Chaim Amalek writes: The greater the number of governments the goyim have the more opportunities there are for us to advise then, help them raise money, consult, and so forth. I say the more the merrier.
Posted inJews|Comments Off on Catalan independence: is it good for the Jews?
With the former literary editor of The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier and his formidable Old Testament prophet-meets-Beethoven affect, in the news again, it’s perhaps worth remembering his outraged reaction to The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in TNR in 1994:
Murray and Herrnstein protest that “the fascination with race, I.Q. and genes is misbegotten,” but a few pages later they mutter, about the “environment/genetic debate,” that “the question, of course, is fascinating.” The question, of course, is not fascinating. It is old, dreary and indecent, philosophically shabby and politically ugly. …
The scientism of Murray (I will refer only to him, since he is the principal author of what this magazine has published, and de mortuis nil nisi bonum) is a little quaint.
And it would be kind of silly for Wieseltier to imply that The Bell Curve is anti-Semitic since Herrnstein cowrote it, so Wieseltier gets around that problem by dropping Herrnstein’s name for the rest of his essay and denouncing only Murray. Granted, somebody might make fun of you for such a transparent ploy, but you are Leon Wieseltier so only Bad People would do that.
“The pariah status of intelligence as a construct and I.Q. as its measure,” he writes, “for the past three decades has been a function of political fashion, not science.” As if it were science that drew Murray to the subject! … The occult entity known as “g” is not exactly the sturdy stuff of, say, molecular biology.
Or so I imagine. I am not a scientist. I know nothing about psychometrics. Before Murray, I had never made the acquaintance of “visuospatial abilities” or “the digit span subtest.” I do not doubt that there is such a thing as intelligence, and that there are better and worse methods of measuring it. But Murray’s enterprise collapses, theoretically and morally, long before he gets to his graphs. For the question of the bearing of science on life is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical question. There is not a graph in the world that will explain the place of graphs in the world.
That last line sounds like G.K. Chesterton if he smoked crack.
… I am not suggesting, of course, that Murray is an anti-Semite. Still, when I read, on page 275 of The Bell Curve, that “Jews — specifically, Ashkenazi Jews of European origins — test higher than any other ethnic group,” I am repulsed. I am repulsed not only because I would like to believe that what I will achieve in my life will be owed to myself and not to my group, though I am honored by my membership in my group; but also because there have been many scientistic comparisons of Jews and non-Jews during the past two centuries in which Jews did not “test higher,” and the consequences were catastrophic. What if the conclusions that Murray takes from the study that he calls “Storfer 1990″ had turned out differently? How would he explain my failure to express the limitations of my group? Or would it be more appropriate, in the event of psychometric embarrassment, that I stop pretending and start tailoring?
These are not unintelligent questions.
Yes, they are.
I am, after all, an Ashkenazi Jew of European origins. More to the point, a retreat to tailoring is precisely what Murray would prescribe for a Jew who discovered, as the result of some new “definitive” measurement, that he was a member of the cognitive underclass.
In literary terms, Wieseltier might be the Jewish, heterosexual answer to Oscar Wilde. It was Wilde, after all, who lamented, “I have put my genius into my life; all I’ve put into my works is my talent”—an observation that would seem to suit Leon Wieseltier. “Why don’t you take it a step further,” he suggests, “and call me the ‘Oscar very Wilde’?”
He’s been at The New Republic since 1982, frequently deploying his considerable influence outside his own section to shape the general content of the magazine. A series of frustrated top editors—whose superior rank on the masthead was no match for Wieseltier’s political muscle—has come and gone. His power flows from Marty Peretz, who lured him down from Harvard, having been dazzled by the young scholar over coffee on the Square.
“He was fluent and learned in almost everything one talked about,” recalls Peretz, who compares Wieseltier to the great Jewish philosopher Spinoza. “He’s pretty unusual in that he’s extremely cerebral and extremely what we used to call ‘hip.’ . . .
Comments at Steve Sailer:
* The most important word is “indecent.” Nature versus nurture is something that’s simply not thought about. That is, if there’s any chance you’ll come down on the side of nature. Otherwise, drive it from your mind! Don’t think about it. Not in front of a lady, certainly, but not in front of anyone. Not even at night, alone under your covers. Foreshame!
I’m not familiar with this modern-day Beethoven’s writings, but something tells me he doesn’t go around calling things “indecent,” or “I say good day, sir!” everyday. Something about the Bell Curve brings out the Victorian scold in them.
* Here is Larry Auster commenting on one particularly odious remark made by Wieseltier.
“When Charles Moore of the London Spectator described how his Muslim neighbors prayed loudly next-door during the Gulf War in 1991, and spoke of his worries of what would happen to England if the number of Muslims kept increasing, an enraged Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, fired off this riposte:
Three cheers, I say, for the neighbors. I hope that they pray noisily, and that they pray five times a day, and that the evening prayer comes just as the Moores and the Mellors are turning to the claret … It is amusing to watch the colonizers complain about being colonized. [The New Republic, January 6, 1992.]”
