Luke Ford

John Podhoretz writes Sept. 5, 2005: …may not be Kanye West’s denunciation of Bush after all. I think West is given a run for his money by by Steve Sailer’s shockingly racist and paternalistic riff off of the New Orleans slogan “Let the good times roll,” on the website vdare.com. “What you won’t hear, except from me, is that ‘Let the good times roll’ is an especially risky message for African-Americans. The plain fact is that they tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society.” Nobody with the unspeakable gall and tastelessness to write such sentences should be suggesting that any other person on earth requires “stricter moral guidance.”

Steve Sailer writes for VDARE July 17, 2005:

I recently pointed out that even though actress Jodie Foster reportedly had carefully searched out a sperm donor with an IQ of 160 to father her two children, the expected boost in her kids` IQ over what she would have gotten from a typical 100 IQ donor would fall in a range centering around merely 12 points. This is due to a pervasive phenomenon that its discoverer, Sir Francis Galton, called “regression toward mediocrity” and we now call “regression toward the mean.”

Interacting with John Podhoretz, the son of long-time Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, inevitably calls to mind Galton`s great discovery.

Last week, I noted on my iSteve.com blog some of the younger Podhoretz`s bumptious comments on National Review Online`s “Corner” free-for-all. In reaction to John Derbyshire`s concerns about the current interpretation of the 14th Amendment granting automatic birthright citizenship to the children of illegal aliens, Podhoretz blustered:

“Sorry, pal. You`re born here, you`re a citizen here. Period. That`s how it works, and thank God for it, otherwise a great deal of the advances made in the 20th century by immigrant children to the United States would not have come to pass…”

I suggested this “birthright pundit” might extend his logic like this:

“Sorry, pal. If you`re born a Podhoretz, you get to make a living offering your opinions, no matter how big of a jerk and fool you are. Period. That`s how it works, and thank God for it, otherwise a great deal of the money made in the 21st century by Podhoretz relatives would not have come to pass.”

Later, out of the blue, I received an email from Podhoretz reading:

“Please keep attacking me. It`s how I know I`m not a bigoted, racist scum.”

Peter Brimelow has observed how often a “racist” turns out to be someone who is winning an argument with a liberal. But with a neocon of Podhoretz the Lesser`s quality, well, you don`t even have to be arguing with him to be “a bigoted, racist scum.” I`m not exactly sure what “a … scum” is, but, clearly, Pod No Like. I replied:

“Such wit, such eloquence, such insight!”

He fired back:

“If you think I lack them, I imagine you think I have too much melanin in my skin.”

Hoo-boy! You got me there!

Thoroughly enjoying shooting fish in a barrel, I answered:

“How do you come up with such devastating comebacks? Do you keep a half-dozen Nobel Laureates on staff, or do you, somehow, just make these up all by yourself?”

While Podhoretz Minor might be an extreme example, he reflects the intellectual decline of neoconservatism from the first generation to the second. While the formidable father has often provoked fury, the son has mostly elicited laughter. Hanna Rosin reported in 1998:

… around the Washington Times offices, the [Podhoretz] column was often read out loud in Podhoretz`s absence, for comic value, in a ritual famously called Podenfreude ….

Norman Podhoretz was somewhat anomalous among the first generation of neoconservatives, such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nathan Glazer, and James Q. Wilson, because he was trained as a literary critic rather than a social scientist. But like them, and like later neoconservatives such as Charles Murray, he had some audacious things to say about race.

In his 1963 essay in Commentary, “My Negro Problem—And Ours,” the elder Podhoretz wrote:

“[F]or a long time I was puzzled to think that Jews were supposed to be rich when the only Jews I knew were poor, and that Negroes were supposed to be persecuted when it was the Negroes who were doing the only persecuting I knew about—and doing it, moreover, to me… [It] was the whites, the Italians and Jews, who feared the Negroes, not the other way around.”

Thirty years later, the elder Podhoretz reflected on the controversy his article about “black thuggery” had caused:

“In 1963 those descriptions were very shocking to most white liberals. In their eyes Negroes were all long-suffering and noble victims of the kind who had become familiar through the struggles of the civil rights movement in the South, the “heroic period” of the movement, as one if its most heroic leaders, Bayard Rustin, called it. While none of my white critics went so far as to deny the truthfulness of the stories I told, they themselves could hardly imagine being afraid of Negroes (how could they when the only Negroes most of them knew personally were maids and cleaning women?). In any case they very much disliked the emphasis I placed on black thuggery and aggression.

