Jews and American conservatism.

"Commentary" in American Life, edited by Murray Friedman, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2005. 226 pp.

The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy, by Murray Friedman, Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 301 pp.

THE SUBJECT OF American Jewish conservatives would appear at first glance to be of limited importance. On issues involving civil rights, labor unions, the military, social welfare, abortion, taxation, international organizations and international law, and government involvement in the economy, the major Jewish secular and religious organizations have almost invariably supported policies associated with the Left. Richard Brookhiser, the conservative writer, once quipped that the only difference between the Democratic Party and Reform Judaism was their respective holidays. Jews have generously funded liberal organizations and publications, and Jewish journalists, intellectuals, and scholars have provided much of the intellectual heft for liberal and radical politics. Jews also have voted more consistently for Democratic presidential candidates, particularly liberal candidates, than any other major group, with the exception of blacks. Indeed, Jews vote more reliably for liberal politicians than do Hispanics and members of labor unions.

The relationship between Jews and American politics is, however, more complicated than it appears. Conservative politicians have at times been able to garner Jewish support, and Jews have funded conservative organizations and publications. Jews have also voted for the more conservative candidate in mayoral elections in New York City, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. Most important, Jews have been played a notable role in the conservative intellectual movement. They were prominent in the early years of the National Review, they have been disproportionately represented within the ranks of the neo-conservatives, and they have edited many of the most important conservative publications, including the Public Interest, the National Interest, the Weekly Standard, and Commentary. No person was more indefatigable in chronicling this often overlooked history of Jewish conservatives than Murray Friedman, the head of the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History at Temple University and for many years the Mid-Atlantic Regional Director of the American Jewish Committee.

Friedman, a frequent contributor to Commentary, Atlantic Monthly, and other magazines, also wrote several books pertaining to Jews and conservatism, including The Utopian Dilemma: American Jews and Public Policy (1985) and What Went Wrong? The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance (1994). His last book, The Neoconservative Revolution, appeared in May 2005, a few days before his unexpected death. At the time he was editing for publication a collection of papers on Jews in American business given at a conference sponsored by the Feinstein Center in October 2004. This collection will be published shortly by Temple University Press.

Friedman also organized several conferences on American Jewish conservatism, including one at the City University of New York in March 2003 on Commentary magazine, which resulted in "Commentary" in American Life. The book's nine essays discuss the history of Commentary since its founding in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee, its turn to the right circa 1970, and its contributions to American conservatism. Some of these essays were written by persons well-known within the conservative movement, and they will be of interest to readers eager to learn more about the recent history of American conservatism. Especially relevant are the essays by Richard Gid Powers ("Norman Podhoretz and the Cold War"), Fred Siegel ("Commentary and the City"), and George H. Nash ("Joining the Ranks: Commentary and American Conservatism").

Historian Richard Pells once remarked that no journal in recent American history "has been so consistently influential, or so central to the major debates that have transformed the political and intellectual life of the United States" as Commentary, and Irving Kristol, the so-called "Godfather" of neo-conservatism, called it the most influential Jewish magazine in history. This influence has largely stemmed from the fact that over the past four decades the magazine has been right for the most part on the major foreign and domestic challenges faced by the United States, including the threats of communism and radical Islam, the efforts of extreme feminists to repeal human nature, the undermining of traditional norms of behavior and traditional institutions by an anti-bourgeois "adversary culture," the politicization of the university and the collapse of academic standards, the undermining of the merit principle by affirmative action, quotas, and reverse discrimination in employment and academia, and the growing social pathologies of the inner-city spawned in part by the expansion of the welfare state and the undermining of traditional institutions of authority, including the police and the courts.

After the Six-Day War in 1967, Commentary became more assertive in defending specifically Jewish interests, particularly the security of Israel, then under growing attack from the Left. George Nash suggests that the most enduring of Commentary's accomplishments might turn out to be making conservatism "a respected and unignorable presence in the Jewish community." In his 2002 autobiography, A Jew in America, the rabbi-historian Arthur Hertzberg noted why he had not followed the magazine's political trajectory and moved to the right. "I refused to believe that Jews could find dependable allies in that part of American society that had almost always excluded them and held them in social contempt." According to Hertzberg, and he was not the only American Jew to speak this way, conservatism ran counter to Jewish ethnic interests and religious values. That an increasing number of American Jews disagreed with Hertzberg was due in part to what they read in Commentary.

While other conservative magazines have flourished, Commentary has remained the gold standard of conservative journalism since the late 1960s. And as John Ehrman notes in his essay "Commentary's Children: Neoconservatism in the Twenty-First Century," the influence of the magazine has continued through individuals who grew up reading the magazine and who are now important in their own right. They include Elliot Abrams, Max Boot, David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Michael Leeden, Joshua Muravchik, and John Podhoretz. Commentary's children have also established their own publications, most notably William Kristol's Weekly Standard.

