78 Winter 2006

Jews andAmerican Conservatism

Edward S. Shapiro

“Commentary” in American Life,edited by Murray Friedman, Philadel-phia, Temple University Press, 2005.226 pp.

The Neoconservative Revolution:Jewish Intellectuals and the Shapingof Public Policy, by Murray Fried-man, Cambridge, Eng.: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2005. 301 pp.

THE SUBJECT OF American Jewish conserva-tives would appear at first glance to be oflimited importance. On issues involvingcivil rights, labor unions, the military,social welfare, abortion, taxation, inter-national organizations and internationallaw, and government involvement in theeconomy, the major Jewish secular andreligious organizations have almost in-variably supported policies associatedwith the Left. Richard Brookhiser, theconservative writer, once quipped thatthe only difference between the Demo-cratic Party and Reform Judaism was theirrespective holidays. Jews have generouslyfunded liberal organizations and publi-cations, and Jewish journalists, intellec-tuals, and scholars have provided muchof the intellectual heft for liberal andradical politics. Jews also have voted moreconsistently for Democratic presidential

in a world conflict, they had no choiceother than to act as they did. The usualexplanations that they were simply fol-lowing orders, doing their duty, covereda multitude of evils in their view.

In one of her thoughtful insights,Neiman points out that as the Germanpeople were moved to accept a collectiveguilt for atrocities, individual con-sciences were thereby relieved of a deeper,more profound sense of personal guilt.Distinctions of this character are whatmake Neiman’s book provocative andinstructive. This is never more evidentthan in her comments on present-dayterrorism:

Evil is not merely the opposite of good butinimical to it. True evil aims at destroyingmoral distinctions themselves. One way todo so is to make victims into accomplices....The worst horror of September 11 was thefact that those riding in the planes thatslammed into the World Trade Center werenot only torn out of ordinary lives into theirown deaths, but became part of the explo-sions that killed thousands of others.

This terrorist action was surely shat-teringly successful, but in one way it wasnot completely so. Its purpose was tomake Americans feel they were completelyhelpless in the face of such an unexpectedand deadly attack. As it happened, theywere not. There was the fourth plane,Flight 93, diverted from some unknowntarget, presumably Washington, D.C. thatended up crashing into a Pennsylvaniafield, the result of some passengers, madeaware of what was happening throughtheir cell phones, acting somehow toabort the flight even at the cost of theirown lives.

Neiman concludes, “Terror is meant tostrike us dumb. Finding words with whichto face it is an act of reconstruction.” Inthat sense, her comments are a defianceof terrorism. Even the reading of her work,discussing it, can be considered an act ofconfrontation, thwarting the terrorists.

EDWARD S. SHAPIRO is Professor Emeritus of His-tory at Seton Hall University and the author of WeAre Many: Reflections on American JewishHistory and Identity (2005), and Crown Heights:Blacks, Jews, and the 1991 Riot (2006).

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candidates, particularly liberal candi-dates, than any other major group, withthe exception of blacks. Indeed, Jews votemore reliably for liberal politicians thando Hispanics and members of laborunions.

The relationship between Jews andAmerican politics is, however, more com-plicated than it appears. Conservativepoliticians have at times been able togarner Jewish support, and Jews havefunded conservative organizations andpublications. Jews have also voted for themore conservative candidate in mayoralelections in New York City, Los Angeles,and elsewhere. Most important, Jews havebeen played a notable role in the conser-vative intellectual movement. They wereprominent in the early years of the Na-tional Review, they have been dispropor-tionately represented within the ranks ofthe neo-conservatives, and they haveedited many of the most important con-servative publications, including the Pub-lic Interest, the National Interest, the WeeklyStandard, and Commentary. No person wasmore indefatigable in chronicling this of-ten overlooked history of Jewish conser-vatives than Murray Friedman, the head ofthe Feinstein Center for American JewishHistory at Temple University and for manyyears the Mid-Atlantic Regional Directorof the American Jewish Committee.

