Neoconservative has lately become a term of abuse referring to the supposed cabal that brought about the Iraq war. The neocons became in the public imagination a group of hubristic imperialists, determined to spread democracy through conquest. They were said to be guided by Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish émigré philosopher at the University of Chicago described in The Boston Globe as a “disguised Machiavelli, a cynical teacher who encouraged his followers to believe that their intellectual superiority entitles them to rule over the bulk of humanity by means of duplicity.” According to Der Spiegel: “They are not new conservatives. They’re Jacobins. Their predecessor is French Revolution leader Maximilien Robespierre.”

The striking feature of this frenzied post-9/11 attention, most of which came from the anti-war left, was the way it drew from an old well of resentment filled to brimming by the old right, a group known after the neoconservative ascendancy as the paleocons.

But first, a little history: The term “neoconservative” used to be deployed more descriptively, to refer to liberal anticommunists who, having failed to halt the leftward drift of the Democratic Party, came in the 1970s to feel more at home on the right, where they took it upon themselves to battle Soviet expansionism abroad and anti-Americanism at home, and to fault the overreaching social programs of the Great Society.

Not that the neoconservatives immediately joined conservative ranks. Seeing themselves as the true heirs of the liberal tradition, they instead endeavored to remain faithful to cold war liberalism, to what Arthur Schlesinger had called the vital center. Still committed to social reform, they clung to a belief in the welfare state and to the hope of somehow redeeming the Democratic Party from its descent into McGovernism after the Chicago convention in 1968.

But after McGovern’s landslide 1972 defeat, when their efforts to keep the Democrats faithful to the party’s Henry “Scoop” Jackson wing failed, the neocons felt they no longer had a home in the Democratic camp. By 1980, waking up to the conservative implications of their own line of thinking, they threw their support behind Ronald Reagan.

Yet far from finding a welcome reception from the conservatism to which they had defected, neoconservatives suffered a new kind of vilification. The paleocons accused the newcomers of attenuating conservatism, of corrupting the true faith. As one paleocon (Stephen J. Tonsor) put it, “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.” Pat Buchanan added that the neoconservatives’ tactics “left many conservatives wondering if we hadn’t made a terrible mistake when we brought these ideological vagrants in off the street and gave them a warm place by the fire.”

The most telling feature of the new criticism of neoconservatives, then, is also the one that most tightly binds it to the old attacks from the right: the focus on Jewishness. Some of the post-9/11 critics, like Jacob Heilbrunn, have defined neoconservatism as an “ineluctably Jewish” mentality that derives from ethnic experience — “as much a reflection of Jewish immigrant social resentments and status anxiety as a legitimate movement of ideas.” Others claimed that the neoconservative takeover was engineered by Jewish intellectuals who put Israel’s interests before America’s. Harvard historian Stanley Hoffman said neoconservatives “look on foreign policy through the lens of one dominant concern: Is it good or bad for Israel? Since that nation’s founding in 1948, these thinkers have never been in very good odor at the State Department, but now they are well ensconced in the Pentagon.”

But the paleocons had already traversed this territory, having decades ago charged the neocons with dual loyalty. The country-club conservatives saw themselves as a Christian old guard beleaguered by power-hungry interlopers, sons of Jewish immigrants who had insinuated themselves into positions of power. Neocons were often criticized as arrivistes, as parvenus, as overanxiously Americanized Jews.

They were also seen as “Likudniks” who uncritically supported Israel. As Russell Kirk said in 1988: “Not seldom it has seemed as if some eminent neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States.” In short, paleocons felt crowded out by what Kirk called a “little sect” of upstart usurpers, Johnnies-come-lately who had taken over the paleocons’ estate just as they were about to inherit.

Like Esau complaining that his birthright was stolen by the deceits of Jacob, critics both left and right will continue to find in neoconservatives a convenient mark.

In recent years, more than a few angry critics have insinuated with malicious intent that neoconservatism is an intrinsically Jewish school of politics and ideas. True, Jews are disproportionately represented in neoconservative ranks. But the same might be said of the ranks of communism, socialism, and liberalism, to say nothing of the ranks of lawyers, doctors, financiers, and comedians.

