Norman Podhoretz (b.1930) is an American political and social commentator. A major intellectual anchor of the American neoconservative movement, he edited the Commentary magazine for 35 years.
Born to a Jewish immigrant family in Brooklyn, New York City, Podhoretz was educated at Columbia University, where the literary critic Lionel Trilling mentored him. Podhoretz also earned a bachelor’s degree in Hebrew literature from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and a third bachelor’s degree and an Oxbridge M.A. from Clare College-Cambridge (where he was mentored by the literary critic F. R. Leavis.)
Podhoretz edited the neoconservative flagship magazine Commentary 1960–95. With Irving Kristol, Midge Decter (Podhoretz’s wife, also an anti-feminist activist,) Nathan Glazer, and other intellectuals, Podhoretz founded the neoconservative movement. Disillusioned with the American left during the 1960s and 1970s, the neoconservatives aimed to reform the Democratic Party.
Podhoretz was a staunch critic of liberal counterculture in America and disapproved of Jack Kerouac, James Baldwin, and the Beat Generation (he indicated it was “hostile to civilization.”) Podhoretz gained notoriety for his patronage of Republican policies, his criticism of feminism and homosexuality, and his support for bombing Iran.
Podhoretz’s books include Why We Were in Vietnam (1982,) My Love Affair with America: The Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative (2000,) World War IV: The Long Struggle against Islamo-Fascism (2007,) and Why Are Jews Liberals? (2010.) His memoir is Breaking Ranks (1979.)
Marquette University’s Thomas L. Jeffers wrote Norman Podhoretz: A Biography (2010.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Norman Podhoretz
Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy-the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence.
—Norman Podhoretz
Topics: Creativity, Imagination, Inner-child
Our culture is ill-equipped to assert the bourgeois values which would be the salvation of the under-class, because we have lost those values ourselves.
—Norman Podhoretz
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