Wieseltier is not exactly shy in his hatred. He mocks an Englishmen’s fears about the survival of English culture. He rejoices at the thought of Englishmen being discomforted, disoriented, and displaced in their own country by Muslims. If anyone is driven by an ethnic animus, surely it is Wieseltier and the many Jews who think and feel as he does.
I was never a huge of fan of Larry Auster (especially not after I was ‘Austericized’ from his circle for some Jew-critical commentary that cut a bit close to the bone), but I’m hugely supportive of his attitude towards his fellow Jews – which was essentially, we had a good thing going here, why’d you have to go and wreck it?
* Speaking of Peretz though, now that the dam is breaking everywhere else, when will the dirty details come out about him and his proteges? Which ones (if any) did he have homosexual relations with?
* There are really two school of Jew-crit. Call them the ‘behavioral’ and the ‘existential.’
The behavioral school criticizes Jewish behavior, with a view to changing prevailing Jewish behavioral patterns. When the behavior changes, so does the criticism. (As Keynes might have said had he applied himself to a bit of Jew-crit, “When the behavior changes, so does my attitude – what does yours do so, sir?”)
The existential school criticizes Jewish existence. Sure, they will criticize behavior a la the behavioral school too, but that’s only because Jewish behavior adds insult to injury: it’s the fact that Jews are here, walking among us, that is the actual problem.
Larry Auster was on the verge of comprehending this crucial distinction just before he died. Very few other Jews understand it – or, more importantly, trust it – at all. Paul Gottfried would surely be one, but how old is he now? Our esteemed host, Mr. Unz, is very likely another. Such men are clearly few and bar between, however.
In terms of critics, I would place Sailer firmly in the behavioral school. So too Derbyshire (I mean, what little emanates from him in this regard). Kevin MacDonald is a tougher to categorize. I think he started out in the behavioral school, but his trials and tribulations are pushing him to the existential school.
Groups like the ADL understand this only too well. Yes, most of them start out as behavioralists, they’ll tell you, but it’s only a matter of time before they transform into snarling Hitlerite existentialists. And frankly, there’s considerable evidence – which I’ve seen with my own eyes – to support this contention.
So what’s a good behavioralist to do then? Alas, I don’t have any definitive answers, except: press on.
* Decades spent rationalizing to oneself the kind of behavior that has recently come to light has a way of dulling the sharpest intellect and degrading the finest character. It’s no surprise that by the time the Bell Curve came around Wieseltier had too little of either left to tell decent from indecent.
* 1. The worst thing a gentile can do to a Jew is notice he’s a Jew.
2. The worst thing a Jew can do to a fellow Jew is not notice he’s a Jew.
3. The second worst thing a Jew can do to a fellow Jew is alert the goyim that either of them are Jews and different from the goyim.
Everything Leon Wieseltier wrote about The Bell Curve above is covered by those three rules.
* Reminds me of George Costanza. Jon Lovitz plays a character in an episode of Seinfeld who’s been pretending to suffer from cancer. He says, “I’ve been living a lie.”
George responds, “Just one? I’m living like 20.”
* He thinks the act he puts on (of which the hair is a part) and the complete certainty with which he makes every unsubstantiated sweeping statement raises him to the level of a literary genius. It does not. I would like to see a Takimag article slicing and dicing this guy. It shouldn’t be that hard.
* Steve is a great man.
In every way.
It seems to me however Steve that when Jews do something bad, they are Jews. When they do something tou approve of they are Whites.
You made much of Nobels-too-white when im fact they are nobels-too-jewish.
In terms of achievement Jews are to Whites as Whites are to Blacks.
It’s clear as day. Nothing from the social sciences is clearer.
Is that why your readers love reading every example of “Jews Behaving Badly”? Because, in more literate terms they are nuttily The Man keeping them down?
You know very well, even if many of your readers do not, that the matter of Israel aside, Jews perform no worse than anyone else among the elite. And those Jews part of the lower classes crime no more than their socioeconomic compatriots either.
Roger Alies got a pass. No mention. He doesn’t fit The Narrative.
Bill’O has been paying off women – publicly – for over a decade. How much have you played that up?
It’s almost like you have a third antenna to sniff out any potential wrongdoing by a member of this tribe. It feeds The Narrative that is so popular in this local echo-chamber. Throwing in a commensurate number of goyim would ruin it.
Better yet, does anyone imagine for a moment (anyone remotely sane that is) that Trump has been more appropriate with women than Weinstein? Even for a moment??
But making a big deal of it locally would confuse people locked into the narrative. So it only gets – at best – a couple of asides. No stuttering and pointing. Unlie those pervy Jews (we all know how pervy they are, just ask julius streicher and hefner and flynt and glitter and 10 thousand Catholic Priests. They tell ya.
I mean, you even had to dig up some director nobody ever heard of and show us his slimy jewish visage. And of course you made sure to get his Jewishness in there. Making a big deal of him and expecting people to wiki him won’t suffice.
As for these men…
What the fuck did they do already?!
Their unfortunate Jewish consciences has them falling over in apologies and shame. Fucking portnoyesque neurotics feeling guilty about anything to do wiyh sex so that the moment they’re exposed of having – uh, what? – they prostrate, weep and beg for forgiveness. No Trumpian comfort in one’s own skin there.
