Norman Podhoretz’s friends—there were no dissenting voices among them—warned him not to publish Making It. Lionel Trilling, the high priest of the New York intellectuals, told Podhoretz that his reputation might never recover. Daniel Bell urged him to append a coda retracting the whole thing, as if the book were a literary prank. They regarded the text—a confessional memoir in which Podhoretz asserts that “many men” masturbate before sitting down to write—and its argument, an apologetic defense of his pursuit of fame and money, as evidence of an unmoored mind.
The book was published in 1967. As it turned out, those friends accurately anticipated the hostility that would flow its way, and how its publication would send Podhoretz into a kind of internal exile on the Upper West Side. But they misjudged the literary merits of the book. Like the book’s subject, ambition, Podhoretz’s prose burst from the pages. His slashing judgments of his peers—a style that one of his friends described as “the emperor has no scrotum”—were, in turns, self-serving and bravely honest. And despite the book’s flaws, and mostly because of them, I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Podhoretz’s memoir chronicles the first chapters of a life that ended this week at the age of 95. What his friends misunderstood, and his enemies could never see, was that Podhoretz was both a political intellectual and a literary invention. He was one of the greatest magazine editors of the 20th century, an ideologue who remade the American right, and a self-invented character with profound flaws—someone whose biography can be read as a novelistic tale of the Golden Age of American Jewry.
[Franklin Foer: The golden age of American Jews is ending]
The first chapter of Making It starts, “One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan—or at least from certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn to certain parts of Manhattan.” A high-school teacher, who called him a “filthy little slum child,” began the invention of Norman Podhoretz. She saw the potential in this son of a milkman, whose Yiddish accent needed correcting, and cultivated him with trips to the Frick and the Met, to elegant restaurants that served nonkosher food.
Teachers kept spying potential in the brash young Jew. Two venerable literary scholars of the mid-century—Trilling at Columbia and F. R. Leavis at Cambridge—encouraged their protégé to live a life of letters. In his mid-20s, his byline graced the pages of the Partisan Review and The New Yorker. Intellectually, he came of age in the 1950s, when, as he said, “Jews were culturally all the rage in America.” Podhoretz was too young to experience the Jewish dalliance with socialism; he never felt the sting of social exclusion. The doors of the literary establishment swung wide open for him.
In fact, during those years after World War II, the Jewish literary establishment was barely distinguishable from the American literary establishment—to the point that a little magazine called Commentary, sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, became that era’s most formidable journal of ideas. In 1960, at the age of 30, Podhoretz was anointed its editor.
During his early reign, Podhoretz was a patron of the intellectual left. Probably no other American magazine, beyond those targeted toward a Black readership, was as full-throated in its support for the civil-rights movement. (Podhoretz’s characteristically quixotic and unintentionally revealing intervention was called “My Negro Problem—And Ours,” in which he admitted his own racism and suggested that intermarriage was the solution to America’s most profound social ill. Rabbis denounced him from the pulpit for it.) Whereas Commentary was founded in the spirit of Cold War liberalism, Podhoretz’s magazine ran essays skeptical of containment, hostile to the war in Vietnam. He published James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, and Hannah Arendt. Even though it never fully joined the New Left, it anticipated it—and briefly served as its fellow traveler.
Like his erstwhile friend Norman Mailer, Podhoretz wrote with uncomfortable intimacy about his personal flaws. He was alert to every slight, eager to shove down rivals, and unable to resist the temptation of a biting quip. Podhoretz made enemies as if they were a biological necessity. (He eventually wrote a memoir called Ex-Friends.) Allen Ginsberg had been a friend of his at Columbia during their undergrad days, but Podhoretz attacked the poet and his fellow Beats in an essay called “The Know-Nothing Bohemians.” At a gathering at Mailer’s, Ginsberg accosted Podhoretz and called him a “dumb fuckhead.”
Enmity emerged as the master narrative of Podhoretz’s life. After the hostile reception to Making It, he began to turn against the New York intelligentsia. This wasn’t just wounded pride. Like other Jewish intellectuals, he felt a deeper attachment to Israel after the Six-Day War—and felt betrayed by his old friends on the left who began to denounce the Jewish state as a colonial outpost. In 1972, he voted for Richard Nixon, and Commentary was well on its rightward path.
Along with Irving Kristol—another gifted magazine editor—Podhoretz began to self-consciously identify as a leader of a movement of disillusioned liberals who had been mugged by the reality of the Great Society’s failures. The socialist Michael Harrington branded the group with the epithet neoconservative, which it wore as a badge of honor. Neoconservativism exuded Podhoretz’s sense of enmity. His magazine became a scourge of the left-wing intelligentsia that it once nurtured, an organ of Kulturkampf.
Much of this cultural commentary, filled with nasty insinuation, makes for difficult reading. Podhoretz’s wife, Midge Decter, wrote an unapologetic attack on gay culture called “The Boys on the Beach.” The magazine’s writing about AIDS, which dismissed the epidemic as “overstated,” is a stain on its reputation that can never be wiped away. In the 1970s and ’80s, the magazine’s signature essays on crime and “the culture of poverty” disdainfully depicted Black people as the source of their own misery, deploying gross generalizations and the crudest stereotypes. In pompous prose, deploying dubious sociology, Commentary mounted a highbrow defense of base prejudices.
Gore Vidal, who liked to smear Podhoretz with anti-Semitic innuendo, wrote, “But tact is unknown to the Podhoretzes. Joyously they revel in the politics of hate, with plangent attacks on blacks and/or fags and/or liberals, trying, always, to outdo those moral majoritarians who will, as Armageddon draws near, either convert all the Jews, just as the Good Book says, or kill them.” (Vidal and Podhoretz were meant for each other.)
But Commentary accomplished something rare in intellectual history: It published essays that actually changed the world. It articulated a muscular foreign policy that presented the United States as the world’s lonely guardian of democracy. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote one of these essays, “The United States in Opposition.” Henry Kissinger found it so compelling that he persuaded Nixon to appoint Moynihan ambassador to the United Nations. Ronald Reagan later gave Jeane Kirkpatrick that very same perch because of her Commentary essay “Dictatorships & Double Standards.”
[From the January 2026 issue: The neocons were right]
That Podhoretz became a chief theorist of the American right is itself a triumphalist tale, or at least it seemed that way for a time. At the beginning of the 1960s, the John Birch Society was ascendant; anti-Semitism was ubiquitous in the conservative movement. Yet here was that “filthy little slum child” having lunch with Reagan in the Cabinet Room; here was the publication of the American Jewish Committee being read with Talmudic care by evangelical intellectuals and Wall Street tycoons. (The AJC formally dissociated itself from Commentary in 2007.) But in the age of Tucker Carlson, Podhoretz’s victory feels ephemeral. Commentary has slipped from the place it once occupied in right-wing discourse; anti-Semitism has crept back into conservatism. Although his fellow neoconservatives became Never Trumpers, Podhoretz never broke ranks. He was an apologist for MAGA until the end.
A strange facet of nostalgia is that we begin to think fondly of our enemies—although Podhoretz may never have succumbed to such a weakness. For much of my life, I would throw his essays across the room in anger; I despised his snideness and felt trolled by his attacks on liberals. “Podhoretz,” I would angrily mutter. But now, amid the triumph of populism on the right, I’m wistful for much of the intellectual world he created—in which literary style mattered and a writer’s persona was their greatest creation. Podhoretz didn’t just journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan; he spent 60 years making sure that no one forgot he was there.
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