It is a matter of record that a small group of Jews played a leading role in the 1970s and 1980s in originating what has come to be known as neoconservatism, and many of neoconservatism’s most prominent spokesmen today are Jewish. The sensibility or persuasion they cultivated did in some measure grow out of reflections on Jewish ideas and experiences: the biblical teaching that all human beings are created in God’s image; the importance of tradition, family, and education; the horrors of the Holocaust; the enduring need for free nations to stand ready to take action, including military action, against the enemies of freedom; and Israel’s struggles against terrorism, autocracy, and religiously inspired fanaticism.

Yet no account of neoconservatism would be respectable if it omitted mention of eminent non-Jews such as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat from N.Y. state and, as assistant secretary of Labor in 1965, author of The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, which created a national storm by arguing that the deterioration of the black family was a central cause of black poverty; Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Democrat from Washington state and Cold War liberal around whom many emerging neoconservatives rallied in the 1970s; Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, a professor of government at Georgetown who staunchly represented the U.S. at the United Nations under Ronald Reagan; Father Richard John Neuhaus, founding editor of First Things and incisive analyst of religion and public life; William Bennett, former Secretary of Education in the Reagan administration, author of the bestselling Book of Virtues, and today host of a popular talk radio show; and James Q. Wilson, for many years a professor of government at Harvard and for decades an outstanding scholar of American politics.

More important, however, than the diversity of backgrounds of those who have elaborated it, is the fact that neoconservatism does not rest on Jewish premises. Nor does it seek to advance specifically Jewish goals.

Neoconservatism’s founding premise is that liberal democracy in America is a great good. And its governing aim is to conserve the larger liberal tradition grounded in individual freedom, equality under law, tolerance for religious and political diversity, respect for private property and free markets, and the practice of limited constitutional government.

This more conservative form of liberalism — which with equal justice might have been dubbed neoliberalism — arose in opposition to the left-wing interpretation of liberalism that emerged in the late 1960s and took hold in the 1970s. According to neoconservatives, this left-liberalism ignored or sought to undermine the discipline and culture on which liberty and democracy depended; searched for the solution to social ills in big government programs, that instead of encouraging habits of independence and personal responsibility fostered dependence on the state and unleashed personally and socially destructive conduct; and downplayed the evils of Soviet communism, the chief foreign threat to America, while greatly exaggerating America’s flaws.

Neoconservatism’s emphasis on conserving a more traditional understanding of the liberal tradition puts it in tension with social conservatism and libertarianism, its major partners in the broader conservative alliance in America. Neoconservatives argue in favor of greater respect for religion in public life, but stop short of those social conservatives who wish to infuse the constitutional framework with religion. And neoconservatives defend the free market as the engine of our prosperity and an expression of our freedom but are more attuned than many libertarians to the cultural contradictions of capitalism.

In foreign policy, neoconservatives also occupy an in-between position. They see a much closer convergence between the advancement of American interests and the pursuit of American ideals than do typical conservative realists. But in seeking to promote liberty and democracy abroad, neoconservatives are much more skeptical of the United Nations and other international bodies than standard liberal internationalists.

The Bush administration’s decision in the fall of 2003 to emphasize the promotion of democracy as the chief justification for the invasion of Iraq exposed a deep division within neoconservative ranks. On the one hand, many neoconservative thinkers welcomed Bush’s speeches, culminating in his Second Inaugural’s ambitious call to spread liberty around the world, seeing in them a vindication of their belief that by virtue of its power and its principles, America was uniquely well positioned to advance its own interests by advancing the cause of freedom globally. On the other hand, over the last forty years, neoconservatism has done as much as any school in America to teach that liberty and democracy have moral and social preconditions, a teaching that, if taken to heart, would have compelled far greater caution than the Bush administration showed in undertaking to democratize societies in Afghanistan and Iraq whose language, family structure, tradition, sectarian divisions, and religious beliefs were largely unknown to American policymakers.

This division is a reflection of the deeper struggle in the neoconservative mind to appreciate the tension between, and mutual influence of, liberty and tradition, a topic that should be of permanent interest to Jews and non-Jews alike.