* The hilarious thing about that 1995 Vanity Fair profile is that they only put it online *today*. It was so devastating, apparently, that although it ran in the print edition Wieseltier got his friends at VF to hide it. Apparently journos used to pass photocopies of it round. (See David Graham’s Twitter feed.)
* I think Wieseltier’s problem is all too common among Jewish Liberals. On the one hand, they sincerely do want to be cosmopolitan individualists, ‘citizens of the world’. So, they have a tendency to denigrate any sign of ‘atavistic’ nationalism or anti-intellectual populism.
However, their undying and even fanatical support for Zionism and Jewish pride makes us wonder if their anti-gentile-nationalism is really sincere and principled OR strategic and opportunistic to favor Jewish interests above all.
It’s possible that these Jewish Liberals don’t really know themselves because they are so deeply invested in cosmopolitan liberalism and Zionist tribalism.
Peretz himself was a deeply contradictory figure, an ardent Zionist nationalist editing a premier magazine of Liberal Ideas.
* To his credit, Wieseltier actually managed to walk the walk – he tossed away the yarmulke and married a muslim Pakistani.
It didn’t last, and as outrageous as it sounds, I suppose there is some possibility that he only did it so he could deflect later criticism.
As an ardent ethnocentrist myself, I’ve long felt that there is no lie so vile I wouldn’t tell it, no act so low I wouldn’t stoop to it, if it was a matter of defending my vital racial interests…
* So, to sum up, give up the money, white man. Give up the pussy, white woman. That’s it, in a nutshell. Anti-racism is the con man’s racist colonialism, done by guile instead of brute force, but with the same goal of exploitation. Without that exploitation, without the robbery, modern anti-racism is essentially meaningless, except as naked hatred and aggression.
How ’bout that Israel, Leon? Kind of apartheidy and racisty, isn’t it? What’s that, you support the Jewish state? As I say, no real principles but hate and exploitation.
* Existentialist critics of Jews like Mike Enoch and Andrew Anglin are the first to acknowledge the obvious Ashkenazi genetic gift of high verbal intelligence. Or is it really just verbal combativeness in defense of one’s in group?
But also there is also the question of the often total lack of self-awareness exhibited by “high intelligence” Jews of the consequences of their actions if they were to be extended beyond the in group to be a universal norm. A very useful genetic trait or adaption if one is comfortable with their group’s role as outsiders or even parasites.
Hence Steve Sailer’s comments about the difference between Goyim and Jewish concepts of guilt. For the Goyim, guilt is a question of not living up to some universal moral ideal. For Jews is not being ethnocentric enough.
If the lack of self-awareness exhibited by even highly intelligent Jews is in part genetic as an “arch Nazis” like Andrew Anglin suggests then hopes of ameliorating Jewish subversive behavior through ridicule and shaming alone is very limited in deed.
Then only existential remedies are likely to work. The least violent and repressive ones would be those recommended by old school Catholic apologists like E. Michael Jones.
* According to the article, Wieseltier’s over-indulgence in coke and booze during that period was brought on by the disintegration of his marriage to a Pakistani heiress and then-international relations graduate student. Explaining the attraction, Wieseltier said, “Look, I have always had a great appetite for The Other. The Other means the sexual other as well as the ethnic other and the intellectual other.”
Ok, fine, but he evidently had no intention of remaining monogamous, and what was the likelihood of marriage to this allegedly beautiful and no-doubt pampered merchant princess standing the test of time? I ask this because I think it goes to the mindset of a good many bright but arguably deluded liberals. They have very little interest in the nuts-and-bolts workings of human relations. Ideas, plans, fantasies, and philosophies they have aplenty, but they wash their hands of the sometimes mundane but generally inescapable realities of human nature.
Having taken a bit of an interest in this Wieseltier character during the current dustup, I watched a video of a discussion he had with Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard president, at the Aspen Festival of Ideas. The title was “Do We Need to Rescue the Humanities?” The answer was “Boy, do we ever!”
Needless to say, Drew Gilpen Faust and Leon Wieseltier have plenty of ideas about what needs to be done. They have, however, far fewer ideas about how these things are to be done, and fewer still sensible or implementable ideas. Some of their observations I agreed with, but identifying a problem and fixing a problem are two different things. Worse yet — particularly in academe — you may actually have a pretty good idea, and it may actually be impossible to implement. Not everybody gets that.
For the record, Leon Wieseltier is significantly more interesting than Faust (Gilpen Faust?), not to mention funnier. You can see whay she is a bureaucrat and he isn’t. I’m sure he would suck at being a university president.
* I agree – but if you listen into the above linked discussion, you hear from ca. minute 12:40 on Wieseltier struggle with the same question he struggles with in the NRP-quote about The Bell Curve in Steve Sailer’s post above. Wieseltier’s (big) mistake is to claim that the humanities teach to negate scientific insights into human nature. (That’s philosophically wrong, too – see Jürgen Habermas’ Between Naturalism and Religion and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s classic Truth and Method).
Another aspect: In Aspen too, Wieseltier might by and large be following Stephen Jay Gould’s wrong ideas about IQ in his book The Mismeasure of Man and in Gould’s attack on their work in the NYT and various other places.
