Stars of David (29 page)

William Kristol

WILLIAM KRISTOL, one of the most influential opinion-shapers on the political right, founding editor of the conservative
Weekly Standard
magazine, former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, now a ubiquitous television commentator, bristles when people say “Jewish” and “neoconservatives” in the same breath. “That's a polemic attack,” he says, sitting in his office, legs crossed, in a gray-striped suit. “Part of that is done by people who are hostile, who want to say, ‘They're just apologists for Israel really, distorting American foreign policy to serve Israel's goals,' which really isn't true.”

The list of Jewish neoconservatives usually includes Kristol, Richard Perle (resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute), David Brooks (former
Weekly Standard
senior editor, current
New York Times
columnist), Charles Krauthammer (
Washington Post
columnist), Douglas J. Feith (undersecretary of defense for policy under President George W. Bush), and Paul Wolfowitz (president of the World Bank). “When I was a political theory professor,” Kristol says, speaking of his early days teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, “my friends who are neoconservatives—or Straussians, to use another term that's become sort of famous recently— were not particularly Jewish. No one at the
Weekly Standard
now is Jewish except for me. I mean, I haven't done a census; we don't have a test here. But here I am, at the heart of this famous neoconservative magazine that is supposed to be so Jewish, with Fred Barnes and Terry Eastland—serious Protestants—and other people who are less serious Protestants and Catholics.”

In other words, there is no right-wing Jewish cabal at the
Weekly Standard
plotting to commandeer foreign policy for the benefit of Israel. Furthermore, Kristol insists that his ideology is not informed by his religion. “In all honesty, in terms of my political views—pro-Reagan, pro-Bush—I really don't think it has much to do with my being Jewish.” And when people assume that his aggressive stance on Iraq was driven by loyalty to Israel? Kristol scoffs, pointing out that his magazine has pushed for intervention in many other hot spots. “We were hawks on China, we were hawks on Bosnia, we were also hawks on getting rid of Saddam. But just because Iraq happens to be in the Middle East doesn't mean that it has much to do with Israel policy. On Israel, I'm actually moderately hawkish, but I'm not a big Likudnik. I'm sort of where [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon is now: a combination of tough on terror, don't give back every inch of the West Bank, make the security arrangements you need but then don't try to have Greater Israel. Really for me, Israel has always been an important part of the world—you have to think about it—but it has not driven my general views about American politics.”

So when his ethnicity and that of his cohorts is constantly mentioned, does he view that as anti-Semitic? “Well, sure. Pat Buchanan invented this, let's not forget, twelve years ago, when he accused the first Bush Administration—not a wildly pro-Israel administration, I might point out—of pursuing the war against Saddam because it was serving Israel's interests. He accused at least me and Krauthammer of supporting that war because of Israel. So it's always lurked out there on the right.”

Kristol, fifty-three, was weaned on this kind of controversy. His parents, Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb, riled the New York intellectual elite back in the 1950s when they abandoned liberal orthodoxy and embraced—or pioneered—the neoconservative movement. Some Jewish critics viewed neoconservative policies as un-compassionate and therefore un-Jewish. It's still a criticism leveled at pundits like Kristol today. “It's nonsense,” Kristol says. “That just assumes that liberal programs work better or are more compassionate than conservative programs. Rudy Giuliani was a more conservative mayor of New York and a supposedly less
compassionate
mayor of New York than David Dinkins. Were poor people better off after Giuliani was mayor or with Dinkins, when crime was out of control and schools were terrible? I'm not going to endorse every conservative idea out there obviously, but I just think a lot of people want to say that liberal policies are better for poor people and then if you're not for liberal policy, you don't care about poor people. And that's not true.”

What about the sense that conservatism doesn't further the Jewish premium on social justice and goodwill? “Look, I think people should give to Jewish charities and we do, and people in our synagogue do, and some of the politically conservative Jews I know actually do more of that than some of the liberal Jews I know. Liberal Jews seem to give all their money to the Museum of Modern Art and to Harvard [where Kristol went], which does not really help poor people. So let all these big-shot liberal Jews actually go give some more money to help poor people.”

I suspect that Kristol would characterize “Jewish values” very differently than most of the Jews I grew up with, but I ask him for his definition. “I'm sort of hostile to the phrase,” he says. “Because to a degree it just becomes another word for liberalism. I just think it's an importing of people's views—which are legitimate views, some of which I even agree with—into the Jewish tradition, which obviously has plenty of support for a whole bunch of alternative political and social views. I think the Jewish tradition, Jewish religion, and Jewish thought are very important. But I've always rebelled a little when people say, ‘My Jewish values lead me to really care about the poor.' I know some Christians who care about the poor, too.”

Kristol was raised among many of the “big-shot liberal Jews,” as he calls them, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Educated at private schools— Lycée Français, then Collegiate—he went to Hebrew school in an Orthodox Spanish-Portuguese synagogue three times a week. “Shearith Israel is the grand old Sephardic synagogue in New York,” says Kristol. “It's very formal and ornate, as I think the old Sephardic synagogues were in the old country. People wore a top hat to come to the Torah. So as a thirteen-year-old, I wore a top hat for my bar mitzvah.”

