People always point out that Elliott Abrams’s father-in-law is Norman Podhoretz. Well that’s not the whole story. Bear with me a minute.
A friend passed along a snippet of David Bezmozgis’ review of Gal Beckerman’s new book on the freeing of Soviet Jewry, “When They Come For Us We’ll Be Gone” (firewall, sorry) in the November issue of Harper’s:
For instance, Moshe Decter, whose Foreign Affairs article had influenced the men in Cleveland [activists Lou Rosenblum and Herb Caron], was covertly paid by Israel for his work. (page 85)
Yehuda Mirsky picks up the same factito in this review:
Elsewhere, in the Free World, the Israelis were similarly surreptitious but more sophisticated. Among other things, they facilitated the work of a New York-based intellectual, Moshe Decter, whose articles in The New Leader and Foreign Affairs first brought the persecution of Soviet Jews to the attention of journalism and policy elites as well as ordinary citizens. The hope was that they would do what Israel could not risk doing on its own…. Reading Decter’s articles spurred [Caron and Rosenblum] to actio..
OK, so Foreign Affairs is unwittingly running pieces by an agent of Israel? All in a day’s work.
My friend notes that Moshe Decter was the first husband of Midge Decter. They had two daughers, Rachel and Naomi. Rachel Decter is the wife of Elliott Abrams. In 1997, when he was likely not contemplating White House service, Elliott Abrams wrote that Jews dedicated themselves to the cause of Israel after 1967, except for a fringe, and said:
“Outside the land of Israel, there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart-except in Israel- from the rest of the population.”
Abrams served in the Bush White House, miraculously, and he has lately counselled Obama, in an interview with the Voice of America, not to pressure Israel in any way…
A friend passed along the Harper’s article. A couple excerpts:
Then they [the Cleveland organizers of the campaign] read another, more current essay [apparently in early 1960s], published in Foreign Affairs, written by Moshe Decter, in which Decter assailed Soviet Jewish policy as “spiritual strangulation— the deprivation of Soviet Jewry’s natural right to know the Jewish past and to participate in the Jewish present.”… The Israelis…had long regarded the 3 million Soviet Jews as the greatest potential bloc of Jewish immigrants to Israel—who, if the country hoped to maintain both its Jewish and its democratic constitution, would provide a bulwark against the growing Israeli Arab population. As early as the 1950s, the Israelis had waged a clandestine propaganda campaign on behalf of the Soviet Jews. For instance, Moshe Decter, whose Foreign Affairs article had influenced the men in Cleveland, was covertly paid by Israel for his work. From the Israeli perspective, the Soviet Jewry movement was primarily a Zionist movement whose purpose was to get as many Jews as possible to Israel.
