Neocons and Jews

In his recent history of neoconservatism, Jacob Heilbrun, a one-time neocon himself, points out that neoconservatism is not only a movement populated by Jews but one whose main agenda and interests are influenced deeply by Judaism. In the NYT book review, Timothy Noah says, in part:

“To be neoconservative is to bear almost daily witness to the resurrection of Adolf Hitler. ‘Truly Hitlerian,’ the Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer pronounced Saddam Hussein’s saber-rattling before Iraq invaded Kuwait. Three days after the 9/11 attacks, Paul Wolfowitz , then deputy defense secretary, opined that Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda followers ‘misread our system as one that’s weak, that can’t take casualties. . . . Hitler made that mistake.’ Norman Podhoretz, the former editor of Commentary , said of the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last spring, ‘Like Hitler, he is a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system.’ In the same month, the defense analyst Richard Perle mused on whether it had been ‘a correct reading’ of the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat ‘to believe that business could be done with him that would produce a result? I don’t think so. These are the difficult decisions. Diplomacy with Hitler. Chamberlain went to Munich, presumably on the theory that you talk to your enemies and not to your friends, and what did it produce?’”

He adds a few paragraphs later, “neoconservatism’s priorities, which range from strong support for Israel to vehement opposition to affirmative action, are heavily influenced by the values, interests and collective historical memory of the Jewish people. Heilbrunn carries this conceit to the outermost boundaries of good taste by dividing his book into sections whose names are derived from the Old Testament: ‘Exodus,’ ‘Wilderness,’ ‘Redemption’ and ‘Return to Exile.’”

According to Heilbrun, “neoconservatism was the final stop of an ideological journey for a group of New York intellectuals, typically the children of Jewish immigrants, that began during the early 1940s in Alcove 1 of the cafeteria at City College. Alcove 1 was the gathering place for a group of brilliant young Trotskyists that included Irving Kristol, Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer and Melvin Lasky. Along with Irving Howe, who would later break with Trotskyism but not with the left, and Daniel Bell, who never accepted Marxist orthodoxies in any form, the Alcove 1 Trotskyists waged intellectual battle with the Stalinists in Alcove 2, who vastly outnumbered them.”