UNDERSTANDING JEWISH INFLUENCE III:
NEOCONSERVATISM AS A JEWISH MOVEMENTKEVIN MACDONALD

O

ver the last year, there has been a torrent of articles on neoconservatism
raising (usually implicitly) some difficult issues: Are neoconservatives
different from other conservatives? Is neoconservatism a Jewish
movement? Is it “anti-Semitic” to say so?
The thesis presented here is that neoconservatism is indeed a Jewish
intellectual and political movement. This paper is the final installment in a threepart series on Jewish activism and reflects many of the themes of the first two
articles. The first paper in this series focused on the traits of ethnocentrism,
intelligence, psychological intensity, and aggressiveness.1 These traits will beapparent here as well. The ethnocentrism of the neocons has enabled them tocreate highly organized, cohesive, and effective ethnic networks. Neoconservatives
have also exhibited the high intelligence necessary for attaining eminence in theacademic world, in the elite media and think tanks, and at the highest levels ofgovernment. They have aggressively pursued their goals, not only in purging
more traditional conservatives from their positions of power and influence, butalso in reorienting U.S. foreign policy in the direction of hegemony and empire.
Neoconservatism also illustrates the central theme of the second article in thisseries: In alliance with virtually the entire organized American Jewish
community, neoconservatism is a vanguard Jewish movement with close ties tothe most extreme nationalistic, aggressive, racialist and religiously fanatic
elements within Israel.2
Neoconservatism also reflects many of the characteristics of Jewish
intellectual movements studied in my book, The Culture of Critique3 (see Table 1).

TABLE 1: CHARACTERISTICS OF JEWISH INTELLECTUAL MOVEMENTS♦A deep concern with furthering specific Jewish interests, such as helping Israel orpromoting immigration.

♦Issues are framed in a rhetoric of universalism rather than Jewish particularism.
♦Issues are framed in moral terms, and an attitude of moral superiority pervades
the movement.

♦Centered around charismatic leaders (Boas, Trotsky, Freud).
♦Jews form a cohesive, mutually reinforcing core.
♦Non-Jews appear in highly visible roles, often as spokespersons for the movement.

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are portrayed as the personification of evil and are expunged from the movement.
♦The movement is irrational in the sense that it is fundamentally concerned withusing available intellectual resources to advance a political cause.
♦The movement is associated with the most prestigious academic institutions in the society.
♦Access to prestigious and mainstream media sources, partly as a result of Jewish
influence on the media.
♦Active involvement of the wider Jewish community in supporting the movement.

__________________________________
However, neoconservatism also presents several problems to any analysis,
the main one being that the history of neoconservatism is relatively convolutedand complex compared to other Jewish intellectual and political movements. To
an unusual extent, the history of neoconservatism presents a zigzag of positions
and alliances, and a multiplicity of influences. This is perhaps inevitable in afundamentally political movement needing to adjust to changing circumstances
and attempting to influence the very large, complex political culture of the UnitedStates. The main changes neoconservatives have been forced to confront havebeen their loss of influence in the Democratic Party and the fall of the Soviet
Union. Although there is a remarkable continuity in Jewish neoconservatives’interests as Jews—the prime one being the safety and prosperity of Israel—these
upheavals required new political alliances and produced a need for new work
designed to reinvent the intellectual foundation of American foreign policy.
Neoconservatism also raises difficult problems of labeling. As described in
the following, neoconservatism as a movement derives from the long associationof Jews with the left. But contemporary neoconservatism is not simply a term for
ex-liberals or leftists. Indeed, in its present incarnation, many second-generation
neoconservatives, such as David Frum, Jonah Goldberg, and Max Boot, havenever had affiliations with the American left. Rather, neoconservatism
represents a fundamentally new version of American conservatism, if it can beproperly termed conservative at all. By displacing traditional forms ofconservatism, neoconservatism has actually solidified the hold of the left onpolitical and cultural discourse in the United States. The deep and continuingchasm between neocons and more traditional American conservatives—a topic
of this paper—indicates that this problem is far from being resolved.
The multiplicity of influences among neoconservatives requires somecomment. The current crop of neoconservatives has at times been described as
Trotskyists.4 As will be seen, in some cases the intellectual influences of
neoconservatives can be traced to Trotsky, but Trotskyism cannot be seen as acurrent influence within the movement. And although the political philosopher
Leo Strauss is indeed a guru for some neoconservatives, his influence is by nomeans pervasive, and in any case provides only a very broad guide to what the
neoconservatives advocate in the area of public policy. Indeed, by far the best

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predictor of neoconservative attitudes, on foreign policy at least, is what thepolitical right in Israel deems in Israel’s best interests. Neoconservatism does not
fit the pattern of the Jewish intellectual movements described in The Culture of
Critique, characterized by gurus (“rabbis”) and their disciples centered around atightly focused intellectual perspective in the manner of Freud, Boas, or Marcuse.
Neoconservatism is better described in general as a complex interlocking
professional and family network centered around Jewish publicists andorganizers flexibly deployed to recruit the sympathies of both Jews and non-Jews
in harnessing the wealth and power of the United States in the service of Israel. As
such, neoconservatism should be considered a semicovert branch of the massive
and highly effective pro-Israel lobby, which includes organizations like theAmerican Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)—the most powerfullobbying group in Washington—and the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA).
Indeed, as discussed below, prominent neoconservatives have been associatedwith such overtly pro-Israel organizations as the Jewish Institute for National
Security Affairs (JINSA), the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP),
and ZOA. (Acronyms of the main neoconservative and pro-Israel activist
organizations used in this paper are provided in Table 2.)__________________________________TABLE 2: ACRONYMS OF NEOCONSERVATIVE AND PRO-ISRAELACTIVIST ORGANIZATIONS USED IN THIS PAPER♦AEI: American Enterprise Institute—A neoconservative think tank; produces
and disseminates books and articles on foreign and domestic policy; www.aei.org.
♦AIPAC: American Israel Public Affairs Committee—The main pro-Israel lobbying organization in the U.S., specializing in influencing the U.S. Congress;www.aipac.org.
♦CSP: Center for Security Policy—Neoconservative think tank specializing in defense policy; formerly headed by Douglas Feith, CSP is now headed by Frank
Gaffney; the CSP is strongly pro-Israel and favors a strong U.S. military;
www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org.
♦JINSA: Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs—Pro-Israel think tankspecializing in promoting military cooperation between the U.S. and Israel;
www.jinsa.org.
♦MEF: Middle East Forum—Headed by Daniel Pipes, the MEF is a pro-Israel advocacy organization overlapping with the WINEP but generally more strident;
www.meforum.org.
♦PNAC: Project for the New American Century—Headed by Bill Kristol, the
PNAC issues letters and statements signed mainly by prominent neocons and designed to influence public policy; www.newamericancentury.org.
♦SD/USA: Social Democrats/USA—“Left-neoconservative” political organization
advocating pro-labor social policy and pro-Israel, anticommunist foreign policy;
www.socialdemocrats.org.

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www.washingtoninstitute.org.
♦ZOA: Zionist Organization of America—Pro-Israel lobbying organization associated with the more fanatical end of the pro-Israel spectrum in America;
www.zoa.org.

__________________________________
Compared with their deep and emotionally intense commitment to Israel,
neoconservative attitudes on domestic policy seem more or less anafterthought, and they will not be the main focus here. In general,
neoconservatives advocate maintaining the social welfare, immigration, andcivil rights policies typical of liberalism (and the wider Jewish community) up
to about 1970. Some of these policies represent clear examples of Jewish
ethnic strategizing—in particular, the role of the entire Jewish political
spectrum and the entire organized Jewish community as the moving force
behind the immigration law of 1965, which opened the floodgates tononwhite immigration. (Jewish organizations still favor liberal immigration
policies. In 2004, virtually all American Jewish public affairs agencies belong
to the National Immigration Forum, the premier open borders immigrationlobbying group.5) Since the neocons have developed a decisive influence inthe mainstream conservative movement, their support for nonrestrictive
immigration policies has perhaps more significance for the future of theUnited States than their support for Israel.
As always when discussing Jewish involvement in intellectual movements,
there is no implication that all or even most Jews are involved in these
movements. As discussed below, the organized Jewish community shares the
neocon commitment to the Likud Party in Israel. However, neoconservatism has
never been a majority viewpoint in the American Jewish community, at least if
being a neoconservative implies voting for the Republican Party. In the 2000
election, 80 percent of Jews voted for Al Gore.6
These percentages may be misleading, since it was not widely known
during the 2000 election that the top advisors of George W. Bush had very
powerful Jewish connections, pro-Likud sympathies, and positive attitudes
toward regime change in Arab countries in the Middle East. Republican
strategists are hoping for 35 percent of the Jewish vote in 2004.7 President
Bush’s May 18, 2004, speech to the national convention of AIPAC “received
a wild and sustained standing ovation in response to an audience member’s
call for ‘four more years.’ The majority of some 4,500 delegates at the national
conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee leaped to theirfeet in support of the president…Anecdotal evidence points to a sea change
among Jewish voters, who historically have trended toward the Democratic
Party but may be heading to Bush’s camp due to his stance on a single issue:
his staunch support of Israel.”8 Nevertheless, Democrats may not lose many

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11

Jewish voters because John Kerry, the likely Democratic candidate, has a“100% record” for Israel and has promised to increase troop strength andretain the commitment to Iraq.9
The critical issue is to determine the extent to which neoconservatism is a
Jewish movement—the extent to which Jews dominate the movement and are a
critical component of its success. One must then document the fact that the Jews
involved in the movement have a Jewish identity and that they are Jewishly
motivated—that is, that they see their participation as aimed at achieving specific
Jewish goals. In the case of neoconservatives, an important line of evidence is toshow their deep connections to Israel—their “passionate attachment to a nation nottheir own,” as Pat Buchanan terms it,10 and especially to the Likud Party. As
indicated above, I will argue that the main motivation for Jewish neoconservatives
has been to further the cause of Israel; however, even if that statement is true, it does
not imply that all Jews are neoconservatives. I therefore reject the sort of arguments
made by Richard Perle, who responded to charges that neoconservatives werepredominantly Jews by noting that Jews always tend to be disproportionately
involved in intellectual undertakings, and that many Jews oppose theneoconservatives.11 This is indeed the case, but leaves open the question ofwhether neoconservative Jews perceive their ideas as advancing Jewish interests
and whether the movement itself is influential. An important point of thefollowing, however, is that the organized Jewish community has played a criticalrole in the success of neoconservatism and in preventing public discussion of its
Jewish roots and Jewish agendas.

NON-JEWISH PARTICIPATION IN NEOCONSERVATISM
As with the other Jewish intellectual and political movements, non-Jews
have been welcomed into the movement and often given highly visible roles
as the public face of the movement. This of course lessens the perception thatthe movement is indeed a Jewish movement, and it makes excellent
psychological sense to have the spokespersons for any movement resemble
the people they are trying to convince. That’s why Ahmed Chalabi (a Shiite
Iraqi, a student of early neocon theorist Albert Wohlstetter, and a close
personal associate of prominent neocons, including Richard Perle) was the
neocons’ choice to lead postwar Iraq.12 There are many examples—including
Freud’s famous comments on needing a non-Jew to represent psychoanalysis(he got Carl Jung for a time until Jung balked at the role, and then Ernest
Jones). Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict were the most publicly recognized
Boasian anthropologists, and there were a great many non-Jewish leftists andpro-immigration advocates who were promoted to visible positions in
Jewish-dominated movements—and sometimes resented their role.13 Albert
Lindemann describes non-Jews among the leaders of the Bolshevik
revolution as “jewified non-Jews”—“a term, freed of its ugly connotations,[that] might be used to underline an often overlooked point: Even in Russia

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there were some non-Jews, whether Bolsheviks or not, who respected Jews,
praised them abundantly, imitated them, cared about their welfare, andestablished intimate friendships or romantic liaisons with them.”14
There was a smattering of non-Jews among the New York Intellectuals, who,
as members of the anti-Stalinist left in the 1940s, were forerunners of the
neoconservatives. Prominent examples were Dwight MacDonald (labeled byMichael Wrezin “a distinguished goy among the Partisanskies”15—i.e., thelargely Jewish Partisan Review crowd), James T. Farrell, and Mary McCarthy.
John Dewey also had close links to the New York Intellectuals and was lavishly
promoted by them;16 Dewey was also allied closely with his former student
Sidney Hook, another major figure on the anti-Stalinist left. Dewey was aphilosemite, stating: “After all, it was the Christians who made them ‘it’ [i.e.,
victims]. Living in New York where the Jews set the standard of living fromdepartment stores to apartment houses, I often think that the Jews are the finest
product of historical Christianity…. Anyway, the finest living man, so far as I
know, is a Jew—[humanitarian founder of the International Institute ofAgriculture] David Lubin.”17This need for the involvement of non-Jews is especially acute forneoconservatism as a political movement: Because neoconservative Jews
constitute a tiny percentage of the electorate, they need to make alliances with
non-Jews whose perceived interests dovetail with theirs. Non-Jews have avariety of reasons for being associated with Jewish interests, including careeradvancement, close personal relationships or admiration for individual Jews,
and deeply held personal convictions. For example, as described below, SenatorHenry Jackson, whose political ambitions were intimately bound up with the
neoconservatives, was a strong philosemite due partly to his experiences inchildhood; his alliance with neoconservatives also stemmed from his (entirely
reasonable) belief that the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in a
deadly conflict and his belief that Israel was a valuable ally in that struggle.
Because neoconservatives command a large and lucrative presence in the media,
thinktankdom, and political culture generally, it is hardly surprising thatcomplex blends of opportunism and personal conviction characterize
participating non-Jews.

UNIVERSITY AND MEDIA INVOLVEMENT
An important feature of the Jewish intellectual and political movements I havestudied has been their association with prestigious universities and media sources.
The university most closely associated with the current crop of neoconservatives is
the University of Chicago, the academic home not only of Leo Strauss, but also ofAlbert Wohlstetter, a mathematician turned foreign policy strategist, who wasmentor to Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, both of whom have achieved power
and influence in the George W. Bush administration. The University of Chicago wasalso home to Strauss disciple Allan Bloom, sociologist Edward Shils, and novelist
Saul Bellow among the earlier generation of neoconservatives.

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Another important academic home for the neocons has been the School of
Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Wolfowitz spent mostof the Clinton years as a professor at SAIS; the Director of the Strategic Studies
Program at SAIS is Eliot Cohen, who has been a signatory to a number of the Project
for a New American Century’s statements and letters, including the April 2002 letter
to President Bush on Israel and Iraq (see below); he is also an advisor for Frank
Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, an important neocon think tank. Cohen isfamous for labeling the war against terrorism World War IV. His book, Supreme
Command, argues that civilian leaders should make the important decisions and notdefer to military leaders. This message was understood by Cheney and Wolfowitz
as underscoring the need to prevent the military from having too much influence, as
in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War when Colin Powell as chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff had been influential in opposing the removal of Saddam Hussein.18
Unlike other Jewish intellectual movements, the neoconservatives have been forced
to deal with major opposition from within the academy, especially from Arabs and leftists
in academic departments of Middle East studies. As a result, neoconservative activist
groups, especially the WINEP and the MEF’s Campus Watch, have monitored
academic discourse and course content and organized protests against professors,
and were behind congressional legislation that will mandate U.S. government
monitoring of programs in Middle East studies (see below).
Jewish intellectual and political movements also have typically had ready accessto prestigious mainstream media outlets, and this is certainly true for the neocons.
Most notable are the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, The Public Interest, Basic Books(book publishing), and the media empires of Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch.
Murdoch owns the Fox News Channel and the New York Post, and is the main sourceof funding for Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard—all major neocon outlets.
A good example illustrating these connections is Richard Perle. Perle is listed asa Resident Fellow of the AEI, and he is on the boards of directors of the Jerusalem Post
and the Hollinger Corporation, a media company controlled by Conrad Black.
Hollinger owns major media properties in the U.S. (Chicago Sun-Times), England(Daily Telegraph), Israel (Jerusalem Post), and Canada (National Post; 50 percent
ownership with CanWest Global Communications, which is controlled by Israel
Asper and his family; CanWest has aggressively clamped down on its journalists forany deviation from its strong pro-Israel editorial policies19). Hollinger also owns
dozens of smaller publications in the U.S., Canada, and England. All of these media
outlets reflect the vigorously pro-Israel stance espoused by Perle. Perle has written
op-ed columns for Hollinger newspapers as well as for the New York Times.
Neoconservatives such as Jonah Goldberg and David Frum also have a verylarge influence on National Review, formerly a bastion of traditional conservative
thought in the U.S. Neocon think tanks such as the AEI have a great deal of crossmembership with Jewish activist organizations such as AIPAC, the main proIsrael lobbying organization in Washington, and the WINEP. (When President
George W. Bush addressed the AEI on Iraq policy, the event was fittingly held in

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the Albert Wohlstetter Conference Center.) A major goal of the AEI is to maintaina high profile as pundits in the mainstream media. A short list would include AEI
fellow Michael Ledeen, who is extreme even among the neocons in his lust for
war against all of the Arab countries in the Middle East, is “resident scholar in theFreedom Chair at AEI,” writes op-ed articles for The Scripps Howard News
Service and the Wall Street Journal, and appears on the Fox News Channel.
Michael Rubin, visiting scholar at the AEI, writes for the New Republic (controlled
by staunchly pro-Israel Martin Peretz), the New York Times, and the Daily
Telegraph. Reuel Marc Gerecht, a resident fellow at the AEI and director of the
Middle East Initiative at PNAC, writes for the Weekly Standard and the New YorkTimes. Another prominent AEI member is David Wurmser who formerly headed
the Middle East Studies Program at the AEI until assuming a major role inproviding intelligence disinformation in the lead up to the war in Iraq (seebelow). His position at the AEI was funded by Irving Moscowitz, a wealthy
supporter of the settler movement in Israel and neocon activism in the US.20 At
the AEI Wurmser wrote op-ed pieces for the Washington Times, the Weekly
Standard, and the Wall Street Journal. His book, Tyranny’s Ally: America’s Failure to
Defeat Saddam Hussein advocated that the U.S. should use military force toachieve regime change in Iraq. The book was published by the AEI in 1999 witha foreword by Richard Perle.
Prior to the invasion of Iraq, the New York Times was deeply involved in
spreading deception about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and ties toterrorist organizations. Judith Miller’s front-page articles were based on
information from Iraqi defectors well known to be untrustworthy because of
their own interest in toppling Saddam.21 Many of these sources, including thenotorious Ahmed Chalabi, were also touted by the Office of Special Plans of the
Department of Defense, which is associated with many of the most prominent
Bush administration neocons (see below). Miller’s indiscretions might be chalked
up to incompetence were it not for her close connections to prominent neoconorganizations, in particular Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum (MEF), which
avidly sought the war in Iraq. The MEF lists Miller as an expert speaker on
Middle East issues, and she has published articles in MEF media, including the
Middle East Quarterly and the MEF Wire. The MEF also threw a launch party forher book on Islamic fundamentalism, God Has Ninety-Nine Names. Miller, whose
father is ethnically Jewish, has a strong Jewish consciousness: Her book One by
One: Facing the Holocaust “tried to … show how each [European] country that I
lived and worked in, was suppressing or distorting or politically manipulating
the memory of the Holocaust.”22
The New York Times has apologized for “coverage that was not as rigorous as
it should have been” but has thus far refused to single out Miller’s stories as
worthy of special censure.23 Indeed, the Times’s failure goes well beyond Miller:
Some of the Times’s coverage in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq
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Johnston, James Risen and others that provided perspective or challenged
information in the faulty stories were played as quietly as a lullaby. Especiallynotable among these was Risen’s “C.I.A. Aides Feel Pressure in Preparing Iraqi
Reports,” which was completed several days before the invasion andunaccountably held for a week. It didn’t appear until three days after the war’s
start, and even then was interred on Page B10.24