Ruth Wisse: I’m always amused when people carp about neoconservatives because there is so little in the carping that I tend to recognize. Some movements declare themselves, like Communism, Fascism, or Zionism, but others are labeled by adversaries and then the affronted party decides to wear the title as a badge of honor.

Those who attacked neoconservatives obviously felt that there was nothing worse than being called conservatives, but Irving Kristol, and then Norman Podhoretz, decided that there might be an advantage in this designation. Since every neocon I know is a maverick, I wanted to know how you would characterize a neoconservative? And how do you feel about the term when it’s applied to you?

Seth Lipsky: I feel fine about the term when it’s applied to me. I endorsed Bill Clinton twice when I was at the Forward. Amity Shlaes, my wife, voted for George H. W. Bush in 1992 and Bob Dole in 1996. She was on the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, and I voted for Clinton both times when I was editor of theForward. I explained that decision by saying that she and I got together and decided to put our newspapers ahead of our country. I didn’t come up through the intellectual wars. I often think of neoconservatism as a movement that one entered through the Jewish struggle; that’s probably how I entered it. Certainly a lot of this started in Commentary.

Wisse: Being Jewish had a lot to do with it for the neocons I know. Many started out on the left. Though they rarely talked about European Jewry or the rise of the State of Israel, what happened in the 1940s influenced them deeply as Jews. One of the ways it came out was in their turning away from an earlier indifference. They realized how wrong they had been in their diagnosis of domestic and foreign issues.

Lipsky: I made my first trip to Israel in 1967 as an undergraduate, accredited to the Berkshire Eagle and with an assignment from the Jewish Advocate in Boston. There, I had a conversation with family friends and discovered they were extraordinarily hawkish about Vietnam. And as a naïve, vaguely centrist undergraduate at Harvard, I kept asking them, why? They answered that we’re next in line for attack and if you flinch in Vietnam, they’re coming after us. That conversation helped turn my views.

Wisse: Everyone I know who would define themselves as neoconservative became so simply because of changing their minds. So, you might almost call it a group of people who changed their minds in the same direction. My turning or my recognizing this started a little earlier than the 1960s.

In fact, it was a book, Lionel Trilling’s novel Middle of the Journey, that I would suggest is the original text of neoconservatism. It describes exactly what you were saying about your trip to Israel. It tells the story of an intellectual, John Laskell, who at the beginning of the book is recovering from an illness, and this illness changes him because he recognizes within it the real presence of death. He then meets a character based on the figure of Whittaker Chambers who had just broken with Communism who is afraid he is going to be killed for his defection. When Laskell goes to meet friends of his who are archetypal progressives, he is terribly disappointed in them on both counts. The progressives don’t want to talk about death; they think death is reactionary. Neither do they want to give up their dream of the Soviet Union. No matter how much they find out about it, they still want to carry on as if it were the greatest place on earth. This confrontation with them (and with his former self) turns him “neoconservative” by the end of the book.

One could say that progressive attitudes toward Israel went in the opposite direction. Jews of the Left assumed the country would be an ideal socialist or communist entity and became disillusioned at its deviation from Marxist orthodoxy as they defined it. When Arab nations attacked, they held the Jews of Palestine responsible for the aggression against them. The neocons came to understand that the first task of liberal democracy, imperfect as it might be, was to defend its existence. This was as true of America as it was of the Jews of Palestine. Do you think, then, that neoconservatism is kind of a defensive movement?

Lipsky: We’re certainly under attack, and I do think there is a war against the Jews being levied by the same people who are levying war against America. So, in that sense, it’s similar to the Cold War.

Though there is a war being levied against us, there’s also a proactive element to conservatives — the creating of conditions for people to be free, Americans to be free, Jews to be free, other people, as George Bush often says.

Wisse: I’m talking about the defense of freedom and you’re talking about the obtainment of freedom. Maybe neoconservatism means putting a premium on freedom and taking it seriously — truly obtaining political liberty for all.