Wieseltier is right, when he stresses, that the humanities can’t be replaced by the hard sciences, but he is wrong when he claims, that no insight into the behavior of man is useful at all, that comes from the hard sciences or from the counting branch of the social sciences.
Habermas’ way out is right, and he found the formula, that a weak naturalism is, what enables to hold both perspectives – those of the artist, the novelist, the actor, the director on the one hand – and – lets say Murray/Herrnstein et. al. on the other valid and – most important point: In a productive dialogue/exchange!
* It strikes me that to deal with reality lefties always need a brain-altering chemical, whether legal or illegal, prescribed or imbibed.
One of Woody Allen’s long tropes is how everyone is see therapists. Of course, the people see analysists and these quacks give them all some form of medication to deal with reality being too hard on them.
And of course all the Lefty women use artificial birth control (the pill), which severely messes with their natural hormones. And the Lefty push for pot and other drug legalization also comes from this desire for easy access to a drug that confuses their reality and makes them numb to truth.
These days, any female lefty writing a story about an emotional point in her life will throw in how she was taking some form of medication as a result, or else was institutionalized.
During my time living in Lefty cities as a younger man I had yet to to meet a Lefty girl there who didn’t have a drinking problem or who didn’t use pot/cocaine/stolen prescription meds semi-regularly.
A real question future historians will have about our era is how many of the social Lefty pushes were led by people who were constantly high as a kite and/or suffering from mental problems that put them out of touch with reality.
* Leon Weasel-tier has been a public advocate for the various neo-con wars which have cost the US thousands of dead, many billions in cost and, let’s not forget, millions of people thrown into misery overseas. But yet this long-haired dandy is supposed to be an “intellectual” even though the results of his politics have been such a disaster. Must be his nifty writing style, then. But hey, what’s just some dead people as compared to Weasel’s hairstyle? The American servicemen died for a good cause which, of course, is his cause even as he would never have hung around with any of them since they’d be too low-class for his tastes.
*
Jeffrey Goldberg: “If the tragic outcome of this [i.e. the importation of Africans and Middle Easterners] is that the Jews in fact do all need to leave Europe, what would be the most Jewish thing for the last Jew to do, the most appropriate fitting thing?”
Leon Weiseltier: “One[?] said that the last thing a Jew should do when he or she leaves Europe is spit.”
Another funny instance in this video is when Golberg, Weiseltier, and Bennett (all three are Jewish), blame the Tragic Dirt of Europe for the anti-semitism of the Muslim arrivals.
* I have a suspicion this account of Wieseltier as a hipster lothario has no reality outside of Lloyd Grove’s imagination. Wieseltier’s a physically ugly man and was unattractive a generation ago. His voice has a sibilant quality you ordinarily see in male homosexuals. His grooming is wretched. It’s very difficult to believe that someone with such a history of ponderous if not pretentious writing is a great wit in private conversation.
Richard John Neuhaus once disputed the contention that Bilge Clinton was a ‘very good liar’ with this retort, “A man who is a very good liar would not have a reputation a reputation for being ‘a very good liar’”. (In P.J. O’Rourke’s account of meeting with him and conversing with him, Clinton emerges as a ready and glib liar, not a successful one). Here’s a similar hypothesis: men who are capable seducers do not acquire a reputation for being mashers. Applied here, Wieseltier’s success, such as it was, was in being put in pigeonhole marked ‘disconcerting’ rather than the pigeonhole marked ‘creep’.
* I think Gore Vidal had it right when he said that Wieseltier’s big accomplishment was having “important hair.”
Posted inLeon Wieseltier|Comments Off on Wieseltier vs. “The Bell Curve”
A New Jersey town has introduced hateful and highly discriminatory new rules aimed at barring Orthodox Jews from moving in, according to a stunning complaint filed by the state attorney general.
The nine-count complaint accuses Mahwah’s public officials and most vocal residents of using the same tactics employed by “1950s-era white flight suburbanites who sought to keep African-Americans from moving into their neighborhoods.”
The lawsuit takes aim at two ordinances that state prosecutors say were designed specifically to deter Orthodox Jews seeking to relocate from upstate New York, according to NJ Advance Media.
The first edict, which went into effect at the end of July, barred out of state residents from using Mahwah parks and other recreational facilities.
Valerie Plame sorry for ‘Jews Are Driving America’s Wars’ tweet
The second, which was introduced but not passed, expanded a ban on placing signs on utility poles to include any “device or other matter.”
The measure would have prevented Orthodox Jews from installing on utility poles a white piping used to create an eruv, a ritual boundary that allows the community members to carry house keys or push baby strollers outside the home on the Sabbath.
Posted inOrthodoxy|Comments Off on This is crazy, what public school parents wouldn’t want Orthodox Jews coming to their neighborhood en masse?
Leon Wieseltier, a major cocaine hound and bisexual degenerate, has enjoyed many a threesome with leading male Jewish intellectuals (including famous professors) and various lucky ladies. Abusing drugs and women are his leading hobbies aside from lecturing the rest of us on right and wrong.
Leon did drugs and girls with the late Leonard Cohen. That’s how the literary titan bonds with his fellow Jewish lefties.
Wieseltier is no respecter of the sanctity of marriage — his own or anyone else’s.
