{"id":9928,"date":"2009-08-23T11:52:08","date_gmt":"2009-08-23T19:52:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=9928"},"modified":"2009-08-23T11:52:08","modified_gmt":"2009-08-23T19:52:08","slug":"my-ambivalence-about-robert-novak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=9928","title":{"rendered":"My Ambivalence About Robert Novak"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I read Novak&#8217;s enormous memoir. We agreed on most things, but not about things Jewish. Bob Novak was a relentless critic of Israel. Why?<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/news-and-politics\/14094\/darkness-falls\/\">From TheTablet.com<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, much of the Jewish pundit class has treated news of Novak&rsquo;s passing delicately. While noting that Novak had Jewish &ldquo;issues,&rdquo; <em>Commentary<\/em> editor John Podhoretz eulogized him as &ldquo;a difficult man in many ways, but I always found him interesting, lively, and friendly.&rdquo; My colleague John Judis at <em>The New Republic<\/em> was even more nostalgic: &ldquo;I miss Novak as a columnist, and miss the kind of columnist he was, who wasn&rsquo;t content to air his hallowed opinion of facts that were already drearily familiar to readers.&rdquo; According to Barnes, Novak&rsquo;s polemical and charged attitude toward Israel and his embrace of less-than-philo-Semitic figures at home wasn&rsquo;t enough to alienate him from all of American Jewry. While working at <em>The Boston Herald<\/em> in the late 1980s, Barnes befriended some conservative students at Brandeis University. &ldquo;They asked me if Novak would come speak at Brandeis, of all places,&rdquo; Barnes said. &ldquo;And he did! I thought it was pretty gutsy. Most of the students there were Jewish and though I didn&rsquo;t take notes of what he said that night, I remember him talking about the Middle East. By and large, he was civilly received. There was no guerrilla theater. Imagine that.&rdquo;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I read Novak&#8217;s enormous memoir. We agreed on most things, but not about things Jewish. Bob Novak was a relentless critic of Israel. Why? From TheTablet.com: Meanwhile, much of the Jewish pundit class has treated news of Novak&rsquo;s passing delicately. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=9928\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,139,37,29],"tags":[10894,18489,30984,18550,1146,9271],"class_list":["post-9928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christianity","category-islam","category-israel","category-jews","tag-american-jewry","tag-bob-novak","tag-brandeis-university","tag-guerrilla-theater","tag-john-judis","tag-john-podhoretz"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9928"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9928\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9930,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9928\/revisions\/9930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}