Time to pat myself on the back. Marty Peretz, who gave me work when I was young, has finally noticed this site, calling me an "aging leftwing ideologue." (I am aging and leftwing, but I’ve never been an ideologue.) He also says that along with Matt Yglesias and Spencer Ackerman, I’m one of the philosophers of the J Street "circle jerk."
Marty also attempts to skewer Max Blumenthal as "barely pubescent." The arrow misses: if Blumenthal has anything, it’s great presence.
You’d think from these slings that Marty Peretz is 27 years old, a young inkstained squibmeister. But he’s not. He’s 70. And that’s the puzzle about Peretz. When he was young, he was famously generous and charming. He had warmth and spirit; in fact, he included me in a kind manner when I was struggling. Young people really wanted to be around him. But in recent years he’s become nasty and personal at an age when most people who have as much going for them as Marty (incredible wealth, adulation, achievement, position–he’s a power at the goddamn Yivo Institute among other things) are rising above the pettiness of life and seeking lordly wisdom and trying to praise not hurt. And the question is: Why is Marty so meanspirited as to be throwing around words like "circle jerk" and "pubescent" and self-hatred, etc?
The answer, I think, is that Peretz is watching as young people are leaving the fold of Zionism, including former charges such as Andrew Sullivan (Ackerman is surely also guilty of some betrayal, though he is still committed to Zionism.) This explains Peretz’s mean attack on "the juicebox Mafia," last February when he railed against a group of younger Jewish bloggers and said viciously, "I pity them their hatred of their inheritance" and called them "pipsqueaks." My friend James North, who observed Peretz back when, says that Peretz used to be the Pied piper of Hasbara (not Hamelin!) and now he’s seeing other pied pipers coming along, like J Street, who are far more hopeful/compelling in the eyes of idealistic young people. Peretz sees that history is edging him out. And he’s responded with vitriol.
