Norman Podhoretz

My Love Affair With America: The Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative (2001)

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Norman Podhoretz (/pɒdˈhɔrɨtz/; born January 16, 1930) is an American neoconservative pundit and writer for Commentary magazine. The son of Julius and Helen (Woliner) Podhoretz,[3] Jewish immigrants[4] from the Central European region of Galicia (now part of Poland)[5] Podhoretz was born and raised in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Podhoretz's family was leftist, with his elder sister joining a socialist youth movement. He attended Boys High School in the borough's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, ultimately graduating third in his class in 1946; his classmates included the prominent Assyriologist William W. Hallo and advertising executive Carl Spielvogel. Admitted to Harvard University and New York University with partial tuition scholarships, Podhoretz ultimately elected to attend Columbia University after receiving a full Pulitzer Scholarship.[6] In 1950, Podhoretz received his BA degree in English literature from Columbia, where he was mentored by Lionel Trilling. He concurrently earned a second bachelor's degree in Hebrew literature from the nearby Jewish Theological Seminary of America; although Podhoretz never intended to enter the rabbinate, his father (who only attended synagogue on the High Holidays) wanted to ensure that his son was nonetheless conversant in "the intellectual tradition of his people" as "a nonobservant New World Jew who... treasured the Hebraic tradition".[7] After being awarded the Kellett Fellowship and a Fulbright Scholarship, he later received a second BA in literature with first-class honors and an MA from Clare College, Cambridge, where he briefly pursued doctoral studies after rejecting a graduate fellowship from Harvard. He also served in the United States Army (1953–1955) as a draftee assigned to U.S. Army Security Agency.[8] Podhoretz served as Commentary magazine's Editor-in-Chief from 1960 (when he replaced Elliot E. Cohen) until his retirement in 1995. Podhoretz remains Commentary's Editor-at-Large. In 1963, he wrote the essay "My Negro Problem — And Ours", in which he described the oppression he felt from African-Americans as a child, and concluded by calling for a color-blind society, and advocated "the wholesale merging of the two races [as] the most desirable alternative for everyone concerned." From 1981 to 1987, Podhoretz was an adviser to the U.S. Information Agency. From 1995 to 2003, he was a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush in 2004. The award recognized Podhoretz's intellectual contributions as editor-in-chief of Commentary magazine and as a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.[9] Podhoretz is married to author Midge Decter,[10] and is the stepfather of Rachel Abrams (née Decter, Elliott Abrams' wife) and father of syndicated columnist and current Commentary editor-in-chief John Podhoretz. Norman Podhoretz was one of the original signatories of the "Statement of Principles" of the Project for the New American Century founded in 1997.[citation needed] That organization sent a letter to President Clinton in 1998 advocating the removal by force of Saddam Husein in Iraq. Podhoretz received the Guardian of Zion Award from Bar-Ilan University on May 24, 2007. He served as a senior foreign policy advisor to Rudy Giuliani in his 2008 presidential campaign.[11] The same year, he publicly advocated an American attack on Iran.[12] Podhoretz's 2009 book Why Are Jews Liberals? questions why American Jews for decades have been dependable Democrats, often supporting the party by margins of better than two-to-one, even in years of Republican landslides.[13] Books 1963: Hannah Arendt on Eichmann: a study in the perversity of brilliance New York: American Jewish Committee 1964: Doings and Undoings; the fifties and after in American writing. New York, Farrar, Straus (collection of essays) 1964: My Negro problem and ours New York: American Jewish Committee 1966: The Commentary reader; two decades of articles and stories, New York, Atheneum[disambiguation needed] editor (collection of essays). 1967: Making It New York, Random House (autobiography) ISBN 0-394-43449-8 1967: Jewishness & the younger intellectuals; a symposium reprinted from Commentary, a journal of significant thought and opinion on Jewish affairs and contemporary issues New York: American Jewish Committee (introduction) 1979: Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir New York: Harper & Row, 1980: The Present Danger: "Do We Have the Will to Reverse the Decline of American Power?" New York: Simon and Schuster, ISBN 0-671-41395-3 1981: The new defenders of capitalism Washington, D.C. : Ethics and Public Policy Center 1982: Why We Were in Vietnam New York : Simon and Schuster, (history and argument) ISBN 0-671-44578-2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Podhoretz