Rabbi Andrea’s Sermon 27th December / 7th Tevet 5786

When Universalism Breaks: Norman Podhoretz, Jewish Peoplehood, and Life in Exile

It has almost become a cliché. Many Jews have followed a similar path: an early attraction to left-wing politics and universalist ideals, followed, sometimes gradually, sometimes abruptly, by a painful awakening to antisemitism. It happened after the Six-Day War, when Jewish self-defence suddenly became morally suspect. It happened under Stalin, when the rhetoric of universal equality coexisted with deeply rooted hostility toward Jews. And it has happened again in our own time, especially since October 7.

What makes this awakening so painful is not only the hatred itself, but where it comes from. It comes from spaces that speak the language of justice, liberation, and universal human values. One expects antisemitism from the far right; encountering it on the left feels like a betrayal. It forces a reckoning not only with prejudice, but with entire moral vocabularies that once seemed emancipatory.

That betrayal has a social and emotional cost. People you thought were allies fall silent, or turn openly hostile. You discover that you are welcome only as long as you do not appear too Jewish: as long as you deny belonging to a people with history, memory, and collective destiny. Often the process is ugly. Former friends do not simply disagree; they mock, isolate, and sometimes retaliate, professionally, socially, symbolically, for what they perceive as betrayal.

The archetype of this trajectory in the modern Jewish intellectual world is Norman Podhoretz, who died recently at the age of ninety-four.

Born in Brooklyn in 1930 to Yiddish-speaking immigrant parents, Podhoretz rose from modest beginnings into the elite world of the “New York intellectuals.” In his early years, he was very much a man of the liberal left: ambitious, culturally sophisticated, and convinced that universal ideals could ground a just society. Over time, however, he grew increasingly disillusioned with the left’s indulgence of the counterculture, its reflexive anti-Americanism, and, most decisively, hostility that surfaced whenever Jewish particularity, Jewish power, or Israel entered the discussion.

You can trace this evolution clearly through his memoirs, which offered an unsparing anatomy of liberal intellectual culture: its shifting orthodoxies, hunger for moral performance, and harsh punishments for heresy.¹

This personal evolution helped define what came to be known as neoconservatism: the conviction that democratic societies must be defended, culturally and geopolitically, not only against external totalitarian threats, but also against the erosion of moral confidence within their own elites.

Under Podhoretz’s leadership, Commentary evolved into one of the central arenas of American political and cultural debate, a launching pad for arguments that shaped U.S. foreign-policy discussions for decades. Around the magazine formed a moral, intellectual circle rather than a party or faction. Figures associated with it included Irving Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who famously, as head of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations, opposed the resolution declaring Zionism a form of racism.²

What united these figures was not loyalty to a party or administration, but a shared belief that politics is inseparable from moral judgment, and that liberal democracy must be defended not only pragmatically, but uncompromisingly, against its enemies and against its own moral erosion. They believed, moreover, that democracy, Western political culture, and Jewish survival were historically and morally intertwined.

In the generation that followed, thinkers influenced by this world, among them Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith, entered government during the George W. Bush administration.³ Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging limits and failure. This lineage is inseparable from the Iraq War, widely regarded as a moral and strategic catastrophe. That judgment should not be evaded. But neither should an entire moral tradition be reduced to its most controversial political outcome.

One of the most consequential achievements of Podhoretz and those around him was their impact on the moral culture of the Republican Party. For much of the twentieth century, the American right had been an uneasy home for Jews. Country club antisemitism, suspicion of Jewish intellectuals, and indifference toward Israel were not marginal phenomena.

Podhoretz and his circle helped change that. Through sustained argument, in magazines, books, speeches, and personal confrontations, they reframed support for Israel as a moral imperative of democratic politics, not a sectarian interest. Israel, they insisted, was not a liability to the West but a frontline democracy confronting the same enemies of liberal civilization. For decades, Republicans became, on balance, Israel’s most reliable allies.

Crucially, this alignment never meant blind loyalty. Podhoretz did not hesitate to criticize Republican leaders, including Ronald Reagan, when he believed that moral clarity or Israel’s security was at stake.⁴ This transformation built on earlier efforts by figures such as William F. Buckley Jr., who worked to expel anti-Semites from the conservative movement. But history does not move in straight lines. Isolationist and antisemitic currents have re-emerged, amplified by social media and stripped of shame. If a long parenthesis is closing, Podhoretz’s legacy matters even more.⁵

There is no point in denying that Podhoretz was a controversial figure. Much of what surrounded him was hard to take. Some positions associated with his circle, especially the polemics of his wife, Midge Decter, against feminism, and Podhoretz’s own writings on the LGBT movement, are deeply troubling.⁶

And yet I want to be personal, because Commentary opened my eyes.