As is well known, the New York Times is Jewish-owned and has often beenaccused of slanting its coverage on issues of importance to Jews.25 It is perhaps
another example of the legacy of Jacob Schiff, the Jewish activist/philanthropist
who backed Adolph Ochs’s purchase of the New York Times in 1896 because hebelieved he “could be of great service to the Jews generally.”26

INVOLVEMENT OF THE WIDER JEWISH COMMUNITY
Another common theme of Jewish intellectual and political movements has
been the involvement and clout of the wider Jewish community. While theprominent neoconservatives represent a small fraction of the American Jewish
community, there is little doubt that the organized Jewish community shares
their commitment to the Likud Party in Israel and, one might reasonably infer,
Likud’s desire to see the United States conquer and effectively control virtually
the entire Arab world.27 For example, representatives of all the major Jewish
organizations serve on the executive committee of AIPAC, the most powerfullobby in Washington. Since the 1980s AIPAC has leaned toward Likud and only
reluctantly went along with the Labor government of the 1990s.28 In October 2002,
the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations issued adeclaration of support for disarming the Iraqi regime.29 Jack Rosen, the presidentof the American Jewish Congress, noted that “the final statement ought to be
crystal clear in backing the President having to take unilateral action if necessary
against Iraq to eliminate weapons of mass destruction.”30
The organized Jewish community also plays the role of credential validator,
especially for non-Jews. For example, the neocon choice for the leader of Iranfollowing regime change is Reza Pahlavi, son of the former Shah. As is the casewith Ahmed Chalabi, who was promoted by the neocons as the leader of postSaddam Iraq, Pahlavi has proven his commitment to Jewish causes and the wider
Jewish community. He has addressed the board of JINSA, given a public speechat the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, met with
American Jewish communal leaders, and is on friendly terms with Likud Party
officials in Israel.31
Most important, the main Jewish activist organizations have been quick tocondemn those who have noted the Jewish commitments of the neoconservative
activists in the Bush administration or seen the hand of the Jewish community inpushing for war against Iraq and other Arab countries. For example, the ADL’s
Abraham Foxman singled out Pat Buchanan, Joe Sobran, Rep. James Moran,
Chris Matthews of MSNBC, James O. Goldsborough (a columnist for the San
Diego Union-Tribune), columnist Robert Novak, and writer Ian Buruma as

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subscribers to “a canard that America’s going to war has little to do withdisarming Saddam, but everything to do with Jews, the ‘Jewish lobby’ and the
hawkish Jewish members of the Bush Administration who, according to thischorus, will favor any war that benefits Israel.”32 Similarly, when Senator Ernest
F. Hollings (D-SC) made a speech in the U.S. Senate and wrote a newspaper
op-ed piece which claimed the war in Iraq was motivated by “President
Bush’s policy to secure Israel” and advanced by a handful of Jewish officials
and opinion leaders, Abe Foxman of the ADL stated, “when the debate veers
into anti-Jewish stereotyping, it is tantamount to scapegoating and an appeal
to ethnic hatred …. This is reminiscent of age-old, anti-Semitic canards abouta Jewish conspiracy to control and manipulate government.”33 Despite
negative comments from Jewish activist organizations, and a great deal ofcoverage in the American Jewish press, there were no articles on this story in
any of the major U.S. national newspapers.34
These mainstream media and political figures stand accused of antiSemitism—the most deadly charge that can be imagined in the contemporary
world—by the most powerful Jewish activist organization in the U.S. The Simon
Wiesenthal Center has also charged Buchanan and Moran with anti-Semitism fortheir comments on this issue.35 While Foxman feels no need to provide anyargument at all, the SWC feels it is sufficient to note that Jews have varying
opinions on the war. This of course is a nonissue. The real issue is whether it islegitimate to open up to debate the question of the degree to which the neocon
activists in the Bush administration are motivated by their long ties to the Likud
Party in Israel and whether the organized Jewish community in the U.S. similarly
supports the Likud Party and its desire to enmesh the United States in wars thatare in Israel’s interest. (There’s not much doubt about how the SWC viewed thewar with Iraq; Defense Secretary Rumsfeld invited Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of
the Center, to briefings on the war.)36
Of course, neocons in the media—most notably David Frum, Max Boot,
Lawrence F. Kaplan, Jonah Goldberg, and Alan Wald37—have also been busy
labeling their opponents “anti-Semites.” An early example concerned a 1988
speech given by Russell Kirk at the Heritage Foundation in which he remarked
that “not seldom it has seemed as if some eminent neoconservatives mistook Tel
Aviv for the capital of United States”—what Sam Francis characterizes as “awisecrack about the slavishly pro-Israel sympathies among neoconservatives.”38
Midge Decter, a prominent neocon writer and wife of Commentary editor
Norman Podhoretz, labeled the comment “a bloody outrage, a piece of antiSemitism by Kirk that impugns the loyalty of neoconservatives.”39
Accusations of anti-Semitism have become a common response tosuggestions that neoconservatives have promoted the war in Iraq for the benefitof Israel.40 For example, Joshua Muravchik, whose ties to the neocons areelaborated below, authored an apologetic article in Commentary aimed at denyingthat neoconservative foreign policy prescriptions are tailored to benefit Israel and

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MacDonaldthat imputations to that effect amount to “anti-Semitism.”41 These accusations arenotable for uniformly failing to honestly address the Jewish motivations andcommitments of neoconservatives, the topic of a later section.
Finally, the wider Jewish community provides financial support for intellectualand political movements, as in the case of psychoanalysis, where the Jewish
community signed on as patients and as consumers of psychoanalytic literature.42
This has also been the case with neoconservatism, as noted by Gary North:With respect to the close connection between Jews and neoconservatism, it isworth citing [Robert] Nisbet’s assessment of the revival of his academic career
after 1965. His only book, The Quest for Community (Oxford UP, 1953), had comeback into print in paperback in 1962 as Community and Power. He then began towrite for the neoconservative journals. Immediately, there were contracts for
him to write a series of books on conservatism, history, and culture, beginningwith The Sociological Tradition, published in 1966 by Basic Books, the newly
created neoconservative publishing house. Sometime in the late 1960’s, he told
me: “I became an in-house sociologist for the Commentary-Public Interest crowd.
Jews buy lots of academic books in America.” Some things are obvious but
unstated. He could follow the money: book royalties. So could his publishers.43

The support of the wider Jewish community and the elaborate
neoconservative infrastructure in the media and thinktankdom provide
irresistible professional opportunities for Jews and non-Jews alike. I am notsaying that people like Nisbet don’t believe what they write in neoconservative
publications. I am simply saying that having opinions that are attractive toneoconservatives can be very lucrative and professionally rewarding.
In the following I will first trace the historical roots of neoconservatism. Thisis followed by portraits of several important neoconservatives that focus on their
Jewish identities and their connections to pro-Israel activism.

HISTORICAL ROOTS OF NEOCONSERVATISM
COMING TO NEOCONSERVATISM FROM THE FAR LEFT
All twentieth century Jewish intellectual and political movements stem fromthe deep involvement of Jews with the left. However, beginning in the late 1920s,
when the followers of Leon Trotsky broke off from the mainstream communist
movement, the Jewish left has not been unified. By all accounts the major figure
linking Trotsky and the neoconservative movement is Max Shachtman, a Jewborn in Poland in 1904 but brought to the U.S. as an infant. Like other leftists
during the 1920s, Shachtman was enthusiastic about the Soviet Union, writing in
1923 that it was “a brilliant red light in the darkness of capitalist gloom.”44
Shachtman began as a follower of James P. Cannon,45 who became converted to
Trotsky’s view that the Soviet Union should actively foment revolution.
The Trotskyist movement had a Jewish milieu as Shachtman attracted young
Jewish disciples—the familiar rabbi/disciple model of Jewish intellectual
movements: “Youngsters around Shachtman made little effort to hide their New
York background or intellectual skills and tastes. Years later they could still hear

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Shachtman’s voice in one another’s speeches.”46 To a much greater extent than theCommunist Party, which was much larger and was committed to following theSoviet line, the Trotskyists survived as a small group centered aroundcharismatic leaders like Shachtman, who paid homage to the famous Trotsky,
who lurked in the background as an exile from the USSR living in Mexico. In the
Jewish milieu of the movement, Shachtman was much admired as a speakerbecause of his ability in debate and in polemics. He became the quintessential
rabbinical guru—the leader of a close, psychologically intense group: “He would
hug them and kiss [his followers]. He would pinch both their cheeks, hard, in ahabit that some felt blended sadism and affection.”47
Trotskyists took seriously the Marxist idea that the proletarian socialist
revolution should occur first in the economically advanced societies of the Westrather than in backward Russia or China. They also thought that a revolution only in
Russia was doomed to failure because the success of socialism in Russia depended
inevitably on the world economy. The conclusion of this line of logic was that Marxists
should advocate a permanent revolution that would sweep away capitalism
completely rather than concentrate on building socialism in the Soviet Union.
Shachtman broke with Trotsky over defense of the Soviet Union in World War
II, setting out to develop his own brand of “third camp Marxism” that followed
James Burnham in stressing internal democracy and analyzing the USSR as“bureaucratic collectivism.” In 1939–1941, Shachtman battled leftist intellectuals
like Sidney Hook, Max Eastman, and Dwight Macdonald, who were rejecting not
only Stalinism but also Trotskyism as insufficiently open and democratic; theyalso saw Trotsky himself as guilty of some of the worst excesses of the early
Bolshevik regime, especially his banning of opposition parties and his actions in
crushing the Kronstadt sailors who had called for democracy. Shachtman
defended an open, democratic version of Marxism but was concerned that his
critics were abandoning socialism—throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Hook, Eastman, Burnham, and Macdonald therefore constituted a “rightist”
force within the anti-Stalinist left; it is this force that may with greater accuracy belabeled as one of the immediate intellectual ancestors of neoconservatism. By 1940,
Macdonald was Shachtman’s only link to the Partisan Review crowd of the New YorkIntellectuals—another predominantly Jewish group—and the link became tenuous.
James Burnham also broke with Shachtman in 1940. By 1941 Burnham rejected
Stalinism, fascism, and even the New Deal as bureaucratic menaces, staking out aposition characterized by “juridical defense, his criticism of managerial politicaltendencies, and his own defence of liberty,”48 eventually becoming a fixture at
National Review in the decades before it became a neoconservative journal.
Shachtman himself became a Cold Warrior and social democrat in the late
1940s, attempting to build an all-inclusive left while his erstwhile Trotskyist allies
in the Fourth International were bent on continuing their isolation in separate
factions on the left. During this period, Shachtman saw the Stalinist takeover in
Eastern Europe as a far greater threat than U.S. power, a prelude to his support

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for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and the U.S. role in Vietnam. By the 1950s herejected revolutionary socialism and stopped calling himself a Trotskyist;49
during the 1960s he saw the Democratic Party as the path to social democracy,
while nevertheless retaining some commitment to Marxism and socialism.
“Though he would insist for the rest of his life that he had found the keys to
Marxism in his era, he was recutting the keys as he went along. In the early 1950s
he had spoken, written, and acted as a left-wing, though no longer revolutionary,socialist. By the late 1950s he moved into the mainstream of U.S. social
democracy”50 with a strategy of pushing big business and white Southerners outof the Democratic Party (the converse of Nixon’s “Southern strategy” for theRepublican Party). In the 1960s “he suggested more openly than ever before that
U.S. power could be used to promote democracy in the third world”51—a viewthat aligns him with later neoconservatives.
In the 1960s, Michael Harrington, author of the influential The Other America,
became the best known Shachtmanite, but they diverged when Harrington
showed more sympathy toward the emerging multicultural, antiwar, feminist,“New Politics” influence in the Democratic Party while Shachtman remainedcommitted to the Democrats as the party of organized labor and anticommunism.52 Shachtman became an enemy of the New Left, which he saw asoverly apologetic toward the Soviet Union. “As I watch the New Left, I simply
weep. If somebody set out to take the errors and stupidities of the Old Left andmultiplied them to the nth degree, you would have the New Left of today.”53
This was linked to disagreements with Irving Howe, editor of Dissent, whopublished a wide range of authors, including Harrington, although Shachtman
followers Carl Gershman and Tom Kahn remained on the editorial board ofDissent until 1971–1972.
The main link between Shachtman and the political mainstream was theinfluence he and his followers had on the AFL-CIO. In 1972, shortly before his
death, Shachtman, “as an open anti-communist and supporter of both theVietnam War and Zionism,”54 backed Senator Henry Jackson in the Democraticpresidential primary. Jackson was a strong supporter of Israel (see below), andby this time support for Israel had “become a litmus test for Shachtmanites.”55
Jackson, who was closely associated with the AFL-CIO, hired Tom Kahn, who
had become a Shachtman follower in the 1950s. Kahn was executive secretary of
the Shachtmanite League for Industrial Democracy, headed at the time by Tom
Harrington, and he was also the head of the Department of International Affairsof the AFL-CIO, where he was an “obsessive promoter of Israel”56 to the pointthat the AFL-CIO became the world’s largest non-Jewish holder of Israel bonds.
His department had a budget of around $40 million, most of which was provided
by the federally funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED).57 During
the Reagan administration, the AFL-CIO received approximately 40 percent ofavailable funding from the NED, while no other funded group received morethan 10 percent. That imbalance has prompted speculation that NED is

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effectively in the hands of the Social Democrats USA—Shachtman’s political heir(see below)—the membership of which today includes both NED president Carl
Gershman and a number of AFL-CIO officials involved with the endowment.
In 1972, under the leadership of Carl Gershman and the Shachtmanites, theSocialist Party USA changed its name to Social Democrats USA.58 Working with
Jackson, SD/USA’s members achieved little political power because of thedominance of the New Politics wing of the Democratic Party, with its strong New
Left influence from the 1960s. With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, however,key figures from SD/USA achieved positions of power and influence both in thelabor movement and in the government. Among the latter were Reagan-era
appointees such as United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, Assistant
Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Elliott Abrams (son-in-law of Podhoretz
and Decter), Geneva arms talks negotiator Max Kampelman (aide to Hubert
Humphrey and founding member of JINSA; he remains on its advisory board),
and Gershman, who was an aide to UN Ambassador Kirkpatrick and head of theNED.59 Other Shachtmanites in the Reagan administration included Joshua
Muravchik, a member of SD/USA’s National Committee, who wrote articles
defending Reagan’s foreign policy, and Penn Kemble, an SD/USA vicechairman, who headed Prodemca, an influential lobbying group for the Contra
opponents of the leftist Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Abrams and Muravchik havecontinued to play an important role in neocon circles in the George W. Bushadministration (see below). In addition to being associated with SD/USA,60
Kirkpatrick has strong neocon credentials. She is on the JINSA Board and is asenior fellow at the AEI. She also has received several awards from Jewish
organizations, including the Defender of Israel Award [New York], given to nonJews who stand up for the Jewish people (other neocon recipients include Henry
Jackson and Bayard Rustin), the Humanitarian Award of B’nai B’rith, and the50th Anniversary Friend of Zion Award from the prime minister of Israel(1998).61 Kirkpatrick’s late husband Evron was a promoter of Hubert Humphrey
and long-time collaborator of neocon godfather Irving Kristol.
During the Reagan Administration, Lane Kirkland, the head of the AFLCIO from 1979 to 1995, was also a Shachtmanite and an officer of the SD/USA.
As secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO during the 1970s, Kirkland was amember of the Committee on the Present Danger, a group of
neoconservatives in which “prominent Jackson supporters, advisers, andadmirers from both sides of the aisle predominated.”62 Kirkland gave aeulogy at Henry Jackson’s funeral. Kirkland was not a Jew but was married
to a Jew and, like Jackson, had very close ties to Jews: “Throughout his career
Kirkland maintained a special affection for the struggle of the Jews. It may be
the result of his marriage to Irena [nee Neumann in 1973—his second
marriage], a Czech survivor of the Holocaust and an inspiring figure in her
own right. Or it may be because he recognized…that the cause of the Jews andthe cause of labor have been inseparable.”63

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MacDonaldCarl Gershman remains head of the NED, which supports the U.S.-led
invasion and nation-building effort in Iraq.64 The general line of the NED is that
Arab countries should “get over” the Arab-Israeli conflict and embracedemocracy, Israel, and the United States. In reporting on talks withrepresentatives of the Jewish community in Turkey, Gershman frames the issues
in terms of ending anti-Semitism in Turkey by destroying Al Qaeda; there is no
criticism of the role of Israel and its policies in producing hatred throughout theregion.65 During the 1980s, the NED supported nonviolent strategies to end
apartheid in South Africa in association with the A. Philip Randolph Institute,headed by longtime civil rights activist and SD/USA neocon Bayard Rustin.66
Critics of the NED, such as Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex), have complained that the NED“is nothing more than a costly program that takes U.S. taxpayer funds to promotefavored politicians and political parties abroad.”67 Paul suggests that the NED’s
support of former Communists reflects Gershman’s leftist background.
In general, at the present time SD/USA continues to support organized labor
domestically and to take an active interest in using U.S. power to spreaddemocracy abroad. A resolution of January 2003 stated that the main conflict inthe world was not between Islam and the West but between democratic andnondemocratic governments, with Israel being the only democracy in the Middle
East.68 The SD/USA strongly supports democratic nation building in Iraq.
A prominent member of SD/USA is Joshua Muravchik. A member of the SD/
USA National Advisory Council, Muravchik is also a member of the advisory board
of JINSA, a resident scholar at the AEI, and an adjunct scholar at WINEP. His book
Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism69 views socialism critically, but
advocates a reformist social democracy that falls short of socialism; he viewssocialism as a failed religion that is relatively poor at creating wealth and isincompatible with very powerful human desires for private ownership.
Another prominent member of SD/USA is Max Kampelman, whose article,
posted on the SD/USA website, makes the standard neoconservative complaints
about the UN dating from the 1970s, especially regarding its treatment of Israel:
Since 1964,…the U.N. Security Council has passed 88 resolutions against
Israel—the only democracy in the area—and the General Assembly has passed
more than 400 such resolutions, including one in 1975 declaring “Zionism as aform of racism.” When the terrorist leader of the Palestinians, Arafat, spoke in1974 to the General Assembly, he did so wearing a pistol on his hip and received
a standing ovation. While totalitarian and repressive regimes are eligible anddo serve on the U.N. Security Council, democratic Israel is barred by U.N. rules
from serving in that senior body.70

NEOCONSERVATIVES AS A CONTINUATION OF
COLD WAR LIBERALISM’S “VITAL CENTER”
The other strand that merged into neoconservatism stems from Cold War
liberalism, which became dominant within the Democratic Party during theTruman administration. It remained dominant until the rise of the New Politics

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influence in the party during the 1960s, culminating in the presidential nomination ofGeorge McGovern in 1972.71 In the late 1940s, a key organization was Americans for
Democratic Action, associated with such figures as Reinhold Niebuhr, Hubert
Humphrey, and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., whose book, The Vital Center (1947),
distilled a liberal anticommunist perspective which combined vigorous containmentof communism with “the struggle within our country against oppression andstagnation.”72 This general perspective was also evident in the Congress for Cultural
Freedom, whose central figure was Sidney Hook.73 The CCF was a group of
anticommunist intellectuals organized in 1950 and funded by the CIA, and included
a number of prominent liberals, such as Schlesinger.
A new wrinkle, in comparison to earlier Jewish intellectual and political movements
discussed in Culture of Critique, has been that the central figures, Norman Podhoretz and
Irving Kristol, have operated not so much as intellectual gurus in the manner of Freud orBoas or even Shachtman, but more as promoters and publicists of views which they saw
as advancing Jewish interests. Podhoretz’s Commentary (published by the American
Jewish Committee) and Kristol’s The Public Interest became clearinghouses forneoconservative ideas, but many of the articles were written by people with strong
academic credentials. For example, in the area of foreign policy Robert W. Tucker andWalter Laqueur appeared in these journals as critics of liberal foreign policy.74 Their work
updated the anticommunist tradition of the “vital center” by taking account of Western
weakness apparent in the New Politics liberalism of the Democratic Party and theAmerican left, as well as the anti-Western posturing of the third world.75
This “vital center” intellectual framework typified key neoconservatives at theorigin of the movement in the late 1960s, including the two most pivotal figures,
Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. In the area of foreign policy, a primaryconcern of Jewish neoconservatives from the 1960s–1980s was the safety andprosperity of Israel, at a time when the Soviet Union was seen as hostile to Jews
within its borders and was making alliances with Arab regimes against Israel.
As they saw it, the world was gravely threatened by a totalitarian Soviet Union
with aggressive outposts around the world and a Third World corrupted by
vicious anti-Semitism…. A major project of Moynihan, Kirkpatrick, and otherneoconservatives in and out of government was the defense of Israel.… By themid-1970s, Israel was also under fire from the Soviet Union and the Third
World and much of the West. The United States was the one exception, and theneoconservatives—stressing that Israel was a just, democratic state
constantly threatened by vicious and aggressive neighbors—sought to deepenand strengthen this support.76