Numerous synagogues, including Sinai Temple in Westwood, had Wieseltier in as a scholar in residence after his book Kaddish came out.
Ab3 says:
You mentioned that Mr. Wieseltier was a scholar-in-residence at Sinai Temple. Did you know that he was also a guest scholar at Beth Jacob shortly before Creepy Jonathan Rosenblatt?
But perhaps more significant is that Wieseltier is active at Georgetown’s Kesher Israel Congregation, former home of Voyeur Extraordinaire Barry Freundel. Wieseltier was the lead speaker there this past Shavuot. Imagine that — members of the Modern Orthodox synagogue of record in the Swamp stayed up all night to hear what this pervert had to say.
A literary lady says: “He came on strong, but there wasn’t anything really ever forced. I definitely put myself knowingly in situations and led him on a bit. And he’s so fucking smart that he can manipulate women into doing anything. Almost.”
A source says: “He likes poppers. I didn’t even know what those were before him. I had to look them up. He was doing them when we were in his TNR office together and he was begging me to take off my clothes so he could jerk off.”
I hope Leon has some super-high-grade cocaine to help him through this bumpy patch. Or Torah might suffice.
Editor Michael Kinsley initially tried to edit Leon Wieseltier’s impenetrable prose but Leon complained to the owner of The New Republic, Marty Peretz, who got Kinsley to back off.
This cult around Wieseltier helped protect him. He let it be known he held sway inside and outside The New Republic. In 1999, The New York Times called him “a Wunderkind turned near-elder statesman…. part Maimonides, part Oscar Wilde.” Years earlier, he quipped to Vanity Fair that they should refer to him as “Oscar very Wilde.”
If you got on his good side, he could make your career, several former staffers said. If he turned on you, you felt it. In editorial meetings, Wieseltier had his own chair positioned at the end of a long table opposite the editor-in-chief. If anyone sat in his chair, he considered it a capital offense. Like Weinstein, he delighted in being cruel to others he perceived as weaker — which included the men on staff.
“He was perceived as the person who capped editors, who created editors, made careers,” said the top editor. “He was somebody that held really vicious grudges against people. He was just a very intimidating person to deal with.”
Several of the magazine’s former editors refused to comment for this story, including Franklin Foer, who left as editor in 2014. Andrew Sullivan, who edited the magazine in the early to mid-’90s, did not return an email request for comment. Charles Lane, who was at the helm from September 1997 through October 1999, told HuffPost that no complaints from female staffers ever came to him. But he understands why that was the case.
“I will tell you that the truth of the sort of reality of life at The New Republic was not what was represented on the masthead,” Lane said. “In other words, the editor was nominally the supervisor of Leon Wieseltier. But that was not reality, OK? I mean Leon had total autonomy as literary editor and a very close, almost brother-like relationship with the owner at the time, Marty Peretz, who, of course, was above both of us on the masthead and totally had complete untrammeled control of the magazine.”
“In reality I don’t think I was the place where the buck stopped, given how the place worked,” Lane said. “The buck stopped with Marty. I think he’s the person you need to be asking that question. I really do. I mean, if you want an answer from the person who was in authority, that’s it.”
But Wieseltier’s reputation concerning women was well known, Lane says. “I was aware, as everyone in Washington was aware, that Leon had extramarital affairs. I think those are public knowledge. I’m racking my brain. I did not have specific knowledge of anything like what these people are talking about. Having said that, none of it surprises me.”
Leon Wieseltier Admits ‘Offenses’ Against Female Colleagues as New Magazine Is Killed
Leon Wieseltier, a prominent editor at The New Republic for three decades who was preparing to unveil a new magazine next week, apologized on Tuesday for “offenses against some of my colleagues in the past” after several women accused him of sexual harassment and inappropriate advances…
Several women on the chain said they were humiliated when Mr. Wieseltier sloppily kissed them on the mouth, sometimes in front of other staff members. Others said he discussed his sex life, once describing the breasts of a former girlfriend in detail. Mr. Wieseltier made passes at female staffers, they said, and pressed them for details about their own sexual encounters.
One woman recounted that while she was attempting to fact-check a column Mr. Wieseltier wrote, he forced her to look at a photograph of a nude sculpture in an art book, asking her if she had ever seen a more erotic picture. She wrote that she was shaken and afraid during the incident.
Mr. Wieseltier often commented on what women wore to the office, the former staff members said, telling them that their dresses were not tight enough. One woman said he left a note on her desk thanking her for the miniskirt she wore to the office that day. She said she never wore a skirt to the office again.
According to the women, male staff members routinely witnessed Mr. Wieseltier’s behavior and did nothing.
Which brings us to the awkwardness of Leon Stories. As woman after woman has stressed, Leon’s was not a Harvey Weinstein or Roger Ailes type of predation. No one I spoke with was ever physically afraid of him. Yes, some feared his ability to make their lives miserable and ruin their futures. (No one ever doubted his ability to do this.) Leon had a reputation for turning hard on those who displeased him. Upon joining The New Republic, most people knew (or quickly learned) not to get on Leon’s bad side. Bad Leon could be scary, no matter where you fell on the org chart.