“Today, when black-on-white violence is much more common than it was then, many white readers could easily top those stories with worse. And yet even today few of them would be willing to speak truthfully in public about their entirely rational fear of black violence and black crime. Telling the truth about blacks remains dangerous to one`s reputation: to use that now famous phrase I once appropriated from D.H. Lawrence in talking about ambition, the fear of blacks has become the dirty little secret of our political culture. And since a dirty little secret breeds hypocrisy and cant in those who harbor it, I suppose it can still be said that most whites are sick and twisted in their feelings about blacks, albeit in a very different sense that they were in 1963.”

Time for John Podhoretz to email to his father accusing him of being “a bigoted, racist scum.”!

From Steve Sailer, Sept. 15, 2005:

A reader writes:

I attended a forum in Skokie outside of Chicago sponsored by the Jewish Policy Center (JPC) — the think tank offshoot of the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC). The forum consisted of a moderator – Michael Medved, and four presenters, including John Podhoretz and David Horowitz.

I would say about 300 people showed up for the event, a lot considering it was a nice afternoon and both the Bears and Sox were playing.

The audience (naturally) had lots of questions about Israel. And here is where John Podhoretz began to squirm. One questioner asked him about his father, and John Podhoretz curtly cut him off, saying he was not his father. But that he would be happy to answer the question as John Podhoretz.

Another questioner from the audience asked the panel about our immigration problems. Medved, unfortunately, began to waffle and squish on the subject. He pointed out that America had (roughly) 3,000 miles of borders and it couldn’t possibly protect them all. He noted that Israel, by comparison, had something like 240 miles of borders and was having a hard time controlling even that. It was a bit disappointing as an answer from a guy I am normally inclined to agree with.

And Israel has 1/50th the population of America and 1/100th GNP.

But Podhoretz decided he wanted to answer this question, and here is where the fireworks began. He started by saying something along the lines of, “Well, first I feel when it comes to any issue of immigration, I have to rely on my Jewish experience. And I think back on the 1924 immigration restrictionist law which excluded so many Jews…”

Here he was interrupted and cut off by boos and jeers from the audience.

He was visibly taken aback by this reaction. He asked, “Why are you booing me?” Clearly shocked. Then he thought he had it figured out and responded by basically, “Oh, well I guess now this is an issue of Mexicans versus Jews…” And this produced even more jeers and boos from the audience, since he was clearly implying the audience was racist.

Damn Sailerites following him wherever he goes.

It seemed that at this point David Horowitz started speaking into his mike, and knocked the ball out of the park. He began by immediately denouncing our lax border controls and reckless illegal immigration — which prompted cheers from the audience. He then noted we needed massive deportations in addition to border controls. More cheers. I forget the rest of what he said on the subject, but he was clearly the hardliner on the subject (if only on illegal immigration I guess) and clearly much more on the audiences side then the bewildered JPod.

Michael Medved recovered his footing by picking up on the Horowitz line for deportations, noting that something like 400,000 illegal aliens with felonies were on the loose and they needed to be deported first.

Steve Sailer wrote Sept. 7, 2005:

After John Derbyshire bravely defends me once more in NRO’s Corner against John Podhoretz’s fatwa against my New Orleans article and its mention of the lower average IQ of African-Americans, JPod sputters:

I have read only two things by [Sailer] in the past few years, both of them e-mailed to me, and I regret having soiled my eyes, my brain and my sensibility with them.

This is another example of the typical attack on me — the “point-and-sputter” diatribe devoid of logic and facts.

Inevitably, responses to Pod the Lesser’s sallies traditionally fall into the “point-and-laugh” mode — for example, his former colleagues at the Washington Times coined the pun Podenfruede for their group ritual of reading Pod’s latest effusion and laughing at his shortcomings as a writer, thinker, and human being. Since JPod doesn’t give anyone anything to sink their teeth into — it’s hard to point out the fallacies in JPod’s logic when all he is expressing is mindless rage and thuggish threats. So, “point-and-laugh” is natural.