Irving Kristol is quite frank in his view that the U.S. should support Israel
even if it is not in its national interest to do so:
Large nations, whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear
and the United States of today, inevitably have ideological interests in addition
to more material concerns…. That is why we feel it necessary to defend Israel
today, when its survival is threatened. No complicated geopolitical
calculations of national interest are necessary.77

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MacDonaldA watershed event in neoconservatism was the statement of November 1975
by UN Ambassador Daniel P. Moynihan in response to the UN resolution
equating Zionism with racism. Moynihan, whose work in the UN made him aneocon icon and soon a senator from New York,78 argued against the“discredited” notion that “there are significant biological differences among
clearly identifiable groups, and that these differences establish, in effect, different
levels of humanity.”79 (In this regard Moynihan may not have been entirely
candid, since he appears to have been much impressed by Arthur Jensen’s
research on race differences in intelligence. As an advisor to President Nixon on
domestic affairs, one of Moynihan’s jobs was to keep Nixon abreast of Jensen’s
research.80) In his UN speech, Moynihan ascribed the idea that Jews are a race totheorists like Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose motivation was to find “newjustifications…for excluding and persecuting Jews” in an era in which religious
ideology was losing its power to do so. Moynihan describes Zionism as a“National Liberation Movement,” but one with no genetic basis: “Zionists
defined themselves merely as Jews, and declared to be Jewish anyone born of a
Jewish mother or—and this is the absolutely crucial fact—anyone who converted
to Judaism.”81 Moynihan describes the Zionist movement as composed of a wide
range of “racial stocks” (quotation marks in original)—“black Jews, brown Jews,
white Jews, Jews from the Orient and Jews from the West.”
Obviously, there is much to disagree with in these ideas. Jewish racial theorists,
among them Zionists like Arthur Ruppin and Vladimir Jabotinsky (the hero of the
Likud Party throughout its history) were in the forefront of racial theorizing about
Jews from the late nineteenth century onwards.82 And there is a great deal ofevidence that Jews, including most notably Orthodox and Conservative Jews andmuch of the settler movement that constitutes the vanguard of Zionism today, havebeen and continue to be vitally interested in maintaining their ethnic integrity.83(Indeed, as discussed below, Elliott Abrams has been a prominent neoconservative
voice in favor of Jews marrying Jews and retaining their ethnic cohesion.)
Nevertheless, Moynihan’s speech is revealing in its depiction of Judaism as
unconcerned about its ethnic cohesion, and for its denial of the biological reality ofrace. In general, neoconservatives have been staunch promoters of the racial zeitgeistof post-WWII liberal America. Indeed, as typical Cold War liberals up to the end of
the 1960s, many of the older neocons were in the forefront of the racial revolution in
the United States. It is also noteworthy that Moynihan’s UN speech is typical of thelarge apologetic literature by Jewish activists and intellectuals in response to the“Zionism is racism” resolution, of which The Myth of the Jewish Race by Raphael Pataiand Jennifer Patai Wing is perhaps the best-known example.84
The flagship neoconservative magazine Commentary, under the editorship of
Norman Podhoretz, has published many articles defending Israel. Ruth Wisse’s
1981 Commentary article “The Delegitimation of Israel” is described by Mark
Gerson as “perhaps the best expression” of the neoconservative view that Israel“was a just, democratic state constantly threatened by vicious and aggressive

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neighbors.”85 Wisse views hostility toward Israel as another example of the long
history of anti-Jewish rhetoric that seeks to delegitimize Judaism.86 This tradition issaid to have begun with the Christian beliefs that Jews ought to be relegated to an
inferior position because they had rejected Christ. This tradition culminated intwentieth century Europe in hatred directed at secular Jews because of their failure
to assimilate completely to European culture. The result was the Holocaust, whichwas “from the standpoint of its perpetrators and collaborators successful beyond
belief.”87 Israel, then, is an attempt at normalization in which Jews would be justanother country fending for itself and seeking stability; it “should [also] have been theend of anti-Semitism, and the Jews may in any case be pardoned for feeling that they
had earned a moment of rest in history.”88 But the Arab countries never accepted thelegitimacy of Israel, not only with their wars against the Jewish state, but also by the“Zionism as racism” UN resolution, which “institutionalized anti-Semitism ininternational politics.”89 Wisse criticizes New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis
for criticizing Israeli policies while failing to similarly criticize Arab states that fail toembody Western ideals of freedom of expression and respect for minority rights.
Wisse also faults certain American Jewish organizations and liberal Jews forcriticizing the policies of the government of Menachem Begin.90
The article stands out for its cartoonish view that the history of anti-Jewish
attitudes can be explained with broad generalizations according to which the
behavior and attitudes of Jews are completely irrelevant for understanding thehistory of anti-Semitism. The message of the article is that Jews as innocent victimsof the irrational hatred of Europeans have a claim for “a respite” from history thatArabs are bound to honor by allowing the dispossession of the Palestinians. The
article is also a testimony to the sea change among American Jews in their support
for the Likud Party and its expansionist policies in Israel. Since Wisse’s article
appeared in 1981, the positive attitudes toward the Likud Party characteristic of the
neoconservatives have become the mainstream view of the organized American
Jewish community, and the liberal Jewish critics attacked by Wisse have beenrelegated to the fringe of the American Jewish community.91
In the area of domestic policy, Jewish neoconservatives were motivated byconcerns that the radicalism of the New Left (many of whom were Jews)
compromised Jewish interests as a highly intelligent, upwardly mobile group.
Although Jews were major allies of blacks in the civil rights movement, by the late1960s many Jews bitterly opposed black efforts at community control of schools
in New York, because they threatened Jewish hegemony in the educational
system, including the teachers’ union.92 Black-Jewish interests also diverged
when affirmative action and quotas for black college admission became a divisive
issue in the 1970s.93 It was not only neoconservatives who worried about
affirmative action: The main Jewish activist groups—the AJCommittee, the
AJCongress, and the ADL—sided with Bakke in a landmark case on racial quota
systems in the University of California–Davis medical school, thereby promoting
their own interests as a highly intelligent minority living in a meritocracy.94

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Indeed, some neoconservatives, despite their record of youthful radicalism andsupport for the civil rights movement, began to see Jewish interests as bound up withthose of the middle class. As Nathan Glazer noted in 1969, commenting on black antiSemitism and the murderous urges of the New Left toward the middle class:Anti-Semitism is only part of this whole syndrome, for if the members of the
middle class do not deserve to hold on to their property, their positions, or even
their lives, then certainly the Jews, the most middle-class of all, are going to beplaced at the head of the column marked for liquidation.95

The New Left also tended to have negative attitudes toward Israel, with theresult that many Jewish radicals eventually abandoned the left. In the late 1960s,
the black Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee described Zionism as“racist colonialism”96 which massacred and oppressed Arabs. In Jewish eyes, agreat many black leaders, including Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Touré), Jesse
Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, and Andrew Young, were seen as entirely too proPalestinian. (Young lost his position as UN ambassador because he engaged insecret negotiations with the Palestinians.) During the 1960s, expressions ofsolidarity with the Palestinians by radical blacks, some of whom had adopted theMuslim religion, became a focus of neoconservative ire and resulted in many
Jewish New Leftists leaving the movement.97 Besides radical blacks, other
New Left figures, such as I. F. Stone and Noam Chomsky (both Jews), also
criticized Israel and were perceived by neocons as taking a pro-Soviet line.98
The origins of neoconservatism as a Jewish movement are thus linked to thefact that the left, including the Soviet Union and leftist radicals in the UnitedStates, had become anti-Zionist.
In 1970 Podhoretz transformed Commentary into a weapon against the
New Left.99 In December of that year National Review began, warily at first, towelcome neocons into the conservative tent, stating in 1971, “We will bedelighted when the new realism manifested in these articles is applied byCommentary to the full range of national and international issues.”100 Irving
Kristol supported Nixon in 1972 and became a Republican about ten years
before most neocons made the switch. Nevertheless, even in the 1990s the
neocons “continued to be distinct from traditional Midwestern and southernconservatives for their northeastern roots, combative style, andsecularism”101 — all ways of saying that neoconservatism retained its
fundamentally Jewish milieu.
The fault lines between neoconservatives and paleoconservatives wereapparent during the Reagan administration in the battle over the appointment of
the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, eventually won by the
neoconservative Bill Bennett. The campaign featured smear tactics and innuendo
aimed at M. E. Bradford, an academic literary critic and defender of Southern
agrarian culture who was favored by traditional conservatives. After neocons
accused him of being a “virulent racist” and an admirer of Hitler, Bradford was
eventually rejected as a potential liability to the administration.102

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The entry of the neoconservatives into the conservative mainstream did
not, therefore, proceed without a struggle. Samuel Francis witnessed much of
the early infighting among conservatives, won eventually by the neocons.
Francis recounts the “catalog of neoconservative efforts not merely to debate,
criticize, and refute the ideas of traditional conservatism but to denounce,
vilify, and harm the careers of those Old Right figures and institutions they
have targeted.”103
There are countless stories of how neoconservatives have succeeded inentering conservative institutions, forcing out or demoting traditional
conservatives, and changing the positions and philosophy of such institutions
in neoconservative directions.… Writers like M. E. Bradford, Joseph Sobran,
Pat Buchanan, and Russell Kirk, and institutions like Chronicles, the Rockford
Institute, the Philadelphia Society, and the Intercollegiate Studies Institutehave been among the most respected and distinguished names in American
conservatism. The dedication of their neoconservative enemies to driving
them out of the movement they have taken over and demonizing them as
marginal and dangerous figures has no legitimate basis in reality. It is clear
evidence of the ulterior aspirations of those behind neoconservatism to
dominate and subvert American conservatism from its original purposes andagenda and turn it to other purposes.… What neoconservatives really dislike
about their “allies” among traditional conservatives is simply the fact that theconservatives are conservatives at all—that they support “this notion of a
Christian civilization,” as Midge Decter put it, that they oppose mass
immigration, that they criticize Martin Luther King and reject the racialdispossession of white Western culture, that they support or approve of Joe
McCarthy, that they entertain doubts or strong disagreement over American
foreign policy in the Middle East, that they oppose reckless involvement inforeign wars and foreign entanglements, and that, in company with theFounding Fathers of the United States, they reject the concept of a puredemocracy and the belief that the United States is or should evolve toward it.104

Most notably, neoconservatives have been staunch supporters of arguably
the most destructive force associated with the left in the twentieth century—
massive non-European immigration. Support for massive non-European
immigration has spanned the Jewish political spectrum throughout the twentiethcentury to the present. A principal motivation of the organized Jewish
community for encouraging such immigration has involved a deeply felt
animosity toward the people and culture responsible for the immigration
restriction of 1924–1965—“this notion of a Christian civilization.”105 As
neoconservative Ben Wattenberg has famously written, “The nonEuropeanization of America is heartening news of an almost transcendental
quality.”106 The only exception—thus far without any influence—is that since 9/11
some Jewish activists, including neoconservative Daniel Pipes, head of the MEF, andStephen Steinlight, senior fellow of the American Jewish Committee, have
opposed Muslim—and only Muslim—immigration because of possible effects
on pro-Israel sentiment in the U.S.107

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In general, neoconservatives have been far more attached to Jewish
interests, and especially the interests of Israel, than to any other identifiableinterest. It is revealing that as the war in Iraq has become an expensive
quagmire in both lives and money, Bill Kristol has become willing to abandon
the neoconservatives’ alliance with traditional conservatives by allying withJohn Kerry and the Democratic Party. This is because Kerry has promised toincrease troop strength and retain the commitment to Iraq, and because Kerryhas declared that he has “a 100 percent record—not a 99, a 100 percent
record—of sustaining the special relationship and friendship that we havewith Israel.”108 As Pat Buchanan notes, the fact that John Kerry “backs partial
birth abortion, quotas, raising taxes, homosexual unions, liberals on theSupreme Court and has a voting record to the left of Teddy Kennedy” is lessimportant than his stand on the fundamental issue of a foreign policy that isin the interest of Israel.109

THE FALL OF HENRY JACKSON AND THE RISE
OF NEOCONSERVATISM IN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY
The neoconservative takeover of the Republican Party and of American
conservatism in general would have been unnecessary had not the Democratic
Party shifted markedly to the left in the late 1960s. Henry Jackson is the pivotal
figure in the defection of the neocons from the Democratic Party to the
Republican Party—the person whose political fortunes most determined the later
trajectory of neoconservatism. Jackson embodied the political attitudes andambitions of a Jewish political network that saw Jewish interests as combining
traditionally liberal social policies of the civil rights and Great Society era (butstopping short of advocating quota-type affirmative action policies or minority
ethnic nationalism) with a Cold War posture that was at once aggressively proIsrael and anticommunist at a time when the Soviet Union was perceived as themost powerful enemy of Israel. This “Cold War liberal” faction was dominant in
the Democratic Party until 1972 and the nomination of George McGovern. Afterthe defeat of McGovern, the neoconservatives founded the Committee for a
Democratic Majority, whose attempt to resuscitate the Cold War coalition of the
Democratic Party had a strong representation of Shachtmanite labor leaders aswell as people centered around Podhoretz’s Commentary: Podhoretz; Ben
Wattenberg (who wrote speeches for Hubert Humphrey and was an aide toJackson); Midge Decter; Max Kampelman (see above); Penn Kemble of the SD/
USA; Jeane Kirkpatrick (who began writing for Commentary during this period);sociologists Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, and Seymour Martin Lipset; Michael
Novak; Soviet expert Richard Pipes; and Albert Shanker, president of theAmerican Federation of Teachers. Nevertheless, “by the end of 1974, theneoconservatives appeared to have reached a political dead end. As guardians ofvital center liberalism, they had become a minority faction within the Democratic
Party, unable to do more than protest the party’s leftward drift.”110

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The basic story line is that after failing again in 1976 and 1980 to gain thepresidential nomination for a candidate who represented their views, this largely
Jewish segment of political activists—now known as neoconservatives—switched allegiance to the Republican Party. The neocons had considerable
influence in the Reagan years but less in the George H. W. Bush administration,
only to become a critically important force in the foreign policy of the George W.
Bush administration where, in the absence of a threat from the Soviet Union,
neoconservatives have attempted to use the power of the United States tofundamentally alter the political landscape of the Middle East.
Henry Jackson was an ideal vehicle for this role as champion of Jewish interests.
He was a very conscious philosemite: “My mother was a Christian who believed ina strong Judaism. She taught me to respect the Jews, help the Jews! It was a lesson
I never forgot.”111 Jackson also had very positive personal experiences with Jews
during his youth. During his college years he was the beneficiary of generosity froma Jew who allowed him to use a car to commute to college, and he developed lifelong
friendships with two Jews, Stan Golub and Paul Friedlander. He was also horrified
after seeing Buchenwald, the WWII German concentration camp, an experiencethat made him more determined to help Israel and Jews.
Entering Congress in 1940, Jackson was a strong supporter of Israel from its
beginnings in 1948. By the 1970s he was widely viewed as Israel’s best friend in
Congress: “Jackson’s devotion to Israel made Nixon and Kissinger’s look
tepid.”112 The Jackson-Vanik Amendment linking U.S.-Soviet trade to the abilityof Jews to emigrate from the Soviet Union was passed over strenuous opposition
from the Nixon administration. And despite developing a reputation as the“Senator from Boeing,” Jackson opposed the sale of Boeing-made AWACS to
Saudi Arabia because of the possibility that they might harm the interests of
Israel.
Jackson’s experience of the Depression made him a liberal, deeply empathetic
toward the suffering that was so common during the period. He defined himself
as “vigilantly internationalist and anticommunist abroad but statist at home,committed to realizing the New Deal–Fair Deal vision of a strong, active federal
government presiding over the economy, preserving and enhancing welfare
protection, and extending civil rights.”113 These attitudes of Jackson, andparticularly his attitudes on foreign policy, brought him into the orbit of Jewish
neoconservatives who held similar attitudes on domestic issues and whose
attitudes on foreign policy stemmed fundamentally from their devotion to thecause of Israel:
Jackson’s visceral anticommunism and antitotalitarianism…brought him into
the orbit of Jewish neoconservatives despite the subtle but importantdistinction in their outlook. The senator viewed the threat to Israel as amanifestation of the totalitarian threat he considered paramount. Someneoconservatives viewed Soviet totalitarianism as the threat to Israel they
considered paramount.114

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Jackson had developed close ties with a number of neocons who would later
become important. Richard Perle was Jackson’s most important national security
advisor between 1969 and 1979, and Jackson maintained close relations with Paul
Wolfowitz, who began his career in Washington working with Perle in Jackson’s
office. Jackson employed Perle even after credible evidence surfaced that he had
spied for Israel: An FBI wiretap on the Israeli Embassy revealed Perle discussingclassified information that had been supplied to him by someone on the National
Security Council staff, presumably Helmut (“Hal”) Sonnenfeldt. (Sonnenfeldt,
who was Jewish, “was known from previous wiretaps to have close ties to theIsraelis as well as to Perle …. [He] had been repeatedly investigated by the FBI forother suspected leaks early in his career.”115) As indicated below, several
prominent neocons have been investigated on credible charges of spying for
Israel: Perle, Wolfowitz, Stephen Bryen, Douglas Feith, and Michael Ledeen.
Neocon Frank Gaffney, the non-Jewish president of the CSP, a neocon thinktank,
was also a Jackson aide. Jackson was also close to Bernard Lewis of Princeton
University; Lewis is a Jewish expert on the Middle East who has had an important
influence on the neocons in the George W. Bush administration as well as close
ties to Israel.116
In the 1970s Jackson was involved with two of the most important neocongroups of the period. In 1976 he convened Team B, headed by Richard Pipes (aHarvard University Soviet expert), and including Paul Nitze, Wolfowitz, andSeymour Weiss (former director of the State Department’s Bureau of PoliticalMilitary Affairs). Albert Wohlstetter, who was Wolfowitz’s Ph.D. advisor at the
University of Chicago, was a major catalyst for Team B. Jackson was also close to
the Committee on the Present Danger. Formed in November 1976, the committee
was a Who’s Who of Jackson supporters, advisors, confidants, and admirers fromboth the Democratic and Republican parties, and included several members
associated with the SD/USA: Paul Nitze, Eugene Rostow, Jeane Kirkpatrick,
Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Max Kampelman, Lane Kirkland, Richard Pipes,
Seymour Martin Lipset, Bayard Rustin, and Norman Podhoretz. CPD was a sortof halfway house for Democratic neocons sliding toward the Republican Party.
The result was that all the important neocons backed Jackson for president in1972 and 1976. Jackson commanded a great deal of financial support from theJewish community in Hollywood and elsewhere because of his strong support for
Israel, but he failed to win the 1976 Democratic nomination, despite having moremoney than his rivals. After Jackson’s defeat and the ascendance of the leftist
tendencies of the Carter administration, many of Jackson’s allies went to work for
Reagan with Jackson’s tacit approval, with the result that they were frozen out of
the Democratic Party once Carter was defeated.117 A large part of thedisillusionment of Jackson and his followers stemmed from the Carter
administration’s attitude toward Israel. Carter alienated American Jews by his
proposals for a more evenhanded policy toward Israel, in which Israel would
return to its 1967 borders in exchange for peace with the Arabs. Jews were also