Friedman, a frequent contributor toCommentary, Atlantic Monthly, and othermagazines, also wrote several books per-taining to Jews and conservatism, includ-ing The Utopian Dilemma: American Jewsand Public Policy (1985) and What WentWrong? The Creation and Collapse of theBlack-Jewish Alliance (1994). His last book,The Neoconservative Revolution, appearedin May 2005, a few days before his unex-pected death. At the time he was editingfor publication a collection of papers onJews in American business given at a con-ference sponsored by the Feinstein Cen-ter in October 2004. This collection willbe published shortly by Temple Univer-

sity Press.Friedman also organized several con-

ferences on American Jewish conserva-tism, including one at the City Universityof New York in March 2003 on Commen-tary magazine, which resulted in “Com-mentary” in American Life. The book’snine essays discuss the history of Com-mentary since its founding in 1945 by theAmerican Jewish Committee, its turn tothe right circa 1970, and its contributionsto American conservatism. Some of theseessays were written by persons well-known within the conservative move-ment, and they will be of interest to read-ers eager to learn more about the recenthistory of American conservatism. Espe-cially relevant are the essays by RichardGid Powers (“Norman Podhoretz and theCold War”), Fred Siegel (“Commentary andthe City”), and George H. Nash (“Joiningthe Ranks: Commentary and AmericanConservatism”).

Historian Richard Pells once remarkedthat no journal in recent American his-tory “has been so consistently influen-tial, or so central to the major debatesthat have transformed the political andintellectual life of the United States” asCommentary, and Irving Kristol, the so-called “Godfather” of neo-conservatism,called it the most influential Jewish maga-zine in history. This influence has largelystemmed from the fact that over the pastfour decades the magazine has been rightfor the most part on the major foreign anddomestic challenges faced by the UnitedStates, including the threats of commu-nism and radical Islam, the efforts of ex-treme feminists to repeal human nature,the undermining of traditional norms ofbehavior and traditional institutions byan anti-bourgeois “adversary culture,” thepoliticization of the university and thecollapse of academic standards, the un-dermining of the merit principle by affir-mative action, quotas, and reverse dis-crimination in employment andacademia, and the growing social patholo-

80 Winter 2006

gies of the inner-city spawned in part bythe expansion of the welfare state and theundermining of traditional institutionsof authority, including the police and thecourts.

After the Six-Day War in 1967, Commen-tary became more assertive in defendingspecifically Jewish interests, particularlythe security of Israel, then under growingattack from the Left. George Nash sug-gests that the most enduring ofCommentary’s accomplishments mightturn out to be making conservatism “arespected and unignorable presence inthe Jewish community.” In his 2002 auto-biography, A Jew in America, the rabbi-historian Arthur Hertzberg noted why hehad not followed the magazine’s politicaltrajectory and moved to the right. “I re-fused to believe that Jews could find de-pendable allies in that part of Americansociety that had almost always excludedthem and held them in social contempt.”According to Hertzberg, and he was notthe only American Jew to speak this way,conservatism ran counter to Jewish eth-nic interests and religious values. That anincreasing number of American Jews dis-agreed with Hertzberg was due in part towhat they read in Commentary.

While other conservative magazineshave flourished, Commentary has re-mained the gold standard of conserva-tive journalism since the late 1960s. Andas John Ehrman notes in his essay“Commentary’s Children: Neoconser-vatism in the Twenty-First Century,” theinfluence of the magazine has continuedthrough individuals who grew up readingthe magazine and who are now importantin their own right. They include ElliotAbrams, Max Boot, David Brooks, CharlesKrauthammer, William Kristol, MichaelLeeden, Joshua Muravchik, and JohnPodhoretz. Commentary’s children havealso established their own publications,most notably William Kristol’s WeeklyStandard.

The Neoconservative Revolution at-

tempts to place the story of Commentarywithin the larger context of the history ofconservatism since the end of World WarII. Neo-conservatism, the particular brandof conservatism advocated in the pagesof Commentary, can be traced back to thedisaffection from the Left of former liber-als such as Norman Podhoretz, the editorof Commentary, Irving Kristol, andGertrude Himmelfarb. The neo-conserva-tives did not repudiate the liberal viewsthey had held in the 1950s, but they didreject what the Left became during the1960s due to the Vietnam War, theradicalization of the civil rights and femi-nist movements, and the emergence ofthe New Left. Podhoretz noted that “in theideological precincts” of the AmericanLeft during the 1960s an animosity to-ward Israel had merged with a larger hos-tility to the United States, middle-classvalues, industrialism, capitalism, technol-ogy, and democracy. The neo-conserva-tives particularly resented the Left’s ten-dency to exaggerate America’s failingsand to blame her for seemingly every-thing wrong in the world.

