JAMES PIERESON: Norman Podhoretz: the Undeceived.
In the wake of Hamas’s terrorist attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, many observers assumed that the massacre would release a wave of sympathy for the Jewish state and for Jews around the world. That would have been the logical expectation. After all, some 1,400 Israelis and Jews from other nations were killed in the attacks, and more than 200 were taken into Gaza as hostages.
Yet, something altogether different happened: the attacks unleashed a barrage of criticism against Israel, along with a resurgence of anti-Semitism in the United States and Western Europe. Jews were victims twice over: first in the terror attacks; second, in the response to them. That may have been part of the plan all along, since anti-Israel marchers hit the streets almost as soon as the event occurred. Nevertheless, the counterintuitive response took many by surprise.
Among those not surprised was Norman Podhoretz, who died on December 16, one month shy of his 96th birthday. Podhoretz was widely known for his transition in the late 1960s from radicalism to conservatism, in defiance of views widely and vehemently held by those who then dominated New York’s intellectual scene. In rejecting his youthful views and, much worse, turning himself into a conservative, Podhoretz became an outcast among his former friends, as he chronicled in Ex Friends, one of his later books. But by turning in those credentials, he won a larger following not only among Jews but also among many Americans who were not Jewish and had never stepped foot in Manhattan but looked to him, and to Commentary, the magazine he edited, for guidance in cutting through the fashionable left-wing views that they encountered in schools, Hollywood movies, and television news programs. It was a response that he did not expect but certainly welcomed.
Moreover, the concerns that caused him to change his views more than a half century ago were basically the same as those that led his allies today to lament the resurgence of anti-Semitism and hostility to Israel after the October 7. Podhoretz saw decades ago, as he saw recently, that an irrational and deeply rooted animus existed on the left toward Israel, linked to a parallel animus toward the United States. The more successful these countries are, the more the organized Left despises them. As much as anything, Podhoretz’s recognition of these twin impulses led him along a path toward conservatism, and turned him into the most influential editor and public intellectual of the postwar era.
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