that love for his country that animated his refusal to go along with cultural trends that denigrated it.”

Podhoretz was called many things, some fair and some less so. One thing he could never be called was anti-American. Quite to the contrary, he was always pro-American. That didn’t really learn all of what that meant until he met people from outside NY.... is quite understandable to me. I have had the privilege of knowning a number of NYCers. Several of them were “doctrinaire, hard-core, committed communistas” (my phrase, obviously). They DID NOT REALIZE just how “brainwashed” (my phrase, again) they were... even while reflexively or slavishly repeating hard-core-leftist propaganda phrases in their (pathetic, really, albeit in good faith) efforts to explain (more or less justify) their committments to “progressive” (if there ever was an oxymoronic term in our public political discourse, that’s it!) “causes.”

They were just like little leftist robots, without even the ability to deal rationally with “inconvenient” factual information.

What I really admired about Podhoretz was how he was able to do just that, deal rationally with factual information that contradicted his original political or sociological learning, leanings.

Given the general failures of most communistic policies and programs, we would have a much, much improved country of more people could do as Podhortez did and simply put their “progressive” politics in suspense for even ten minutes...and -— all ideologies aside, just look at how so many of the communist/leftwing policies actually have worked (failed) in the real world.

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