This may be why it’s so hard to define precisely. Freedom is both liberal and conservative. We have the story of the Jews breaking out of Egypt and trying to be free. On one hand the Bible records an amazing rush to freedom but, on the other hand, this rabble is no sooner free than you see what animals they are, you see how incapable they are of living in any civilized way until they receive the code of behavior, the Ten Commandments, a very stringent code of law. Given the laws of Leviticus, the laws of kashrut, the boundaries of the Sabbath, the commands of humility before God, can anyone really think that Judaism itself is not conservative — that it doesn’t have a deeply conservative view of the human condition?

Lipsky: The question of whether Judaism is mainly conservative is widely disputed, though. I take your point completely.

Wisse: Perhaps everybody has a liberal and a conservative tendency; if things go too far in one direction then you see movement in the other. But also, because Judaism is so tough and maybe because it’s so conservative, you always have movements like Christianity in its time or socialism in its time that say, let’s get beyond the Jewish condition. Let’s universalize the Jewish condition. Let’s think of bringing this to a higher level without the specific laws and restrictions. And if that goes too far, then it becomes an anti-Judaism.

Irving Kristol in 1949 wrote in Commentary, “Judaism today, and especially liberal

Judaism, despite the horrors of modern totalitarianism, seems unable to recognize sin when it sees it. It does see the evil of individual wickedly-minded men (or nations) but it refuses to assign evil its full and menacing stature. It has preferred to dress itself up in the clothes of 19th-century liberalism in order to attend a 20th-century execution. The transcendental hope of Judaism has settled into uncomprehending, complacent euphoria.”

I believe Kristol is saying that Judaism was supposed to be hardheaded enough to deal with evil. That was really its greatest accomplishment — to delimit evil and to be able to keep evil in check. So how could the Jews be the ones, when so much evil is directed at them, to get caught up, to dress themselves up in the clothes of 19th-century liberalism in order to attend a 20th-century execution when that execution was their own? Neoconservatives are the ones who faced up to the evil and refused to attend the liberal masquerade in costume. Perhaps that’s what defines neoconservatism and proves its great virtue, especially for Jews.

Lipsky: I don’t know that I have felt a great deal of disappointment in liberal Jews. I just don’t agree with them in politics. You know, there are some streaks of liberalism that I admire a great deal still, although it’s more a European-style liberalism.

Wisse: Liberalism that created the modern liberal state. But what about people who are unwilling to take into account the political context within which liberal democracies are trying to flourish? In relation to Israel, many liberals have an idealized version of behavior that does not take into account the context within which it functions.

Lipsky: One of the formative passages in my own career was editing the Forward. I used to make habit of going back to read what the Forward, a tribune of progressive pro-labor or socialist worldview, said about things, and I was always startled at how conservative it was in terms of our current thinking. I bought a used microfilm reader for Lucy Dawidowicz to use in her apartment. She was a genius at teasing out of these files of the back issues of the Forward items that illuminated the ironies that we’re speaking of. We lost, when she died, the genius that she put into that column of items from back issues of the Forward. What Jews sometimes attribute to the neoconservatives today, are ideas not far off from what were mainstream liberal views of an earlier time. It’s like what Ronald Reagan said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, it left me.” Lucy understood that much of the hostility was hostility to Jews and to the Jewish struggle. I think of that often these days.

Wisse: I want to read from a lecture that Leo Strauss delivered in 1962 — republished as an essay called “Why We Remain Jews.” He writes, “The Jewish people and their fate are living witness for the absence of redemption. This, one could say, is the meaning of the chosen people; the Jews are chosen to prove the absence of redemption.” It’s a chilling but amazingly incisive way of formulating the issue. People who want to believe that the world has been redeemed or is immediately redemptive, would have to wish the Jews out of existence since the aggression against them so clearly contradicts this faith.

I still remember my puzzlement when, as a college student opposed to the Vietnam war, I heard arguments from American Jews in favor of throwing ever more American resources into the war. Why were Jews — expressing concern about threats to liberty and the dangerous spread of Communism — advocating that American troops be sent to Southeast Asia to fight a war that was ravaging a country so far from our own, a war that trampled on human rights and resulted in the deaths and maiming of untold Vietnamese and Americans? As time has shown, the Vietnam War was fundamentally a national conflict dressed up as a war against communism. And the dominos that neoconservatives had so somberly predicted would fall did not; U.S. withdrawal did not result in Thailand becoming communist. That withdrawal should have taught Americans a critical lesson about the limits of our ability to successfully impose our will on nations and ethnic groups far different from those who support American democracy.

