In the month following my father’s death in December 2025, a fight has broken out over his legacy that would have amused him no end. It concerns the capture and arrest of Nicolás Maduro. Did this action—together with the strike on Iran’s nuclear program earlier in the year—place Donald Trump in the camp of the neoconservatives? The idea is a bitter My Pillow to swallow for the most fanatical acolytes in his MAGA camp, many of whom are incapable of even speaking the word “neoconservative” without spittle flying from their mouths in rage. Some associated with the neocon tendency say the Venezuela operation does not fit well with our ideas because Trump is uninterested in democracy promotion. Others say the removal of a Communist dictator alone qualifies it as an unabashedly neoconservative move. At which point, the Talmudic debates begin about what happens “the day after,” whether the neocon worldview is too simplistic to take account of real-world difficulties, and the like.
There’s a Yiddish word for all this, and Yiddish was my father’s first language. The word is narischkeit, foolishness. He would have thought all the back-and-forthing absurd, because he would have been absolutely and unashamedly delighted by the Maduro extraction. And not, I expect, for the reasons you might expect. He would have been delighted by it not because it clicked neatly into his overall philosophy but because of something larger. Norman Podhoretz believed that when America acts forcefully in the world, when America lays down demarcation lines defining what is and what is not proper or good or decent, it almost always does so with good motive and with good reason. Even when the execution is horribly flawed, the intent is noble. Because America is noble.
He was, after all, the author of a book entitled My Love Affair with America. The enduring element of that book is the emotion expressed at its conclusion: America has earned our love and gratitude because, like the message of the Passover song “Dayenu,” if this country had just done only one of the myriad things it has done to bring freedom and prosperity and goodness to the world, only one, that would have been enough. So America has earned the benefit of the doubt. He believed it when Bill Clinton did what he did in Bosnia; he believed it when Bush père et fils did what they did against Saddam Hussein in Iraq; he believed it when Barack Obama went into Libya. American action can change the world for the better. It’s only when America itself ceases to believe this to be true and loses faith in the validity of its own actions—or when its elites fall prey to the siren song of self-doubt and self-abasement and begin actively hampering the efforts—that it will fail.
This was his explanation for America’s defeat in his 1982 book Why We Were in Vietnam; he said the country fought the war on the political, military, and strategic cheap, and in failing to remain resolute and do the job properly, it lost sight of its purpose. Vietnam was a war we could have won and chose not to, and it was, in the words of Ronald Reagan, a “noble cause” even though American elites chose to believe that it was bad or evil. In January 2026, America removed an evil election-stealing dictator from power who had impoverished his people in the name of discredited Communist ideology and flooded the hemisphere with crippling narcotics; and that, Norman Podhoretz would have thought, was America at its best.
Coming to this worldview was part of the journey he undertook, somewhat unwillingly, in his 30s and 40s. His clarifying moment arose from depression. In the summer of 1969, when he was 39 years old, my father was at the lowest ebb of his life. Norman Podhoretz was in the Catskill mountains, at the austere and unprepossessing 1841 farmhouse he and my mother had purchased for $17,500 at the urging of his best friend, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, because it was seven miles from the Moynihan farm. This was our family’s potted version of a weekend country house; we never got things like this right. The place was decrepit and ungainly, and it took more than four hours to drive there, so it was an agony to go Friday and come back Sunday on the choked New York State Thruway. Once my father found himself marooned for six hours because the Thruway had been shut down owing to the massive pilgrimage to Max Yasgur’s farm that would come to be known as Woodstock, and he literally knew no other way to get to the house in East Meredith, New York, what with Waze 40 years in the future.
My mother was then working at Harper’s and could not get away. My sister Ruthie and I were at summer camp; my older sisters were in their late teens and gallivanting about; so he was alone in the country. Choked with disappointment over the hostile reception of his book Making It, finding it impossible to get purchase on a book he had contracted to write on the politics of the 1960s, and increasingly alienated from his social circle both because of that seeming failure and his own rapidly changing political views, my father was riven with despair.
Much later, and for many years, he tried to write the third in the series of personal testimonies he began with his account of ambition in Making It and then continued with his 1979 political memoir, Breaking Ranks. That volume would have been about his faith. But because his own relation to these matters was uncharacteristically blurry and unclear to him, he was unable to pull it off. What’s interesting about this project is that each aborted iteration of it began the same way:
He is on the country road called the Catskill Turnpike that passed by our house. A quarter mile away lies the one-room schoolhouse that had come with the property and had been set up as his writing studio—a horrible irony, since he was gripped with writer’s block and could not produce the book for which he had received a substantial advance (a failure that would, a few years later, force him to sell the house to give the money back to Simon & Schuster). He is thinking seriously about suicide, like Levin near the end of Anna Karenina, who, Tolstoy tells us, finds himself thinking obsessively that “without knowing what I am and why I am here, life’s impossible; and that I can’t know, and so I can’t live.”
