A Passion for Truth: The Selected Writings of Eric Breindel
edited by John Podhoretz
HarperCollins. 230 pp. $25.00

When Eric Breindel died suddenly in March 1998 at the age of forty-two, a whole sector of American culture seemed to grieve. At the packed funeral, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan eulogized his former student and aide by paraphrasing the Talmud: “Fools measure their lives in years, while wise people measure them in days. Eric was wise in this respect as he was in so many others.” Mayor Rudolph Giuliani spoke glowingly about what Breindel had done for his native city of New York, and of his “strong, loving, courageous soul.” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., recalled his former Harvard classmate as “the smartest person [any of us] knew.” Martin Peretz, editor of the New Republic, suggested that, as the child of Holocaust survivors, Breindel’s passionate intensity about public issues was something unknown to “intellectuals on the sunny side of the street.” Norman Podhoretz spoke eloquently of the manifold ways in which Breindel, whose first contribution to COMMENTARY appeared in 1977, had been “a very good Jew.”

A graduate of Harvard Law School and the London School of Economics, Breindel served for ten years as the editorial-page editor of the New York Post, where he also wrote a weekly column, “Agendas.” What did he say or do there, and elsewhere, to win the respect of so many distinguished mourners? A part of the answer is on view in this posthumous selection of his columns, lovingly edited and introduced by John Podhoretz, now associate editor of the Post.

What the book reveals is that Breindel became the Gary Cooper of journalists the old-fashioned way, by trying to protect those he loved. A child of privilege who was also very smart and attractive, Breindel could have become anything he wanted. This made it all the more impressive that he wanted to become the champion of his people—his people being New Yorkers, Americans, and Jews. Far from making him parochial or chauvinistic, Breindel’s championship of those closest to home enlarged his sympathies, sharpened his understanding of international politics, and even gained him the trust of ideological adversaries.

_____________

Despite the obviously dated quality of many of the events described in these pieces, the thrust of the arguments remains surprisingly fresh. “This column concerns the media—or, more precisely, a major media failure,” one of them opens. “It’s also about racism. And about silence on the part of public officials in the face of something they know to be wrong.” There follows Breindel’s searing indictment of the 1990 boycott of Korean-owned groceries in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, a boycott fueled by a self-styled black racist whom local authorities felt powerless to stop.

Ignoring none of the major culprits in the chain of complicity, Breindel singled out the New York media for all but ignoring the boycott, a sin of omission committed, he accurately noted, out of fear of offending blacks. But as he went on to show, this was to manifest prejudice twice over—against the Koreans, the victims of black racism, and against the majority of black people for assuming that they supported black racism. Upholding the long-range claims of justice against the day’s political correctness, Breindel refused to countenance that the victimhood of one group could ever serve as an excuse for denying equal protection to another.

This was hardly the only occasion on which Breindel strove to expose the dangerous alliance in New York between violent offenders and their liberal apologists, people who think they can help the downtrodden by condoning their criminality, or who make excuses for evil because they are afraid to stand up to it. Responding to breaking events—the savage beating of a female jogger in Central Park, the Leonard Jeffries affair at City College, the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum in what he rightly called New York’s first pogrom—Breindel unflinchingly explored the pernicious consequences of “white guilt” and the ways in which political activists “exploit the plight of unfortunate individuals in the service of larger ideological goals.”

_____________

Continuing to patrol his own beat, Breindel also focused with intensity on the crimes of Communism, and in particular on the ongoing efforts of American elites to obfuscate its historical record. This preoccupation must have seemed especially odd in someone of his age and background, and yet it is perhaps here that he made his greatest and most original contribution, both as an American and as a Jew.

Most American liberals, while abundantly deploring the evils of Nazism, have tended to ignore the vexing question of the liberal (and, by extension, Jewish) attraction to socialism, including in its most repressive variety. Citing their interest in social justice, liberals have felt secure in their good intentions even as they themselves have been pulled leftward, countenancing radicalism on one side of the political spectrum while excoriating it on the other. Breindel, by contrast, recognized the connection between Auschwitz and the Gulag. For him, just as revulsion against the Ku Klux Klan required an opposition to racism when it manifested itself among blacks, so revulsion against Nazism required opposition to Communism. Otherwise, anyone could claim the right to impose his political will on others in the name of a “purifying” ideal.

Breindel did some of his best writing on this topic. In several columns about leftism in Hollywood, for example, he pointed out how, in the 1950’s and later, former Communists used the excesses of McCarthyism as a cloak for their own unrepentant support of Soviet totalitarianism. “Why,” he inquired, “haven’t the movie-industry Communists ever been asked what they knew about the Soviet Union and when they knew it?” His description of how Hollywood rendered the actor Robert Taylor a “nonperson” for having testified in 1947 about the political struggle between Communists and anti-Communists in the Screen Actors Guild could serve almost verbatim as a capsule description of the campaign against Elia Kazan that continued right up to his recent belated Academy Award.

Finally, the Jews. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out in his eulogy, Breindel was one of the rare persons of his generation who even in his student days grasped the historical implications of the 1975 United Nations resolution branding Zionism as “a form of racism,” a resolution issued with terrible irony on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the 1938 event that inaugurated the Nazi war against the Jews. In his Post column, Breindel monitored with zealous rigor attacks directed at the Jewish people, whether mounted by Arabs against Israel, by black anti-Semites against their hasidic neighbors, or by liberals and others blaming the Jews themselves for the aggressions they suffered. Addressing the Clinton State Department in 1997, for example, he wondered why, in light of Yasir Arafat’s flagrant violations of the Oslo peace accords, Washington should be devoting all its efforts to exerting pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu. His conclusion—that “Israel, presumably is an easier target”—was remarkably free of bitterness, just deadly accurate.

_____________

On the whole, Breindel addressed the practical aspects of politics, not their human motives. Nevertheless, it is possible to discern a link among his areas of concern in the human tendency to self-deception. Opponents of racism choose to ignore the bigotry of those whom they have identified as victims of racism. Liberal sentimentalists camouflage crimes committed by Communists because they prefer not to face up to the evil consequences of egalitarian ideals. Arab aggression against Israel is denied, or deprecated, or blamed on the Jews, so that one need not confront the present and very palpable danger in which Israel finds itself.

Breindel’s uncommon insight into the way people substitute wish for fact may have been born, at least in part, out of his own experience. Subject to health problems and chronic pain while still in college, he began to rely on heavy painkillers and then illegal drugs in the search for more effective relief. Eventually, an FBI arrest interrupted a budding career in government and sent him into treatment. The sobriety of Breindel’s writing seems to derive from hard-won self-knowledge, particularly about the desire to escape into an artificially sweetened world. Having overcome that temptation in himself, he addressed it in others, urging them and us to cut no corners.

Eric Breindel was delicate in appearance, almost too beautiful for a man. The last time I saw him—on television, hosting a talk show—I was amused by the contrast between his northern drawl and the rat-a-tat style of others on the panel, and I wondered how long he would be able to maintain his thoughtful pace. I need not have. This book reminds us of the toughness behind his diffident bearing, the moral stamina behind the aura of fragility. He succumbed only to illness, never to weakness. The traditional phrase, may his memory be for a blessing, is fulfilled by this testament to his mind and heart.

_____________