If adjectives were analysis, Leon Wieseltier’s review of Norman Podhoretz’s Why Are Jews Liberals? in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review would be impressive. Wieseltier suggested that the book and/or its author is “dreary,” “completely axiomatic,” in a state of “apocalyptic excitation,” “trite,” “anti-intellectual,” “sputtering,” a “heresy hunter,” and possessed of a “voyeuristic” admiration for the Orthodox. Wieseltier was apparently not amused.

I have a different view of the book, as did the 10 prominent writers in the COMMENTARY and Tablet Magazine symposiums, among others. This post is intended not to refute Wieseltier’s argument (to the extent that a string of adjectives is even a reasoned argument) but rather to note that his review is further evidence of one of liberalism’s increasingly illiberal tendencies: reacting with hyperbolic criticism to those who dare challenge it.

The title of Wieseltier’s review—“Because They Believe”—effectively captures its spirit: Jews are liberals, according to Wieseltier, because of “the dispensations of 20th-century liberalism.” The use of the word dispensations, with its religious connotations, is obviously intentional, and the three-word title of the review reflects an analysis only slightly more sophisticated than “It’s the religion, stupid!”

Wieseltier correctly argues that Judaism is neither inherently liberal nor conservative, but that observation does not address Podhoretz’s contention that liberalism has become a religion itself—one that, for many American Jews, has replaced Judaism, and one that (not to put too fine a point on it) does not welcome discussion of its fundamental dogma.

Podhoretz’s contention is provocative, but here is one way to test it: if liberalism were a religion, one would expect a book such as Why Are Jews Liberals? to provoke from one of its priests not a reasoned response but a refutation in hysterical terms, in the religion’s paper of record, using a set of adjectives intended not to communicate but to excommunicate.