Militarism Has Long Worked to Shield Antisemitism

John Podhoretz inherited from his famous parents his neoconservative worldview, an editorial sinecure at Commentary magazine, and the charming habit of presenting his ideas in so crude and blunt a fashion as to be self-discrediting. Podhoretz is the son of the late Midge Decter (who started working for Commentary in 1950) and Norman Podhoretz (who edited Commentary from 1960 to 1995 and remains on the masthead as editor at large). Commentary was founded in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), so for the vast majority of its history it has been under the sway of one Podhoretz or another. Aside from the trio just named, the magazine has also published Naomi Munson (Midge and Norman’s daughter), Rachel Abrams (another daughter), Steven C. Munson (a son-in-law), Elliot Abrams (another son-in-law), and Sam Munson (a grandson). Not surprisingly, in 2003 Commentary published an excerpt of the book In Praise of Nepotism, by Adam Bellow (son of the famous novelist, who was also a Commentary contributor).

In launching Commentary, the AJC outlined a mandate that included aiding “in the struggle against bigotry.” It’s perhaps just as well that Commentary severed its relationship with the AJC in 2007, since today Commentary can more accurately be called a magazine devoted to aiding and abetting bigotry—including even at times anti-Jewish bigotry. The magazine has been animated with an obsessive anti-Black animus dating back to the 1963 publication of Norman Podhoretz’s notorious essay “My Negro Problem—And Ours.” Decter’s equally infamous 1980 essay “The Boys on the Beach” was a spectacular airing of hatred for gays and lesbians.

Now the Podhoretz scion has made his own contribution to this tradition. At a rally on July 3, Donald Trump praised the recent budget his party passed in these terms: “Think of that: No death tax. No estate tax. No going to the banks and borrowing from, in some cases, a fine banker—and in some cases, Shylocks and bad people.” This casual use of the term “Shylocks” was a relatively venial sin compared to Trump’s many other bigoted words and deeds (ranging from his 2017 “very fine people on both sides” comment in response to a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, to the current immigration crackdown), but it was still noxious and rightly condemned as antisemitic.

John Podhoretz had a different view. On the social media site X, Podhoretz tweeted, “Trump bombed Iran. He can say Shylock 100 times a day forever as far as I’m concerned.” With an admirably succinct brutality, Podhoretz articulated a long-held neoconservative principle: that bigotry, even antisemitism, is forgivable if done by someone who supports American militarism.

This history of this idea is worth tracing. Because Podhoretz is a Zionist and because the Iran bombing was conducted at the behest of Israel’s prime minister, it might be thought that the special license to antisemites is a narrow matter of supporting the Jewish state. In fact, there has long been a wider support of military hawkishness at play.

Before Commentary made its neoconservative turn in 1970, it was an organ of Cold War liberalism. The neoconservative attachment to Israel was combined with an older and deeper attachment to American empire. Within the context of the Cold War, it was often necessary to refurbish the reputation of various far-right (in some cases fascistic) figures who were stalwart anti-communists. This was expressed in the apocryphal adage attributed to Franklin Delano Roosevelt about a Latin American dictator: “He may be a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch.”

In the context of Cold War, allying with “our SOBs” often meant working with antisemites and even “former” Nazis (as in the CIA’s recruitment of war criminals in Operation Paperclip). Intellectuals played a role in this Cold War laundering of the far right. In 1960, the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb (later a neoconservative doyen and Commentary contributor) published an essay celebrating the British novelist John Buchan in Encounter (a Cold War liberal magazine covertly funded by the CIA and edited by her husband, Irving Kristol, another Commentary contributor). Buchan was an odd figure for Himmelfarb to enthuse over. Best known as the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, Buchan was mostly a mediocre Rudyard Kipling knock-off—a writer of boy’s adventure books celebrating empire and chaste athleticism.

Buchan’s spy novels also had a distinctly antisemitic agenda, featuring Jewish financiers who plotted the destruction of Western civilization. Himmelfarb characterizes these stories as “Jewish-capitalist-communist conspiracies.” This narrative is a pulpy expression of the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism—the claim that Jews are covertly behind both capitalist and communist machinations, which formed a crucial ideological rationale for the Holocaust.

In her essay, Himmelfarb goes out of her way to exonerate Buchan, claiming that his bigotry was “the innocent antisemitism of the clubman.” She also notes that Buchan was a Zionist. Himmelfarb argued:

This is not to suggest that Buchan’s novels can be acquitted of the charge of anti-Semitism. They were anti-Semitic in the same sense that they were anti-Negro. If the Jews, unlike the Negroes, were not in all ways inferior, they were most certainly different…. But this kind of anti-Semitism, indulged in at that time and place, was both too common and too passive to be scandalous. Men were normally anti-Semitic, unless by some quirk of temperament or ideology they happened to be philo-Semitic. So long as the world itself was normal, this was of no great consequence. It was only later, when social impediments became fatal disabilities, when antisemitism ceased to be the prerogative of English gentlemen and became the business of politicians and demagogues, that sensitive men were shamed into silence. It was Hitler, attaching such abnormal significance to filiation and physiognomy, who put an end to the casual, innocent anti-Semitism of the clubman. When the conspiracies of the English adventure tale became the realities of German politics, Buchan and others had the grace to realize that what was permissible under civilized conditions was not permissible with civilization in extremis.