Still, my readers might be interested in some of the logical contradictions related to Pod Minor, even if rationality is not, personally, his thing. For example, will he next condemn Commentary and the American Enterprise Institute?

I ask this because the sentence in my New Orleans article that called “the most disgusting sentence yet written about Katrina” simply applied to the disaster the facts printed in the feature article in this month’s neoconservative Commentary magazine (and also posted on the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute’s website): “The Inequality Taboo” by Charles Murray, the Bradley Fellow at AEI.

Indeed, my previous VDARE.com article “Charles Murray Reenters America’s Inequality Debate” was a celebration of the article’s publication by Commentary, where Big Little Pod’s father, Norman Podhoretz, is “Editor-at-Large” after a distinguished quarter-century career as Commentary’s Editor-in-Chief. Further, many of the foreign policy pundits that Commentary routinely publishes are domiciled at the AEI, and the think tank gave Norman Podhoretz its Francis Boyer award in 2002.

Indeed, Norman Podhoretz has said:

“I’m a defender of The Bell Curve. I think The Bell Curve has been subjected to the most vicious lynching of any book since Making It.“

That was Podhoretz Major’s first autobiography, which came out 27 years before The Bell Curve.

Perhaps, JPod’s attacks on me are a surreptitious, indirect form of Oedipal warfare upon his father, since he knows by now that every time he attacks me on race, IQ, and crime, I will shine the spotlight of attention on the fact that his father holds equally politically incorrect views on the same subjects.

We should pause for a moment of sympathy for John Podhoretz. It can’t be emotionally easy having such a formidable figure as Norman Podhoretz as your father. Financially, of course, being connected has been very easy for John, but it must be tough on his dignity to go through life being known among the punditocracy as the world’s leading example of nepotistic incompetence and regression toward the mean.

More generally, JPod’s Oedipal anger reflects the understandable resentment of the second generation of neoconservatives (the “minicons”) looking back on the heroic first generation. The first generation — Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nathan Glazer, James Q. Wilson, Andrew Greeley, and so forth, with Charles Murray as probably the youngest member of that pantheon — were primarily social scientists studying domestic issues of race, ethnicity, and crime. (As a literary critic, Norman Podhoretz was an odd man out among the quant jocks, but he was a trenchant writer on black crime even back when he was a self-proclaimed radical leftist. As he aged, he has, of course, become more obsessed with foreign policy, but that’s a natural progression for an elderly gentleman with four grandchildren abroad.)

The minicons, in embarrassing contrast, are primarily pundits obsessed with Middle Eastern affairs.

Warren St. John wrote:

Mr. Podhoretz, the chubby 36-year-old son of neocon pioneers Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter, recently quit his job as deputy editor at Rupert Murdoch’s Washington-based Weekly Standard -the gleefully contrarian conservative journal that he co-founded in 1995 with Dan Quayle’s former chief of staff, William Kristol, and former New Republic editor Fred Barnes-to take over the editorial page of Mr. Murdoch’s New York Post . Despite two successful years at The Weekly Standard , Mr. Podhoretz grew weary of working in the shadow of the mediagenic Mr. Kristol. “It’s Bill Kristol’s magazine,” Mr. Podhoretz explained over tea at the Algonquin on a recent Sunday. “I wanted to run my own shop.”

…Politics weren’t the only thing that brought Mr. Podhoretz back to the city he grew up in. His brief marriage to fellow inside-the-Beltway conservative Elisabeth Hickey unraveled this fall in a very public way. The two were married in May after a courtship of only 10 days, and thanks in part to Mr. Podhoretz’s declarations of love in his Weekly Standard column-he ended one column with the words, “in her calm, there is the permanence I seek”-the relationship had become the talk of Washington’s small conservative media clique. The couple split after three months. Mr. Podhoretz would say only that the breakup was a “sad disruption in my personal life.”

…But whatever ends up on the page, Mr. Podhoretz’s former colleagues said, his light touch often comes with a heavy hand behind the scenes. He is described alternately as “brilliant” and “a monster” by Standard staff. His writers report that he regularly derides them by saying their copy “sucks.”