The neoconservatives emerged out of that political conflict with a militant stance — with roots in the earlier important opposition to totalitarianism in general and to Stalinism in particular — against the spread of communism. The new militancy, however, brought an isolating tendency to unilateralism, and it was accompanied by a deep concern about the moral and political backbone of opponents to the war. Protesting against the war was seen as a lack of patriotism and loyalty to the U.S. But when liberals demonstrated against the war, it was not out of a lack of patriotism; we thought that being loyal entailed an obligation to offer moral criticism when warranted. As Jews we think that offering tokheha, caring critique, is an obligation. We believe that our country should be a model of rectitude. Though the fear of the military draft was also a motivating factor, the percentage of Jews serving in Vietnam was remarkably low.

The neoconservative view on Vietnam stemmed from a particular political and economic analysis as well as a set of moral values that are largely shared by today’s neoconservatives. One aspect of that view is the belief that America’s system of democracy is so superior to all other forms of governance that America has a moral obligation to spread it across the world — even if that means imposing it on people who do not seek it. That belief was central to the neoconservative commitment to overthrowing Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The fact that Iraq was a functional nation with a substantial middle class and an army that supported its leader did not deter the neoconservatives from assuming that invasion of Iraq was justified by the evil nature of Hussein’s rule. Ostensibly in support of democracy, neoconservatives have supported tactics such as imprisonment without trial and forcible interrogation by the CIA. As a Jew, I see these tactics as violations of our country’s democratic principles as well as my own. Jewish tradition asks that we cultivate humility. Interfering in the sovereign affairs of another nation that has committed no act of aggression toward us is anything but an act of modesty.

Neoconservatives supported the U.S.’s unilateral invasion of Iraq, which has led us to an intractable military situation without the international support needed to end the conflict. The loss of life, the shattering of a country’s economy, the creation of a breeding ground for terrorists that Saddam Hussein would never have tolerated, and the disruption of untold lives are part of the horrendous cost of this war. And the loss of American moral capital across the world is disastrous. Nor has this war — with a cost already in the trillion-dollar range — done anything for American economic interests.

Jews and others who believe that we ought to be relying on negotiation and multilateralism whenever possible hold that belief partly because of our values — including the worth we attach to human lives — and partly because we believe that unilateralism is bound to weaken us militarily, economically, and morally. More important, no nation ought to claim that it has special rights in the world because of its might.

Neoconservative positions too often conflate spreading democracy with defeating America’s enemies. This undermines American moral resolve. Recent losses of civil rights, such as those embodied in the Patriot Act, are inimical to the cause of democracy, yet neoconservatives often defend these losses as part of the sacrifice Americans must pay for self-defense. It would be foolish to believe that sacrificing our values and rights would result in increasing our safety. Nevertheless, we have an obligation to defend ourselves. We had the right, and indeed the obligation, for example, to depose the Taliban in Afghanistan through an international force in light of their explicit commitment to furthering terrorism — a form of war — against us.

The factual basis for the neoconservative claim — that if we solve economic and educational problems in foreign lands, we can rid ourselves of the breeding grounds that give rise to terrorism, violence, and military upheaval —is questionable. Terrorist activity usually requires considerable discipline and organization, which is why it is driven for the most part by people with considerable education and sophistication, as the biographies of the 9/11 terrorists demonstrate. The claim that the issues are fundamentally economic makes sense if the model we use for understanding other countries and peoples is the U.S., but that model is insufficient. In some parts of the world, complex ideologies and religious beliefs interact with ethnic and nationalist commitments in ways that do not lend themselves to financially driven solutions. The fall of Saddam Hussein came at the cost of loosing ethnic and religious conflicts far more long-lasting and potentially destructive in their virulence than Saddam’s reign of terror.

