Jews, Israel, Hamas, and my book: My Review Problem (Not Yours)

I wrote the below as Substack “notes” because I don’t really get this place. But here they all are together, again for the record and so I can get this off my metaphorical chest:

1. I was perusing this week’s New York Magazine, which contains, roughly speaking, at least a dozen articles about how the Hamas/Israel war is affecting New Yorkers and for appromixately the millionth time in the past year—since November 22, 2022, as it happens—it has occurred to me that both journalists and consumers of journalism would really benefit from knowing something about the history of the debate over Israel in this country, especially as it occurred within the the American Jewish community and especially as it related to the frequent confliect between American Jewish lliberalism—remember Jews are the only “white” people who stuck with Democrats—and their liberalism. But for any number of reasons I can speculate on, most mainstream publications have ignored this 512 page history of just that topic. amazon.com/gp/product/046509631X/ref=ox…

Now it is considered incredibly lame and self defeating for authors to complain about reviews, or in this case, not being reviewed, but in this case, it is weird, given the fact that I have been a contributor at one time or another in many if not most of publications I name below, as well as the fact that almost alll of them appear in the text, in the agenda-setting role they play in the debate. Among the pubications that have ignored the book that the The New Yorker called both “fearless” and “scrupulous” and added to its list of the best books of 2022 after it was initially published, includes the following,; all of which are cited, discussed and/or analyzed in the book itself:

THE NEW YORK TIMES

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

THE LOS ANGELES TIIMES

(Virtually every other daily newspaper except The Guardian and The Washington Post)

THE NATION (!)

THE NEW REPUBLIC

THE ATLANTIC

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

NEW YORK

DISSENT

THE LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS

HARPER’S

JEWISH CURRENTS

SLATE

SALON

I could go on. I should mention I suppose, that the book did receive two significant hatchet jobs. One of them, in The Jewish Review of Books, was good enough to publish my extremely lengthy response. The other, Commentary, which probably appears in the book more than any other magazine, save perhaps The New Rupublic (which has published my own articles, drawn on the book since its publication) wrote a dishonest review and did not even acknowlege my response. The Washington Post published a review by someone with whom I had a problemmatic relationship and who should not have been allowed to review the book. They edited a letter I wrote describing just some of the author’s conflict, to cut out some of these and then decided not to publish the letter at all. I will, for the record, publish my unpublished responses to those reviews in Substack notes that follow this one. Thanks, ERA

2. Here is the Commentary hatchet job.

   commentary.org/articles/jonathan-tobin/…

   Here is my response that I am still waiting for them to even acknowledge

   To the editor:

   17 February 2023

   I was disappointed with Jonathan Tobin’s hatchet job on my book, not because it was a hatchet job, I expected that. Rather, because it was such a lazy hatchet job, It read as if spit out by a ChatGP bot.

   “Blah blah… hard-left… anti-Zionist…heavy handed, snide and generally clueless… banal, merely rehashing the claims of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, …”  I mean rhully: Was an actual author even necessary for this?

   There are plenty of false claims in Tobin’s screed. This does not surprise me, given the fact that he is employed by a “news” service that was principally funded by Sheldon Adelson (a major subject of my book). And given his apparent lack of any scholarly credentials—or ever even having written a single book--I’m should not be surprised his ideologically driven venom leads him to dismisses my thousands of sources as a “veneer of scholarly effort.”

   For the record, I am not, nor have I ever been “anti-Zionist.” The book is quite critical of Walt and Mearsheimer. And nowhere do I even imply American Jewry was “indifferent” to the Shoah—shame on Tobin’s entire family for that slanderous lie. (Was Nahum Goldmann, then of the Jewish Agency, later President of the World Zionist Congress indifferent to the slaughter of Jews in Europe when he mused: “One half of the generation is being slaughtered before our eyes, and the other half has to sit down and cannot prevent this catastrophe. . . . Nothing can be done to check them; we can only work for victory.”)

   There are other egregious misrepresentations. But rather than pile them up, I have a question: Wouldn’t Tobin’s concoction of false accusation and personal smears have sounded the tiniest bit more credible if he had at least acknowledged the central role played in my narrative by the longtime editor of Commentary Norman Podhoretz, (along with many of its contributors), his son, the current editor, and the occasional appearance of the current editor’s mother and Commentary contributor, Midge Decter and his family-member-by-marriage, and also frequent Commentary contributor, Elliott Abrams?

