Who is irving kristol

I know the question of equality is something that many religious people are quite obsessed with. Here I will simply plead my Jewishness and say, equality has never been a Jewish thing.

Rich men are fine, poor men are fine, so long as they are decent human beings. I do not like equality. I do not like it in sports, in the arts, or in economics. I just don't like it in this world.

He had not started out writing about politics from a Jewish perspective, but once he realized how much of his political thinking derived from Jewish experience, he also wrote about the concurrence of Jewish and American interests and values. The political behavior of Jews similarly influenced Kristol's writings. In the above example, he applauds the traditional Jewish relation to capitalism. But elsewhere he calls modern Jews exemplars of "political stupidity," in part because of their failure to recognize that only by standing up for themselves could they benefit their country.

Harrington leveled the "charge" of neoconservative at Kristol for having moved in the opposite intellectual direction from himself. But Kristol had the wit to realize that the term could be useful, and convinced others, including Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, to adopt it favorably.

The prefix was valuable in differentiating the "neos" from the nativists whose traditionalism was shaped by Christian culture, and sometimes included undesirable and outdated regional and class tendencies. Unlike the "paleo-conservatives," neocons had the intellectual advantage of having turned against ideas they had once embraced. Many of them were only one generation removed from Russia, where the Bolshevik takeover of that vast country proved how powerful ideas could be.

Earlier Marxist revolutions in Europe had failed; the one in Russia succeeded, and to horrible effect. The neoconservatives knew that, though American democracy was far more resilient than tsarist authoritarianism, the Judeo-Christian foundations of America and Western civilization as a whole were no less at risk unless they could rely on the defense of better ideas.

Kristol and other neoconservatives sought to provide this defense. He believed that political ideas were essential not only to intellectuals but to the general public, and that they always helped to shape our political reality.

In his autobiography, he argued that "[i]t is ideas that establish and define in men's minds the categories of the politically possible and the politically impossible, the desirable and the undesirable, the tolerable and the intolerable. Here we come to one of the ways in which Kristol is at his most original. As his expertise expanded from politics to economics, sociology, philosophy, history, anthropology, and beyond, he saw the way these subjects came together in rabbinic wisdom. Few other Jewish intellectuals prominently featured Jewishness in their work, and fewer still made it the culmination of their intellectual journey.

Gertrude Himmelfarb gives us a comprehensive description of her husband's thinking about these questions in her introduction to On Jews and Judaism , a posthumous collection of his essays on those themes. The Kristols were for a time members of a study circle at the Jewish Theological Seminary under the maverick thinker Jacob Taubes. A closer and stronger influence was Kristol's brother-in-law Milton Himmelfarb, director of research for the American Jewish Committee, editor of its American Jewish Yearbook , and a regular contributor to Commentary on Jewish subjects.

The two men's political views sometimes read like the Jewish and general versions of the same ideas. The conservatism of both men incorporates the pervasive "liberal" component in Talmudic thought. If they differed, it was because Himmelfarb was solidly centered in Jewish affairs whereas Kristol stood apart from Jewish communal concerns like intermarriage, the low Jewish birthrate, failing Jewish education, or the daily threat to the Jews of Israel. It was rather the steady search for wisdom and truth that brought Kristol, pace Spinoza, to the intellectual love of Judaism.

He experienced Judaism as an American. Lionel Trilling's novel Middle of the Journey , which provided an indispensable study of the politics of his intellectual circle which included Kristol , underscores the significance of Kristol's relationship with Judaism, albeit indirectly.

The novel's main character, John Laskell, speaks for Trilling. A second character, Gifford Maxim, is based on the real-life Whittaker Chambers, who had run an underground spy network for the Soviets, defected out of moral revulsion at Soviet criminality, and sought the help of Trilling, his former Columbia University classmate, in resuming his life as a loyal U. The climax of the novel is a showdown between Laskell and Maxim that is, Trilling and Chambers over what happens after their disillusionment with communism.

Laskell's position is very much like the one Kristol took in his essay on civil liberties. He is first among his fellow liberal-leftists to admit that the Soviet Union really is as evil as Maxim claims, and he categorically rejects its claim to be serving humankind. But like everyone who breaks with the left, he must figure out where to go from there. Like the real Chambers, Maxim became a devout Christian following his break with communism. In the novel, he explains that his "community with men is that we are children of God.