Another aspect of the neoconservative approach is the belief that tax cuts are the path to economic growth. While it would be hard to argue that tax policy is unimportant as a tool for economic stabilization, the cost of cutting taxes while simultaneously fighting distant wars has been an astounding and frightening increase in the size of America’s national debt. One result of that increased debt is our weaker ability to respond effectively to an array of domestic problems, many of which could easily have been attended to for less than the cost of the war in Iraq.

Neoconservatives are right in pointing out the power and diversity of Israel’s enemies, and the state’s right to defend itself. But military methods of defense can only be an interim measure. Sooner or later all military powers lose wars. For Israel to exist and thrive in the long run, it must find ways — presumably with the help of other countries and of international bodies — to come to terms with its neighbors. Peacemaking is a venture undertaken with one’s enemies. Regardless of how efforts at peacemaking play out, Israel should exercise profound concern for the civil rights of everyone within its borders and the territories it controls. If Israel lives up to the commitment to universal human rights embodied in its Basic Laws, it will stand entirely on the moral high ground, and it will have strengthened its moral core. People who simultaneously work to support Israel’s right to exist, offer a loving critique through organizations like Rabbis for Human Rights, and support the development of an Israeli infrastructure of concern with human welfare through organizations like the New Israel Fund, help Israel live up to its moral legacy. Human beings will never be perfect. But it is a deeply held Jewish belief that we ought to do the best we can.

Regarding all these issues, what is at stake for Jews who believe that all people are created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God, and who also believe that we have an obligation to preserve the kavod, the honor and dignity, of every human being? I believe that neoconservative policies severely undermine the capacity of the U.S. to meet those obligations, and that they have the same impact in Israel. Their policies are flawed economically, politically, and morally. Many neoconservatives distrust Jews like me, who believe in multilateralism, unabridged civil rights, compromise with those with whom we have conflicts, and the avoidance of triumphalism in all it guises. They think our naïveté is dangerous. But the one thing we cannot afford to sell is our soul. The only responsible way to act is like a mensch, which is as true for a group or nation as it is for individuals. I admit I am still astonished when Jews disagree with me about that.

Maybe there are some things about which we should continue to be shocked.

Growing up as the only hearing child in a deaf family meant that I had a unique sense of sound. While my mother, father, and two sisters were profoundly deaf, my home was not necessarily filled with silence.

Real silence is never really achievable — and even if we would encoffin ourselves into a desensitization tank, our brain would just create the noises in our heads. We are not permitted to be silent — and I believe that this is true even for most deaf people, who are certainly physically aware of sound even if they cannot clearly hear it. In my family, my mother and two sisters have much residual hearing — although not enough to comprehend spoken language. The true disability of deafness, the real silence that deaf people experience, is the inability to produce and understand speech and be part of the hearing world. Deafness makes deaf people silent in a hearing world. They are not the only group of individuals who have no voice in society — but they represent to me a powerful metaphor for the dangers of being silenced and marginalized. When I was growing up I was keenly aware that I was the person attended to — even though I was the child. My parents tended to be ignored, devoiced, silenced.

I do not think it is an accidental metaphor for the Jewish people to have proclaimed “Na’aseh V’Nish’ma” ( Shemot , 24:8), which literally translates, “We will do and will hear.” The words suggest the Jewish people will only begin the process of understanding the Torah after accepting it. The metaphor of hearing rather than seeing is used here indicating the understanding of a nuanced theory of how the Torah is best learned. It is a process of speaking and hearing, rather than one of seeing, that creates stronger links throughout time — that is, generally the verbal rather than the visual memory engraves more permanently in the mind. The Torah is dependent on this communication system for its survival.

Although the Torah does use visual metaphors (for example, Devarim , 11:26 “See what I have set before you today, a blessing and a curse”), it suggests the language of exhortation and fear rather than that of learning and love. In general, the Torah associates the visual domain with idol worship and being distracted from the true voice of God. The preference of the auditory over the visual probably reflects the preferred status of human beings for using verbal language to communicate and create relationships. Perhaps this partially explains how so many Jewish deaf people often find themselves outside of the Jewish community while also reflecting the experience of most deaf individuals who find themselves out of the hearing world’s narrative. They are often marginalized into their own visual communication world, which represents a different dimension of storytelling.

