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Each month the journal Sh'ma posts three or four essays from the print publication. To read all of the essays—which create a “conversation-in-print”—click on “New Subscription” above. This month, Sh'ma explores the Neoconservative current in American political and intellectual life, one with significant implications and one that is only understood if all its many, complex ramifications are taken into account. At no time since the rise of the New York Jewish Intellectuals in the 1940s and ‘50s have Jewish voices played as central a role in American political and cultural life. Talk about Jews and Neoconservatives is divisive, often explosive; their impact is often seen as deleterious and dangerously influential especially with regard to the onset of the Iraqi War. Sh'ma examines the issue. Jews & NeoconservativesBenjamin Balint: In recent years, “neoconservative” has become a term of abuse referring to the supposed cabal that brought about the Iraq war... 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. Peter Berkowitz: 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. Ruth Wisse & Seth Lipsky: 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? David Teutsch: 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. |
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