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concerned because of the Andrew Young incident. (Young, the U.S. Ambassador
to the UN and an African American, had been fired after failing to disclose to theState Department details of his unauthorized meeting with representatives of thePalestinians. Blacks charged that Jews were responsible for Young’s firing.)
In October 1977 the Carter administration, in a joint communiqué with the Soviet
Union, suggested Israel pull back to the 1967 borders: “Jackson joined the ferocious
attack on the administration that ensued from devotees of Kissinger’s incremental
approach and from Israel’s supporters in the United States. He continued to regard
unswerving U.S. support for Israel as not only a moral but a strategic imperative, andto insist that the maintenance of a strong, secure, militarily powerful Israel impeded
rather than facilitated Soviet penetration of the Middle East.”118 Jackson wasparticularly fond of pointing to maps of Israel showing how narrow Israel’s borders
had been before its 1967 conquests. For his part, Carter threatened to ask theAmerican people “to choose between those who supported the national interest andthose who supported a foreign interest such as Israel.”119
There was one last attempt to mend the fences between the neocons and the
Democrats, a 1980 White House meeting between Carter and major neocons, including
Jeane Kirkpatrick, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Ben Wattenberg, Elliott Abrams(aide to neocon favorite Patrick Moynihan120), Max Kampelman, and Penn Kemble. The
meeting, which discussed attitudes toward the USSR, did not go well, and “henceforth,their disdain for Carter and dislike of Kennedy would impel the neoconservatives to turnaway from the Democratic Party and vote for Reagan.”121 “They had hoped to find a new
Truman to rally around, a Democrat to promote their liberal ideas at home while
fighting the cold war abroad. Not finding one, they embraced the Republican party
and Ronald Reagan as the best alternative.”122
Perle left Jackson’s office in March 1980 to go into business with John F.
Lehman (Secretary of the Navy during the Reagan administration and, as of thiswriting [2004] a member of the panel investigating the events of 9/11). Quite afew neocons assumed positions in the Reagan administration in the area of
defense and foreign policy: Kirkpatrick as UN ambassador (Kirkpatrick hired
Joshua Muravchik, Kenneth Adelman, and Carl Gershman as deputies); Perle as
Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy (Perle hired Frank
Gaffney and Douglas Feith); Elliott Abrams as Assistant Secretary of State for
Human Rights Affairs; Max Kampelman as U.S. ambassador to the Helsinki
human rights conference and later as chief U.S. arms negotiator); Wolfowitz as
Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian affairs. Another Jewish neocon,
Richard Pipes, was influential in putting together a paper on grand strategy
toward the USSR. Nevertheless, Reagan kept the neocons at arm’s length andceased heeding their advice. He favored developing trust and confidence with
Soviet leaders rather than escalating tensions by threats of aggressive action.123
Bill Clinton courted neocons who had defected to Reagan. Perle, Kirkpatrick,and Abrams remained Republicans, but thirty-three “moderate andneoconservative foreign policy experts” endorsed Clinton in 1992, including

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Nitze, Kemble, and Muravchik, although Muravchik and several others later
repudiated their endorsement, saying that Clinton had returned to the left liberalforeign policy of the Democrats since McGovern.124 Ben Wattenberg and Robert
Strauss remained Democrats “who have not written off the Jackson tradition in
their own party.”125 Senator Joseph Lieberman, the Democrat’s 2000 vicepresidential nominee is the heir to this tradition.

RESPONDING TO THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION
With the end of the Cold War, neoconservatives at first advocated a reducedrole for the U.S., but this stance switched gradually to the view that U.S. interests
required the vigorous promotion of democracy in the rest of the world.126 Thisaggressively pro-democracy theme, which appears first in the writings ofCharles Krauthammer and then those of Elliot Abrams,127 eventually became anincessant drumbeat in the campaign for the war in Iraq. Krauthammer also
broached the now familiar themes of unilateral intervention and he emphasized
the danger that smaller states could develop weapons of mass destruction which
could be used to threaten world security.128
A cynic would argue that this newfound interest in democracy was tailor-madeas a program for advancing the interests of Israel. After all, Israel is advertised as the
only democracy in the Middle East, and democracy has a certain emotional appeal
for the United States, which has at times engaged in an idealistic foreign policy aimed
at furthering the cause of human rights in other countries. It is ironic that during theCold War the standard neocon criticism of President Carter’s foreign policy was that
it was overly sensitive to human rights in countries that were opposed to the Soviet
Union and insufficiently condemnatory of the human rights policies of the Soviet
Union. The classic expression of this view was Jeane Kirkpatrick’s 1979 Commentary
article, “Dictatorships and Double Standards.” In an essay that would have been
excellent reading prior to the invasion of Iraq, Kirkpatrick noted that in many
countries political power is tied to complex family and kinship networks resistant tomodernization. Nevertheless, “no idea holds greater sway in the mind of educatedAmericans than the belief that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime,
anywhere, under any circumstances.”129 Democracies are said to make heavy
demands on citizens in terms of participation and restraint, and developing
democracies is the work of “decades, if not centuries.”130 My view is that democracy
is a component of the uniquely Western suite of traits deriving from theevolution of Western peoples and their cultural history: monogamy, simple
family structure, individual rights against the state, representative government,
moral universalism, and science.131 This social structure cannot easily be
exported to other societies, and particularly to Middle Eastern societies whose
traditional cultures exhibit traits opposite to these.
It is revealing that, while neocons generally lost interest in Africa, Latin America,
and Eastern Europe after these areas were no longer points of contention in the Cold
War, there was no lessening of interest in the Middle East.132 Indeed,

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neoconservatives and Jews in general failed to support President George H.
W. Bush when, in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, his administrationpressured Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians and resisted a
proposal for $10 billion in loan guarantees for Israel. This occurred in thecontext of Secretary of State James A. Baker’s famous comment, “Fuck theJews. They didn’t vote for us.”133

NEOCONSERVATIVE PORTRAITS
As with the other Jewish intellectual movements I have studied,neoconservatives have a history of mutual admiration, close, mutually
supportive personal, professional, and familial relationships, and focusedcooperation in pursuit of common goals. For example, Norman Podhoretz, theformer editor of Commentary, is the father of John Podhoretz, a neoconservative
editor and columnist. Norman Podhoretz is also the father-in-law of Elliott
Abrams, the former head of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (aneoconservative think tank) and the director of Near Eastern affairs at the
National Security Council. Norman’s wife, Midge Decter, recently published ahagiographic biography of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, whose
number-two and number-three deputies at the Pentagon, respectively, are
Wolfowitz and Feith. Perle is a fellow at the AEI.134 He originally helped
Wolfowitz obtain a job with the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1973.
In 1982, Perle, as Deputy Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy,
hired Feith for a position as his Special Counsel, and then as Deputy Assistant
Secretary for Negotiations Policy. In 2001, Deputy Secretary of Defense
Wolfowitz helped Feith obtain an appointment as Undersecretary for Policy.
Feith then appointed Perle as chairman of the Defense Policy Board. This is only
the tip of a very large iceberg.

LEO STRAUSSLeo Strauss is an important influence on several important neoconservatives,
particularly Irving and Bill Kristol. Strauss was a classicist and politicalphilosopher at the University of Chicago. He had a very strong Jewish identityand viewed his philosophy as a means of ensuring Jewish survival in the
Diaspora.135 As Strauss himself noted, “I believe I can say, without any
exaggeration, that since a very, very early time the main theme of my reflections
has been what is called the ‘Jewish Question.’ ”136
Much of Strauss’s early writing was on Jewish issues, and a constant theme in
his writing was the idea that Western civilization was the product of the“energizing tension” between Athens and Jerusalem—Greek rationalism and theJewish emphasis on faith, revelation, and religious intensity.137 Although Strauss
believed that religion had effects on non-Jews that benefited Jews, there is little
doubt that Strauss viewed religious fervor as an indispensable element of Jewish
commitment and group loyalty—ethnocentrism by any other name:

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MacDonaldSome great love and loyalty to the Jewish people are in evidence in the life andworks of Strauss…. Strauss was a good Jew. He knew the dignity and worth oflove of one’s own. Love of the good, which is the same as love of the truth, ishigher than love of one’s own, but there is only one road to the truth, and it leads
through love of one’s own. Strauss showed his loyalty to things Jewish in a way
he was uniquely qualified to do, by showing generations of students how totreat Jewish texts with the utmost care and devotion. In this way he turned anumber of his Jewish students in the direction of becoming better Jews.138

Strauss believed that liberal, individualistic modern Western societies
were best for Judaism because the illiberal alternatives of both the left(communism) and right (Nazism) were anti-Jewish. (By the 1950s, antiSemitism had become an important force in the Soviet Union.) However,
Strauss believed that liberal societies were not ideal because they tended tobreak down group loyalties and group distinctiveness—both qualities
essential to the survival of Judaism. And he thought that there is a danger
that, like the Weimar Republic, liberal societies could give way to fascism,
especially if traditional religious and cultural forms were overturned; hence
the neoconservative attitude that traditional religious forms among non-Jews
are good for Jews.139 (Although Strauss believed in the importance of Israel
for Jewish survival, his philosophy is not a defense of Israel but a blueprint
for Jewish survival in a Diaspora in Western societies.)
The fate of the Weimar Republic, combined with the emergence of antiSemitism in the Soviet Union, had a formative influence on his thinking. As
Stephen Holmes writes, “Strauss made his young Jewish-American students
gulp by informing them that toleration [secular humanism] was dangerous andthat the Enlightenment—rather than the failure of the Enlightenment—led
directly to Adolph Hitler.”140 Hitler was also at the center of Strauss’s admiration
for Churchill—hence the roots of the neocon cult of Churchill: “The tyrant stoodat the pinnacle of his power. The contrast between the indomitable andmagnanimous statesman and the insane tyrant—this spectacle in its clear
simplicity was one of the greatest lessons which men can learn, at any time.”141 I
suspect that, given Strauss’s strong Jewish identity, a very large part of his
admiration of Churchill was not that Churchill opposed tyrants, but that he went
to war against an anti-Jewish tyrant at enormous cost to his own people andnation while allied with another tyrant, Joseph Stalin, who had by 1939 alreadymurdered far more people than Hitler ever would.
Strauss has become a cult figure—the quintessential rabbinical guru, with
devoted disciples such as Allan Bloom.142 Strauss relished his role as a guru to
worshiping disciples, once writing of “the love of the mature philosopher for the
puppies of his race, by whom he wants to be loved in turn.”143 In turn, Strauss wasa disciple of Hermann Cohen, a philosopher at the University of Marburg, who
ended his career teaching in a rabbinical school; Cohen was a central figure in aschool of neo-Kantian intellectuals whose main concern was to rationalize Jewish
nonassimilation into German society.

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Strauss understood that inequalities among humans were inevitable andadvocated rule by an aristocratic elite of philosopher kings forced to pay lip
service to the traditional religious and political beliefs of the masses while notbelieving them.144 This elite should pursue its vision of the common good but
must reach out to others using deception and manipulation to achieve its goals.
As Bill Kristol has described it, elites have the duty to guide public opinion, but“one of the main teachings [of Strauss] is that all politics are limited and none ofthem is really based on the truth.”145 A more cynical characterization is provided
by Stephen Holmes: “The good society, on this model, consists of the sedated
masses, the gentlemen rulers, the promising puppies, and the philosophers who
pursue knowledge, manipulate the gentlemen, anesthetize the people, andhousebreak the most talented young”146—a comment that sounds to me like analarmingly accurate description of the present situation in the United States andelsewhere in the Western world. Given Strauss’s central concern that an
acceptable political order be compatible with Jewish survival, it is reasonable toassume that Strauss believed that the aristocracy would serve Jewish interests.
Strauss’s philosophy is not really conservative. The rule by an aristocratic
elite would require a complete political transformation in order to create a societythat was “as just as possible”:
Nothing short of a total transformation of imbedded custom must be
undertaken. To secure this inversion of the traditional hierarchies, the political,
social and educational system must be subjected to a radical reformation. For
justice to be possible the founders have to “wipe clean the dispositions of men,”that is, justice is possible only if the city and its citizens are not what they are:the weakest [i.e., the philosophic elite] is supposed to rule the strongest [themasses], the irrational is supposed to submit to the rule of the rational.147[emphasis in original]

Strauss described the need for an external exoteric language directed at outsiders,and an internal esoteric language directed at ingroup members.148 A general featureof the movements I have studied is that this Straussian prescription has been
followed: Issues are framed in language that appeals to non-Jews rather than
explicitly in terms of Jewish interests, although Jewish interests always remain in the
background if one cares to look a little deeper. The most common rhetoric used by
Jewish intellectual and political movements has been the language of moral
universalism and the language of science—languages that appeal to the educatedelites of the modern Western world.149 But beneath the rhetoric it is easy to findstatements describing the Jewish agendas of the principal actors. And the languageof moral universalism (e.g., advocating democracy as a universal moral
imperative) goes hand in hand with a narrow Jewish moral particularism (altering
governments that represent a danger to Israel).
It is noteworthy in this respect that the split between the leftist critics ofStrauss like Shadia Drury and Stephen Holmes versus Strauss’s disciples like
Allan Bloom and Harry V. Jaffa comes down to whether Strauss is properly seen
as a universalist. The leftist critics claim that the moral universalism espoused by

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Strauss’s disciples is nothing more than a veneer for his vision of a hierarchicalsociety based on manipulation of the masses. As noted, the use of a universalist
rhetoric to mask particularist causes has a long history among Jewish intellectualand political movements, and it fits well with Strauss’s famous emphasis on
esoteric messages embedded in the texts of great thinkers. Moreover, there is atleast some textual support for the leftist critique, although there can never becertainty because of the intentionally enigmatic nature of Strauss’s writings.
I am merely adding to the leftist critique the idea that Strauss crafted his
vision of an aristocratic elite manipulating the masses as a Jewish survival
strategy. In doing so, I am taking seriously Strauss’s own characterization of his
work as centrally motivated by “the Jewish question” and by the excellent
evidence for his strong commitment to the continuity of the Jewish people. At afundamental level, based on my scholarship on Jewish intellectual and politicalmovements, one cannot understand Strauss’s well-attested standing as a Jewish
guru — as an exemplar of the familiar pattern of an intellectual leader in themanner of Boas or Freud surrounded by devoted Jewish disciples — unless he had
a specifically Jewish message.
The simple logic is as follows: Based on the data presented here, it is quite
clear that Strauss understood that neither communism nor fascism was good forJews in the long run. But democracy cannot be trusted given that Weimar ended
with Hitler. A solution is to advocate democracy and the trappings of traditionalreligious culture, but managed by an elite able to manipulate the masses via
control of the media and academic discourse. Jews have a long history as an elitein Western societies, so it is not in the least surprising that Strauss would
advocate an ideal society in which Jews would be a central component of the elite.
In my view, this is Strauss’s esoteric message. The exoteric message is theuniversalist veneer promulgated by Strauss’s disciples—a common enoughpattern among Jewish intellectual and political movements.
On the other hand, if one accepts at face value the view of Strauss’s disciples
that he should be understood as a theorist of egalitarianism and democracy, thenStrauss’s legacy becomes just another form of leftism, and a rather
undistinguished one at that. In this version, the United States is seen as a“proposition nation” committed only to the ideals of democracy andegalitarianism—an ideology that originated with Jewish leftist intellectuals like
Horace Kallen.150 Such an ideology not only fails to protect the ethnic interests ofEuropean Americans in maintaining their culture and demographic dominance,
it fails as an adequate survival strategy for Jews because of the possibility that,like Weimar Germany, the U.S. could be democratically transformed into a statethat self-consciously opposes the ethnic interests of Jews.
The most reasonable interpretation is that neocons see Strauss’s moral
universalism as a powerful exoteric ideology. The ideology is powerful among nonJews because of the strong roots of democracy and egalitarianism in American
history and in the history of the West; it is attractive to Jews because it has no ethnic

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content and is therefore useful in combating the ethnic interests of European
Americans—its function for the Jewish left throughout the 20th century.151 But
without the esoteric message that the proposition nation must be managed andmanipulated by a covert, Jewish-dominated elite, such an ideology is inherently
unstable and cannot be guaranteed to meet the long-term interests of Jews.
And one must remember that the neocons’ public commitment to egalitarianism
belies their own status as an elite who were educated at elite academic institutions
and created an elite network at the highest levels of the government. They form anelite that is deeply involved in deception, manipulation, and espionage on issues
related to Israel and the war in Iraq. They also established the massive neocon
infrastructure in the elite media and think tanks. And they have often become
wealthy in the process. Their public pronouncements advocating a democratic,
egalitarian ideology have not prevented them from having strong ethnic identities
and a strong sense of their own ethnic interests; nor have their public
pronouncements supporting the Enlightenment ideals of egalitarianism anddemocracy prevented them from having a thoroughly anti-Enlightenment ethnic
particularist commitment to the most nationalistic, aggressive, racialist elements
within Israel—the Likud Party, the settler movement, and the religious fanatics. At
the end of the day, the only alternative to the existence of an esoteric Straussian
message along the lines described here is massive self-deception.

SIDNEY HOOK
Born in 1902, Sidney Hook was an important leader of the anti-Stalinist, nonTrotskyist left. Hook’s career is interesting because he illustrates an evolution
toward neoconservatism that was in many ways parallel to the Shachtmanites.
Indeed, Hook ended up as honorary chairman of the SD/USA during the 1980s.152
Hook became a socialist at a time when virtually all socialists supported the
Bolshevik revolution as the only alternative to the anti-Jewish government of thetsar.153 As a professional philosopher, he saw his role as an attempt to develop an
intellectually respectable Marxism strengthened with Dewey’s ideas. But until the
Moscow Trials of the 1930s he was blind to the violence and oppression in the USSR.
During a visit to the USSR in 1929, “I was completely oblivious at the time to thesystematic repressions that were then going on against noncommunist elements andaltogether ignorant of the liquidation of the so-called kulaks that had already begun
that summer. I was not even curious enough to probe and pry, possibly for fear ofwhat I would discover.”154 During the 1930s, when the Communist Party exercised
a dominant cultural influence in the United States, “the fear of fascism helped to blurour vision and blunt our hearing to the reports that kept trickling out of the Soviet
Union.”155 Even the Moscow Trials were dismissed by large sectors of liberal
opinion. It was the time of the Popular Front, where the fundamental principle was
the defense of the Soviet Union. Liberal journals like the New Republic did notsupport inquiries into the trials, citing New York Times reporter Walter Duranty as
an authority who believed in the truth of the confessions.

