Losing Jewishness at TNR

How The New Republic stopped being a Jewish magazine | Haaretz |

Last week, The New Republic, the magazine I used to edit, fell apart. The owner ousted the top two editors, most of the senior staff resigned, and while something called The New Republic will continue, it is unlikely to bear much relationship to the crusading, literary publication founded by Walter Lippmann and other progressive intellectuals 100 years ago.

It’s an important moment not only in the history of American journalism, but in the history of American Jews.

It’s an important moment for American Jews because for the last 40 years, The New Republic has been a culturally Jewish magazine. Jews had always worked at TNR; Lippmann himself was an assimilated German Jew. But in 1974, when Martin Peretz bought The New Republic, it came to reflect his very public Jewish identity. TNR became a remarkable hybrid, only possible because of the extraordinary acceptance and privilege afforded to Jews in late 20th century America: an influential liberal political magazine that was explicitly informed by Jewish sensibilities and concerns.

Peretz was a fervent Zionist and made defending the Jewish state one of the magazine’s chief passions.

As a force in American journalism, we certainly have. Jews edit The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Weekly Standard, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Vox, Buzzfeed, Politico, and the opinion pages of The New York Times and Washington Post. But it’s unlikely to last.

…
Many of the most prominent American Jewish journalists in their late 40s, 50s or 60s – Wieseltier, Thomas Friedman, David Remnick, Roger Cohen, Jeffrey Goldberg, William Kristol, Jennifer Rubin, Charles Krauthammer – write about Israel frequently. By contrast, the most successful Jewish journalists in their 20s and 30s – Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, Ben Smith, Dana Goldstein, Spencer Ackerman – write it about it much less.

Demographic Change

This is how it has always worked in America. When The New Republic was founded 100 years ago, Jews were rising in both numbers and influence. Now we’re beginning to decline. It’s the nature of living in a country that allows in immigrants from different religious and ethnic backgrounds …

The New Republic Exodus Raises Doubts About Magazine’s Jewish Future | The Forward |

My Marty Peretz Problem — And Ours
by Eric Alterman | June 17, 2007 |

What’s more, during his reign, Peretz has also done lasting damage to the cause of American liberalism. By turning TNR into a kind of ideological police dog, Peretz enjoyed the ability — at least for a while — to play a key role in defining the borders of “responsible” liberal discourse, thereby tarring anyone who disagreed as irresponsible or untrustworthy. But he did so on the basis of a politics simultaneously so narrow and idiosyncratic — in thrall almost entirely to an Israel-centric neoconservatism — that it’s difficult to understand how the magazine’s politics might be considered liberal anymore. Ironically Peretz’s stance ultimately turned out to be not only out of step with most liberals but also most American Jews, who consistently cling to views far more dovish, both on Israel and on U.S. foreign policy generally, than those espoused in TNR.

It is a sad but true fact of American political life that liberals rarely exercise so much influence as when they happen to be endorsing conservative causes, and this temptation has proven consistently irresistible to Peretz and his magazine. TNR under Peretz has been a vehicle that proved extremely helpful to Ronald Reagan’s wars in Central America and George Bush’s war in Iraq. It provided seminal service to Newt Gingrich’s and William Kristol’s efforts to kill the Clinton plan for universal health care and offered intellectual legitimacy to Charles Murray’s efforts to portray black people as intellectually inferior to whites. As for liberal causes, however … well, not so much.

See earlier fp stories posted by BooMan …

Their Friends Abandoned Them

This is Still Bugging Me

More Reviews On TNR

Continue beyond the fold …

Promoting regime change in Iraq paved the way to regime change at the New Republic | Mondoweiss |

Jacob Heilbrunn has published the best piece on the matter, “The Myth of the Liberal New Republic,” that focuses on the neoconservative foreign policy.

[Peretz and Leon Wieseltier] viewed any kind of hesitation about force as tantamount to a cold and heartless foreign policy. They saw themselves as always on the side of the angels and promoted a kind of group-think at the magazine that I believe explains its disastrous endorsement of the Iraq War and that cost it many of its readers.

As I recall it, once I joined the magazine and began writing opinion and reported pieces, it seemed as though there was never a stand that was hard-line enough to satisfy Peretz and Wieseltier. The weekly Thursday meetings, where Marty and Leon egged each other in their mutual hawkishness (not that it took all that much egging), started to feel oppressive.

The adherence was significant: The neoconservative groupthink of the publication set the tune for the liberal D.C. discourse:

Having been practically weaned on the New Republic’s bellicosity, I myself developed a fairly hawkish disposition and published a number of pieces attacking the Clinton administration for insufficient zealousness abroad. But I always viewed the neoconservatives with some skepticism, and by 1999 my antipathy toward the idea of ballistic missile defense probably helped to ensure that I fell into a state of ungrace. It was no accident that I was replaced by my talented friend Lawrence F. Kaplan, who was then a staunch neoconservative and co-author of a book with Weekly Standard editor William Kristol that demanded a new war against Iraq. At the time, my one word of advice to him was that you could never be too far right for them.

Which is why I confess to rubbing my eyes in disbelief at some of the sentimental piffle being circulated about the magazine’s latest round of upheaval.

All roads lead to Israel in the New Republic’s worldview. Heilbrunn notes that Israel was “the neuralgic tender spot of the magazine” and that Leon Wieseltier“would, more often than not, devote himself to playing what might be called the anti-anti Israel card.” Wieseltier grew up a Revisionist Zionist, and he carried on with the militant Israel stuff after Marty Peretz left the building in disgrace in 2009:

He has constantly striven to package a crusading and militant moralism as synonymous with liberalism and American national interests. The most recent example was his endorsement of Brookings Institution fellow Robert Kagan’s article “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire” as a revelatory essay, even though Andrew J. Bacevich, writing in Commonweal, correctly called it “slickly mendacious” for remaining silent about the Iraq War and acting as though American power can set everything that is wrong abroad aright.

John Cole sneers:

Providing a forum for the noxious Marty Peretz to slander at will anyone to the left of Avigdor Lieberman
I can’t think of one occasion that sticks out where it was a force for good.