“John is smart and he’s a good editor,” said Lisa McCormack, who wrote for Mr. Podhoretz at The Washington Times . “But he finds people’s weak spots psychologically and gets a hot poker and sticks it in there and breaks them.”

…Under the eccentric editor Arnaud de Borchgrave, Mr. Podhoretz’s colleagues joked that his last name was “Normanson,” because Mr. de Borchgrave frequently referred to him as “John Podhoretz, Norman’s son.”

…But by 1989, Mr. Podhoretz was back editing at The Washington Times . His colleagues from those days have said that many staff members under Mr. Podhoretz left. “He’s a bully. He’ll take an elephant gun to a fly,” said Ms. McCormack. “He’d tell people they were idiots if they misplaced a comma.” (Mr. Podhoretz responded, “Lisa McCormack is an idiot, but otherwise I don’t think it’s true that I’ve said that. I’ve been known to misplace a comma myself.”)

…Mr. Podhoretz lived the life of a media junkie. “He’s a compulsive TV watcher, he gets every magazine from Spin to Creme , and he watches every infomercial,” said a Standard staff member. “A number of times, he’s had to go cold turkey from television.”

…Members of the Standard staff, like some at The Washington Times , had some problems with Mr. Podhoretz’s style. They objected to his withering assessments and were miffed last year when he gave a cover assignment to his then-girlfriend Wendy Shalit (sister of journalist Ruth Shalit) and paid her more than The Standard ‘s regular freelance rate.

Staff members also said Mr. Podhoretz had a long memory of personal slights. “John holds grudges,” said one staff member. “There are certain people he still hates for, say, insulting his father in 1972 in The New York Review of Books .” (Indeed, Post media critic [and Observer art critic] Hilton Kramer was fired soon after Mr. Podhoretz arrived, and Standard staff members believe Mr. Podhoretz fired Mr. Kramer because the latter once wrote a Post column dismissing The Standard as “a snooze.”)

…Over time, Mr. Kristol emerged as The Standard ‘s media face, and Mr. Podhoretz said he felt it had become “somebody else’s magazine.” Then love struck: In February 1997, Mr. Podhoretz ran into Ms. Hickey at a party thrown by Arianna Huffington. Mr. Podhoretz soon circulated news of his engagement in an e-mail to friends headed “This is not a put-on.” The couple was married in May. Three months later, Mr. Podhoretz told friends he hadn’t been in love after all. Said a friend of the couple, “they cut their losses.”

…Podhoretz. “Outrageousness is one way of getting attention, but it’s not the only way.”

Charles Johnson writes:

GotNews.com has been observing Commentary Magazine John Podhoretz’s descent into Jew policing and madness for quite some time now. But the person who has been really accelerating it is Donald Trump.

Yes, Trump, the father of two Jewish-(ish) daughters, is supposedly a closet anti-Semite! And the Jews that support him (or at least try to understand him and his supporters) aren’t real Jews, of course. His Jewish Catholic campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and his Jewish policy advisor Steve Miller must not understand what Podhoretz understands about the man they worked for.

Lately, though, Podhoretz has gone on a tear accusing anyone and everyone of being insufficiently Jewish or anti-Semitic.

Podhoretz incredibly accused fellow Jew Mytheos Holt of not being Jewish on Twitter after Holt wrote an article about the rise of Trump and his voters.

class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500">

OK,kid, I have no idea what you're saying here and neither do you, so go back to winning over white nationalists now https://t.co/CO1bKqMluu

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) April 1, 2016

Is Mytheos Holt a Jew?

GotNews.com went looking and emailed Mytheos’s aunt and mother. And, lo and behold, his Auntie Jo and his very Jewish mother says he is.

Here’s the aunt’s response:

Yes it is weird!

Yes Mytheos is my nephew and yes he is Jewish! I think I may have seen that post on Facebook!

Have a good night J

Here Holt’s mother:

I can positively confirm that my son is Jewish. We are Jewish as many generations back, on both sides, as I am aware of generations in my family. As far as I am aware, there is no one in the generations who is not Jewish. As I am his mother, his Jewishness is based on my religion, as you probably are aware. I was confirmed in the Jewish faith at Temple Beth Israel in Phoenix, Arizona, as was my sister, Jo Trust. Although my sister’s 2 sons were Bar Mitvah’ed. Myth was not, as I have become rather secular. [Editor’s note: Mytheos says he had informal one, who cares.] But, he was raised to embrace and be proud of his Jewish heritage, which he is. Please let me know if you need any other information to confirm that Mytheos is indeed Jewish.

