At the age of 40, Norman Podhoretz had a revelation—the revelation “that Judaism was true.” What was the Judaism that was true, to Norman Podhoretz? At its core, it was a Judaism of obligation and joy in equal measure. Such a combination was anathema to most public intellectuals of the 1960s and ’70s, but not to Norman Podhoretz, whose life was defined by the seamless blending of such contradictions.
Podhoretz was born in Brooklyn but spoke the Galician Yiddish of his parents as a first language. He attended a secular elementary school but went to cheder afterward a few days a week. His secondary education followed this model, as did his college years, during which he attended the Jewish Theological Seminary even as he was matriculating at Columbia University.
In 1951, Podhoretz practically literalized this duality by visiting Athens and Jerusalem on the same trip. “I felt more at home in Athens!” he wrote to his mentor Lionel Trilling. Yet this was no rejection of his Jewishness: Instead, it would prefigure his belief that Judaism was not primarily a series of places to visit—houses of worship, study halls, pilgrimages—but a way to live. From the moment he began writing for COMMENTARY in 1953, this belief left its fingerprints all over his work.
At just 21 years old, Podhoretz reviewed a new translation of Sholom Aleichem’s final novel, Adventures of Mottel the Cantor’s Son. The protagonist’s family leaves Eastern Europe for America as violence and privation crack up the Yiddish-speaking world and give rise to the effort to define the post-ghetto Jew. “What were the Jews—a civilization, a religion, a political entity? What was their proper language—Yiddish, Hebrew, English? How were they supposed to behave and dress? Sholom Aleichem answered these questions by refusing to believe in their validity; it is one aspect of his greatness,” Podhoretz wrote.
Podhoretz lauded the fact that, to Sholom Aleichem, “Jewishness was not a matter of ‘values’ or ‘essential characteristics’ of race or nationality or both; it was nothing abstract, neither a civilization nor yet a peculiar kind of religion. Jewishness was simply the way Jews behaved; it was, in short, the very manners and habits despised by the avant-garde, and it was the rich diversity of attitudes implied by the things they did and the way they did them.”
Jews certainly carried their manners with them to the new world, making Sholom Aleichem’s cast of characters instantly recognizable to their audience. The book is narrated by the nine-year-old Mottel, who marvels at the similarity between the Jews of America and the Jews of the shtetl. Podhoretz, in turn, marveled at Mottel. Yes, he wrote, Jewishness includes all the traits noted by the perceptive child-narrator. “But above all,” said Podhoretz, “Jewishness was Mottel, the image of the adaptability, resilience, energy, resourcefulness, and—most important—the durability of the Jew.”
And Mottel, mischievous and picked-on but wide-eyed and hilarious, is the perfect ambassador for the Jew in literature. Since the time of Job, there has been no satisfactory answer to the question of why the Jews have suffered as they have. “And if there is no answer,” Podhoretz wrote, “one can either rage like a Dostoevsky, or laugh. Sholom Aleichem laughed. His laughter has something to teach modern apologists for Original Sin who believe that optimism and a love of life must necessarily reflect superficiality of spirit.”
This would amount to a statement of principle for Norman Podhoretz, refined and polished the rest of his days.
In 1960, Podhoretz became the editor of COMMENTARY. By his own account, the magazine was until then a Jewish publication “with an interest in the world at large.” He would reverse the emphasis. But in making the magazine less quantitatively Jewish, he would make it no less qualitatively Jewish. Soon after taking the helm, he commissioned a symposium on Jewishness from a wide variety of Jewish personalities under the age of 40. In his introduction to the symposium, Podhoretz noted how many of the respondents associated Jewishness with a shallow universalist idealism. Yet, he objected, there has to be something about Judaism itself that explains the defiant survival of the Jewish people. Podhoretz chastised the participants’ ambivalence toward the preservation of Jewish tradition: “There are—there must be—in the life of every individual areas that are sacred, and demands before which the only proper attitude is piety or reverence.”
Whether through rituals or moral example, Judaism demanded action. Podhoretz repeatedly pointed out that the Israelites’ response to God’s offer of chosenness was “We will do and we will hear.” What’s more, as Podhoretz would point out more than four decades later in his book on the Hebrew prophets, God tells the people of Israel that His instruction “is not hidden from thee, neither is it far off… the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayst do it.” Living according to God’s law is doable.
And yet, all around him, and to his great horror, a certain nihilism was taking hold. Left-liberal political discourse had become apocalyptic and tinged with violence. This he could not abide: Despair was a sin, after all. Podhoretz’s liberalism held that America was wonderful but imperfect and that its institutions could be reformed and its missteps could be remedied. Like Judaism, its traditions were valuable to its own survival. Nor did Podhoretz demand slavishness to the government; after all, what he loved about the Bible, what he believed was evidence of its truth, was its lack of hero worship. There is no need to coddle power. Criticize America’s leaders for their foibles, sure. But damn her as beyond salvation? No, never.
It was clear that Podhoretz’s reverence for history and tradition was a guard against radicalism. But such restraints were freely discarded by the intellectuals with whom he had come of age and whom he had once agreed with on so much. Time and again, Jewish history provided him the lens through which to see the whole dispiriting trend with clarity.