And then suddenly, in his darkest moment, on that rural country road, Norman Podhoretz felt bathed in light and love, and knew there was a God. It was the first, and last, purely religious experience of his life.
I would like to report that this moment of salvation was emotionally transformative and that it brought him peace. It did not. In almost exact parallel to Levin, who has a similar moment of transcendent catharsis at the end of Anna Karenina only to discover he remains the same fractious person he has always been, my father remained easily distracted by annoyances, unable to avoid falling into political arguments with people he needn’t have bothered arguing with, and frustrated in many of his worldly ambitions. He was saved from the ultimate despair, but the struggle to get through a day contentedly would last the rest of his life.
Peace he didn’t get, not then and not really ever. But he rebounded from his lowest moment with renewed energy and purpose, even though he had immense difficulty writing for the next seven years. These were the years in which COMMENTARY under his editorship became (in the estimation of many at the time, and in retrospect an undeniable fact in the idea biz) the greatest and most urgent magazine of its time. COMMENTARY, month after month, offered an astonishingly formidable presentation of the uncompromising vision shared by my father and his colleague Neal Kozodoy—of an America awash in unjustified self-flagellation, the Soviet Union on the march, and the joint threats to civilization posed by the return of Jew-hatred to the center of international affairs after a quarter century of quiescence in the wake of the Holocaust and the emergence of radical Islamism.
What did this have to do with his religious revelation? That moment on the Catskill Turnpike clarified his ability to see the difference between right and wrong and good and evil and left him unafraid to draw the distinctions. No, not unafraid—utterly compelled to draw them, so much so that he could not hold himself back. A world with God is a world in which God’s truths—if you can understand them—are as immutable as the laws of mathematics. The verse from the Torah he considered the most important comes at the end of Deuteronomy, after Moses has laid out most of the 613 laws of Jewish practice. In his beloved King James translation, it reads, “I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.” Having himself come so close to choosing death, the rest of his days on this earth he dedicated to choosing life.
This did not mean he prayed three times a day, wore phylacteries and tzitzit, used no electricity on the Sabbath, and kept kosher. He did none of these things. Superbly educated in the tenets of Jewish faith and history after years of study at the Jewish Theological Seminary, he resisted daily Jewish practice. Having grown up kosher, he broke the practice by having a cheeseburger at the Chock Full o’ Nuts on 116th and Broadway during his first year in college at Columbia. And once he was treif, he was treif. He did not like going to synagogue, in part out of snobbery; he said he had met the entire post–World War II conservative rabbinate during his years of study at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and his general impression was that with a few exceptions, they were pompous and second-rate and he did not need their guidance or counsel. When I would press him on these matters, the way a kid will try to poke holes in his parents’ inconsistencies to find his own way, my father would justify the idea that he was a “good Jew” even if he didn’t practice Judaism by citing Maimonides on the virtue of achieving faith through reason. Practice, you see, was for those who could not understand God and had to follow practical steps laid out for them in those 613 commandments that showed you how to live. His great friend Paul Johnson wrote a wonderful book called Intellectuals that is nothing but an attack on intellectuals for their sophistries. I fear Paul’s perspective had my father dead to rights on the Maimonidean narischkeit he offered me.
And yet Norman Podhoretz did choose life, as God commanded. He chose the God-given freedoms of the United States Constitution over the godless unfreedom of the Soviet Union and said compromises with Moscow were acts of moral cowardice. And he defended ordinary Americans against the scorn expressed toward them by the very intellectuals Paul Johnson made such great sport of. His favorite quote from George Orwell, from a 1938 review of a book by the intellectual Cyril Connolly (one of Johnson’s targets, in fact), was this: “The fact to which we have got to cling, as to a life-belt, is that it is possible to be a normal decent person and yet to be fully alive.” My father was himself not a normal person, this penniless son of Yiddish-speaking immigrants whose father was a milkman and whose sister was a secretary but who would find himself at the age of 74 awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and whose obituary would appear on the front page of the New York Times—a thing I can tell you he never would have expected.
But he believed in the nobility of ordinariness, and spoke up for the ordinary, as he believed in the nobility of the United States; and, just as the choir sings the praises of the divine in the piece of art he believed to be the greatest ever produced, Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion, Norman Podhoretz sang the praises of America until the day he died.
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