Not all of neo-conservatism’s criticswere on the Left. Some traditionalist con-servatives, including Russell Kirk, wereput off by the neo-conservatives’ secular-ism, their refusal to repudiate the welfarestate, and their neo-Wilsonian view offoreign policy. “The neo-conservatives,”Kirk said, “were often clever but seldomwise.” They were lacking “in the under-standing of the human condition, and inthe apprehension of the accumulatedwisdom of our civilization.” The neo-con-servatives’ growing influence led to nastycharges by a small group of so-called“paleo-conservative” intellectuals thatthe neo-cons were conspiring to take overthe conservative movement. In 1986 theconservative historian Stephen J. Tonsorremarked regarding the neo-cons that “Itis splendid when the town whore getsreligion and joins the church. Now andthen she makes a good choir director, but

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when she begins to tell the minister whathe ought to say in his Sunday sermons,matters have been carried too far.” By theend of the century, this split between neo-cons and paleo-cons had largely dissi-pated, in part due to the neo-cons’ greateremphasis on the cultural and religiousissues which were of greatestconcern to the traditional-ists. Not all the traditional-ists, however, were mollified.In 2002, Pat Buchanan helpedfound the magazine Ameri-can Conservative to serve as acounter-weight to neo-con-servatism in general and toCommentary in particular.

The Neoconservative Revo-lution is in certain respectsan unreliable guide to neo-conservatism and to theplace of Jews in the post-World War II conservative movement. Itportrays neo-conservatism as the be-alland the end-all of conservatism, and itdescribes conservative Jewish intellec-tuals either as “premature” neo-conserva-tives, neo-conservatives, or post-neo-con-servatives. This conflating of conserva-tism with neo-conservatism is seen in thebook’s introduction which states thatfollowing chapters will profile many lead-ing neo-conservative intellectuals in or-der “to provide an examination of Ameri-can Jewish conservatism that is both com-prehensive and objective.” But not allJewish conservative intellectuals belongin the neo-conservative camp. The mostimportant element of post-war conserva-tism has been the free market economicsof a Milton Friedman or an AlanGreenspan, both Jews, but free marketeconomics is not a variant of neo-conser-vatism. The same can be said of the con-servatism identified with the hard-lineanti-communism of a Sidney Hook, whocontinued to describe himself as a social-ist well into the 1970s. Finally, not allconservative Jewish intellectuals have

been sympathetic to neo-conservatism.The most bitter paleo-conservative criticof the neo-cons has been Paul Gottfried,a graduate of Yeshiva University.

The Neoconservative Revolution is of-ten also fuzzy about what neo-conserva-tism is all about, perhaps because the

book’s view of conservatismis so muddled. It defines con-servatism as “a body ofthought that emphasizes theright of individuals in soci-ety to pursue their own inter-ests with as little governmentinterference as possible.”This is certainly true for thelibertarian wing of conserva-tism, but it does apply tothose conservatives moreconcerned with moralitythan liberty. The Neocon-servative Revolution also gets

some crucial details wrong. For example,it describes Will Herberg, the religiouseditor of the National Review during the1960s, as an “Orthodox Jew.” Herberg washardly an Orthodox Jew, as any reader ofHerberg’s Judaism and Modern Man quicklyrealizes.

Finally, The Neoconservative Revolu-tion fails to explain why some Jewish intel-lectuals were attracted to neo-conserva-tism, whether there was anything Jewishabout the Jewish neo-conservatives be-sides the ethnic and religious heritagethey inherited at birth, and whether therewas anything in Jewish history or in Juda-ism which might help illuminate neo-conservatism’s appeal. Instead, it settlesfor describing the many contributionsindividual Jews have made to the conser-vative movement, and, in the absence ofan overarching theme, it argues that theJewish neo-conservative intellectualswere acting out their Jewishness throughintellectualism. But if being attracted tointellectualism is a quintessentially Jew-ish trait, then, by definition, all intellectu-als are Jews.

Norman Podhoretz