Timothy Noah writes for the New York Times:
There’s no point denying it: neocons tend to be Jewish. There are plenty of prominent exceptions — William Bennett, the former education secretary, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late United States senator, diplomat, White House aide and sociologist, were both Roman Catholics — but neoconservatism’s priorities, which range from strong support for Israel to vehement opposition to affirmative action, are heavily influenced by the values, interests and collective historical memory of the Jewish people. Heilbrunn carries this conceit to the outermost boundaries of good taste by dividing his book into sections whose names are derived from the Old Testament: “Exodus,” “Wilderness,” “Redemption” and “Return to Exile.”
Heilbrunn, a senior editor at The National Interest, is himself a lapsed neocon who spent the 1990s writing hard-line foreign policy articles for that magazine, then but no longer a neocon redoubt, and also for The New Republic, a centrist-liberal magazine somewhat sympathetic to neoconservative arguments, especially concerning the cold war and the Middle East. (Truth in book reviewing compels me to note that I worked there a decade before Heilbrunn did, but we’ve never met.)
Heilbrunn confesses in the book’s prologue that he found neoconservatism “supplied me with a beguiling but ultimately artificial clarity about the world that was hard to shake.” His front-row seat gives him an easy familiarity with his subject, but in this case that seems less help than hindrance, because the author’s disillusioned perspective feels a tad insular, and occasionally shades into snideness…