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Unlike the Shachtmanites, Hook never accepted Trotsky because of his recordof defending “every act of the Soviet regime, until he himself lost power.”156 “To
the very end Trotsky remained a blind, pitiless (even when pitiable) giant,defending the right of the minority vanguard of the proletariat—the Party—to
exercise its dictatorship over ‘the backward layers of the proletariat’—i.e., those
who disagreed with the self-designated vanguard.”157
Hook became a leader of the anti-Stalinist left in the 1930s and during the Cold
War, usually with John Dewey as the most visible public persona in variousorganizations dedicated to opposing intellectual thought control. His main issue
came to be openness versus totalitarianism rather than capitalism versus socialism.
Like other neoconservatives, from the 1960s on he opposed the excesses of the New
Left, including affirmative action. Sidney Hook received the Presidential Medal of
Freedom from Ronald Reagan. Like many neoconservatives, he never abandoned
many of his leftist views: In his acceptance speech, Hook stated that he was “anunreconstructed believer in the welfare state, steeply progressive income tax, asecular humanist,” and pro-choice on abortion.158 Sounding much like SD/USA
stalwart Joshua Muravchik,159 Hook noted that socialists like himself “never took the
problem of incentives seriously enough.”160
Like Strauss, Hook’s advocacy of the open society stemmed from his belief thatsuch societies were far better for Judaism than either the totalitarian left or right.
Hook had a strong Jewish identification: He was a Zionist, a strong supporter ofIsrael, and an advocate of Jewish education for Jewish children.161 Hook developed
an elaborate apologia for Judaism and against anti-Semitism in the modern world,162
and he was deeply concerned about the emergence of anti-Semitism in the USSR.163
The ideal society is thus culturally diverse and democratic:
No philosophy of Jewish life is required except one—identical with the
democratic way of life—which enables Jews who for any reason at all accept
their existence as Jews to lead a dignified and significant life, a life in which
together with their fellowmen they strive collectively to improve the quality of
democratic, secular cultures and thus encourage a maximum of cultural
diversity, both Jewish and non-Jewish.164

STEPHEN BRYEN
Despite his low profile in the George W. Bush administration, Stephen Bryen
is an important neocon. Bryen served as executive director of JINSA from 1979 to
1981 and remains on its advisory board. He is also affiliated with the AEI and the
CSP. Richard Perle hired Bryen as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense during
the Reagan administration. At the Pentagon, Perle and Bryen led an effort toextend and strengthen the Export Administration Act to grant the Pentagon amajor role in technology transfer policy. This policy worked to the benefit of Israelat the expense of Europe, as Israel alone had access to the most secret technology
designs.165 In 1988 Bryen and Perle temporarily received permission to export
sensitive klystron technology, used in antiballistic missiles, to Israel. “Two senior

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unusual, and was in fact ‘standard operating procedure’ for him, recalling
numerous instances when U.S. companies were denied licenses to export
sensitive technology, only to learn later that Israeli companies subsequently
exported similar (U.S. derived) weapons and technology to the intended
customers/governments.”166
It is surprising that Perle was able to hire Bryen at all given that, beginning in
1978, Bryen was investigated for offering classified documents to the Mossad
station chief of the Israeli embassy in the presence of an AIPAC representative.167
Bryen’s fingerprints were found on the documents in question despite his denials
that he had ever had the documents in his possession. (Bryen refused to take apolygraph test.) The Bryen investigation was ultimately shut down because of the
failure of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to grant access to the JusticeDepartment to files important to the investigation, and because of the decision by
Philip Heymann, the chief of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and later
Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton Administration, to drop the case.
Heymann is Jewish and had a close relationship with Bryen’s lawyer, Nathan
Lewin. Heymann’s Jewish consciousness can be seen from the fact that heparticipated in the campaign to free Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard and expunge hisrecord —a major effort by a great many Jewish organizations and Jewish activists
such as Alan Dershowitz. There were reports that Heymann was attempting to
bypass Attorney General Janet Reno by preparing a Justice Department
recommendation for presidential clemency, and that Heymann’s behavior may
have been a factor in his resignation shortly thereafter.168
Despite this history of covert pro-Israeli activism, in 2001 Bryen was
appointed, at the urging of Paul Wolfowitz, to the China Commission, whichmonitors illicit technology transfers to China, a position that requires top secretsecurity clearance.169 Many of the illicit technology transfers investigated by thecommission are thought to have occurred via Israel.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
In his 1995 book, John Ehrman regards Charles Krauthammer as a key
neoconservative foreign policy analyst because Krauthammer was on the cuttingedge of neocon thinking on how to respond to the unipolar world created by thecollapse of the Soviet Union. Krauthammer has consistently urged that the U.S.
pursue a policy to remake the entire Arab world—a view that represents the“party line” among neoconservatives (e.g., Michael Ledeen, Norman Podhoretz,
Bill Kristol, David Frum, and Richard Perle170). In a speech at the AEI in February
2004, Krauthammer argued for a unilateral confrontation with the entire ArabMuslim world (and nowhere else) in the interests of “democratic globalism.” He
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MacDonaldwhole point of the multilateral enterprise: To reduce American freedom of action
by making it subservient to, dependent on, constricted by the will—andinterests—of other nations. To tie down Gulliver with a thousand strings. To
domesticate the most undomesticated, most outsized, national interest on theplanet—ours.”171 Democratic globalism is aimed at winning the struggle with the
Arab-Islamic world:
Beyond power. Beyond interest. Beyond interest defined as power. That is thecredo of democratic globalism. Which explains its political appeal: America isa nation uniquely built not on blood, race or consanguinity, but on a
proposition—to which its sacred honor has been pledged for two centuries….
Today, post-9/11, we find ourselves in an…existential struggle but with adifferent enemy: not Soviet communism, but Arab-Islamic totalitarianism,
both secular and religious…. [D]emocratic globalism is an improvement overrealism. What it can teach realism is that the spread of democracy is not just an
end but a means, an indispensable means for securing American interests. The
reason is simple. Democracies are inherently more friendly to the United States,
less belligerent to their neighbors, and generally more inclined to peace.
Realists are right that to protect your interests you often have to go around theworld bashing bad guys over the head. But that technique, no matter how
satisfying, has its limits. At some point, you have to implant something,something organic and self-developing. And that something is democracy. But
where? The danger of democratic globalism is its universalism, its open-ended
commitment to human freedom, its temptation to plant the flag of democracy
everywhere. It must learn to say no. And indeed, it does say no. But when it says
no to Liberia, or Congo, or Burma, or countenances alliances with authoritarian
rulers in places like Pakistan or, for that matter, Russia, it stands accused of
hypocrisy. Which is why we must articulate criteria for saying yes…. I proposea single criterion: where it counts…. And this is its axiom: We will support
democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood and treasure only in places
where there is a strategic necessity—meaning, places central to the larger war
against the existential enemy, the enemy that poses a global mortal threat to
freedom.
Where does it count today? Where the overthrow of radicalism and the
beginnings of democracy can have a decisive effect in the war against the new
global threat to freedom, the new existential enemy, the Arab-Islamic
totalitarianism that has threatened us in both its secular and religious forms forthe quarter-century since the Khomeini revolution of 1979…. There is not asingle, remotely plausible, alternative strategy for attacking the monster
behind 9/11. It’s not Osama bin Laden; it is the cauldron of political oppression,
religious intolerance, and social ruin in the Arab-Islamic world—oppression
transmuted and deflected by regimes with no legitimacy into virulent,murderous anti-Americanism. It’s not one man; it is a condition.

Krauthammer is a Jew and his Jewish identification and pro-Israel motivation
are typical of Jewish neoconservatives, as is his obeisance to the idea that America
is a proposition nation, rather than a nation founded by a particular ethnic
group—an ethnocultural creation of Western Europe that should attempt to

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preserve this heritage. The same attitude can be seen in Irving Kristol’s commentthat the U.S. is an “ideological nation” committed to defend Israel independent of
national interest (see above). This ideology was the creation of leftist Jewish
intellectuals attempting to rationalize a multicultural America in which
European-Americans were just one of many cultural/ethnic groups.172
Krauthammer is a regular columnist for the Jerusalem Post and has written
extensively in support of hard-line policies in Israel and on what he interprets as
a rise in age-old anti-Jewish attitudes in Europe. In 2002 Krauthammer waspresented with Bar-Ilan University’s annual Guardian of Zion Award at the KingDavid Hotel in Jerusalem. His acceptance speech reveals an observant Jew who
is steeped in Jewish history and the Hebrew tradition. The 1993 Oslo Accords are
termed “the most catastrophic and self- inflicted wound by any state in modern
history”; this disastrous policy was based on “an extreme expression of postZionistic messianism.”173 Krauthammer rejected the “secular messianism” of
Shimon Peres as more dangerous than the religious messianism of Gush Emunim(a prominent settler group with a message of Jewish racialism and a vision of a
“Greater Israel” encompassing the lands promised to Abraham in Genesis—from
the Nile to the Euphrates174) or of certain followers of the Lubavitcher Rebbe
because of its impact on shaping contemporary Jewish history.
Krauthammer is also deeply concerned with anti-Semitism:
What is odd is not the anti-Semitism of today [in Europe], but its relative
absence during the last half-century. That was the historical anomaly.
Holocaust shame kept the demon corked for that half-century. But now theatonement is passed. The genie is out again. This time, however, it is moresophisticated. It is not a blanket hatred of Jews. Jews can be tolerated, evenaccepted, but they must know their place. Jews are fine so long as they are
powerless, passive and picturesque. What is intolerable is Jewish assertiveness,
the Jewish refusal to accept victimhood. And nothing so embodies that as theJewish state.175

Another barometer of Jewish identification is Krauthammer’s take on Mel
Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. In sentiments similar to those of many otherJewish activists and writers, he terms it a “blood libel,” “a singular act ofinterreligious aggression,” a “spectacularly vicious” personal interpretation.176
Gibson’s interpretations “point overwhelmingly in a single direction — to thevillainy and culpability of the Jews.” The crucifixion is “a history of centuries ofrelentless, and at times savage, persecution of Jews in Christian lands.” One getsthe impression of a writer searching as best he can to find the most extreme terms
possible to express his loathing of Gibson’s account of the Christian gospel.

PAUL WOLFOWITZPaul Wolfowitz’s background indicates a strong Jewish identity. His father
Jacob was a committed Zionist throughout his life and in his later years organizedprotests against Soviet treatment of Jews.177 Jacob was deeply concerned about

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the Holocaust,178 and, in his own reminiscences of his teenage years, Paul
recalls reading books about the Holocaust and traveling to Israel when his
father was a visiting professor at an Israeli university. Wolfowitz reads
Hebrew, and his sister married an Israeli and lives in Israel.179 At the
University of Chicago the professors mentioned in his account of the period
are all Jewish:180 Albert Wohlstetter, his Ph.D. advisor; Leo Strauss(Wolfowitz’s original intent when enrolling at the University of Chicago wasto study with Strauss, and he ended up taking two courses from him);
Strauss’s disciple Alan Bloom, whose Closing of the American Mind: How
Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s
Students (1987) is a neocon classic; and Saul Bellow, the novelist.
Also indicative of a strong Jewish identity is a conversation Wolfowitz had with
Natan Sharansky, Israeli Cabinet Minister and leader of a right wing, pro-settlement
political party, at a conference on Middle East policy in Aspen, Colorado, in 2002. The
conference was arranged by Richard Perle under the auspices of the AEI. Wolfowitz
and Sharansky walked to a reception, because the latter, as an observant Jew, could
not drive on the Sabbath. Sharansky noted that the walk “gave us a chance to talkabout everything — Arafat, international terrorism, Iraq and Iran and, of course,
Jewish history, our roots and so on.”181 Wolfowitz is married to Clare Selgin, and they
have three children, Sara, David, and Rachel.182
Ravelstein is Bellow’s fictionalized but essentially accurate description of Alan
Bloom and his circle at the University of Chicago.183 It is of some interest because
it recreates the Jewish atmosphere of Wolfowitz’s academic environment.
Wolfowitz was a member of Bloom’s circle at Cornell University and chose theUniversity of Chicago for his graduate training because of the presence there of
Leo Strauss, most likely at the urging of Bloom. Wolfowitz and Bloom maintained
a close relationship after Bloom moved to the University of Chicago and during
Wolfowitz’s later career in the government. Wolfowitz was one of the “favored
students” of Bloom described in Robert Locke’s comment that “Favored studentsof the usually haughty Bloom were gradually introduced to greater and greater
intimacies with the master, culminating in exclusive dinner parties with him andSaul [Bellow] in Bloom’s lavishly furnished million-dollar apartment.”184
As depicted by Bellow, Bloom emerges as the quintessential guru,
surrounded by disciples—a “father” who attempts not only to direct his
disciples’ careers but their personal lives as well.185 His disciples are described as“clones who dressed as he did, smoked the same Marlboros”; they were heading
toward “the Promised Land of the intellect toward which Ravelstein, their Moses
and their Socrates, led them.”186 “To be cut off from his informants in Washington
and Paris, from his students, the people he had trained, the band of brothers, theinitiates, the happy few made him extremely uncomfortable.”187 Bloom in turn isdepicted as a “disciple” of the Strauss character, Felix Davarr: “Ravelstein talked
so much about him that in the end I was obliged to read some of his books. It had
to be done if I was to understand what [Ravelstein] was all about.”188

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Bloom’s Ravelstein is depicted as very self-consciously Jewish. A theme is thecontrast between “crude” Jewish behavior and genteel WASP behavior—a theme
described beautifully and authoritatively in the writings of John Murray Cuddihy.189
And there is the acute consciousness of who is a Jew and who isn’t; all of Ravelstein’s
close friends are Jews. There is an intense interest in whether non-Jews dislike Jews
or have connections to fascism. And there is a fixation on the Holocaust and when it
will happen again: “They kill more than half of the European Jews…. There’s notelling which corner it will come from next.”190 Ravelstein thought of Jews as
displacing WASPs: He “liked to think of living in one of the tony flat buildings
formerly occupied by the exclusively WASP faculty.”191
Following Strauss, Bloom thought of Western civilization as the product ofAthens and Jerusalem, and is said to have preferred the former, at least until theend of his life, when Jerusalem loomed large: Bellow’s narrator writes, “I could
see [Ravelstein/Bloom] was following a trail of Jewish ideas or Jewish essences.
It was unusual for him these days, in any conversation, to mention even Plato or
Thucydides. He was full of Scripture now”—all connected to “the great evil,” thebelief during the World War II era “that almost everybody agreed that the Jews
had no right to live…a vast collective agreement that the world would be
improved by their disappearance and their extinction.”192 Ravelstein’s conclusion
is that “it is impossible to get rid of one’s origins, it is impossible not to remain a
Jew. The Jews, Ravelstein…thought, following the line laid down by [his] teacher
Davarr [Strauss], were historically witnesses to the absence of redemption.”193
Ravelstein recounts a conversation with the Wolfowitz character, Philip
Gorman, which reflects Wolfowitz’s well-known desire to invade Iraq in 1991:
Colin Powell and Baker have advised the President not to send the troops all theway to Baghdad. Bush will announce it tomorrow. They’re afraid of a few
casualties. They send out a terrific army and give a demonstration of up-to-datehigh-tech warfare that flesh and blood can’t stand up to. But then they leave thedictatorship in place and steal away.…194

Wolfowitz has had a close relationship with Richard Perle beginning with
their service in the office of Sen. Henry Jackson.195 He also has a long record ofpro-Israel advocacy. In 1973 he was appointed to the Arms Control andDisarmament Agency (ACDA); Mark Green notes that “Wolfowitz… brought toACDA a strong attachment to Israel’s security, and a certain confusion about his
obligation to U.S. national security.”196 In 1978, he was investigated for providing
a classified document to the Israeli government through an AIPAC intermediary,
but the investigation ended without indictment. (As Paul Findley shows, leakageof classified information to Israel by American Jews is routine within the
Departments of State and Defense—so routine that it is accepted as a part of lifein these departments, and investigations of the source of leaks are seldom
performed.197) Later, in 1992, the Department of Defense discovered that
Wolfowitz, as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, was promoting the export toIsrael of advanced AIM-9M air-to-air missiles. The sale was canceled because

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MacDonaldIsrael had been caught selling the previous version to the Chinese. Until his
appointment as Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Bush administration,
Wolfowitz was on the Advisory Board of WINEP, and was a patron of Dennis
Ross, who was Ambassador to Israel in the Clinton Administration before
becoming director of Policy and Strategic Planning at WINEP.
Wolfowitz wrote a 1997 Weekly Standard article advocating removal of
Saddam Hussein, and signed the public letter to President Clinton organized byBill Kristol’s Project for the New American Century urging a regime change in
Iraq. Within the George H. W. Bush administration, Wolfowitz was “theintellectual godfather and fiercest advocate for toppling Saddam.”198 Wolfowitz
has become famous as a key advocate for war with Iraq rather than Afghanistan
in the immediate aftermath of September 11.199 Richard Clarke recounts anincident on September 12, 2001, in which President Bush asked a group at theWhite House for any information that Saddam Hussein was involved in the
September 11 attacks. After Bush left, a staffer “stared at [Bush] with her mouth
open. ‘Wolfowitz got to him.’”200
Former CIA political analysts Kathleen and Bill Christison note that “Onesource inside the administration has described [Wolfowitz] frankly as ‘over-thetop crazy when it comes to Israel.’”201 Although they find such an assessment
insufficiently nuanced, they acknowledge that zealotry for Israel is a prime
motivator for Wolfowitz. Journalist Bill Keller is much more cautious:
You hear from some of Wolfowitz’s critics, always off the record, that Israel
exercises a powerful gravitational pull on the man. They may not know that as ateenager he spent his father’s sabbatical semester in Israel or that his sister ismarried to an Israeli, but they certainly know that he is friendly with Israel’s
generals and diplomats and that he is something of a hero to the heavily Jewish
neoconservative movement. Those who know him well say this—leaving aside
the offensive suggestion of dual loyalty—is looking at Wolfowitz through thewrong end of the telescope. As the Sadat story illustrates, he has generally been lessexcited by the security of Israel than by the promise of a more moderate Islam.202

This is a remarkable statement. “The Sadat story” refers to Wolfowitz’s
very positive reaction to Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat’s speech to the
Knesset as part of the peace process between Israel and Egypt. Obviously, it
is silly to suppose that this event shows Wolfowitz’s relative disinterest in
Israel’s security. Moreover, statements linking Wolfowitz to Israel are always
off the record, presumably because people fear retaliation for stating theobvious. Thus Bill Keller coyly manages to document the associations
between Wolfowitz and Israel while finding assertions of dual loyalty“offensive” rather than a well-grounded probability.
One of Joshua Muravchik’s apologetic claims is that “in fact the careers of leading
neoconservatives have rarely involved work on Middle East issues.”203 This is false.
For example, Wolfowitz wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on nuclear proliferation in the
Middle East. During the Carter administration, he prepared the Limited
Contingency Study, which emphasized the “Iraqi threat” to the region, and during

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the Reagan administration he lobbied against selling AWACS to Saudi Arabia andagainst negotiating with the Palestinians; during the George H. W. Bushadministration he was Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, a position where he“would once again have responsibility for arms control, the Middle East and thePersian Gulf, the areas to which he had devoted the early years of his career.”204

RICHARD PERLE
Like Wolfowitz and the Strauss-Bloom nexus at the University of Chicago,
for Perle
the defining moment in our history was certainly the Holocaust…. It was thedestruction, the genocide of a whole people, and it was the failure to respondin a timely fashion to a threat that was clearly gathering…. We don’t want thatto happen again…. [W]hen we have the ability to stop totalitarian regimes weshould do so, because when we fail to do so, the results are catastrophic.205