The Neoconservative Revolution attempts to place the story of Commentary within the larger context of the history of conservatism since the end of World War II. Neo-conservatism, the particular brand of conservatism advocated in the pages of Commentary, can be traced back to the disaffection from the Left of former liberals such as Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, Irving Kristol, and Gertrude Himmelfarb. The neo-conservatives did not repudiate the liberal views they had held in the 1950s, but they did reject what the Left became during the 1960s due to the Vietnam War, the radicalization of the civil rights and feminist movements, and the emergence of the New Left. Podhoretz noted that "in the ideological precincts" of the American Left during the 1960s an animosity toward Israel had merged with a larger hostility to the United States, middle-class values, industrialism, capitalism, technology, and democracy. The neo-conservatives particularly resented the Left's tendency to exaggerate America's failings and to blame her for seemingly everything wrong in the world.

Not all of neo-conservatism's critics were on the Left. Some traditionalist conservatives, including Russell Kirk, were put off by the neo-conservatives' secularism, their refusal to repudiate the welfare state, and their neo-Wilsonian view of foreign policy. "The neo-conservatives," Kirk said, "were often clever but seldom wise." They were lacking "in the understanding of the human condition, and in the apprehension of the accumulated wisdom of our civilization." The neo-conservatives' growing influence led to nasty charges by a small group of so-called "paleo-conservative" intellectuals that the neo-cons were conspiring to take over the conservative movement. In 1986 the conservative historian Stephen J. Tonsor remarked regarding the neo-cons that "It is splendid when the town whore gets religion and joins the church. Now and then she makes a good choir director, but when she begins to tell the minister what he ought to say in his Sunday sermons, matters have been carried too far." By the end of the century, this split between neo-cons and paleo-cons had largely dissipated, in part due to the neo-cons' greater emphasis on the cultural and religious issues which were of greatest concern to the traditionalists. Not all the traditionalists, however, were mollified. In 2002, Pat Buchanan helped found the magazine American Conservative to serve as a counter-weight to neo-conservatism in general and to Commentary in particular.

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The Neoconservative Revolution is in certain respects an unreliable guide to neo-conservatism and to the place of Jews in the post-World War II conservative movement. It portrays neo-conservatism as the be-all and the end-all of conservatism, and it describes conservative Jewish intellectuals either as "premature" neo-conservatives, neo-conservatives, or post-neo-conservatives. This conflating of conservatism with neo-conservatism is seen in the book's introduction which states that following chapters will profile many leading neo-conservative intellectuals in order "to provide an examination of American Jewish conservatism that is both comprehensive and objective." But not all Jewish conservative intellectuals belong in the neo-conservative camp. The most important element of post-war conservatism has been the free market economics of a Milton Friedman or an Alan Greenspan, both Jews, but free market economics is not a variant of neo-conservatism. The same can be said of the conservatism identified with the hard-line anti-communism of a Sidney Hook, who continued to describe himself as a socialist well into the 1970s. Finally, not all conservative Jewish intellectuals have been sympathetic to neo-conservatism. The most bitter paleo-conservative critic of the neo-cons has been Paul Gottfried, a graduate of Yeshiva University.

The Neoconservative Revolution is often also fuzzy about what neo-conservatism is all about, perhaps because the book's view of conservatism is so muddled. It defines conservatism as "a body of thought that emphasizes the right of individuals in society to pursue their own interests with as little government interference as possible." This is certainly true for the libertarian wing of conservatism, but it does apply to those conservatives more concerned with morality than liberty. The Neoconservative Revolution also gets some crucial details wrong. For example, it describes Will Herberg, the religious editor of the National Review during the 1960s, as an "Orthodox Jew." Herberg was hardly an Orthodox Jew, as any reader of Herberg's Judaism and Modern Man quickly realizes.

Finally, The Neoconservative Revolution fails to explain why some Jewish intellectuals were attracted to neo-conservatism, whether there was anything Jewish about the Jewish neo-conservatives besides the ethnic and religious heritage they inherited at birth, and whether there was anything in Jewish history or in Judaism which might help illuminate neo-conservatism's appeal. Instead, it settles for describing the many contributions individual Jews have made to the conservative movement, and, in the absence of an overarching theme, it argues that the Jewish neo-conservative intellectuals were acting out their Jewishness through intellectualism. But if being attracted to intellectualism is a quintessentially Jewish trait, then, by definition, all intellectuals are Jews.

EDWARD S. SHAPIRO is Professor Emeritus of History at Seton Hall University and the author of We Are Many: Reflections on American Jewish History and Identity (2005), and Crown Heights: Blacks, Jews, and the 1991 Riot (2006).