The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy

This engaging, if shallow, study recounts the epochal post-war migration of Jewish intellectuals from Left to Right. Friedman (What Went Wrong?: The Creation and Collapse of the Black Jewish Alliance), himself a self-avowed Jewish neo-con, surveys his fellow travelers' journey from their socialist salad days to their Cold War shift towards liberal anti-Communism to their revulsion at the counter-cultural excesses of the New Left to their final decampment for Reagan Republicanism. He focuses on such neo-con pillars as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, but he also profiles lesser known Right-wing Jewish antecedents (Frank Chodorov), neo-con newbies (William Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz) and Gentile conservatives (William F. Buckley and Ralph Reed). Friedman emphasizes neo-conservatism's growing support for religion as a social glue, its militant defense of Israel and its patriotic appreciation of the opportunities America offers Jews. He also argues that Jewish neo-cons helped the larger conservative movement exchange a racist, anti-Semitic aura for intellectual sophistication and social-science chops. Friedman's conservative sympathies and biographical approach mean that he takes neo-con enthusiasms like supply-side economics and the Contra war in Nicaragua largely at face value without subjecting them to serious critical appraisal. Though neither a ground-breaking interpretation nor an incisive analysis of Jewish neo-conservatism, his book is a useful introduction to its history.