Podhoretz attacked Joel Pollak merely for working at a publication that published a think piece on the rise of the alt-right (written by a half Jewish British queer and a half Pakistani-Brit).

class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500">

The idea that any Jew would still work at Breitbart after its piece on the alt-Right beggars the imagination. Do you hear me, @joelpollak?

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) March 31, 2016

Pollak, with characteristic class, responded well to Podhoretz’s swipe.

(We didn’t all inherit jobs, John.)

class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500">

Is that you Rabbi @jpodhoretz? What totalitarian tripe. The Talmud debates great diversity of views. As do I. @Nero https://t.co/hJQDQlszhT

— Joel Pollak (@joelpollak) March 31, 2016

Podhoretz continued to harass Pollak and Holt on Twitter. He also attacked another Jew and Breitbart CEO Larry Solov for daring to publish something about the alt-right. You know, sometimes it seems as if Podhoretz backs censorship or shaming his people.

Holt and Pollak aren’t the first to get the Podhoretz treatment.

In 2006 Phillip Weiss wrote an interesting missive about an unsolicited email from Podhoretz that attacked his Judaism.

Commentator Mike Cernovich is right.

class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500">

Jews v. SJWs is going to be a big cultural fight. Media doesn't know how to cover it yet.

— Mike Cernovich (@Cernovich) March 22, 2016

Alas, anyone who has done anything of interest on the internet has come in for attack by Podhoretz.

I reported on the Ebola scare of 2014 and came under fire again. You’ll note he was looking for the way to purge me with Josh Barro, son of the famed economist, who I’m sure has his job entirely on merit.

class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500">

@jbarro I honestly don't know

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) October 4, 2014

Podhoretz first called me a mentally ill monster after I reported how James Foley had converted to Islam before ISIS decapitated him and that I didn’t feel sympathy for him as he was being beheaded.

class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500">

Once again, Charles C. Johnson proves he is one of the worst people on Earth–calling a beheaded man a shill. May God forgive you. I won't.

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) October 27, 2014

The New York Times later confirmed my reporting about Foley’s conversion — it wasn’t forced but come to naturally — but Podhoretz didn’t care. He had already slimed me.

And he wasn’t even original about it. He calls everyone a “monster” if his Twitter feed is any indication though when I called him on that he called me a “sick fuck.”

class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500">

Charles Johnson is a disgusting monster and no one should ever give him a nickel again. You unimaginable filth. https://t.co/v6dKurWJIc

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) August 20, 2014

Now he’s lecturing me about the meaning of words and about tone. Oh my.

He’s accused me of being a “Trumpkin theoretician” — I support Ted Cruz for president — and compared me to Adolph Hitler peddling the “Big Lie” by referencing the dual meaning of “faggot.” (Do you even Internet bro?)

class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500">

It's no wonder Trumpkin theoreticians like Chuck Johnson say words don't mean what they mean. That's the essence of the Big Lie game.

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) April 2, 2016

Hey, John, guess what. My kin fought to liberate two continents and preserved the peace — they won the awards and built the NATO you want to expand to the point of breaking– but you’ll compare anyone to an anti-Semite these days even those of us with long histories of fighting for Israel and the Jewish people. My other grandfather worked with the Israelis to protect the peace in the 1970s and to resettle the Vietnamese civilians in America, those civilians whose country your kin thought should be decimated. My cousins and friends fought the wars you backed that have bankrupted our country and, to quote Trump, we didn’t even get the oil.

To paraphrase:

class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500">

.@AceofSpadesHQ
I don't think Grandpa fought the Nazis so Democrats could call me a Nazi for being like my Grandpa. pic.twitter.com/x5CegbatGs

— John Rivers (@JohnRiversToo) June 29, 2015

Podhoretz is one of those commentators that works behind the scenes to purge people for thinking for themselves. He hasn’t had an original thing to say for much of his life so instead he sets about persecuting those of us who have.