As a close intimate of the magazine’s owner, not to mention a quasi-celebrity himself who hobnobbed with the likes of Barbra Streisand and Kirk Douglas, Leon was the most powerful person at the magazine—regardless of who was the top editor at any given moment.
It wasn’t immediately clear how the allegations first reached Emerson Collective. Wieseltier was named—along with more than five dozen other men who work in journalism or publishing—on an anonymous spreadsheet titled “SHITTY MEDIA MEN” that quietly, and then less quietly, circulated in national media circles last week. (The Atlantic obtained a copy of the spreadsheet, but is not publishing it because the allegations are anonymous and unverified.) Anonymous charges against the men were wide-ranging, and spanned from acting “creepy af” in online conversation—“af” being an abbreviation for “as fuck”—to physical assault and rape. Wieseltier’s alleged misconduct, according to the unverified, anonymous spreadsheet, was “workplace harassment.” It’s not clear whether the Emerson Collective saw the spreadsheet.
At the same time, a group of more than a dozen women who once worked at TNR started an email thread to discuss their experiences with Wieseltier—and to hatch a plan for how to make those experiences public.
Several women who worked with Wieseltier described him to me as intellectually seductive and charming—even charismatic. He’s long had a reputation for being genuinely interested in the journalistic work of young women, especially at a time when the industry was even more male dominated than it is today. He wasn’t just a leader of the magazine at TNR, but a cultural arbiter there—which meant his opinion of you mattered, several women said. It was dangerous, one former staffer told me, to get on his bad side.
Nearly a dozen journalists who have worked with Wieseltier told me they are unsurprised by the allegations against him. All of the women I talked to had their own “Leon stories,” which included everything from being called “sweetie” in the workplace to unwanted touching, kissing, groping, and other sexual advances.
My colleague Michelle Cottle, a former TNR senior editor who is now a contributing editor at The Atlantic, told me about the time Wieseltier suggested they get a drink at the bar of a well-known luxury hotel in New York City where he was staying, only to declare that it was too crowded. Instead, they could go to his room, and order a bottle of champagne, Wieseltier offered. He delights in making women sexually uncomfortable, she said.
At TNR, there was frequently talk of Wieseltier’s possible dalliances with young women writers, and he relished this kind of gossip, three separate acquaintances of Wieseltier told me. They described him as someone who bragged graphically about sexual encounters the way a teenaged boy might. Two former colleagues described him in separate conversations as “lecherous.”
The suspension of Wieseltier’s new magazine comes after a series of blockbuster scoops by The New York Times detailing a decades-long pattern of alleged sexual harassment by Harvey Weinstein, the now-infamous film producer. Weinstein and Wieseltier have similar starpower within their industries. “Wieseltier is, in sum, well on his way to achieving the best kind of American celebrity,” Vanity Fair wrote in a 1995 profile, “being famous to the famous.”
Yet even after a week of mounting accusations against powerful men in several industries, and even in Washington—a town accustomed to sex scandals—the accusations against Wieseltier are electrifying. It’s not that Wieseltier is universally liked. Quite the opposite—though he is admired by many for his erudite cultural criticism, and by many of the authors who wrote for him at TNR. He is some combination of beloved and despised; his reputation as a philosopher king is perhaps equaled by his reputation for being a machiavellian operator. Wieseltier’s observers have, in one case in the span of two sentences, described his persona as both “saintly” and “thuggish,” as a writer for The Nation put it in 2014. (Wieseltier himself wrote, in a lauded 1994 essay on identity and culture, “I hear it said of somebody that he is leading a double life. I think to myself: Just two?”)
“The nice thing about everybody speaking their mind is that social opprobrium will do its work,” Wieseltier said in a conversation published by The New York Times last year. “If you say something really disgusting, you will be vilified.”
“I feel very uncomfortable without controversy,” he added. “If the stakes are high about important questions — matters of life and death or the future of the culture — it’s inevitable. You have to argue ferociously.”
My colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates has pointed out that Wieseltier can be “gleefully mean.” In the 1980s, Wieseltier and another TNR essayist, Charles Krauthammer—now a columnist at The Washington Post—were known to so dislike each other that they attended the same editorial board meeting for years without speaking to each other, according to a1989 New York Times article. Wieseltier’s many intellectual feuds—unspooling over his three decades in the literary limelight—are as famous as his halo of Doc-Brown-white hair. The Times once described his enemies as “legion.” The vendettas have been so numerous as to perplex even his confidants. Wieseltier is, as a result of all this, one of the best known intellectuals on the East Coast…
The women who worked with Wieseltier, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, felt he could make or break their careers. His role as a mentor to female colleagues, however, was somewhat complicated by his louche reputation. A 1999 New York Times Magazine profile of Wieseltier described him as having “squired a sequence of ‘extremely beautiful, alluring girlfriends.’” That same profile describes a period of “well-reported excesses, which included heavy drinking and cocaine binges” and “a flurry of infidelities” which allegedly ended his first marriage and cast considerable doubt over his literary future. “For Wieseltier, the tension between the scholarly and the sensual is not easily resolved,” Sam Tanenhaus wrote in the Times article. “Until recently, majority opinion in the literary-cultural world—the narrow, gossipy corridor that stretches from Boston to Washington, with tentative windings in the direction of London and Los Angeles—held that not even the most rigorous polishing could restore the sheen to his tarnished image.” Yet Wieseltier went on to write a widely acclaimed memoir, and continued in his role at The New Republic for nearly two decades, until he and much of the rest of the editorial staff walked out in protest of the company’s digital strategy under new ownership. Now, as Wieseltier’s former colleagues reckon with his alleged inappropriate behaviors, several of them told me they worry they were complicit in enabling him over the years.
