The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy - Hardcover

Friedman, Murray

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521836565 ISBN 13: 9780521836562

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2005

Synopsis

This is the first history of the development of American Jewish political conservatism and the rise of a group of Jewish intellectuals and activists who are known as neoconservatives. It describes the growth of perhaps a dozen such figures in the 1940s and 50s, including Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer and Norman Podhoretz, to several hundred younger people such as Paul Wolfowitz, David Brooks and Charles Krauthammer who have had a powerful impact on American public policy, including the run up to and aftermath of the war in Iraq.

About this title

About the Author

Historian, social activist, and a prolific writer, Murray Friedman was appointed as vice chair of the US Civil Rights Commission in Washington, D.C. by Preisdent Ronald Reagan and acting chair following the death of the chairman. He will be honored in 2005 by Temple University which will announce the creation of the Murray Friedman Chair in American Jewish History at that time. In 2003, he served in a State Department delegation representing the US in Vienna at a Conference on Racism, Xenophobia, and Discrimination. Dr Friedman has written and edited numerous books including What Went Wrong? The Creation and Collapse of the Black Jewish Alliance (1995), several volumes on Philadelphia history, and The Utopian Dilemma: American Jews and Public Policy. In addition, he has written articles in Commentary, The Atlantic Monthly, The Weekly Standard, and The New Republic as well as professional journals such as American Jewish History.

Reviews

This engaging, if shallow, study recounts the epochal post-war migration of Jewish intellectuals from Left to Right. Friedman (What Went Wrong?: The Creation and Collapse of the Black Jewish Alliance), himself a self-avowed Jewish neo-con, surveys his fellow travelers' journey from their socialist salad days to their Cold War shift towards liberal anti-Communism to their revulsion at the counter-cultural excesses of the New Left to their final decampment for Reagan Republicanism. He focuses on such neo-con pillars as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, but he also profiles lesser known Right-wing Jewish antecedents (Frank Chodorov), neo-con newbies (William Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz) and Gentile conservatives (William F. Buckley and Ralph Reed). Friedman emphasizes neo-conservatism's growing support for religion as a social glue, its militant defense of Israel and its patriotic appreciation of the opportunities America offers Jews. He also argues that Jewish neo-cons helped the larger conservative movement exchange a racist, anti-Semitic aura for intellectual sophistication and social-science chops. Friedman's conservative sympathies and biographical approach mean that he takes neo-con enthusiasms like supply-side economics and the Contra war in Nicaragua largely at face value without subjecting them to serious critical appraisal. Though neither a ground-breaking interpretation nor an incisive analysis of Jewish neo-conservatism, his book is a useful introduction to its history.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521836565
• ISBN 13: 9780521836562
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 310