Richard Perle first came into prominence in Washington as Senator Henry
Jackson’s chief aide on foreign policy. He organized Congressional support forthe 1974 Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which angered Russia by linking bilateral
trade issues to freedom of emigration, primarily of Jews from the Soviet Union to
Israel and the United States. In 1970 Perle was recorded by the FBI discussingclassified information with the Israeli embassy. In 1981 he was on the payroll of
an Israeli defense contractor shortly before being appointed Assistant Secretaryof Defense for International Security Policy, a position responsible for monitoring
U.S. defense technology exports.206 During his tenure in the Reagan
administration Perle recommended purchase of an artillery shell made by Soltan,
an Israeli munitions manufacturer. After leaving his position in the Defense
Department in 1987, he assumed a position with Soltan. Like many other former
government officials, he has also used his reputation and contacts in thegovernment to develop a highly lucrative business career. For example, although
he did not personally register as a lobbyist, he became a paid consultant to a firm
headed by Douglas Feith that was established to lobby on behalf of Turkey.207
At the present time, Perle is on the board of directors of Onset Technology, atechnology company founded by Israelis Gadi Mazor and Ron Maor with
R&D in Israel. Onset Technology has close ties to Israeli companies andinvestment funds.208 He is a close personal friend of Israel Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon.209
Perle was the “Study Group Leader” of a 1996 report titled “A Clean Break: A
New Strategy for Securing the Realm” published by the Institute for Advanced
Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS), an Israeli think tank. The membership of thestudy group illustrates the overlap between Israeli think tanks close to the Israeli
government, American policy makers and government officials, and pro-Israel
activists working in the U.S. Other members of this group who accepted positions in
the George W. Bush administration or in pro-Israel activist organizations in the U.S.
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Wurmser (member of IASPS, a protégé of Perle at AEI, and senior advisor in the State
Department), Mayrev Wurmser (head of the Hudson Institute [a neocon thinktank]),
James Colbert of JINSA, and Jonathan Torop (WINEP).
Despite Joshua Muravchik’s apologetic claims,210 the “Clean Break” report
was clearly intended as advice for another of Perle’s personal friends,211 Benjamin
Netanyahu, who was then the new prime minister of Israel; there is no indicationthat it was an effort to further U.S. interests in the region. The purpose was to“forge a peace process and strategy based on an entirely new intellectual
foundation, one that restores strategic initiative and provides the nation the roomto engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism.” Indeed, the reportadvises the United States to avoid pressure on the Israelis to give land for peace,a strategy “which required funneling American money to repressive andaggressive regimes, was risky, expensive, and very costly for both the U.S. andIsrael, and placed the United States in roles it should neither have nor want.” Theauthors of the report speak as Jews and Israelis, not as U.S. citizens: “Our claim
to the land—to which we have clung for hope for 2000 years—is legitimate andnoble.” Much of the focus is on removing the threat of Syria, and it is in thiscontext that the report notes, “This effort can focus on removing Saddam Husseinfrom power in Iraq—an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right—asa means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.”212
Proposals for regime change, such as found in “A Clean Break,” have along history in Israeli thought. For example, in 1982 Israeli strategist Oded
Yinon echoed a long line of Israeli strategists who argued that Israel shouldattempt to dissolve all the existing Arab states into smaller, less potentiallypowerful states. These states would then become clients of Israel as aregional imperial power. Neocons have advertised the war in Iraq as a
crusade for a democratic, secular, Western-oriented, pro-Israel Iraq—adream that has a great deal of appeal in the West, for obvious reasons.
However, it is quite possible that the long-term result is that Iraq would
fracture along ethnic and religious lines (Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds). This would
also be in Israel’s interests, because the resulting states would pose less of athreat than the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. As Yinon noted, “Iraq, richin oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a
candidate for Israel’s targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us
than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power
which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel.”213
Former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson has suggested that the dissolution of
Iraq may well have been a motive for the war:
A more cynical reading of the agenda of certain Bush advisers could conclude
that the Balkanization of Iraq was always an acceptable outcome, because
Israel would then find itself surrounded by small Arab countries worried about
each other instead of forming a solid block against Israel. After all, Iraq was an
artificial country that had always had a troublesome history.214

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And as the Iraqi insurgency has achieved momentum, there is evidence that
Israeli military and intelligence units are operating in Kurdish regions of Iraq andthat Israel is indeed encouraging the Kurds to form their own state.215 There islittle doubt that an independent Kurdish state would have major repercussions
for Syria and Iran, as well as for Israel’s ally Turkey, and would lead to continuing
instability in the Middle East. A senior Turkish official noted, “If you end up witha divided Iraq, it will bring more blood, tears, and pain to the Middle East, and[the U.S.] will be blamed…From Mexico to Russia, everybody will claim that theUnited States had a secret agenda in Iraq: you came there to break up Iraq. If Iraq
is divided, America cannot explain this to the world.”

ELLIOTT ABRAMS
Some of Elliott Abrams’ neoconservative family and professional associations
have been described above. In December 2002 Abrams became President Bush’s top
Middle East advisor. He is closely associated with the Likud Party in Israel and withprominent neocons (Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, Marc Paul Gerecht, Michael Ledeen,
Jeane Kirkpatrick, Paul Wolfowitz) and neocon think tanks (PNAC, AEI, CSP,JINSA).216 Because of his reputation as a strongly identified Jew, Abrams was tapped
for the role of rallying Jews in support of Reagan in the 1980 campaign.217
Abrams is also an activist on behalf of Jewish continuity. The purpose of his
book Faith and Fear: How Jews Can Survive in Christian America is to shore up
Jewish religious identification, avoid intermarriage, and avoid secularization inorder to assure Jewish continuity. In this regard it is interesting that otherprominent neocons have advocated interracial marriage between whites andblacks in the U.S. For example, Douglas J. Besharov, a resident scholar at the AEI,
has written that the offspring of interracial marriages “are the best hope for the
future of American race relations.”218
In Faith and Fear, Abrams notes his own deep immersion in the Yiddishspeaking culture of his parents and grandparents. In the grandparents’generation, “all their children married Jews, and [they] kept Kosher
homes.”219 Abrams acknowledges that the mainstream Jewish community“clings to what is at bottom a dark vision of America, as a land permeatedwith anti-Semitism and always on the verge of anti-Semitic outbursts.” The
result is that Jews have taken the lead in secularizing America, but that has
not been a good strategy for Jews because Jews themselves have become lessreligious and therefore less inclined to marry other Jews. (This “dark vision ofAmerica” is a critical source of the “Culture of Critique” produced by Jewish
intellectual movements; it is also a major reason why the Jewish community
has been united in favor of large-scale nonwhite immigration to America:
Diluting the white majority and lessening their power is seen as preventing ananti-Jewish outburst.220) Following Strauss, therefore, Abrams thinks that astrong role for Christianity in America is good for Jews:

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MacDonaldIn this century we have seen two gigantic experiments at postreligious societies
where the traditional restraints of religion and morality were entirely
removed: Communism and Nazism. In both cases Jews became the special
targets, but there was evil enough even without the scourge of anti-Semitism.
For when the transcendental inhibition against evil is removed, when society
becomes so purely secular that the restraints imposed by God on man are truly
eradicated, minorities are but the earliest victims.”221

DOUGLAS FEITH
Like most of his cronies, Feith has been suspected of spying for Israel. In 1972
Feith was fired from a position with the National Security Council because of aninvestigation into whether he had provided documents to the Israeli embassy.
Nevertheless, Perle, who was Assistant Secretary for International Security Policy,
hired him as his “special counsel,” and then as his deputy. Feith worked for Perle
until 1986, when he left government service to form a law firm, Feith and Zell, which
was originally based in Israel and best known for obtaining a pardon for the notorious
Marc Rich during the final days of the Clinton administration. In 2001, Douglas Feith
returned to the Department of Defense as Donald Rumsfeld’s Undersecretary for
Policy, and it was in his office that Abraham Shulsky’s Office of Special Plans (OSP)
was created. It was OSP that originated much of the fraudulent intelligence that Bush,Cheney, and Rumsfeld have used to justify the attack on Iraq. A key member of OSP
was David Wurmser who, as indicated above, is a protégé of Richard Perle.222
Retired army officer Karen Kwiatkowski describes Feith as knowing little
about the Pentagon and paying little attention to any issues except those relating
to Israel and Iraq.223 Feith is deferential to the Israeli military. As Kwiatkowski
escorted a group of Israeli generals into the Pentagon:
The leader of the pack surged ahead, his colleagues in close formation, leaving
us to double-time behind the group as they sped to Undersecretary Feith’s officeon the fourth floor…. Once in Feith’s waiting room, the leader continued at
speed to Feith’s closed door. An alert secretary saw this coming and had leapt
from her desk to block the door. “Mr. Feith has a visitor. It will only be a few
more minutes.” The leader craned his neck to look around the secretary’s headas he demanded, “Who is in there with him?”

Unlike the usual practice, the Israeli generals did not have to sign in, so there are
no official records of their visits.224 Kwiatkowski describes the anti-Arab, pro-Israel
sentiment that pervaded the neocon network at the Department of Defense. Career
military officers who failed to go along with these attitudes were simply replaced.
Feith has a strong Jewish identity and is an activist on behalf of Israel. Whilein law school he collaborated with Joseph Churba, an associate and friend of Meir
Kahane, founder of the racialist and anti-Western Jewish Defense League.
During the late 1980s to early 1990s he wrote pro-Likud op-ed pieces in Israeli
newspapers, arguing that the West Bank is part of Israel, that the Palestinians
belong in Jordan, and that there should be regime change in Iraq. He also headed

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the CSP and was a founding member of One Jerusalem, an Israeli organization“determined to prevent any compromise with the Palestinians over the fate ofany part of Jerusalem.225
He is an officer of the Foundation for Jewish Studies, which is “dedicatedto fostering Jewish learning and building communities of educated andcommitted Jews who are conscious of and faithful to the high ideals of
Judaism.”226 In 1997 Feith and his father (a member of Betar, the Zionist youth
movement founded by Vladimir Jabotinsky) were given awards from the
ZOA because of their work as pro-Israel activists. The ZOA is a staunch
supporter of the most extreme elements within Israel. Feith’s law partner, L.
Marc Zell of the firm’s Tel Aviv office, is a spokesman for the settler
movement in Israel, and the firm itself is deeply involved in legal issues
related to the reconstruction of Iraq, a situation that has raised eyebrowsbecause Feith is head of reconstruction in Iraq.227
Zell was one of many neocons close to Ahmed Chalabi but abandoned his
support because Chalabi had not come through on his prewar pledges
regarding Israel—further evidence that aiding Israel was an important
motive for the neocons. According to Zell, Chalabi “said he would end Iraq’s
boycott of trade with Israel, and would allow Israeli companies to dobusiness there. He said [the new Iraqi government] would agree to rebuild
the pipeline from Mosul [in the northern Iraqi oil fields] to Haifa [the Israeli
port, and the location of a major refinery].”228 Another partner in the law firmof Feith and Zell is Salem Chalabi, Ahmed Chalabi’s nephew. Salem Chalabi
is in charge of the trial of Saddam Hussein.229

ABRAHAM SHULSKY
Abram Shulsky is a student of Leo Strauss, a close friend of Paul
Wolfowitz both at Cornell and the University of Chicago,230 and yet anotherprotégé of Richard Perle. He was an aide to neocon Senators Henry Jackson(along with Perle and Elliot Abrams) and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, andworked in the Department of Defense in the Reagan administration. During
the George W. Bush administration, he was appointed head of the Office ofSpecial Plans under Feith and Wolfowitz. The OSP became more influential
on Iraq policy than the CIA or the Defense Intelligence Agency,231 but iswidely viewed by retired intelligence operatives as manipulating intelligencedata on Iraq in order to influence policy.232 Reports suggest that the OSP
worked closely with Israeli intelligence to paint an exaggerated picture of
Iraqi capabilities in unconventional weapons.233 It is tempting to link theactions of the OSP under Shulsky with Strauss’s idea of a “noble lie” carriedout by the elite to manipulate the masses, but I suppose that one doesn’treally need Strauss to understand the importance of lying in order tomanipulate public opinion on behalf of Israel.

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The OSP included other neocons with no professional qualifications in
intelligence but long records of service in neoconservative think tanks andpro-Israel activist organizations, especially the Washington Institute for Near
East Policy. Examples include Michael Rubin, who is affiliated with AEI andis an adjunct scholar at WINEP, David Schenker, who has written books andarticles on Middle East issues published by WINEP and the Middle East
Quarterly (published by Daniel Pipes’ MEF, another pro-Israel activist
organization), Elliott Abrams, David Wurmser, and Michael Ledeen. The OSP
relied heavily on Iraqi defectors associated with Ahmed Chalabi, who, as
indicated above, had a close personal relationship with Wolfowitz, Perle, andother neocons.234

MICHAEL LEDEEN
Michael Ledeen’s career illustrates the interconnectedness of the
neoconservative network. Ledeen was the first executive director of JINSA (1977–1979) and remains on its board of advisors. He was hired by Richard Perle in the
Defense Department during the Reagan years, and during the same period he
was hired as special advisor by Wolfowitz in his role as head of the State
Department Policy Planning Staff. Along with Stephen Bryen, Ledeen became amember of the China Commission during the George W. Bush administration. He
was also a consultant to Abraham Shulsky’s OSP, the Defense Department
organization most closely linked with the manufacture of fraudulent intelligenceleading up to the Iraq War. The OSP was created by Douglas Feith, who in turnreports to Paul Wolfowitz. As noted above, he is resident scholar in the Freedom
Chair at AEI.
Ledeen has been suspected of spying for Israel.235 During the Reagan
years, he was regarded by the CIA as “an agent of influence of a foreign
government: Israel,” and was suspected of spying for Israel by his immediate
superior at the Dept. of Defense, Noel Koch.236 While working for the WhiteHouse in 1984, Ledeen was also accused by National Security Adviser Robert
C. McFarlane of participating in an unauthorized meeting with Israeli Prime
Minister Shimon Peres that led to the proposal to funnel arms through Israel
to Iran in order to free U.S. hostages being held in Lebanon—the origins of the
Irangate scandal.237
Ledeen has been a major propagandist for forcing change on the entire Arabworld. Ledeen’s revolutionary ideology stems not from Trotsky or Marx, butfrom his favorable view of Italian fascism as a universalist (nonracial)
revolutionary movement.238 His book, War on the Terror Masters, is a program forcomplete restructuring of the Middle East by the U.S. couched in the rhetoric ofuniversalism and moral concern, not for Israel, but for the Arab peoples who
would benefit from regime change. Ledeen is a revolutionary of the right,
committed to “creative destruction” of the old social order:

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Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society andabroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science,
literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies
have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces
their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability tokeep pace. Seeing America undo traditional societies, they fear us, for they do
not wish to be undone. They cannot feel secure so long as we are there, for ourvery existence—our existence, not our politics—threatens their legitimacy.
They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them toadvance our historic mission….
Behind all the anti-American venom from the secular radicals in Baghdad, thereligious fanatics in Tehran, the minority regime in Damascus, and themulticultural kleptomaniacs in the Palestinian Authority is the knowledge thatthey are hated by their own people. Their power rests on terror, recently
directed against us, but always, first and foremost, against their own citizens.
Given the chance to express themselves freely, the Iraqi, Iranian, Syrian,
Lebanese, and Palestinian people would oust their current oppressors. Properly
waged, our revolutionary war will give them a chance.239

BERNARD LEWISThe main intellectual source for imposing democracy on the Arab world is
Bernard Lewis, the Princeton historian who argues that Muslim cultures have an
inferiority complex stemming from their relative decline compared to the West overthe last three hundred years. (Such arguments minimize the role of Israel and U.S.
support for Israel as a source of Arab malaise. However, there is good evidence thatthe motives of Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 conspirators derive much more from
U.S. support for Israel than a general anti-Western animus.240) He contends that Arabsocieties with their antiquated, kinship-based structure can only be changed byforcing democracy on them.241 Wolfowitz has used Lewis as the intellectual
underpinning of the invasion of Iraq: “Bernard has taught how to understand thecomplex and important history of the Middle East, and use it to guide us where wewill go next to build a better world for generations to come.”242 During the 1970s
Lewis was invited by Richard Perle to give a talk to Henry Jackson’s group, and, as
Perle notes, “Lewis became Jackson’s guru, more or less.” Lewis also established ties
with Daniel Patrick Moynihan and with Jackson’s other aides, including Wolfowitz,
Abrams, and Gaffney. One of Lewis’s main arguments is that the Palestinians haveno historical claim to a state because they were not a state before the British Mandate
in 1918.
Lewis also argues that Arabs have a long history of consensus government, if
not democracy, and that a modicum of outside force should be sufficient todemocratize the area—a view that runs counter to the huge cultural differences
between the Middle East and the West that stem ultimately from very different
evolutionary pressures.243 Lewis, as a cultural historian, is in a poor position tounderstand the deep structure of the cultural differences between Europe and theTOQ 4-2.pmd

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Middle East. He seems completely unaware of the differences in family andkinship structure between Europe and the Middle East, and he regards thedifference in attitudes toward women as a mere cultural difference rather than asa marker for an entirely different social structure.244
Lewis’s flawed beliefs about the Middle East have nevertheless beenquite useful to Israel—reflecting the theme that Jewish intellectual
movements have often used available intellectual resources to advance a
political cause. Not only did he provide an important intellectual rationale forthe war against Iraq, he is very close to governmental and academic circles in
Israel—the confidant of successive Israeli Prime Ministers from Golda Meir
to Ariel Sharon.245

DICK CHENEY
By several accounts, Vice President Cheney had a “fever” to invade Iraq
and transform the politics of the Middle East and was the leading force within
the administration convincing President Bush of the need to do so.246 As withthe other Jewish intellectual and political movements I have reviewed, nonJews have been welcomed into the movement and often given highly visibleroles as the movement’s public face. Among the current crop in thisintellectual lineage, the most important non-Jews are Dick Cheney and
Donald Rumsfeld, both of whom have close professional and personal
relationships with neoconservatives that long pre-date their present power
and visibility. Both Cheney and Rumsfeld have been associated with Bill
Kristol’s PNAC (which advocated a unilateral war for regime change in Iraq
at least as early as 1998)247 and the CSP, two neocon think tanks; Cheney waspresented with the ADL’s Distinguished Statesman Award in 1993 and was
described by Abraham Foxman as “sensitive to Jewish concerns.”248 When
Cheney was a Congressman during the early 1980s, he attended lunches
hosted for Republican Jewish leaders by the House leadership. Cheney wasdescribed by Marshall Breger, a senior official in the Reagan and George H.
W. Bush administration, as “very interested in outreach and engaging the
Jewish community.”249 He was also a member of JINSA, a major pro-Israel
activist organization, until assuming his office as vice president.
Cheney has also had a close involvement with leading Israeli politicians,
especially Natan Sharansky, Secretary of Jerusalem and Diaspora Affairs in the
Likud government and the prime architect of the ideology that the key to peace
between Israel and the Arab world, including the Palestinians, is Arab acceptanceof democracy. When President Bush articulated the importance of Palestinian
democracy for the Middle East peace “roadmap” in his June 2002 policy speech,
Sharansky could have written the speech himself, and, for that matter, may
have had a direct hand in its drafting. The weekend prior to the speech, he spentlong hours at a conference [organized by Richard Perle and] sponsored by the
AEI in Aspen secluded together with Vice President Cheney and Deputy

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Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. The Bush speech clearly represented atriumph for the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz axis in the administration over
the State Department, which was eager to offer the Palestinians a provisional
state immediately.”250