Early in 1971, COMMENTARY published a translation of an essay by the scholar Gershom Scholem about the false 17th-century messiah Sabbatai Zevi, who attracted a cult-like following and then converted to Islam to save his life—somehow retaining a small sect of followers even after his conversion. Zevi was a radical antinomian, declaring not only that some laws were obsolete but that the commission of some sins was honorable. Scholem’s essay was called “The Holiness of Sin.”
Podhoretz wrote a column in the same issue contemplating the lessons for, and parallels to, the illiberal left in 1971. Just as the more radical Sabbatians were wholly rejecting their Jewish faith, were not these anti-American nihilists “yearning not to be Americans?” How, Podhoretz asks, “can one fail to be reminded in reading about [the Sabbatians] of the type of revolutionist in America today who declares that the authority of this society is illegitimate and that the law must therefore be resisted and indeed violated if it is to be truly fulfilled?” A war on law—a war on obligation—was a war on civilization.
The following month, Podhoretz had occasion to ponder the participation of fellow American Jews in the burgeoning revolutionary politics of the left. He identified a specific problem: The idealistic-seeming nature of revolutionary programs earns them “expressions of … solidarity” from Jewish organizations. Then the wider public takes this as certification of the movement’s kashrut.
It is important to note here that the left’s radicalism was characterized not only by anti-Americanism but also by increasingly overt anti-Semitism, and therefore progressive Jews were feeding a monster that was planning to devour them. In response to Israel’s magnificent victory in the Six-Day War in 1967, the progressive left used the cover of “anti-Zionism” to inject Jew-baiting back into the bloodstream of mainstream American politics. The rise of Black Power radicalism, meanwhile, produced open anti-Semitism that the rest of the mainstream left was afraid to criticize and over which Jewish organizations were unwilling to cut ties with the progressive coalition. (Remember: This was more than half a century ago.)
The addition of anti-Semitism to the nihilism and antinomianism of the age was creating nightmarish politics. Some American Jews, often simply naive or well-intentioned, were unwittingly enabling that nightmare on the misbegotten belief that they had a moral responsibility to stick by the organizations representing other minorities and with whom they had marched in the streets in the name of civil rights. Podhoretz refused to stay silent, leading to an open confrontation with the organization that published COMMENTARY during his editorship: the American Jewish Committee. The AJC, which subsidized COMMENTARY but afforded Podhoretz full editorial independence, did not share in the left-wing radicalism of the age. But its officers persisted in the fantasy that they could remain in coalition with these radicals without undermining the AJC’s foremost mission as a Jewish defense organization.
Understanding why this fight was so important to Podhoretz requires a brief discussion of the one other major plank of his Jewishness.
Podhoretz often joked that his maternal grandfather was so pious that the 613 commandments weren’t enough for him; he was compelled to invent new ones. But in 1968, it was Norman who saw fit to expand the lawbooks. The inspiration was a remarkable COMMENTARY essay by the historian Emil Fackenheim, who argued that the totalizing evil of the Holocaust posed a unique challenge to the Jewish nation going forward. In editing the piece, Podhoretz saw that it was implicitly making the case for a 614th commandment that held, roughly, There shall be no posthumous victories for Hitler. So he made that commandment explicit in the article and published it.
The crux of this new commandment was that, with the post-Holocaust knowledge that those who seek to obliterate the Jewish nation will have no limiting principles—they will do anything, no matter how monstrous, and even bring about their own destruction rather than fail—the Jews “are commanded to survive as Jews.” Further: “They are forbidden to despair of man and his world, and to escape into either cynicism or otherworldliness, lest they cooperate in delivering the world over to the forces of Auschwitz. Finally, they are forbidden to despair of the God of Israel, lest Judaism perish.”
Podhoretz would sometimes rephrase this commandment as There shall be Jews. And so, after Auschwitz, silence was no longer permissible when the organized voices of hate threatened to finish Hitler’s work. That is what the Arab states had done in 1967 to the State of Israel, and even political radicals in the United States had begun to echo such rhetoric.
The pronouncement of the 614th commandment came two years before Podhoretz’s revelation about the truth of Judaism, which provided clarity on how to marry the joy to the obligation. God’s love, Podhoretz understood, was in his law. That love “consists of enabling you to live in such a way as to have the fullest life possible on earth.” Rather than a burden, therefore, a life of righteous obligation was something to be grateful for. “By placing yourself in a state of such exquisite conscious gratitude,” Podhoretz said, “you get not only all the life there is to live, you get almost too much.”
Podhoretz was guided by the obligation and the joy of choosing life. In 1983, he wrote that the resurgence of Jewish anti-Zionism occasioned by Israel’s war in Lebanon the previous year was a violation of this commandment to choose life. Another example: Though he felt the text-bound Sadducees had the better of the argument against the more freewheeling Pharisees, the Temple-era forerunners of rabbinic Judaism, he admitted that history proved him wrong and that the Pharisees had in fact enabled the survival of the Jewish people. Once again, choosing the increased burden of Jewish obligation was choosing life. As Podhoretz said with a slight smile, “Where are the Sadducees now?”
Judaism demands a life of action. In return, that life will be full and well worth living. It’s a good deal. One responds to this offer, in the worldview of Norman Podhoretz, “We will do and we will hear”—not with trepidation, but with joy.
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