When I first encountered Podhoretz’s writing, I was a conventional left-leaning student, shaped by the moral optimism of the Oslo years. I believed history was bending toward reconciliation, that universalist ethics would dissolve particular conflicts, and that Jewish particularism would become unnecessary, perhaps even embarrassing.

Podhoretz shattered that complacency. He exposed the hunger for moral superiority, the fear of dissent, and the self-deception of the intellectual Left. Most painfully, he showed how hostility toward Jews was excused when wrapped in the language of universal justice. Antisemitism, he taught, does not always announce itself as hatred. Sometimes it presents itself as sophistication.

As an academic who belonged to that very world, I benefited enormously from this act of exposure. Podhoretz helped me see its silences, incentives, and moral blind spots, to understand not only why certain arguments were rejected, but why certain questions could no longer be asked.

So, what can we, as Jews, learn from Norman Podhoretz?

First, that morality and politics must never be separated. Neutrality in the face of evil is not sophistication; it is complicity.

Second, that antisemitism must be confronted wherever it appears, especially when it comes from places that claim moral superiority. When Jews are asked to justify their existence more than anyone else, something rotten is at work.

Third, that Israel must be defended without illusions. Podhoretz opposed demands for irreversible concessions in exchange for nothing, peace processes without peace partners, morality preached from a safe distance.

All of this came at a price. Podhoretz lost friendships, sometimes spectacularly. But that, perhaps, is his final lesson: integrity is not comfortable. It does not guarantee popularity. Without it, politics collapses into fashion and morality into slogans.

Which brings me to a final question: where are the Norman Podhoretzes of the progressive Jewish intellectual world today?

For the most part, they are absent. Post-colonial discourse makes academic careers; moral clarity does not.⁷ Jewish peoplehood is treated as an embarrassment. Long before October 7, voices like Podhoretz’s grasped what many preferred not to see: the convergence of Islamism and elements of the radical left in a shared assault on democracy, moral universals, and the legitimacy of Jewish collective existence.

This brings us to this week’s Torah portion.

Jacob is on his way to Egypt, descending toward a place that promises security and survival, but will become the house of slavery. At this threshold of exile, Jacob dreams. God says to him: “I will go down with you into Egypt, and I will also surely bring you up again” (Genesis 46:4).

God does not demand that Jacob stop being Israel in order to survive Egypt. Exile is never the final word. It does not mean dissolving into universal humanity; it means carrying peoplehood through hostile systems without surrendering it. [Rashi on Genesis 46:4; Talmud Bavli, Megillah 29a]

God does not say Egypt is harmless, because it is not. Instead, God promises presence. But Jewish existence must never depend on the moral approval of the surrounding culture.

The danger is not entering Egypt. The danger of diaspora life is acceptance on false terms, self-erasure disguised as belonging.

Jacob is the patriarch of exile because exile becomes his enduring condition. Night, exile, and uncertainty belong together. That is why rabbinic tradition associates Jacob with Ma’ariv, the evening prayer, recited as light fades. [Talmud Bavli, Berakhot 26b]

Ma’ariv corresponds to the burning of what remains of the day’s offerings, the incomplete sacrifices that continue through the night. What is fragmentary is not meaningless. What is unfinished is not abandoned

.

Exile is survivable only if it remains oriented toward a centre.

Jacob teaches us that God can be found in the night. Podhoretz teaches us that integrity can survive exile. Both insist on the same condition: do not forget Jerusalem, for without it, neither dreams nor peoplehood can endure.

Notes

1.        Norman Podhoretz, Making It (New York: Random House, 1967); Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir (New York: Harper & Row, 1979); Ex-Friends (New York: Free Press, 1999).

2.        Irving Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Dictatorships and Double Standards (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982); Daniel Patrick Moynihan, A Dangerous Place (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978).

3.        Jacob Heilbrunn, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (New York: Doubleday, 2008).

4.        Norman Podhoretz, “J’Accuse,” Commentary 74, no. 3 (September 1982); Robert C. Tucker, “The Middle East: Carterism Without Carter?,” Commentary 72, no. 3 (September 1981).

5.        Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley (New York: Random House, 2008); George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006); Kenneth Janda, The Republican Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022).

6.        Midge Decter, “The Liberated Woman,” Commentary (October 1970); Norman Podhoretz, “How the Gay-Rights Movement Won,” Commentary (November 1996).

7.        Terry Eagleton, After Theory (London: Penguin Books, 2003).