Posted on May 28, 2008 by Steve Pollak
Doubleday recently acquired world English rights to Norman Podhoretz's forthcoming book, "Why Jews Are Liberals."
Podhoretz, the prominent neoconservative thinker who served as editor-in-chief of Commentary magazine from 1960 through 1995 and continues to serve as the magazine's editor-at-large, has received renewed attention in the last year or so because of his participation in the Rudy Giuliani presidential campaign (he was a foreign policy advisor) and his calls for military action against Iran. It was no coincidence that his last book, "World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism," came out on September 11, 2007.
He continues to advocate for a preemptive attack on Iran. Here's more from the February 2008 issue of Commentary:
When I first predicted a year or so ago that Bush would bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities once he had played out the futile diplomatic string, the obstacles that stood in his way were great but they did not strike me as insurmountable. Now, thanks in large part to the new NIE, they have grown so formidable that I can only stick by my prediction with what the NIE itself would describe as “low-to-moderate confidence.” For Bush is right about the resemblance between 2008 and 1938. In 1938, as Winston Churchill later said, Hitler could still have been stopped at a relatively low price and many millions of lives could have been saved if England and France had not deceived themselves about the realities of their situation. Mutatis mutandis, it is the same in 2008, when Iran can still be stopped from getting the bomb and even more millions of lives can be saved—but only provided that we summon up the courage to see what is staring us in the face and then act on what we see.
Unless we do, the forces that are blindly working to ensure that Iran will get the bomb are likely to prevail even against the clear-sighted determination of George W. Bush, just as the forces of appeasement did against Churchill in 1938. In which case, we had all better pray that there will be enough time for the next President to discharge the responsibility that Bush will have been forced to pass on, and that this successor will also have the clarity and the courage to discharge it. If not—God help us all—the stage will have been set for the outbreak of a nuclear war that will become as inescapable then as it is avoidable now.
In the new book, Podhoretz will turn his attention to Jewish political history as he offers a hypothesis for why Jews are (mostly) liberal. Here's the description from a blurb about the book in Publisher's Weekly:
The follow-up to World War IV, this part-history, part-polemic, part-memoir rejects the usual self-congratulatory explanations in favor of a hypothesis based on tensions within the Jewish community and the Jews' experience in Europe and America during the 20th century.
The new book is scheduled to be published in the Spring of 2010.
Norman Podhoretz's most recent book, "World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism," is published by Doubleday (240 pages).
Buy this book >>>
For more news about Jewish books, sign up for Jewish Literary Review's email alerts.