Kudos to Fresh Air host Terry Gross; she did a very fair interview with Stephen Walt yesterday, though she was careful to handle the subject with steel tongs. She kept repeating the thought that the book is "controversial." And she bridled at his mention of neoconservatives; she asked Walt if he wasn’t singling out Perle and Wolfowitz and fellow travelers because "some of them were Jewish." I.e., she hinted at antisemitism.
Walt said, the neocons are Israel-centric, but then denied that the Jewishness of some of them had anything to do with it. Walt is wrong; or anyway, he feels inhibited about speaking about Jewish political culture. Jews don’t feel that inhibition. As Murray Friedman and Benjamin Ginsberg, two neocon scholars, have said themselves, Jewishness is a central current of neoconservatism. Norman Podhoretz also said as much in Breaking Ranks. Leon Hadar says it. Jim Lobe (whose reporting was a key source for Walt and Mearsheimer) says it. Star blogger Glenn Greenwald says the neocons are "Israel-centric" and yes, they’re Jewish by and large…
Gross’s defensiveness on this score is like Whoopi Goldberg defending Michael Vick’s brutality to dogs as being part of his background. There is, obviously, some racial/cultural element to Vick’s insensitivity on this score. And I seem to remember polls saying that most blacks are behind Vick. I wish that blacks would denounce his behavior.
The analogy here is that neocon-ism is an expression of Jewishness that most Jews can halfway relate to. The neocons are our race men. They abide by Rabbi Hillel’s assertion (which neocon A.M. Rosenthal always used to quote), If I am not for myself then who am I for? They are, like their capo Elliott Abrams, particularists who think of what is good for the Jews. I grew up hearing that invocation: Is it good for the Jews? So did many other liberal Jews. So we relate to the neocons as our hawkish uncles, and something in us pulls for them, or thinks, well maybe they know more than we do. Until liberal Jews identify these ideas openly and distance themselves from them, the progressive Jewish tradition will remain compromised, and, more important, the press will continue to live in a fog about Why we are in Iraq.