Anyone who has ever read My Negro Problem–and Ours knows that the older Podhoretz knew the score when it came to the way blacks treated non-blacks.

But the younger Podhoretz decided to purge his then-colleague John Derbyshire at National Review for arguing much the same thing in Takimag.

class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500">

I spent years on NRO's Corner expressing my disgust in ways large and small with John Derbyshire. Now he will reap the whirwind. Deservedly.

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) April 7, 2012

How philosemitic do you think an America that has fewer whites in it will be, John? Or will you run away fleeing the policies you push? Or will you wait for your young children to suffer it?

Regression to the mean is a hell of a thing, John. It’s a hell of a thing.

You might have noticed it in the decreasing quality of our neoconservative commentariat where nepotism is the rule, not the exception. If everyone is an anti-Semite, John, no one is. Such movements that are so inbred often become stillborn and that’s what exactly scares Podhoretz about the right of the alt right.

Podhoretz’s lucky dueling has been made illegal but barring that let’s let his donors know what kind of tweeting habit they are helping to subsidize. Over a 1oo,000 tweets, John? Come on now. I’ve already gathered some emails and will be collecting more. Enough is enough.

I wrote to Podhoretz and told him that we’ll be sending this story and others about him to his donors and he replied, “Please do. Thank you.” So let’s take him up on that.

And you’ll notice, John, that I didn’t even call you a cuckservative though the rumors about your failed first marriage and the way you treated your wife and she treated you were hard to avoid.

But you know that, don’t you, John?

class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500">

#scariestTweets "Your ex-wife is now following you on Twitter!"

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) October 31, 2011

class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500">

I have no memory of who attended my 1997 wedding to my ex-wife and I'd like to keep it that way. I bet Martha Raddatz is the same.

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) October 10, 2012

The Observer published an article about the ill-fated marriage.

Over time, Mr. Kristol emerged as The Standard ‘s media face, and Mr. Podhoretz said he felt it had become “somebody else’s magazine.” Then love struck: In February 1997, Mr. Podhoretz ran into Ms. Hickey at a party thrown by Arianna Huffington. Mr. Podhoretz soon circulated news of his engagement in an e-mail to friends headed “This is not a put-on.” The couple was married in May. Three months later, Mr. Podhoretz told friends he hadn’t been in love after all. Said a friend of the couple, “they cut their losses.”

What a shame we can’t cut ours with the former Bush and Reagan speechwriter-turned-Twitter police.

Steve Sailer writes in 2005:

As you probably know, Ali G is a character who interacts with famous people, asking them idiotic questions (e.g., he inquired of Pat Buchanan whether any BLTs had been found in Iraq).

A reader writes:

I’m wondering if your mockery of John Podhoretz has been unfounded. I had stopped reading NRO a year or so ago because it was a little bit predictable, but since you highlighted Pod’s attempt to criticize John Derbyshire, the Corner has become essential reading. Every week John Podhoretz will attempt to argue with a different member of their team. Because he is one of them, they can’t just ignore him, they have to engage with him. And so they gradually get more and more frustrated as he doesn’t understand their points. He’s like an American Ali G.

For example, there was Andrew Stuttaford, and this week Ramesh Ponnuru was reduced to communicating as if he’s telling off a slightly backwards child:

“I’m not upset, but I do have better things to do. The reason I keep noting the fact that I have not made various points is that you keep erroneously attributing these points to me. Knock it off.”

Perhaps, but maybe JPod is the anti-Ali G. The comedian Sacha Baron Cohen who plays the moronic Pakistani wigger Ali G is actually a member of a brilliant British Jewish family (his cousin Simon Baron-Cohen is an important autism researcher). In contrast, perhaps John Podhoretz plays being a member of brilliant American Jewish family, but actually is a moron.

Jane Eisner writes Dec. 16, 2013:

Well, I certainly never had that happen before. In years of moderating sometimes heated public conversations, never has a panelist just walked off the stage. But that’s what Commentary editor John Podhoretz did Monday night. And I’m still trying to figure out why.

Of course, I expected a feisty evening when the venerable 92nd Street Y asked me to moderate a panel about what it means to be “pro-Israel” (their words), with Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street; David Harris, executive director of American Jewish Committee, and Podhoretz. And from the outset, it was clear that Ben-Ami and Podhoretz were going to disagree about everything, with Harris positioning himself — literally and figuratively — in the middle.

