We lost a towering Jewish figure on Dec. 16 when Norman Podhoretz died only a month shy of 96. The historian Paul Johnson once called Podhoretz the “archetype of the New York intellectual.” A protean thinker, he was never afraid to reevaluate his opinions, which covered virtually every aspect of politics, religion and culture. As the long-time editor-in-chief of Commentary magazine and the author of several books and hundreds of essays, Podhoretz was a staple in Jewish American intellectual life.
Many eulogies are right now being written about him by his admirers and detractors alike. I would like to add mine — as an admirer, albeit an occasional detractor — into the mix, as I think I have something to say about him, too. I have authored two books about neoconservatism in which Norman and his wife Midge Decter were central subjects. I got to know them a bit as I was doing my research and even got the chance to meet with them at their home in Manhattan, where Norman let me hold his Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Podhoretz believed that there was something profoundly wrong with Jews’ partisan allegiances in America. To him the Jewish knee-jerk allegiance to the Democratic Party is about more than an irrational clinging to a false ideology of progressivism, but a spiritual crisis akin to idolatry. In his 2009 book, “Why Are the Jews Liberal?,” he said that too many Jews in America have replaced Torah Judaism with liberalism. He said that the religion of most American Jews is “the Democratic Party platform with some holidays thrown in.”
Podhoretz’s biography is a story of “breaking ranks,” which was even the title of one of his own memoirs, published in 1979, as he was about to move permanently into the Republican camp. By the 1970s, he was becoming more at home with the intellectuals at the right-wing National Review than the left-wing Partisan Review. He would later write another memoir, “Ex-Friends,” chronicling his fallout with several of his closest Jewish compatriots from his days as a man of the Left, which included Lionel and Diana Trilling, Allen Ginsberg, and Hannah Arendt.
Frightened by what he saw as cowardice in George McGovern, he supported Richard Nixon in 1972. He announced his support for Nixon that year in an essay titled, “Between Nixon and the New Politics.” He returned in 1976 to endorse Jimmy Carter, who he thought redeemed the Democratic Party’s tough stance against Communism in the 1960s. When that did not happen, he voiced his disillusionment with Carter and what the Democratic Party had become in “The Present Danger,” a short book in 1980, which then led him to become an enthusiastic backer of Ronald Reagan. And from that point on, he remained a Republican, even resisting the “Never Trump” urge of other neoconservatives to condemn the MAGA movement.
There were three reasons he broke ranks with the Left. The first, as I just indicated, was the Democratic Party’s new policy of endless concessions to Moscow. After the end of the Cold War, this stance morphed into what he described in his post-9/11 book, “World War IV,” that is the war of the democratic, Western world against Islamic terrorism. He believed the Republican Party had pushed the appropriate interventionist approach to dealing with the crisis of global Jihad while the Democrats were pushing feckless diplomacy through international institutions such as the United Nations.
Podhoretz loathed the New Left for failing to declare American civilization superior to its illiberal alternatives. In 2000, he chronicled his patriotism in “My Love Affair with America.” He believed the Left used to stand for the moral excellence of the West, but now he found them apologizing for America’s prosperity.
The second reason for his move to the Right is perhaps the primary factor in his rethinking of politics. He saw moral relativism in almost every one of America’s cultural institutions, which has long been dominated by the Left. His teacher at Columbia University, the great literary critic, Lionel Trilling, although a liberal until his dying day, was one of Podhoretz’s earliest influences on noticing the demise of moral wisdom in American life. Trilling, a Jewish professor of literature, had written a seminal essay called “The Adversary Culture,” which foresaw the rise of hatred of Western heritage among the American cultural elite. It paved the way for anti-Americanism to be ever present in the media, entertainment industry, and universities. It also led to the destruction of sacred principles of right versus wrong and thus, the wrecking of social bonds, especially families.
And having been told in 1958 by beatniks Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, “We’re going to get your children,” Podhoretz was horrified by the trajectory his beloved America was going to take if this budding counterculture continues to take hold on the youth.
Thirdly, he believed that progressive policies of the 1960s designed to cure social pathologies such as crime, poverty and racial economic disparity were abject failures. Podhoretz came to believe that the problems persisting in American society were not the result of economic capitalism or unfair distribution of wealth, but the moral collapse spawned by liberal attitudes. In 1967, at the height of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” legislative reforms, Podhoretz published his first memoir, “Making It,” in which he ascribed his own successes to having made the right choices. Identifying with Horatio Alger’s “rags to riches” formula in realizing the American dream, he said that no one is going to do it for you.
The last time I spoke with Norman, he said that he saw American Jews at a crossroads and had hoped they would choose a different path. With the vast majority of American Jews routinely giving their votes to the Democratic Party for reasons that accord with neither Jewish interests nor Jewish ethics, he did not seem very optimistic that they would choose a different door to go through. He did not find that very many Jews are interested in reevaluating their political ideas.
But Norman lived his entire life reevaluating what he believed. That is perhaps what made Paul Johnson’s depiction of him as the “archetype of New York intellectual” accurate. When it came to Norman’s mind, the more it changed, the more it stayed the same.
Adam L. Fuller, Ph.D., is Clayman Professor of Jewish Studies and Associate Professor of Political Science at Youngstown State University. He is the author of “The Armed Jew: The Case for Jewish Gun Ownership” (Wicked Son, 2025)
