In April 1965, a group of disillusioned New York liberal intellectuals published the first edition of The Public Interest. Mainly Jewish, they shared what one of their number, the sociologist Nathan Glazer, termed "an allergy toward Communist oppression" and a loathing for the "increasing radicalisation, increasing vituperation, increasing disaffection with the country and its institutions".
Coupled with a growing scepticism about the merits of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society-style government activism, those twin beliefs were to become the hallmarks of the neo-conservative movement which the journal would spearhead over the next decade. In its mission, it would be aided and abetted by Commentary, the New York monthly which "transformed the Jewish left into the neo-conservative right".
In terms of raw numbers, Jewish neo-conservatives added little to the political ascendancy of the American right during the 1970s and 1980s. Even as he was re-elected by a landslide against George McGovern in 1972, Richard Nixon was only able to muster the support of barely one-third of American Jews.
For many, the Republican party remained deeply unappealing: barely a decade had passed since William F Buckley had effectively ex-communicated the antisemitic adherents of the John Birch Society from the conservative movement. Intellectually, however, the contribution of men such as Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset is incalculable. The apparent infallibility of American liberalism had been questioned by some of those who had been among its fiercest proponents.
Forty years on, American Jewry remains overwhelmingly politically liberal. Four years ago, Barack Obama won the support of nearly 70 per cent of Jews. As her husband did in his two presidential campaigns, Hillary Clinton will likely win even larger, lop-sided margins among Jewish voters.
Nonetheless, in the media, think-tanks and academia, Jewish conservatism is now well-established: it is no longer the novel, even somewhat exotic, beast it was in the era of Johnson and Nixon. But faced with the now-inevitable prospect of Donald Trump as the Republican party's standard-bearer in November, Jewish conservatism faces its greatest ever test. While distaste for Trump among conservatives is not a uniquely Jewish phenomenon, some of the most high-profile and dogged opposition to him from within the Republican party has come from Jews.
Perhaps most prominent is the editor of The Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol. One of the party's leading intellectuals and operatives, the son of Irving Kristol and the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, Kristol declared last month that his unbroken Republican "presidential voting streak" is about to come to an end. Beyond the presumptive Republican nominee's "mixed bag of motley policies", he wrote, "it is clear that Donald Trump does not have the character to be president of the United States". Kristol is now embarked on a last-ditch effort to recruit an independent conservative candidate to oppose Trump and Clinton in November.
Although denounced by David Horowitz as a "renegade Jew", Kristol is by no means alone. While the Republican Jewish Coalition eventually succumbed to the inevitability of Trump's impending coronation and endorsed their party's candidate - causing a handful of erstwhile Trump critics to fall into line - many more are refusing to do so.
Some, such as former Senator Norm Coleman, historian Daniel Pipes and Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin have declared they will support neither Trump nor Clinton. Others, such as Max Boot, a former foreign policy adviser to John McCain who pronounced that he would "sooner vote for Josef Stalin" than Trump, are leaning towards backing Clinton.
Some have already made the leap. "For this former Republican," wrote Robert Kagan, the historian and foreign policy analyst, "the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton.
The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be". The threat of fascism in America comes not from "jackboots and salutes" but in the form of "a television huckster, a phoney billionaire, a textbook egomaniac".
The forces which drove many Jewish neo-conservatives from the Democratic party in the early 1970s are without doubt very different from those which are now splintering the uneasy alliances which underpin the modern Republican party. Nonetheless, there are parallels that point to the underlying consistency as to why, like their forebears, many Jewish conservatives now find themselves politically homeless.
In 1972, McGovern's neo-isolationist foreign policy drove many into Nixon's seemingly welcoming arms.
This year, however, it is Trump who represents the isolationist reflex which has long twitched on both the left and right fringes of American politics. Indeed, the unholy alliance between the two is evident in the manner some on the left have rushed to suggest that Jewish conservatives' antipathy towards the Republican candidate is driven primarily by their fear that Trump will be "wholly unresponsive" next time they call for "another Big War in the Middle East".
Neo-conservatives have little time for a foreign policy approach which threatens to withdraw to a "Fortress America", promises to be "neutral" in the Israel-Palestinian conflict and has warmer words for Vladimir Putin than the US's long-standing allies in Europe.
But this is only half the story.
As former New Republic reporter Yishai Schwartz has suggested: "The special opposition of Jews goes deeper than policy. Trump is not an ideological candidate; he is a cultural phenomenon. And the culture he represents - anti-intellectual, vulgar and angry - is not a Jewish one."
While in the 1970s it was the New Left which gave voice to the "increasing radicalisation, increasing vituperation, increasing disaffection with the country and its institutions" which Glazer and his fellow neo-conservatives so abhorred, so today this is the phenomenon which has both fuelled, and is represented by, the Trump candidacy. At root, it is a very conservative fear of the "mobocracy" - one that the Founding Fathers both feared and sought to guard against - which best captures why so many Jewish conservatives refuse to reconcile themselves with their party's candidate and what Boot terms his "ugly nativist populism". For many of Boot's fellow Jewish Republican exiles, that threat is compounded by what Kagan calls the "aura of crude strength and machismo" and "whiff of violence" which clings to Trump.
Trump's attempts to incite his supporters to attack protesters at his events, and the creepy manner in which he asked one crowd to raise their right hands and pledge allegiance to him, have led to comparisons with Fritz Kuhn, the leader of the pro-Nazi Depression-era German-American Bund.
Unlike Muslims, Jews have not, of course, been the direct target of Trump's invective. Nor would they likely be: Trump's daughter is a convert to Orthodox Judaism, although her father chose to spend the day campaigning rather than attend his grandson's bris. But, as the young Jewish conservative writer James Kirchick has argued, Trump is "the candidate of the mob, and the mob always ends up turning on Jews". The crowds at Trump's rallies and his fans on social media suggest Kirchick's fears are not unfounded. In March, a Trump supporter was captured giving a Nazi salute and shouting "Go to Auschwitz" at protesters.
Trump's apparent appeal to antisemites is not new. The Republican strategist Rick Wilson noted that "on social media, it seems that while not all Donald Trump supporters are antisemites, many of the vocal and vicious antisemites seem to be Donald Trump supporters". Most recently, the Jewish journalist Julia Ioffe was the target of their ire and subject to a barrage of vicious antisemitic abuse after she profiled Melania Trump in GQ magazine. Ioffe "provoked" the attacks, suggested the aspiring First Lady in response. When New York Times editor Jonathan Weisman attempted to call out the antisemites, the mob turned on him. "After the Mexicans and Muslims, you filth are next," Tweeted one.
The prominent neo-conservative writer Joshua Muravchik is no leftist. An aide to Democrat congressmen in the 1970s - he worked on hawkish Senator Henry 'Scoop' Jackson's failed 1976 presidential bid - Muravchik was a strong advocate of Ronald Reagan's defence build-up, defended neo-conservatism during the depths of George W Bush's unpopularity and denounced Obama's Iran deal.
Nonetheless, like many of his contemporaries and their ideological descendants, he will put aside his doubts and vote for Hillary Clinton: "Trump has degraded American politics in a way unlike anything I have ever witnessed. I can't say enough bad things about him. His ignorance is staggering and his personality is revolting."
And so, for many Jewish conservatives, it is the candidate himself, not some of his unseemly followers, that will seal their determination on polling day to set aside instinct and ideology for what they see as America's good.