Creating a bridge between these two paradigms is difficult but not impossible. Although art and Torah are not normally associated in the halls of Jewish learning, there is now a movement for the visual expression or acceptance of Torah — a kind of Na’aseh V’Nireh. Alternative ways of experiencing and engaging ideas and issues can deepen and expand our relationships. For me, my experience of growing up in a deaf family is a reminder of the power and limitations of verbal language; it also represents an opportunity for an alternative sensual conceptualization of the Torah.

Reviewed by Sean R. Singer

“Neoconservative cabal” has become a familiar phrase. Some say both words have Jewish roots. Kaballah (from which cabal comes) fittingly has mystic connotations, for neocons have cast a spell over the U.S. and transformed it into a nuclear-armed Golem. Others believe the slightest insinuation of any connection is antisemitic.

These are both exaggerations (mostly), but the relationship between Jews and neoconservatism is a sensitive one indeed. They Knew They Were Right explores this relationship candidly. Jacob Heilbrunn argues that “Neoconservatism isn’t about ideology. It isn’t about the left. It is about a mindset, one that has been decisively shaped by the Jewish immigrant experience, by the Holocaust, and by the 20th-century struggle against totalitarianism.”

Heilbrunn, an editor at the National Interest (my former employer, though our tenures did not overlap) is well positioned to make this argument. In a heartfelt prologue Heilbrunn — the son of a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany and once an aspiring neoconservative — places himself in the drama about to unfold. His personal investment in the subject resonates from start to finish.

In the interwar years, young (mostly Jewish) men and women united around radical leftist politics in Manhattan. Their Jewishness was irreligious — most were completely secular — and had even less to do with Zionism, to which they were hostile or indifferent. It also had little to do with the Holocaust, as most were aloof to its horrors, philosopher Sidney Hook being a notable exception.

Instead, in the words of Lionel Trilling, whom Heilbrunn labels a proto-neoconservative, Jewishness provided a “sense of identity” developed in opposition to “social antagonisms.” In that sense, there is nothing innately Jewish about neoconservatism’s origins. It is a phenomenon Jews have steered, not, as Heilbrunn suggests, a “Jewish phenomenon” or “ineluctably Jewish.”

Pushing this line, Heilbrunn’s narrative is religiose. The biblical allusions — starting with the chapter names: Exodus, Wilderness, Redemption, and Return to Exile — that litter the book are often trite, seemingly the inspiration of multiple viewings of The Ten Commandments. The Republican Party is described as a “new Promised Land” and Irving Kristol is “like Joshua leading the Israelites into Canaan.” Commentary was Norman Podhoretz’s “private Sinai.” We get it, they’re Jewish.

In the postwar era two major developments shaped the neoconservatives’ trajectory: First, disillusionment with the Soviet Union, Communism, and then the American Left, and

second, the disappearance of institutional antisemitism, which opened doors that were previously closed.

At this nexus, Heilbrunn judiciously tracks the academic maturation of leading Bush Administration figures, examining the intellectual foundations of neoconservative luminaries like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith. One such pillar is the nuclear strategist Albert Wolhsetter, who, as Heilbrunn writes, believed that “There was no real distinction between defense and offense,” a concept discernible in the aftermath of 9/11 and palpable among some presidential candidates.

As the neoconservative story races toward the present, They Knew They Were Right transitions from intellectual to political history, taking the reader into the heart of the Reagan and Bush 43 administrations, where many other writers have ventured. The narrative becomes increasingly familiar; the intellectual battles throughout the Cold War make for more stimulating reading than the bureaucratic battles inside the Beltway.

September 11 revealed a new antagonism — Al-Qaeda and “Islamofascism” — that dwarfed the others. In the War on Terror, Israel fits seamlessly into the neoconservatives’ Manichean worldview. Contrary to allegations from both the Left and the Right, Heilbrunn argues, convincingly, the neocons have not subordinated America’s interests to those of Israel, but rather conflated them at times. Though this doesn’t excuse the policy missteps such a facile worldview produces, being wrong and being treasonous are quite different.

Heilbrunn repeatedly compares the neoconservatives to the prophets and writes that, “they belong” in exile. With chimerical promised lands, perhaps they have no choice.