Breaking Faith: Commentary and the American Jews

In 1963, the young editor of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz, astonished his readers by appealing for “the wholesale merging of the races in the United States”—ending racism through “miscegenation.” His article, “My Negro Problem—and Ours,” seemed the more remarkable since, to secure the premise that too much hatred attaches to color for civil integration ever to succeed, Podhoretz confessed to the fear, envy, and contempt with which he had grown up in Brooklyn under the siege of “Negro gangs.” Those streets still seemed to him world-historical ground:

There is a fight, they win, and we retreat, half whimpering, half with bravado. My first nausea...