Though he says his family wasn't devout, his mother studied Jewish thought and religion during her days at the Jewish Theological Seminary (which she attended while a student at Brooklyn College), and his father was similarly drawn to Jewish learning. “So there was more of an identification than probably your average, not-too-observant Manhattan Jews,” he says. “It was very much a part of our life, my parents' intellectual careers, their understanding of who they were.”

At Harvard, Kristol didn't visit the university Hillel: “It was a little house on the fringe of campus, kind of a pain to get to,” he says. “People who went were Orthodox.” He attended High Holy Day services at Harvard's Memorial Chapel—“It was kind of amusing, they'd cover up the cross”—but he wasn't immersed. “I was a Scoop Jackson Democrat, I was pro-Israel. But I wasn't Jewishly involved.”

Even so, in 1975, when he married Susan Scheinberg at Westchester Reform Temple, he opted for a traditional Jewish wedding ceremony. “We got married with a
kipah
and a chuppah because I wanted it . . . I remember at the time my mother saying that my grandmother wouldn't believe it was a Jewish wedding if it hadn't had those components. Susan wasn't terribly well-educated in Judaism; she went to Reform Sunday school and learned whatever they learn in Reform Sunday school: social justice.” He smiles.

The Kristols became more Jewish when they had their three children. “Kids are always the key, of course,” he says. “We joined a synagogue and they went to Hebrew school and had a bat and bar mitzvah, and the kids got involved in B'nai Brith Youth [an organization that includes social activities, summer camp, trips abroad, etc.]. So for the last twenty years, I'd say there's much more involvement—more by Susan than me, but me also. I got personally more interested—I won't say ‘studying,' that's too fancy a word—but reading about Jewish thought, biblical stuff, going to Israel more; I'm on the board of a think tank over there now. Susan actually is about to become president of the synagogue, which is of course a nightmare. I think it's a pretty significant part of my life and my family's life. And it's not that I'm searching for it. I think it's actually, existentially, a big part of my life.”

He says his kids, in some sense, took the lead. “They moved faster in this direction than we did. My daughter, Rebecca, began keeping semi-kosher earlier. Then we adopted some version at home—no pork, no shellfish—partly in response to our kids' slight nudging. I would say that my kids are more Jewish because they live in Northern Virginia rather than New York. Because you have to sort of a make a decision when you live outside New York. Once you make a decision to go to Hebrew school, have a bar mitzvah, join the B'nai Brith Youth, and go to a three-week summer camp, you're involved. In New York, everyone's so Jewish you don't have to try to be Jewish. And I think as a result, when you get to college, you sort of drift away and then some people never come back.”

Does he think his children will create Jewish families? “I don't know if they'll marry Jews or not, but I think Judaism is important enough that they would try to get the spouse to convert or to get the kids to be brought up Jewish. I think it matters,” he says. “Obviously, since we're a Conservative synagogue, we're pretty strict; you can't have a bar mitzvah unless you're Jewish. Which means either the mother's Jewish, the father has converted, or the kid has converted.” And he subscribes to that thinking? “I'm a little ambivalent,” he confesses. “But I think you can't just give a bar mitzvah to a kid who's Jewish and then he goes off with the other parent to Catholic Mass the next day. There's something just too weird about that. We don't police it. But I think that you want to have a little more of a sense that this is a choice. You can't be everything.”

That said, Kristol doesn't lose sleep over assimilation and intermarriage. “I'm slightly on the optimistic side,” he says. “Just based more on my personal observation than any grand theory. I just see in my kids' generation a greater interest in Judaism. I think if you're a smart kid, you don't have to be Orthodox or have been educated in a yeshiva to appreciate this stuff.

In the same way that he's not exercised about assimilation in America, he's not worked up about the Christian right. I read aloud a quote he gave the
Forward
in 1995, when he responded to Jewish fears of a Christian revival: “[Jews] are right to be slightly concerned that . . . a serious Christian revival
would set Jews apart from the mainstream of America . . . and I think that's probably going to happen,”
he told the newspaper.
“It will make people for whom
perfect assimilation into America is their goal a little bit uncomfortable. I would argue that's better for everyone.”
I ask him to explain that. “If Jews are at all serious about being Jewish, they're going to be in some state of tension with the mainstream non-Jewish culture,” he says. “If that mainstream culture is a little more Christian, Jews will feel some tension. I think to some degree that's happening—it's just a fact. And I think ultimately it's healthy.”

Put simply: If the mainstream Christian culture becomes more Christian, it will compel Jews to be more Jewish. “My father famously said that the threat to Jews in America is not that Christians want to kill Jews; it's that they want to marry them.”

He thinks Jews should choose whether they're going to be in favor of more faith generally in this country, and if so, it's only fair that more religiosity apply to all religions. “Jews can't say, ‘We want to have a really vigorous Jewish culture, but the Christians should just continue to become secular and assimilated.' It's just silly. And for the same reasons, those of us who do want a more vigorous, self-conscious, even
separate
, Jewish identity, can't really begrudge the Christians having their own identities. There will be slight tensions around the edges—the occasional
Passion
movie or whatever. But my personal view is that instead of a homogenized, secular, postmodern country that is not terribly attractive to me I'd prefer to have a country in which there are vigorous Jewish
and
Christian communities.”