MEDIA A Bastion for Israel, Seething Inside By JENNIFER SCHUESSLERFEB. 28, 2014 The new- York times When John Judis, a longtime senior editor at The New Republic, published a book examining the role of the pro-Zionist lobby in persuading President Harry S. Truman to support the founding of the Jewish state in 1948, he expected strong criticism, and he has certainly gotten it. Since the book, “Genesis: Truman, American Jews and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict” appeared in February, it has drawn sometimes sharply negative assessments in The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, The National Interest and elsewhere. An invitation to speak at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York was rescinded, then reinstated. But perhaps the most stinging response came from one of his own colleagues. The New Republic’s longtime literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, sent an email to the historian Ronald Radosh, praising his review in The Jewish Review of Books that said Mr. Judis had distorted history to write “a profoundly anti-Zionist book.” The book, Mr. Wieseltier wrote, is “shallow, derivative, tendentious, imprecise and sometimes risibly inaccurate.” Mr. Judis, he added, “is a tourist in this subject. Like most Mr. Radosh circulated the note, which was then picked up on Tuesday by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website. Before long, journalists and historians were debating not just Middle East history, but also whether the spat portends a cultural and ideological shift at a liberal magazine as famous for its fractious internal politics as for its strong support of Israel. The New Republic has undergone a substantial revamping under Chris Hughes, the 30-year-old Facebook multimillionaire who bought it in 2012. He has made it less Beltway-centric, supplementing the fine-grained political coverage with more cultural stories, snazzy graphics, even a masthead position for a director of “New Republic Labs.” In the first redesigned issue, he wrote that the magazine would keep faith with its traditions while striving to publish journalism “free of party ideology or partisan bias.” But last week, some questioned whether he and his top editor, Franklin Foer, had Mr. Wieseltier, perhaps the magazine’s strongest voice as well as a renowned old-school office infighter, under control. Peter Beinart, a former New Republic editor whose own book “The Crisis of Zionism” ignited a firestorm when it appeared two years ago, denounced Mr. Wieseltier’s email on Twitter as “vicious and cowardly.” . “I admire Leon greatly,” Mr. Beinart, now a professor of journalism at the City University of New York and a writer for The Atlantic and Ha’aretz, added in an email interview. “But when your longtime colleague writes a book you disagree with, the right thing to do is to tell him, privately and/or publicly, where you disagree and have that debate openly and respectfully. Sending an ad hominem attack to a hostile reviewer is not fair to John.” Andrew Sullivan, who has often clashed with Mr. Wieseltier since Mr. Sullivan led the magazine in the 1990s, went farther on his blog, accusing Mr. Wieseltier of using “the usual tropes of the far right in smearing critics.” “Is there an editor at The New Republic capable of preventing this kind of vicious anti-collegial invective?” he asked. “Not when it comes to Wieseltier, it seems. Chris Hughes and Frank Foer seem to answer to him, and not the other way round.” But to some observers, the fact that Mr. Judis’s book was excerpted on the magazine’s website, while Mr. Wieseltier had to vent his frustrations semi-privately by email, suggests that Mr. Foer and Mr. Hughes hardly answer to Mr. Wieseltier on Israel. “Judis interjects a point of view into the debate that has probably never been expressed by a New Republic writer,” Jack Shafer, a media and politics columnist at Reuters, said in an interview. “That’s what’s fascinating. I don’t think you’ve ever heard a New Republic employee arrive at the conclusions he seems to have arrived at.” In the pre-publication galleys of “Genesis,” Mr. Judis praised Mr. Hughes for an openness to views on Israel that would not have been “tolerated” under its longtime former owner, Martin Peretz, who sold the magazine to Mr. Hughes. “I suppose that having to be associated with a publication whose views on the subject I often disagree with led to a buildup of repressed indignation that fueled the years I spent on this book,” he wrote in the acknowledgments. Mr. Judis, in an interview, said that he had dropped that passage from the finished book after complaints from Mr. Wieseltier, but stood by the basic point. “I always felt I couldn’t write about Israel, and the few times I did there was an enormous fluff,” he said. When Mr. Hughes took over, he added, “I think his attitude was, there’s no correct line. There would be a diversity of views.” Mr. Wieseltier declined to comment. But in his email to Mr. Radosh he mocked what he called Mr. Judis’s notion of “heroically defying the Zionist thought-police at The New Republic,” noting that he and others had long written criticisms, “even bitter ones,” of Israeli policies. Others close to the magazine agreed. “The magazine was less monolithic on Israel under Marty than the popular reputation would have it,” said the historian David Greenberg, a contributing editor. “You wouldn’t have apologetics for Arafat, but there was criticism of Israel.” But to some observers, including Mr. Radosh — who referred to The New Republic as a “once pro-Israel publication” — there has been a clear change. “What’s insulting to the magazine isn’t Leon’s email, it’s that they excerpted the book,” Mr. Radosh said in an interview, adding, “Obviously Chris Hughes doesn’t know anything about Israel.” In a statement, Mr. Foer rejected the notion that the magazine had a new editorial line on Israel, or any line at all. When the magazine was redesigned last year, the tradition of running an editorial in every issue was abandoned. “This was meant to signal a new sensibility — an all-around openness to debate,” he said. In a separate statement, Mr. Hughes said: “Debate in the public forum comes with an expectation of civility and basic respect. It is my responsibility to our readers to always ensure that, and all staff at The New Republic know that this continues to be the standard I hold them to.” Whatever the tone of the current argument, some longtime New Republic watchers said it was true to the magazine’s traditions. “Being a good publisher means letting a good argument happen,” said Jefferson Morley, a journalist who worked at the magazine in the 1980s, when it was deeply divided over the Sandinistas. “And this is a very good argument.”
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 06:50:07 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015