In Search of Anti-Semitism

This volume reprints Buckley's lengthy, genteel, circuitous National Review essay, in which he reached the pained conclusion that his fellow conservative Patrick Buchanan, the reactionary former presidential candidate, is anti-Semitic. In the same piece, Buckley levels charges of anti-Semitism at his friend and fellow conservative, syndicated columnist Joseph Sobran, and at left-liberal Gore Vidal, who asserted in a Nation article that American Jews have twin loyalties. Further, Buckley exonerates of charges of anti-Semitism the Dartmouth Review, which in a 1988 article compared Dartmouth's Jewish president, James Freedman, to Adolf Hitler, and which once ran a Nazi slogan on its masthead. Also included is Sobran's indignant, defiant rebuttal, as well as letters to the National Review, praising or condemning Buckley's essay, by Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, A. M. Rosenthal, Robert Novak and others. Buckley's rejoinders to the letters and an afterword round out this colloquy. (Oct.)