   A search of the document tells me that there were 66 references to “Norman Podhoretz” in the book. Here is one of the first:

   Norman Podhoretz first came to the attention of Commentary’s editors when, in 1951, he penned a condescendingly hostile letter about the Israelis to his mentor, Lionel Trilling. Following a six-week visit there, he called Israeli Jews a very unattractive people,” finding them to be “gratuitously surly and boorish” as well as “arrogant” and “anxious, and therefore had little hope “to become a real honest-to-goodness New York of the East,” as if this had been—or ought to be—the Zionist ideal. Trilling passed the letter on to then-editor Elliot Cohen, and Podhoretz was invited into the magazine’s inner circle.

   Here is a reference to current editor, his son, John Podhoretz:

   Commentary, cut loose by the American Jewish Committee in December 2006, carries on its tradition of relentless attacks on Israel’s critics, with a particular focus on the alleged apostasies of pro-Palestinian Blacks liberal Jews. It is now under the direction of John Podhoretz, Norman Podhoretz’s son—or “John P. Normanson,” as he was referred to when in the employ of Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times, where his colleagues often read his column aloud to one another in a ritual termed “Podenfreude.” (His roughly $500,000 2019 remuneration package for a magazine with a mere twenty-four thousand paid subscriptions may be the highest pay-per-reader compensation ratio in the history of American journalism.)

   Anyway, John Podhoretz once called me a “scorpion” when asked by New York Times magazine reporter if he owed his current job to nepotism. I think he does, but I also think that given the record his father established in the editor’s chair, he has certainly proven the right man to continue that legacy, however diminished in both influence and readership it may be.

   Sincerely

   Eric Alterman

3. Here is Jane Eisner’s review in The Washington Post: washingtonpost.com/books/2023/02/23/alt…

   Here is the long version—longer than the version I sent and much longer than the version they edited and decided not to print-in which I explained my I did not think Eisner should have been allowed to review the book. I reprint that version here because I want it all on the record (and I am not editing myself for space.

   To the editor:

   Washington Post Book World

   February 23, 2023

   I would have liked to address my substantive disagreements with Jane Eisner’s review of my book, We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight over Israel. I am most especially amazed at her description of “the Leon Uris version” of Israel’s history as “not so much untrue as incomplete.” As one of the first comments posted beneath her review also notes, one might as well say the same thing about “Birth of a Nation.” Uris’ Exodus is profoundly untrue, both in its manipulation of actual historical events and its undeniable anti-Arab racism. Otto Preminger’s movie is even worse, as it places actual Nazis in the Palestinian camp.

   But there are actually far larger problems with Ms. Eisner’s review that have to do with its journalistic integrity and respect for the reader. I do not think it’s wrong for a writer to review the work of another writer with whom he or she is acquainted. Often it is unavoidable. But the readers is entitled to know what these complications may be and therefore judge whether or not they affect the reviewer’s judgment. Had I been asked to review a book by Eisner, here is what I would have disclosed to the editor, and were I still to have the assignment, to my readers:

   ·        I was on the search committee that chose Jane Eisner to be the editor of the Forward in 2008. As she knows, I neither supported nor opposed her candidacy, but I did successfully insist that were she to be offered the job, she had to move from Philadelphia to New York, something she was strongly resisting at the time. (That is the least important one of these, but I thought I’d mention it.)

   ·        Eisner later hired me to be a columnist for The Forward. I resigned this position, however, in less than a year owing to what I understood at the time to be political censorship by my editor at the time. I expected Eisner to intervene on my behalf, but I could not reach her as the dispute was taking place. When we finally spoke, after I had quit, she told me that she had been hoping the issue would go away. I have worked for many news organizations and think tanks over the past thirty years had, perhaps, more than my fair share of arguments. But the Forward under Jane Eisner was the only place I felt compelled to resign over my not being allowed to say what I knew to be true.

   ·        Eisner appears in the book in the following unflattering fashion:

   When Obama granted an interview to the editor of the Jewish newspaper The Forward, its editor, Jane Eisner, accused him of employing “incendiary language” against opponents of the deal, citing his use of the phrase “warmongers” to describe them. But, as Obama told her, he never used the phrase. The fact that the editor of a small, liberal Jewish paper, whose editors had to be thrilled to be granted a presidential interview, could level a false accusation against the president himself on behalf of Netanyahu’s defenders demonstrates just how deep the reach of the prime minister’s anti-Obama campaign went. As Obama felt compelled to explain, he had “at no point... ever suggested that those who are critical of the deal are ‘warmongers.’” Instead, he had argued, “if we reject the deal, the logical conclusion is that if we want to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, military strikes will be the last option remaining.”

   Again, I would not argue that this history should ipso facto disqualify Eisner from reviewing my book. But surely someone employed by the Columbia University School of Journalism should know that the reader is entitled be made aware of it, in order to render their own judgment of its fairness.

   Sincerely,

   Eric Alterman

   ps Anyone interested in the extremely long exchange I had with the Jewish Review of Books, can find it here. jewishreviewofbooks.com/authors