Both Cheney and Rumsfeld have close personal relationships with Kenneth
Adelman, a former Ford and Reagan administration official.251 Adelman wrote
op-ed pieces in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal in the period leading
up to the war, and he, along with Wolfowitz and Irving Lewis “Scooter” Libby(Cheney’s chief of staff), were guests of Cheney for a victory celebration in theimmediate aftermath of the war (April 13, 2003).252 Adelman has excellent
neocon credentials. He was a member of the Committee on the Present Danger
in the 1970s and UN Ambassador during the Reagan Administration, andworked under Donald Rumsfeld on three different occasions. He was a signatory
to the April 3, 2002, letter of the Project for a New American Century to President
Bush calling for Saddam Hussein’s ouster and increased support for Israel. The
letter stated, “Israel is targeted in part because it is our friend, and in part
because it is an island of liberal, democratic principles—American principles—in
a sea of tyranny, intolerance, and hatred.” The advocacy of war with Iraq was
linked to advancing Israeli interests: “If we do not move against Saddam Husseinand his regime, the damage our Israeli friends and we have suffered until now
may someday appear but a prelude to much greater horrors…. Israel’s fightagainst terrorism is our fight. Israel’s victory is an important part of our victory.
For reasons both moral and strategic, we need to stand with Israel in its fightagainst terrorism.”253 Adelman’s wife, Carol, is affiliated with the Hudson
Institute, a neoconservative think tank.
Cheney’s role in the ascendancy of the neocons in the Bush administration isparticularly important: As head of the transition team, he and Libby were able tostaff the subcabinet levels of the State Department (John Bolton) and the Defense
Department (Wolfowitz, Feith) with key supporters of the neocon agenda. Libby
is a close personal friend of Cheney whose views “echo many of Wolfowitz’s
policies”; he “is considered a hawk among hawks and was an early supporter ofmilitary action against terrorism and particularly against Iraq.”254 He is Jewish
and has a long history of involvement in Zionist causes and as the attorney for thenotorious Marc Rich. Libby and Cheney were involved in pressuring the CIA tocolor intelligence reports to fit with their desire for a war with Iraq.255 Libby
entered the neocon orbit when he was “captivated” while taking a politicalscience course from Wolfowitz at Yale, and he worked under Wolfowitz in the
Reagan and the Bush I administrations.256 He was the coauthor (with Wolfowitz)
of the ill-fated draft of the Defense Planning Guidance document of 1992, which
advocated U.S. dominance over all of Eurasia and urged preventing any othercountry from even contemplating challenging U.S. hegemony.257 (Cheney was
Secretary of Defense at that time.) After an uproar, the document was radicallyaltered, but this blueprint for U.S. hegemony remains central to neocon attitudes
since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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DONALD RUMSFELD
As noted above, Rumsfeld has deep links with neoconservative think tanks
and individual Jews such as Ken Adelman, who began his career working for
Rumsfeld when he headed the Office of Economic Opportunity in the Nixon
administration. Another close associate is Robert A. Goldwin, a student of Leo
Strauss and Rumsfeld’s deputy both at NATO and at the Gerald Ford WhiteHouse; Goldwin is now resident scholar at the AEI.
Rumsfeld also has a long history of appealing to Jewish and Israeli causes. In his
1964 campaign for reelection to Congress as representative from a district on the
North Shore of Chicago with an important Jewish constituency, he emphasized
Soviet persecution of Jews and introduced a bill on this topic in the House. After the1967 war, he urged the U.S. not to demand that Israel withdraw to its previous
borders and he criticized delays in sending U.S. military hardware to Israel.258 Morerecently, as Secretary of Defense in the Bush II administration, Rumsfeld was praisedby the ZOA for distancing himself from the phrase “occupied territories,” referringto them as the “so-called occupied territories.”259
Despite these links with neoconservatives and Jewish causes, Rumsfeld
emerges as less an ideologue and less a passionate advocate for war with Iraq
than Cheney. Robert Woodward describes him as lacking the feverish intensity of
Cheney, as a dispassionate “defense technocrat” who, unlike Cheney, Wolfowitz,
and Feith, would have been content if the U.S. had not gone to war with Iraq.260

DANIEL PIPES
Many neoconservatives work mainly as lobbyists and propagandists. Rather
than attempt to describe this massive infrastructure in its entirety, I profile Daniel
Pipes as a prototypical example of the highly competent Jewish lobbyist. Pipes is
the son of Richard Pipes, the Harvard professor who, as noted above, was an
early neocon and an expert on the Soviet Union. He is the director of the MEF anda columnist at the New York Post and the Jerusalem Post, and appears on the Fox
News Channel. Pipes is described as “An authoritative commentator on the
Middle East” by the Wall Street Journal, according to the masthead of his
website.261 A former official in the Departments of State and Defense, he hastaught at the University of Chicago, Harvard University, and the U.S. Naval War
College. He is the author of twelve books on the Middle East, Islam, and otherpolitical topics; his most recent book is Militant Islam Reaches America (publishedby W.W. Norton, 2002), a polemic against political Islam which argues thatmilitant Islam is the greatest threat to the West since the Cold War. He serves on
the “Special Task Force on Terrorism and Technology” at the Department of
Defense, has testified before many congressional committees, and served on four
presidential campaigns.

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Martin Kramer is the editor of the Forum’s journal. Kramer is alsoaffiliated with Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Easternand African Studies. His book, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle
Eastern Studies in America, has been a major impetus behind the recent effort
to prevent criticism of Israel on college campuses. The book was warmly
reviewed in the Weekly Standard, whose editor, Bill Kristol, is a member of the
MEF along with Kramer. Kristol wrote that “Kramer has performed a crucial
service by exposing intellectual rot in a scholarly field of capital importanceto national wellbeing.”
The MEF issues two regular quasi-academic publications, the Middle East
Quarterly and the Middle East Intelligence Bulletin, the latter published jointly with
the United States Committee for a Free Lebanon. The Middle East Quarterly
describes itself as “a bold, insightful, and controversial publication.” A recent
article on weapons of mass destruction claims that Syria “has more destructive
capabilities” than Iraq or Iran. The Middle East Intelligence Bulletin “specializes incovering the seamy side of Lebanese and Syrian politics,”262 an effort aimed at
depicting these regimes as worthy of forcible change by the U.S. or Israeli
military. The MEF also targets universities through its campus speakers bureau,seeking to correct “inaccurate Middle Eastern curricula in American education”
by addressing “biases” and “basic errors” and providing “better information”
than students can get from the many “irresponsible” professors that it believes
lurk in U.S. universities.
The MEF is behind Campus Watch, an organization responsible forrepressing academic discussion of Middle East issues at U.S. universities.
Campus Watch compiles profiles on professors who criticize Israel: A major
purpose is to “identify key faculty who teach and write about contemporary
affairs at university Middle East Studies departments in order to analyze andcritique the work of these specialists for errors or biases.” The MEF also develops“a network of concerned students and faculty members interested in promoting
American interests on campus.”263
Again we see the rhetoric of universalism and a concern with “Americaninterests” produced by people who are ethnically Jewish and vitallyconcerned with the welfare of Israel. Recently Campus Watch has decided to
discontinue its dossiers because over one hundred professors asked to be
included in their directory of suspicious people. Nevertheless, Campus
Watch continues to print names of people whose views on the Middle Eastdiffer from theirs. The MEF, along with major Jewish activist organizations(the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and theAnti-Defamation League), has succeeded in getting the U.S. House ofRepresentatives to overwhelmingly approve a bill that would authorize
federal monitoring of government-funded Middle East studies programs
throughout U.S. universities. The bill would establish a federal tribunal toinvestigate and monitor criticism of Israel on American college campuses.

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JEWISH INSTITUTE FOR NATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS (JINSA)
Rather than profile all of the many neoconservative think tanks and lobbyinggroups, I will describe JINSA as a prototypical example. JINSA attempts to “educate
the American public about the importance of an effective U.S. defense capability sothat our vital interests as Americans can be safeguarded [and to] inform theAmerican defense and foreign affairs community about the important role Israel canand does play in bolstering democratic interests in the Mediterranean and the Middle
East.”264 Typical of Jewish intellectual movements is that Jewish interests aresubmerged in a rhetoric of American interests and ethical universalism—in this case,the idea that Israel is a beacon of democracy.
In addition to a core of prominent neoconservative Jews (Stephen D. Bryen,
Douglas Feith, Max Kampelman, Michael Ledeen, Joshua Muravchik, Richard
Perle, Stephen Solarz), JINSA’s advisory board includes a bevy of non-Jewish
retired U.S. military officers and a variety of non-Jewish political figures (e.g.,
Dick Cheney) and foreign policy analysts with access to the media (e.g., Jeane
Kirkpatrick) who are staunch supporters of Israel. As is typical of Jewish
intellectual movements, JINSA is well funded and has succeeded in bringing in
high-profile non-Jews who often act as spokesmen for its policies. For example,
the former head of the Iraq occupation government, General Jay Garner, signed
a JINSA letter stating that “the Israel Defense Forces have exercised remarkable
restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the leadership of [the]Palestinian Authority.”JINSA reflects the recent trend of American Jewish activist groups not simply
to support Israeli policies but to support the Israeli right wing. For JINSA,“‘regime change’ by any means necessary in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia andthe Palestinian Authority is an urgent imperative. Anyone who dissents—be it
Colin Powell’s State Department, the CIA or career military officers—iscommitting heresy against articles of faith that effectively hold there is nodifference between US and Israeli national security interests, and that the only
way to assure continued safety and prosperity for both countries is throughhegemony in the Middle East—a hegemony achieved with the traditional Cold
War recipe of feints, force, clientism and covert action.”265 Note the exclusionary,
us versus them attitude typical of the Jewish intellectual and political movements
covered in The Culture of Critique.
Part of JINSA’s effectiveness comes from recruiting non-Jews who gain byincreased defense spending or are willing to be spokesmen in return for fees andtravel to Israel. The bulk of JINSA’s budget is spent on taking a host of retired U.S.
generals and admirals to Israel, where JINSA facilitates meetings between Israeli
officials and retired but still-influential U.S. flag officers. These officers then write
op-ed pieces and sign letters and advertisements championing the Likudnik line.
In one such statement, issued soon after the outbreak of the latest intifada,

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twenty-six JINSAns of retired flag rank, including many from the advisory board,
struck a moralizing tone, characterizing Palestinian violence as a “perversion of
military ethics” and holding that “America’s role as facilitator in this process
should never yield to America’s responsibility as a friend to Israel,” because“friends don’t leave friends on the battlefield.”266 Sowing seeds for the future,
JINSA also takes U.S. service academy cadets to Israel each summer andsponsors a lecture series at the Army, Navy, and Air Force academies.
JINSA also patronizes companies in the defense industry that stand to gain by thedrive for total war. “Almost every retired officer who sits on JINSA’s board ofadvisers or has participated in its Israel trips or signed a JINSA letter works or has
worked with military contractors who do business with the Pentagon and Israel.”267
For example, JINSA advisory board members Adm. Leon Edney, Adm. David
Jeremiah, and Lieut. Gen. Charles May, all retired, have served Northrop Grumman
or its subsidiaries as either consultants or board members. Northrop Grumman has
built ships for the Israeli Navy and sold F-16 avionics and E-2C Hawkeye planes tothe Israeli Air Force, as well as the Longbow radar system to the Israeli Army for use
in its attack helicopters. It also works with Tamam, a subsidiary of Israeli Aircraft
Industries, to produce an unmanned aerial vehicle.
JINSA is supported not only by defense contractor money but also by deeplycommitted Zionists, notably Irving Moscowitz, the California bingo magnate
who also provides financial support to the AEI. Moscowitz not only sends
millions of dollars a year to far-right Israeli West Bank settler groups like Ateret
Cohanim, he has also funded land purchases in key Arab areas around Jerusalem.
Moscowitz provided the money that enabled the 1996 reopening of a tunnel
under the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, which resulted in seventy deaths due
to rioting. Also involved in funding JINSA is New York investment banker
Lawrence Kadish, who also contributes to Republican causes. Again, we see theeffects of the most committed Jews. People like Moscowitz have an enormous
effect because they use their wealth to advance their people’s interests, a very
common pattern among wealthy Jews.268
The integration of JINSA with the U.S. defense establishment can be seen in
the program for its 2001 Jackson Award Dinner, an annual event named after
Senator Henry Jackson that draws an “A-list” group of politicians and defense
celebrities. At the dinner were representatives of U.S. defense industries (thedinner was sponsored by Boeing), as well as the following Defense Department
personnel: Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz; Under Secretary of
Defense Dov Zakheim (an ordained rabbi); Assistant Secretary of the Navy John
Young; Dr. Bill Synder, the Chairman of the Defense Science Board; theHonorable Mark Rosenker, Senior Military Advisor to the President; Admiral
William Fallon, Vice Chief of Naval Operations; General John Keane, Vice Chiefof Staff of the Army; General Michael Williams, Vice Commandant of the
Marines; Lieutenant General Lance Lord, Assistant Vice Chief of Staff of the Air
Force. Also present were a large number of U.S. flag and general officers who

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MacDonaldwere alumni of JINSA trips to Israel, as well as assorted Congressmen, a U.S.
Senator, and a variety of Israeli military and political figures. The 2002 JacksonAward Dinner, sponsored by Northrup Grumman, honored Paul Wolfowitz.
Dick Cheney was a previous recipient of the award.
JINSA is a good illustration of the point that whatever the deeply held beliefsof the non-Jews who are involved in the neoconservative movement, financial
motives and military careerism are also of considerable importance—a testimony
to the extent to which neoconservatism has permeated the political and military
establishments of the United States. A similar statement could be made about the
deep influence of neoconservatism among intellectuals generally.

CONCLUSION
The current situation in the United States is really an awesome display ofJewish power and influence. People who are very strongly identified as Jews
maintain close ties to Israeli politicians and military figures and to Jewish activist
organizations and pro-Israeli lobbying groups while occupying influential policymaking positions in the defense and foreign policy establishment. These same
people, as well as a chorus of other prominent Jews, have routine access to themost prestigious media outlets in the United States. People who criticize Israel
are routinely vilified and subjected to professional abuse.269
Perhaps the most telling feature of this entire state of affairs is the surreal fact thatin this entire discourse Jewish identity is not mentioned. When Charles
Krauthammer, Bill Kristol, Michael Rubin, William Safire, Robert Satloff, or thelegions of other prominent media figures write their reflexively pro-Israel pieces in
the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, or the Los Angeles Times, or opine on theFox News Network, there is never any mention that they are Jewish Americans who
have an intense ethnic interest in Israel. When Richard Perle authors a report for an
Israeli think tank; is on the board of directors of an Israeli newspaper; maintains close
personal ties with prominent Israelis, especially those associated with the Likud
Party; has worked for an Israeli defense company; and, according to credible reports,
was discovered by the FBI passing classified information to Israel—when, despite allof this, he is a central figure in the network of those pushing for wars to rearrange theentire politics of the Middle East in Israel’s favor, and with nary a soul having thecourage to mention the obvious overriding Jewish loyalty apparent in Perle’s actions,that is indeed a breathtaking display of power.
One must contemplate the fact that American Jews have managed to maintainunquestioned support for Israel over the last thirty-seven years, despite Israel’s
seizing land and engaging in a brutal suppression of the Palestinians in theoccupied territories—an occupation that will most likely end with expulsion orcomplete subjugation, degradation, and apartheid. During the same period
Jewish organizations in America have been a principal force—in my view themain force—for transforming America into a state dedicated to suppressing
ethnic identification among Europeans, for encouraging massive multiethnic

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immigration into the U.S., and for erecting a legal system and cultural ideologythat is obsessively sensitive to the complaints and interests of non-European
ethnic minorities—the culture of the Holocaust.270 All this is done without awhisper of double standards in the aboveground media.
I have also provided a small glimpse of the incredible array of Jewish proIsrael activist organizations, their funding, their access to the media, and theirpower over the political process. Taken as a whole, neoconservatism is an
excellent illustration of the key traits behind the success of Jewish activism:
ethnocentrism, intelligence and wealth, psychological intensity, andaggressiveness.271 Now imagine a similar level of organization, commitment,
and funding directed toward changing the U.S. immigration system put into law
in 1924 and 1952, or inaugurating the revolution in civil rights, or the post-1965
countercultural revolution: In the case of the immigration laws we see the sameuse of prominent non-Jews to attain Jewish goals, the same access to the major
media, and the same ability to have a decisive influence on the political processby establishing lobbying organizations, recruiting non-Jews as important
players, funneling financial and media support to political candidates who agreewith their point of view, and providing effective leadership in government.272
Given this state of affairs, one can easily see how Jews, despite being a tinyminority of the U.S. population, have been able to transform the country to serve
their interests. It’s a story that has been played out many times in Western
history, but the possible effects now seem enormous, not only for Europeans but
literally for everyone on the planet, as Israel and its hegemonic ally restructure
the politics of the world.
History also suggests that anti-Jewish reactions develop as Jews increase
their control over other peoples.273 As always, it will be fascinating to observe thedénouement.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank Samuel Francis for very helpful comments on the paper. I am also
grateful to an expert on Leo Strauss for his comments—many of which wereincorporated in the section on Leo Strauss. Unfortunately, at his request, he mustremain anonymous. Finally, thanks to Theodore O’Keefe for his meticulous
editorial work and his monumental patience.

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ENDNOTES
1. MacDonald 2003a.
2. MacDonald 2003b.
3. MacDonald 1998/2002.
4. Muravchik (2003) describes and critiques the idea of Trotsky’s influence among
neoconservatives.
5. Steinlight 2004.
6. Friedman 2002; Young Jewish Leadership Political Action Committee. http://yjlpac.org/dc/fyi.htm.
7. Kessler 2004.
8. Horrigan (2004). “Bush increases margins with AIPAC.” United Press International,
May 18, 2004.
www.washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20040518-015208-9372r.htm.
9. See Buchanan 2004.
10. Buchanan 2004.
11. B. Wattenberg interview with Richard Perle, PBS, November 14, 2002 (www.pbs.org/
thinktank/transcript1017.html). The entire relevant passage from the interview follows.
Note Perle’s odd argument that it was not in Israel’s interest that the U.S. invade Iraq
because Saddam Hussein posed a much greater threat to Israel than the U.S.
BEN WATTENBERG: As this argument has gotten rancorous, there is also an undertone thatsays that these neoconservative hawks, that so many of them are Jewish. Is that valid
and how do you handle that?
RICHARD PERLE: Well, a number are. I see Trent Lott there and maybe that’s Newt
Gingrich, I’m not sure, but by no means uniformly.
BEN WATTENBERG: Well, and of course the people who are executing policy, President
Bush, Vice President Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Connie Rice, they are not
Jewish at last report.
RICHARD PERLE: No, they’re not. Well, you’re going to find a disproportionate number ofJews in any sort of intellectual undertaking.

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BEN WATTENBERG: On both sides.
RICHARD PERLE: On both sides. Jews gravitate toward that and I’ll tell you if you balanceout the hawkish Jews against the dovish ones, then we are badly outnumbered, badly
outnumbered. But look, there’s clearly an undertone of anti-Semitism about it. There’s
no doubt.
BEN WATTENBERG: Well, and the linkage is that this war on Iraq if it comes about would
help Israel and that that’s the hidden agenda, and that’s sort of the way that works.
RICHARD PERLE: Well, sometimes there’s an out and out accusation that if you take theview that I take and some others take towards Saddam Hussein, we are somehow
motivated not by the best interest of the United States but by Israel’s best interest.
There’s not a logical argument underpinning that. In fact, Israel is probably more
exposed and vulnerable in the context of a war with Saddam than we are because
they’re right next door. Weapons that Saddam cannot today deliver against us could
potentially be delivered against Israel. And for a long time the Israelis themselves werevery reluctant to take on Saddam Hussein. I’ve argued this issue with Israelis. But it’sa nasty line of argument to suggest that somehow we’re confused about where ourloyalties are.
BEN WATTENBERG: It’s the old dual loyalty argument.
12. Chalabi’s status with the neocons is in flux because of doubts about his true
allegiances. See Dizard 2004.
13. MacDonald 1998/2002, Chs. 3, 7; Klehr 1978, 40; Liebman 1979, 527ff; Neuringer
1980, 92; Rothman & Lichter 1982, 99; Svonkin 1997, 45, 51, 65, 71–72.
14. Lindemann 1997, 433.
15. Wrezin 1994.
16. MacDonald 1998/2002, Ch. 7; Hollinger 1996, 158.
17. In Hook 1987, 215. For information on Lubin, see: http://centaur.vri.cz/news/
prilohy/pril218.htm.
18. Mann 2004, 197.
19. “Not in the Newsroom: CanWest, Global, and Freedom of Expression in Canada.”
Canadian Journalists for Free Expression: www.cjfe.org/specials/canwest/canw2.html;
April 2002.
20. Bamford 2004, 281.
21. Moore 2004.
22. In B. Lamb interview of Judith Miller on Bootnotes.org, June 17, 1990.
www.booknotes.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1008.
23. The Times and Iraq. New York Times, May 26, 2004, A10. Okrent (2004) notes that thestory was effectively buried by printing it on p. A10.
24. Okrent 2004.
25. See examples in MacDonald 1998/2002, Preface to the first paperback edition.
26. Tifft & Jones 1999, 38.
27. MacDonald 2003b; Massing 2002.
28. Massing 2002.
29. Cockburn 2003.
30. Cockburn 2003.
31. Massing 2002.

