A foreign journalist asked me what was with the Atlantic Monthly and Jeffrey Goldberg: why did a magazine which was a classic voice of the Eastern seaboard elite have a full time blogger on staff whose writing was devoted almost entirely to Israel? (including inside-baseball issues about giving money to the Jewish National Fund). It would be understandable if the Forward or JTA had him, but aren’t Atlantic readers mostly interested in other things than Israel and Palestine?
It’s a question that can be answered at great length. But the short version is that the Eastern establishment readership of my correspondent’s image exists no longer. There is an Eastern establishment, certainly, grouped around the Ivy League and Wall Street. But to the extent it has an ethnic core at all, (and it far more ethnically diverse than sixty years ago) it is Jewish. And very interested in Israel. Jeffrey Goldberg represents it quite adequately.
And what of the old establishment? No, they weren’t guillotined, or even dispossessed. They are doing fine, thank you very much. Their children, for the most part, own sporting goods stores in the hipper towns of the Mountain West. But do they read intellectual magazines, take an intense interest in foreign policy, feel a sense of stewardship for America and its place in the world?
Not so much.
