Introduction American Jews in an Age of Conservatism

Cambridge University Press 0521836565 - The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy Murray Friedman Excerpt More information Introduction American Jews in an Age of Conservatism Why would I choose to write about American Jewish conservatism? Is there really much to say? As far back as most of us can remember, the vast majority of American Jews have been associated with liberalism, not conservatism. They have consistently supported public assistance for the poor and civil rights for the rejected. Second only to African-Americans, they have been the strongest supporters of the Democratic Party at all levels of government. From the 1930s until the start of the Cold War, a small but influential number joined the American Communist Party or were sympathetic to what they took to be its goals. For many, the far left was simply the farthest end of the liberal political spectrum. But that was then. It is not Jewish liberals who have been making the news in recent years. It is Jewish conservatives with important positions in the administration of President George W. Bush. The Pentagon’s Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith; the National Security Council’s Elliott Abrams; and Richard Perle, formerly of the Defense Policy Board, can be distinguished from moderate WASP conservatives not only by their ethnicity, but also by their militancy. Rather than descending from many generations of conservatives, they are mostly relatively new to the movement – and they have transformed it. Unlike traditional conservatives, they have proudly come to be called neoconservatives (or neocons). Cheering them on have been such prominent and like-minded journal- ists and writers as William Kristol, editor of the Washington-based Weekly Standard, columnists David Brooks and Charles Krauthammer; Robert Kagan, an international affairs specialist and political scientist; Joshua Muravchik, a frequent contributor to Commentary; and Norman Podhoretz, longtime editor of Commentary, the neocon bible. For example, in response to findings by United Nations weapons inspectors and others that Iraq pos- sessed “the elements of a deadly germ warfare arsenal and perhaps poison gases as well as the rudiments of a missile system,” Kristol and Kagan at The Weekly Standard, along with a number of former government officials, urged 1 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521836565 - The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy Murray Friedman Excerpt More information 2 The Neoconservative Revolution President Clinton in January 1998 to oust Saddam Hussein by mounting a ground invasion. Clinton, in fact, also believing the situation to be per- ilous and untenable, initiated at the close of 1998 Operation Desert Fox, a four-day missile and bombing attack against known and suspected weapons facilities in Iraq.1 The American invasion of Iraq has, arguably, left the nation more divided politically than at any time since the Vietnam War. The essence of the debate has revolved around the Bush Doctrine, which, after September 11, 2001, established the rationale for preemptive (unilateral, if necessary) military action “to strengthen our intelligence capabilities to know the plans of ter- rorists before they act and to find them before they strike” and “to pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism.”2 Critics accused the hawkish neocons of unduly influencing an inexperienced chief executive and encouraging him to undertake a reckless, imperialistic adventure. William Pfaff of the Los Angeles Times “argued that the Bush Doctrine undermines the principle of state sovereignty which has hitherto been the bedrock of international relations and the basis of international order” by substitut- ing not a new universalist and allegedly liberating principle, but to achieve American security, to which it implicitly subordinates the security of every other nation.”3 Others took to more personal attacks against Bush or his neocon advisors. Jack Shafer, in the online magazine Slate, noted (albeit critically): “In a letter/photograph spread captioned ‘Separated at Birth’ in the September (2003) issue, Vanity Fair letter-to-the-editor writer Art Dudley attempts to draw parallels between Perle and Nazi Minister of Propaganda Dr. Joseph Goebbels. ...Dudley writes: ‘Here it is: the same arrogance, the same mal- ice toward the photographer, the same all-around creepiness.’” A smaller number of writers and intellectuals, including Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis and diplomatic historian John Lewis Gaddis, perhaps this country’s most eminent scholar of the Cold War, backed the administration.4 Although critical of some of the language used by the Bush administration, Gaddis has argued, in his book Surprise, Security and the American Experience (2004), that the move has increased discussion within the Arab world about political reform. There is no mistaking the emphasis placed by some on Jews as respon- sible for the war and a whiff – more than the whiff – of anti-Semitism that permeates some of the criticism. Writing in the left-wing Nation magazine, Eric Alterman said the “war has put Israel in the showcase as never before. ...The U.S. Congress and White House puppets to Israel military policy have been consistent.” Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader told right-winger Pat Buchanan in an interview in June 2004, “Both parties concede their independent judgment to the pro-Israel lobbies.” And a mu- sical opened several months later in Manhattan attacking Bush, featuring Paul Wolfowitz wearing a yarmulke.5 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521836565 - The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy Murray Friedman Excerpt More information Introduction: American Jews in an Age of Conservatism 3 A national security document of the United States ultimately embodied the president’s doctrine in a formal statement in September 2002.6 He had already followed up his State of the Union speech with a speech in June 2002 at West Point, where he declared that deterrence and containment were too little and again promised to “take the battle to the enemy.”7 For the Bush team and its neocon advisors, September 11 was what Eliot A. Cohen, another of the neocon intellectuals, gave “the less palatable but more accurate name [of] World War IV. The Cold War was viewed as World War III.”8 The enemy was militant Islam. Al-Qaeda-style terrorism was just part of the assault. Attacks had previously occurred and were continuing to occur in Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Kuwait, Indonesia, and Israel, as well as in Western Europe. Accordingly, we could not afford to sit still and wait for the next one. With the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the danger of mass casualties was such that aggressive action was warranted against terrorism’s state sponsors – thus, the initial moves in this country for regime change in Afghanistan and war and occupation in Iraq. As foreign policy experts Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay note in a recent book, Bush has finally laid to rest the hallowed policy of deterrence, which had emerged from America’s struggle to contain expansion of the Soviet Union in the nuclear age.9 The final determiners of the critical new defense and international policy were, of course, such strong-willed figures as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, and President Bush, rather than the neocons. We must leave to history the final reckoning on the Bush Doctrine and the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. What is not in doubt, however, is the important role played by neoconservative intellectuals, not just in the case of the War on Terror but also in the development of public policies, thought, and debate for more than fifty years. Indeed, it’s hardly an exag- geration to suggest that the neocons have been critical players in bringing about an Age of Conservatism in which we live today. How did these conservatives, neo or otherwise, come to play such a role? Where did they come from, and what does their influence portend for America’s future? These are matters I will examine in the pages that follow. Among the shibboleths to be challenged at the outset is the one holding that liberalism has been bred into the bone of American Jewry, as would appear to be the case from Jewish voting patterns since the days of the New Deal. In fact, there has always been a strand of conservative Jewish thought that has been little noticed. A number of scholars and historians, including Jonathan D. Sarna, David Dalin, the late Charles Liebman, and Jerold S. Auerbach, have begun writing about it recently. Jews, according to Liebman, have been “folk-oriented” rather than “uni- versalistic,” “ethnocentric rather than cosmopolitan.”10 Dalin, on the other hand, traces this characteristic back to biblical and postbiblical times. “Over © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521836565 - The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy Murray Friedman Excerpt More information 4 The Neoconservative Revolution the centuries,” he writes, “the preference for charitable lending ...over what might be termed the more liberal alms giving, which I take to be a conservative trait or tendency, became a fundamental principle of the Jewish philanthropic tradition.” This principle found its “most famous and en- during formulation,” Dalin adds, in the Mishnah Torah, the basic guide to the laws and teachings of Judaism for some two thousand years. The great medieval sage Moses Maimonides taught that the highest form of charity lay in offering loans or jobs to indigents so that they could become self-supporting.11 In 1603, at the Jewish Council of Padua, Italy followed Maimonides’ precept in a communal regulation requiring recipients of charity to en- gage in some form of labor.

Load more