“Arguments with everyone”

Over at The Bulwark, Ronald Radosh reviews Martin Peretz’s memoir The Controversalist: Arguments with Everyone, Left Right and Center. Peretz is the former editor of The New Republic.

Here is a taste of Radosh’s review:

WRITING RECENTLY IN HIS New York magazine column, Jonathan Chait looked back with longing to a time before lefty journalists came to accept a “general, widespread, and (from what I can tell) growing taboo against criticizing fellow progressives—unless, of course, the criticism is for their lack of ideological or political ardor.” His nostalgia is not surprising, given that Chait began his career in 1995 at the New Republic, then owned and edited by Martin Peretz.

During the period Marty (as everyone calls him) was editor-in-chief of the magazine—from 1974, when he bought it, until 2011—it was known as the only major, independent liberal publication that regularly took editorial positions and published articles attacking liberal shibboleths. Between the Reagan presidency and that of Bill Clinton, the publication reached new heights of influence; it enjoyed a substantial general readership among those attuned to American politics as well as among thinkers, activists, and those working in the White House. During the Clinton years it was dubbed, in a phrase that began as mockery but was later used in New Republic ads, as “the in-flight magazine of Air Force One.”

In this scintillating memoir, Peretz writes candidly about the life that took a middle-class Jewish kid from the Bronx to decades in the editor’s chair at a national magazine, and how along the way he became a major player in intellectual life, politics, and business. He became known for taking positions that the Democratic party sought to ignore—for instance, making the case for the dangers of communism; the value of American intervention abroad; and the specific need for the United States to intervene on behalf of populations threatened with destruction, whether in the Kurdish territories, Bosnia, or Kosovo.

Peretz also used his pulpit to argue on behalf of those threatened or oppressed by left-wing totalitarianism, especially in Cuba and Nicaragua, and later in El Salvador and other countries in the region similarly gripped by revolutionary war. Most controversial of all was his decision to make his magazine an unabashed defender of Israel, even when it moved in directions that many liberals began to criticize, and that led some of them to eventually become sharp critics of some Israeli policies or even abandon their support of Israel’s very existence and endorse the BDS movement.

This spring, Peretz joined Paul Berman, Michael Walzer, and Leon Wieseltier—“liberal American Zionists” all—in publishing an open letter in the Washington Post opposing the Netanyahu government’s anti-democratic, Orbán-like policies. They noted their “maximum political support for the Israeli protesters in the streets” who were marching for Israel to remain the “decent and liberal Jewish state that the world needs.” In the care and precision with which it delineated its proper target, the group’s letter offered a reminder of Peretz’s editorship at TNR, where such nuanced and carefully phrased editorial positions were a hallmark.

Read the rest here.