When Martin Peretz, owner and editor in chief of The New Republic, offered him a full-time job, Wieseltier pounced. He moved to Washington, where he was joined by Mahnaz Ispahani — they met when she was a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government. Their 1985 wedding, in Washington, was a spectacle, befitting the conjunction of an ascending literary star and the beautiful daughter of a Pakistani merchant prince who wore a diamond in her nose. I remember thinking, ”How long can Leon stay this good?”’ says the journalist Christopher Hitchens.
Wieseltier’s parents were less dazzled. Their son, lapsed from Orthodoxy since the early 70’s, had married not simply a shiksa but a Muslim, the Other to which Wieseltier is irresistibly drawn. ”I think people live doubly, triply and more,” he says. ”And they should. What matters to me is that one identifies one’s genuine obsessions, one’s genuine commitments, one’s genuine appetites, one pursues them seriously and far. Dilettantism is the sort of thing one must avoid.”
But it was, precisely, the trap awaiting him. It was impossible, for instance, to say no to Tina Brown, then the editor of Vanity Fair, or to Conde Nast fees, when she dangled a monthly column. Wieseltier adopted the pen name Tristan Vox, borrowed from a short story by Michel Tournier, ”to distinguish it from my other stuff and because I’ve always loved the idea of learning how to invent a voice.” But his overeducated musings on Frank Sinatra and lingerie verged on self-parody, and his high profile made him an easy target. In 1990 Spy Magazine ridiculed him as ”Leon Vee-ZEL-tee-AY,” who ”jealously guards his highbrow credentials while wearing a lowbrow heart on his sleeve.” Next came well-reported excesses, which included heavy drinking and cocaine binges. These and a flurry of infidelities finished his marriage. Had the heir apparent to the New York intellectuals succumbed to nostalgie de la boue? Or was it a case of the cloistered Brooklyn boy gobbling up the fruits of a postponed adolescence?
A long-term relationship, now ended, with the choreographer Twyla Tharp did him much good. He speaks proudly of their work together. He suggested the music, by Benjamin Britten, for one of her ballets and wrote the program notes for ”Mr. Worldly Wise,” which had its premiere at the Royal Opera House in London in 1995. ”Mister Worldly Wise is finding it harder and harder to keep up with himself, and with his world,” says the commentary for Act I. ”He puts himself in the center of everything, and nothing works. His creations are dissolving into chaos.” A self-assessment? Perhaps not, but Wieseltier was struggling. At one point, the novelist Larry McMurtry gave Wieseltier the use of a furnished room above the Georgetown bookstore he ran. ”It was a little demoralizing working there on the third floor while Larry was churning out one book after the other on the second,” says Wieseltier. Buckley says, ”I’d begun to worry a bit that Leon would be one of those people who was always talking about the book he was going to write — or, worse, was ‘writing.’ ”
But then writing was not Wieseltier’s chosen vocation. Editing was. Even at his most distracted, he nurtured arresting new voices, from Louis Menand and Simon Schama to his current deputy, James Wood, who is also the magazine’s lead fiction reviewer. Wieseltier the colleague, however, was another story. His influence over Peretz was so great that no one else felt safe, particularly the series of rivals who held the title of editor. ”The thing I never understood about him,” says one former colleague, ”is why the scheming, why the Machiavellianism? Why was he always pursuing feuds and vendettas? Here’s a man with great talent, possibly genius, persecuting people with less talent.” In April 1996, when his onetime protege Andrew Sullivan suddenly resigned the editorship after informing the staff that he was infected with H.I.V., it was widely assumed that Wieseltier had engineered his fall, perhaps out of jealously at Sullivan’s growing celebrity. Today the two don’t speak.
Only a month before, Mark Wieseltier had died at the age of 81. The relationship between father and son had always been troubled, ”difficult but very deep,” says Wieseltier. ”He had a kind of feral love for me, and I had a kind of feral love for him.” The novelist Cynthia Ozick recalls meeting Wieseltier senior in the mid-70’s, when he was ”brimming with pride over Leon in such a sweet way. It wasn’t, ‘My son the genius.’ It was, ‘What have I wrought?’ ” By the end, the question had a more plaintive tone. At 43, Leon was divorced, childless, far outside the Jewish faith, with an embarrassing public history, and unrepentant — or so he claimed.
After his father’s death, though he had torn off his yarmulke 20 years before, Wieseltier vowed, in the tradition of obedient Jewish sons, to say kaddish in precisely the manner prescribed by rabbinical authority, thrice daily for 11 months.
New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier is the egghead boy toy of such glamorous powers as Barbara Streisand, Shirley MacLaine, and Tipper Gore. But has he abandoned the life of the mind to be the life of the party?