We talked about the latest controversy at the Swarthmore College Hillel, and who should or should not be invited to speak at a Jewish institution.

We talked about the results of the Pew Research Center study that American Jews are more critical of Israeli government policies than many “pro-Israel” leaders would like, and what that means.

Throughout it all, Podhoretz was firmly, even aggressively, disagreeing with Ben-Ami, and the back-and-forth between them became a little testy. This is the hardest part of being a moderator – trying to make the split-second judgements over when to step in, and when to allow the debate to run its course.

But then we turned to an audience member’s question about the decision announced today by the American Studies Association to endorse an academic boycott of Israel. And things got harder, still.

Ironically, everyone on stage, myself included, believed that this was a hypocritical and ultimately counterproductive action. But after saying he disagreed with the ASA vote, Ben-Ami segued into talking about Israeli government policies that, in his view, make it difficult for some Americans to believe Israel really does want peace with the Palestinians.

You’re blaming the victim, cried Podhoretz. Some members of the audience became enraged, and, mystifyingly, the Commentary editor encouraged them, challenging them to boo and hiss.

And then — honestly, it’s a bit of a blur, but this is what I remember — he started wagging his finger at Ben-Ami in a manner at once threatening and condescending. That’s when I stepped in, trying to rein in the argument, using my hands (I am known to gesticulate) to try to calm him down.

Instead, Podhoretz angrily said that I raised my hand at him and stormed off the stage.

Whoa.

I am, physically, much, much smaller than John Podhoretz, so he could hardly allege that I was intending to do him harm. More than that, I was the moderator, and he had a responsibility to be civil on stage and, at the very least, listen to my requests. I was stunned by what I can only describe as a temper tantrum.

So was everyone else. To the great credit of Harris and Ben-Ami, we continued the conversation for the allotted time, with a spirited debate about the lengths to which American Jews can and should speak up and about Israeli policies.

But the damage was done. The chair was empty. Yes, I made a joke at one point about “Elijah” but it is hard not to view this lopsided scene as an incredibly sad commentary on the difficulty of engaging Jews with vastly different views on Israel in civil dialogue.

Or maybe it was just about one rude, angry man.

From the comments:

* Here is the significant part of Podhoretz&#039s reply:

In the course of her account, she claims that “mystifyingly,” I “encouraged” the audience to boo and hiss me. In fact, after a prolonged bout of booing, I responded by suggesting—in a manner that was intended, for what I would have thought were obvious reasons, to be ironic—that the crowd might try hissing too. Which they did. Maybe they didn’t pick up on the irony; Eisner apparently didn’t, given her level of mystification.

Eisner then says I wagged my finger “in a manner threatening and concescending” at Ben-Ami. As it happens, I had no problem with Ben-Ami personally throughout the panel, though we disagreed vehemently. And given that he was five or ten feet away from me and we were having an exchange that was mutually heated, I’m not sure how threatening my condescending finger-wagging could have been. (I am unaware there was any finger-wagging, by the way, but I will stipulate for the sake of comity that some wagging took place.)

Whatever I did, it was, to be sure, no more “threatening” than Eisner’s response, which was to put her hand up close to me for the purposes of quieting me down. Eisner seems to think that when I spoke in objection to this gesture, which I did angrily, I was perhaps fearful she was going to attack me physically—which is the height of silliness. I was annoyed by the hostility of the crowd, one of whose number had shrieked at me, and I was troubled by Eisner’s effort to shush me.

Bottom line: I’d had a long day and I didn’t see the point in spending more of it getting booed and shushed. So I left. So sue me.

* JPod is a chicken hawk and a chicken debater. The good news is that he just reduced his likelihood of being invited to other settings.

* Recreating a CNN “Crossfire” episode in front of a live audience of cranky, opinionated East Side middle-aged Jews is as likely to bring out thoughtful debate as posing the issue to a NASCAR audience during a crash slowdown.

* Eisner has served as an exemplary moderator on a number of occasions, and, as per my search, has never had any issues while serving in that role before. It seems, despite my surprise at the sincerity and openness of his response, that Mr. Podhoretz was responsible for the improprieties that took place at this event