They cannot believe that anyone in their intellectual circle could turn to religion. They are ultimately less shaken by Maxim's revelations about the Soviet Union than by his emergence as a Christian believer. While Laskell, still speaking for Trilling, doesn't call him crazy, he, too, firmly opposes what he sees as an inadequate replacement for communism. For Laskell, who "had been brought up without religious belief," the religious texts that resonate so deeply with Maxim "had no force of childhood reminiscence.

In the novel, Laskell rejects Maxim's religion. He treats the move from communism to Christianity as merely the exchange of one hermetic system for another, and, as the truer intellectual, he stays clear of both. In Laskell, Trilling creates an unaffiliated American with no ethnic or religious identity.

The following year, at a dinner in Washington, I found myself placed between him and his wife. As is the American way, I had hardly sat down when my hosts announced that I would be taking questions after the first course. One of the first questions came from a journalist. It was as though a critic had requested that I interpret a piece by Mozart while the man himself sat interestedly at my side. I turned the question over to him, and watching Irving and Gertrude, both in their late eighties, talking ideas over provided a master-class in intellectual precision as well as in grace and decency.

It was his self-appointed task — and one he carried out with considerable success — to try to prevent them going wrong again. Kristol captured neoconservatism and, in his personal attitude, epitomised it. Not only does it lack one, it regards signs of one as evidence of unsoundness [and] irresponsibility. He stood outside conservatism and outside liberalism. Since the USIH bloggers write under our real names, we would prefer that our commenters also identify themselves by their real name.

We welcome suggestions for corrections to any of our posts. As the official blog of the Society of US Intellectual History, we hope to foster a diverse community of scholars and readers who engage with one another in discussions of US intellectual history, broadly understood. Perhaps there was a certain anti-Americanism at work or at least an attempt to correct an imbalance that has over the years emphasized American leadership in the intellectual Cold War. There may also have been gaps in the archives and source materials.

By virtue of being radical intellectuals, we had "transcended" alienation to use another Marxist term. We experienced our radicalism as a privilege of rank, not as a burden imposed by a malignant fate. It would never have occurred to us to denounce anyone or anything as "elitist.

Alcove No. There was a small semicircular counter where one could buy franks or milk or coffee. There was also some sandwich scrounging by those who were really poor; one asked and gave without shame or reservation. The center of the lunchroom, taking up most of the space, consisted of chest-high, wooden tables under a low, artificial ceiling. There, most of the students ate their lunches, standing up. I looked upon this as being reasonable, since at Boys' High, in Brooklyn, we had had the same arrangement.

To this day I find it as natural to eat a sandwich standing up as sitting down. Around this central area there was a fairly wide and high-ceilinged aisle; and bordering the aisle, under large windows with small panes of glass that kept out as much light as they let in, were the alcoves-semicircular or were they rectangular?

The first alcove on the right, as you entered the lunchroom, was Alcove No. It was there one ate lunch, played Ping-Pong sometimes with a net, sometimes without, passed the time of day between and after classes, argued incessantly, and generally devoted oneself to solving the ultimate problems of the human race.

The penultimate problems we figured could be left for our declining years, after we had graduated. I would guess that, in all, there were more than a dozen alcoves, and just how rights of possession had been historically established was as obscure as the origins of the social contract itself.

Once established, however; they endured, and in a manner typical of New York's "melting pot," each religious, ethnic, cultural, and political group had its own little alcove.

There was a Catholic alcove, the "turf" of the Newman Society, a Zionist alcove, an Orthodox Jewish alcove; there was a black alcove for the handful of blacks then at CCNY, an alcove for members of the athletic teams, and so forth.

But the only alcoves that mattered to me were No. City College was known at the time as a "radical" institution, and in an era when most college students identified themselves as Republicans the ascription was not incorrect. If there were any Republicans at City -- and there must have been some -- I never met them, or even heard of their existence. Most of the students, from Jewish working-class or lower-middle-class backgrounds with a socialist tint, were spontaneously sympathetic to the New Deal and F.

The really left-wing groups, though larger than elsewhere, were a distinct minority Alcove No.