…he once described his job as “policing the culture.”
…Wieseltier squired Tipper Gore in the 1980s to Washington’s 9:30 club, where they danced the night away to heavy-metal bands while Al was apparently up in the Senate, protecting the national interest…
Wieseltier came to this perch of high culture highly recommended by his doting intellectual mentors: critic Lionel Trilling at Columbia, philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin at Oxford…, and historian Yosef Yerushalmi at Harvard… He was, they all agreed, a brilliant young man of breathtaking promise who would one day bring forth works of enduring importance.
His academic articles feature such sentences as, “The undifferentiated, followed by the simultaneity of the undifferentiated with the differentiated, followed by the withdrawal of the undifferentiated and the triumph of the differentiated: this has been the pattern of metaphysical history in the Jewish view…”
According to witnesses, Wieseltier was soon bringing to the office another habit [aside from alcohol] that he also enjoyed outside the workplace: frequent cocaine use. A person familiar with Wieseltier’s indulgence estimates that at one point in 1993 he was snorting — from a petite silver spoon, dangling from a chain attached to a vial, an entire gram a day. To support this expensive pastime — all but impossible on his salary, which is in the high five figures — he regularly loaded dozens of books he received as literary editor into the trunk of his Honda Accord and hauled them to Washington bookstores, selling them to finance purchases of “truth serum.”
Leon Wieseltier is a self-proclaimed policeman of the culture who refuses to be edited. As a result, his writing is virtually impossible to read all the way through.
Michael Kinsley, early in his tenure as editor of The New Republic, edited one of Leon’s turgid essays. Leon threw a hissy fit, went over Michael’s head to the owner of the magazine (Marty Peretz) and reserved for himself the right to never be edited.
After publishing his over-praised book Kaddish, again unreadable except in sections, Wieseltier was invited to Temple Sinai in Westwood by Rabbi David Wolpe to be a scholar in residence at the shul one weekend and speak about his book. Instead, Leon used all but one of his lectures to expound on his views on the Clinton and Lewinsky scandal, much to the rabbi’s displeasure.
After receiving a Modern Orthodox education at the Yeshiva of Flatbush, Wieseltier led a famously dissolute life.
Dominic Lawson writes in the 11/14/94 Spectator: “…the journalist Leon Wieseltier… the literary editor of New Republic, is the nearest thing the political correctness mob have to a cultural Gauleiter. In an interview with New York magazine earlier this year Mr. Wieseltier referred grandly to ‘part of my job of policing the culture’. (See the policeman wield his truncheon in this issue’s letters pages.)”
9/18/03
Talking to The Los Angeles Times about the controversy over Gregg Easterbrook’s blog about Jewish Hollywood on tnr.com, Leon attributed it in part “to the hubris of this whole blogging enterprise. There is no such thing as instant thought, which is why reflection and editing are part of serious writing and thinking, as Gregg has now discovered.”
3/6/06
The New Republic’s Literary Editor Leon Wieseltier Drones To Toronto Shul
“I went to see Wieseltier speak,” says a source. “He’s kind of a dick. He just read his treatise on Jewish messianic thought – nothing that I didn’t already know and hard to absorb what was unique about it. Then he took questions on whatever. Some of the old folks were complaining that he read in a monotone. That was the extent of his performance. The average age of the audience was 65.”
I’ve never heard a good word about Wieseltier’s public speaking. He’s the most over-rated intellectual in American letters.
Feb. 9, 2010
In an article on Andrew Sullivan, The New Republic’s Literary Editor Leon Wieseltier writes: “He is the master, and the prisoner, of the technology of sickly obsession: blogging–and the divine right of bloggers to exempt themselves from the interrogations of editors–is also a method of hounding.”
What’s with calling “blogging” the technology of sickly obsession? Why is it more sickly obsessive than cell phones? What is sick obsession? Why are you dogged and I am obsessed?
A lot of people have called me obsessed in my blogging. I know then that they lack argument and can only use cheap put-downs.
A Google search could not turn up Leon Wieseltier’s email address. I guess he doesn’t want to be questioned. It’s so much more comfortable just to pronounce.
Posted inAbuse, Leon Wieseltier|Comments Off on Jewish Pundit Leon Wieseltier Exposed
Friend: How about your perspective of what Jewish women want in a guy, in the following age brackets:
20-29
30-39
49-49
Single women
LF: Money becomes increasingly important as women age
Looks become decreasingly important
F: I disagree. Women who are older, say 45 plus, are not chasing after money so much
L: Women want a high status male, but they become more realistic after 35yo. By then, most women have hit the wall and have low marriage value.
F: That’s your chance to pounce. My bud’s oldest daughter set the bar way too high. She missed her prime. She wants a perfect prize
L: A lot of young women make that mistake. They don’t realize that they are most eligible at 16 and start declining after 18 in value.
You’ve got to be married by undergrad or your value goes off a cliff.
F: After 22, the available pool of quality men shrinks rapidly.
D: Let me start the first age group 20-29. Handsome, has a good job, tall, good personality, nice car, gentleman, American, nice parents, frum…
Posted inMarriage|Comments Off on The Case For Marriage
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