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32. Jerusalem Report, May 5, 2003. www.adl.org/anti%5Fsemitism/as%5Fsimple.asp
33. ADL Urges Senator Hollings to Disavow Statements on Jews and the Iraq War. ADL
press release, May 14, 2004; www.adl.org/PresRele/ASUS_12/4496_12.htm. Thesesentiments were shortly followed by a similar assessment by the American Board of Rabbis
which “drafted a resolution demanding that Senator Hollings immediately resign his
position in the Senate, and further demanded that the Democratic Party condemn
Hollings’ blatant and overt anti-Semitism, as well” (USA Today, May 24, 2004)
www.capwiz.com/usatoday/bio/userletter/?letter_id=92235631&content_dir=congressorg;
the American Board of Rabbis is an Orthodox Jewish group that regards Sharon’s policies as
too lenient and advocates assassination of all PLO leaders: see www.angelfire.com/ny2/
abor/. An article of mine on this issue (MacDonald 2003c), published by vdare.com, wasalso said to be “anti-Semitic” by the Southern Poverty Law Center: “Civil rights groupcondemns work of CSULB professor”; Daily Forty-Niner (California State University–
Long Beach) 54(119), May 16, 2004. www.csulb.edu/~d49er/archives/2004/spring/news/volLIVno119-civil.shtml
34. Daily Google-News searches from May 6, 2004 to May 29, 2004. During this period,
several articles on the topic appeared in the Forward, and there were articles in theBaltimore Jewish Times and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Summary articles written in
the Jerusalem Post and Ha’aretz more than three weeks after the incident focused on
anxiety among American Jews that Jews would be blamed for the Iraq war. (J. Zacharia,“Jews fear being blamed for Iraq war,” Jerusalem Post, May 29, 2004; N. Guttman,“Prominent U.S. Jews, Israel blamed for start of Iraq War,” Ha’aretz May 31, 2004).
There were no articles on this topic in Hollinger-owned media in the United States.
35. www.wiesenthal.com/social/press/pr_item.cfm?itemID=7323.
36. Morris 2003.
37. Goldberg 2003; Kaplan 2003; Lind 2003; Wald 2003.
38. Francis 2004, 9.
39. In Francis 2004, 9.
40. Buchanan 2003.
41. Muravchik 2003.
42. See MacDonald 1998/2002, Ch. 4.
43. North 2003.
44. In Drucker 1994, 25.
45. Cannon was not Jewish but lived his life in a very Jewish milieu. He was married to
Rose Karsner.
46. Drucker 1994, 43; “A younger, Jewish Trotskyist milieu began to form around him
in New York” (35).
47. In Drucker 1994, 43.
48. Francis 1999, 52.
49. Drucker 219.
50. Drucker, 261.
51. Drucker, 179.
52. Drucker, 288.
53. In Drucker, 305.
54. Vann 2003.

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55. A short history of the Socialist Party USA. http://sp-usa.org/spri/
sp_usa_history.htm As with everything else, there was an evolution of their views on
Zionism. The Shachtmanite journal, the New International, published two articles by Hal
Draper (1956, 1957) that were quite critical of Israel; this journal ceased publication in1958 when the Shachtmanites merged with the Socialist Party USA.
56. L. Brenner 1997.
57. Massing 1987.
58. This led to the resignations of many and the eventual reconstruction of the Socialist
Party USA with the left wing of the former organization.
59. Sims 1992, 46ff.; Massing 1987.
60. Sims 1992, 46.
61. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, AEI biography: www.aei.org/scholars/filter.all,scholarID.32/
scholar2.asp
62. Kaufman 2000, 296
63. Forward, August 20, 1999.
64. C. Gershman. A democracy strategy for the Middle East. www.ned.org/about/carl/dec1203.html; Dec. 12, 2003.
65. C. Gershman. After the bombings: My visit to Turkey and Istanbul’s Jewish
community. www.ned.org/about/carl/dec2703.html Dec. 27, 2003.
66. Massing 1987.
67. Paul 2003.
68. For democracy in Iraq and the Middle East. Resolution of January 2003. http://
www.socialdemocrats.org/Iraq.html.
69. Muravchik 2002.
70. M. Kampelman. Trust the United Nations? Undated; available atwww.socialdemocrats.org/kampelmanhtml.html as of May 2004. The article has thefollowing description of Kampelman: Max M. Kampelman was counselor of the State
Department; U.S. ambassador to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in
Europe; and ambassador and U.S. negotiator with the Soviet Union on Nuclear andSpace Arms. He is now chairman emeritus of Freedom House; the American Academyof Diplomacy; and the Georgetown University Institute for the Study of Diplomacy.
71. Ehrman 1995.
72. Schlesinger 1947, 256.
73. Hook 1987, 432–460; Ehrman, 47.
74. Ehrman, 50.
75. Tucker (1999) later argued that the United States should avoid the temptations ofdominion in a unipolar world. It should attempt to spread democracy by example
rather than force, and should achieve broad coalitions for its foreign policy endeavors.
76. Gerson 1996, 161–162.
77. Kristol 2003.
78. See Ehrman 1995, 63–96. Moynihan was especially close to Norman Podhoretz,
editor of Commentary, who was Moynihan’s “unofficial advisor and writer” during his
stint as UN ambassador (Ehrman 1995, 84).
79. Moynihan 1975/1996.
80. Miele 2002, 36–38.

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81. Moynihan 1975/1996, 96.
82. See MacDonald 1998/2004, Ch. 5; MacDonald 2003.
83. See MacDonald 1998/2004, Ch. 5; MacDonald 2003.
84. Patai & Patai Wing 1989. See discussion in MacDonald 1998/2004, Ch. 7.
85. Gerson 1996, 162.
86. Wisse 1981/1996.
87. Wisse 1981/1996, 192.
88. Wisse 1981/1996, 193.
89. Wisse 1981/1996, 193.
90. Wisse singles out Arthur Hertzberg as an example of an American Jew critical of
Begin’s government. Hertzberg continues to be a critic of Israeli policies, especially of
the settlement movement. In a New York Times op-ed piece “The price of not keeping
peace” of August, 27, 2003, Hertzberg urges the United States to cease funding the
expansion of Jewish settlements while also preventing the Palestinians’ access toforeign funds used for violence against Israel:
The United States must act now to disarm each side of the nasty things that they
can do to each other. We must end the threat of the settlements to a Palestinianstate of the future. The Palestinian militants must be forced to stop threatening
the lives of Israelis, wherever they may be. A grand settlement is not in sight,
but the United States can lead both parties to a more livable, untidy
accommodation.
91. Reviewed in MacDonald 2003.
92. See Friedman 1995, 257ff.
93. Friedman 1995, 72.
94. MacDonald, in press. In recent years mainstream Jewish groups such as the
AJCommittee have supported some forms of affirmative action, as in the recent
University of Michigan of 2003 case.
95. Glazer 1969, 36.
96. Friedman 1995, 230.
97. Liebman 1979, 561; MacDonald 1998/2002, Ch. 3.
98. Ehrman 1995, 38.
99. Ehrman 43.
100. Ehrman, 46
101. Ehrman, 174.
102. Francis 2004, 7.
103. Francis 2004, 9.
104. Francis 2004, 11–12.
105. MacDonald 1998/2002, preface to the paperback edition and Ch. 7.
106. Wattenberg 1984, 84.
107. Pipes 2001; see also Pipes’ Middle East Forum website: www.meforum.org;
Steinlight 2001, 2004.
108. In Buchanan 2004.
109. Ibid.
110. Ehrman, 62.

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MacDonald111. In Kaufman 2000, 13.
112. Kaufman 2000, 263.
113. Kaufman 2000, 47.
114. Kaufman 2000, 295. Kaufman footnotes the last assertion with a reference to aninterview with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, July 28, 1996.
115. Hersh 1982.
116. Kaufman 2000, 172; Waldman 2004.
117. Z. Brzezinski, in Kaufman 2000, 351.
118. Kaufman 2000, 374. Despite his strong support for Israel, Jackson drew the line at
support for the Likud Party, which came into power in 1977 with the election of
Menachem Begin. Whereas the Likud policy has been to seize as much of the West Bank
as possible and relegate the Palestinians to isolated, impotent Bantustan-like enclaves,Jackson favored full sovereignty for the Palestinians on the West Bank, except fornational security and foreign policy.
119. Kaufman 2000, 375.
120. Moynihan was expelled from the movement in 1984 because he softened his
foreign policy line (Ehrman 1995, 170).
121. Kaufman 2000, 308.
122. Ehrman 1995, 95.
123. Diggins 2004.
124. Kaufman 2000, 446.
125. Ibid., 447.
126. It’s interesting that Commentary continued to write of a Soviet threat even after thefall of the Soviet Union, presumably because they feared a unipolar world in which
Israel could not be portrayed as a vital ally of the United States (Ehrman 1995, 175–176).
127. Ehrman 1995, 181.
128. Ehrman 1995, 182.
129. Kirkpatrick 1979/1996.
130. Ibid., 71.
131. MacDonald 2002.
132. Ehrman 1995, 192.
133. Ehrman 1995, 197.
134. Lobe 2003a.
135. Strauss 1962/1994.
136. Ibid., 44.
137. Dannhauser 1996, 160.
138. Dannhauser 1996, 169–170; italics in text. Dannhauser concludes the passage bynoting, “I know for I am one of them.” Dannhauser poses the Athens/Jerusalem
dichotomy as a choice between “the flatland of modern science, especially social
science, and the fanaticism in the Mea Shaarim section of Jerusalem (incidentally, I
would prefer the latter)” (p. 160).
139. Strauss 1962/1994; Tarcov & Pangle 1987; Holmes 1993, 61–87.
140. Holmes 1993, 63.
141. In Jaffa 1999, 44.

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142. Himmelfarb (1974, 61): “There are many excellent teachers. They have students.
Strauss had disciples.” Levine 1994, 354: “This group has the trappings of a cult. Afterall, there is a secret teaching and the extreme seriousness of those who are ‘initiates.’”
See also Easton 2000, 38; Drury 1997, 2.
143. Strauss 1952, 36.
144. Drury 1997; Holmes 1993; Tarcov & Pangle 1987, 915. Holmes summarizes this thesis asfollows (74): “The good society, on this model, consists of the sedated masses, the gentlemenrulers, the promising puppies, and the philosophers who pursue knowledge, manipulate thegentlemen, anesthetize the people, and housebreak the most talented young.”
145. Easton 2000, 45, 183.
146. Holmes 1993, 74.
147. Levine 1994, 366.
148. Strauss 1952, Ch. 2.
149. MacDonald 1998/2002.
150. See MacDonald 1998/2002, Ch. 7.
151. MacDonald 1998/2002, passim.
152. Massing 1987.
153. Hook 1987, 46.
154. Hook 1987, 123.
155. Hook 1987, 179.
156. Hook 1987, 244.
157. Hook 1987, 246.
158. Hook 1987, 598.
159. Muravchik 2002.
160. Hook 1987, 600.
161. Hook 1989.
162. MacDonald 1998/2002, Ch. 6.
163. Hook 1987, 420: Anti-Semitism in the USSR “had a sobering effect upon
intellectuals of Jewish extraction, who had been disproportionately represented
among dissidents and radicals.”164. Hook 1989, 480–481.
165. Saba 1984.
166. Green 2004.
167. Saba 1984; Green 2004.
168. Dershowitz 1994; Jones 1996.
169. Green 2004.
170. Frum & Perle 2003.
171. Krauthammer. Democratic realism: An American foreign policy for a unipolar world.
Irving Kristol lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, Feb. 10, 2004.
172. Ibid.
173. See MacDonald 1998/2002, Chaps. 7, 8.
174. Krauthammer. He tarries: Jewish messianism and the Oslo peace. Lecture given at
Bar-Ilan University, June 10, 2002; www.biu.ac.il/Spokesman/Krauthammertext.html; see also Jerusalem Post, June 11, 2002.

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MacDonald175. See MacDonald 2003a, 2003b.
176. Krauthammer 2002.
177. Krauthammer 2004a.
178. Mann 2004, 23.
179. Hirsh 2003.
180. Mann 2004, 23, 30.
181. Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz interview with Sam Tannenhaus of Vanity Fair, May
9, 2003. United States Department of Defense News Transcript.
http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030509-depsecdef0223.html.
182. Ephron & Lipper 2002.
183. Curtiss 2003.
184. Locke 2002.
185. Locke 2002.
186. Bellow 2000, 27.
187. Bellow 2000, 56.
188. Bellow 2000, 103.
189. Bellow 2000, 101.
190. Cuddihy 1974. See Bellow 2000, 57–58.
191. Bellow 2000, 174.
192. Bellow 2000, 61.
193. Bellow 2000, 178–179.
194. Bellow 2000, 179.
195. Bellow 2000, 58.
196. Keller 2002.
197. Green 2004.
198. Ibid., 139–164.
199. Woodward 2004, 21.
200. Mann 2004, 302.
201. Clarke 2004, 32.
202. Christison & Christison 2003.
203. Ibid.
204. Muravchik 2003.
205. Mann 2004, 170; see also 79–81; 113.
206. Perle interview on BBC’s Panorama, in Lobe 2003c.
207. Findley 1989, 160; Green 2004.
208. Hilzenrath 2004.
209. Oberg 2003.
210. Brownfield 2003.
211. Muravchik, 2003.
212. Hilzenrath 2004.
213. A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. Institute for Advanced Strategic
and Political Studies Report, 1996. www.iasps.org; see www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm.
214. Yinon 1982.

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215. Wilson 2004, 484; Wilson suggests that Scooter Libby or Elliott Abrams revealed
that his wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent in retaliation for Wilson’s failure to findevidence supporting purchase of material for nuclear weapons by Iraq.
216. Hersh 2004.
217. Lobe 2002c.
218. Ehrman 1995, 139.
219. Besharov & Sullivan 1996, 21; Besharov apparently did not take a position as
moderator of a debate between Elliott Abrams and Seymour Martin Lipset on whether
the American Jewish community could survive only as a religious community (theDiamondback, student newspaper at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, Dec.
9, 1997; www.inform.umd.edu/News/Diamondback/1997-editions/12-Decembereditions/971209-Tuesday/NWS-Flagship). Another prominent neocon, Ben Wattenberg,
who is a senior fellow at AEI, is very upbeat about interracial marriage and immigration
generally—the better to create a “universal nation” (Wattenberg 2001). Wattenberg’s
article notes, with no apparent concern, that Jews have high rates of intermarriage as well.
220. Abrams 1997, ix.
221. See MacDonald 1998/2002, preface to the First Paperback Edition and chap. 7.
222. Abrams 1997, 188.
223. Risen 2004.
224. Kwiatkowski 2004b.
225. Kwiatkowski 2004a.
226. Bamford 2004, 279.
227. http://www.foundationjewishstudies.org/foundation/foundation.html.
228. Kamen 2003.
229. Dizard 2004. Dizard notes:
Why did the neocons put such enormous faith in Ahmed Chalabi, an exile with ashady past and no standing with Iraqis? One word: Israel. They saw the invasionof Iraq as the precondition for a reorganization of the Middle East that would
solve Israel’s strategic problems, without the need for an accommodation witheither the Palestinians or the existing Arab states. Chalabi assured them that the
Iraqi democracy he would build would develop diplomatic and trade ties with
Israel, and eschew Arab nationalism. Now some influential allies believe thoseassurances were part of an elaborate con, and that Chalabi has betrayed his
promises on Israel while cozying up to Iranian Shia leaders.
230. Friends of Israel are turning up in the strangest places. American Conservative,
May 24, 2004, 19.
231. Mann 2004, 75.
232. Kwiatkowski 2004b. Hersh 2003: “‘They [the CIA] see themselves as outsiders,’ aformer C.I.A. expert who spent the past decade immersed in Iraqi-exile affairs said of
the Special Plans people.”
233. Lobe 2003c.
234. Marshall 2004: “Shlomo Brom, a former Israeli intelligence officer now at the Jaffe
Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, has confirmed that Israeli
intelligence played a major role in bolstering the administration’s case for attacking
Iraq. The problem, Brom maintains, is that the information was not reliable.”

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MacDonald235. E.g., Hersh 2003; Bamford 2004.
236. See Green 2004.
237. Green 2004.
238. Milstein 1991.
239. Laughland 2003.
240. Ledeen 2002.
241. See Bamford 2004, 96–101, 138–145.
242. Waldman 2004.
243. Waldman 2004.
244. See MacDonald 2002.
245. Lewis 2002.
246. Waldman 2004.
247. Woodward 2004, 416.
248. PNAC Letter to President Clinton, Jan. 26, 1998, www.newamericancentury.org/
iraqclintonletter.htm; PNAC Letter to Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority
Leader Trent Lott, May 29, 1998, www.newamericancentury.org/iraqletter1998.htm.
249. Samber 2000.
250. Ibid.
251. Rosenblum 2002. See also Milbank 2002. In a later column, Rosenblum (2003)
noted,
Now [Sharansky] delivered the same message to Cheney: No matter how many
conditions Bush placed on the creation of a Palestinian state under Arafat, anysuch announcement would constitute a reward for two years of non-stop terror
against Israeli civilians. The normally laconic Cheney shot to attention when heheard these words. ‘But your own government has already signed off on this,’he told Sharansky, confirming the latter’s worst suspicions. Sharansky
nevertheless repeated, as Cheney scribbled notes, that without the removal of
Arafat and the entire junta from Tunis, the creation of an atmosphere in which
Palestinians could express themselves without fear of reprisal, and thecessation of incitement against Israel in the Palestinian schools and media
peace is impossible. President Bush’s upcoming speech had already undergone
30 drafts at that point. It was about to undergo another crucial shift based on
Sharansky’s conversation with Cheney. Two days later, on June 24, 2002,
President Bush announced at the outset, ‘Peace requires a new and different
Palestinian leadership.’ He did not mention Yasir Arafat once.
252. Drew 2003.
253. Woodward 2004, 409–412.
254. www.newamericancentury.org/Bushletter-040302.htm; other signatories include William Kristol, Gary Bauer, Jeffrey Bell, William J. Bennett, Ellen Bork, Linda
Chavez, Eliot Cohen, Midge Decter, Thomas Donnelly, Nicholas Eberstadt, Hillel
Fradkin, Frank Gaffney, Jeffrey Gedmin, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Charles Hill, Bruce P.
Jackson, Donald Kagan, Robert Kagan, John Lehman, Tod Lindberg, Rich Lowry,
Clifford May, Joshua Muravchik, Martin Peretz, Richard Perle, Daniel Pipes, Norman
Podhoretz, Stephen P. Rosen, Randy Scheunemann, Gary Schmitt, William Schneider,Jr., Marshall Wittmann, R. James Woolsey.

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255. United States National Security Background Guide; University of Chicago:
Chicago Model United Nations VI, Feb. 13, 2001; http://chomun.uchicago.edu/
committees/NSC_back.pdf.
256. Pincus & Priest 2003; Bamford 2004, 368–370.
257. Keller 2002; see also Woodward 2004, 48.
258. Lobe 2002a; Mann 2004, 208–210.
259. Decter 2003, 41–43.
260. ZOA news release, Aug. 7, 2002. ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said: “Israel
has the greater historical, legal, and moral right to Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. At the very
least, those areas should be called disputed territories, not occupied territories, since theterm ‘occupied’ clearly suggests that the ‘occupier’ has no right to be there. We strongly
applaud Secretary Rumsfeld’s courageous and principled stance in distancing himself
from the ‘occupied territory’ fallacy.” www.zoa.org/pressrel2002/20020807a.htm.
261. Woodward 2004, 416.
262. www.danielpipes.org.
263. Whitaker 2002.
264. www.campus-watch.org.
265. www.jinsa.org.
266. Vest 2002.
267. Vest 2002.
268. Vest 2002.
269. See MacDonald 2003a.
270. Findley 1989; MacDonald 2003a.
271. See MacDonald 1998/2002, preface.
272. MacDonald 2003a.
273. MacDonald, 1998/2002, chap. 7.
274. MacDonald 1998/2004.

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