Steve Walt is memorializing two friends who died recently: Samuel Huntington and Rabbi Arnold Wolf, and doing so with his usual grace. Wolf was his neighbor in Chicago. Walt became good friends over the garden fence:
In fact, he was a major force in progressive Jewish circles and a man
of deep convictions about social justice. He was an early opponent of
the Vietnam War and a prominent supporter of the civil rights movement.
In the 1970s, he was one of the founders of Breira, one of the first
Jewish groups to call for negotiations between Israel and the
Palestinians and an end to the occupation of the West Bank, and he
later served as an advisor and honorary board member to Brit Tzedek
v’Shalom
Further evidence of my understanding that Walt has always operated in a Jewish world, and done so fluidly and with affection--and, guess what, he has attacked the Israel lobby! I wonder whether Rabbi Wolf ever spoke out on behalf of neighbors Walt and John Mearsheimer when they were being smeared as antisemites.
As to Huntington, I never knew him, was always opposed to his politics. And yet he is one of the divine inspirations of this blog. When W&M came out in 2007, I wrote:
I said there's no pleasure in the book. The one exception is the book's
dedication, to the scholar Samuel P. Huntington, whom the authors have
known for 25 years. "We cannot imagine a better role model. Sam has
always tackled big and important questions, and he has answered these
questions in ways that the rest of the world could not ignore. Although
each of us has disagreed with him on numerous occasions over the
years--and sometimes vehemently and publicly--he never held those
disagreements against us and was never anything but gracious and
supportive of our work. [my emphasis] He understands that
scholarship is not a popularity contest, and that spirited but civil
debate is essential both to scholarly progress and to a healthy
democracy." Beautiful and deeply moving, that is the credo of an
American faith. Those words should be studied more than W&M's
descriptions of Israeli history.
