Only in America? Podhoretz, Reiner and the Jewish journey

Podhoretz was in the first cohort of working-class Jews to win places at Columbia University. He studied English Literature at Columbia with Lionel Trilling, the first Jew to be hired by Columbia’s English department—while simultaneously taking a second degree, in Hebrew Literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

“One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan,” Podhoretz wrote in his 1967 memoir Making It. By then, Podhoretz had begun another long journey.

In 1960, Podhoretz started editing Commentary magazine. He stayed in the editor’s chair for 35 years. He turned Commentary into the leading Jewish American journal, and turned its political orientation from Cold War liberalism to neoconservatism.

The neocons called themselves “The Family” and became a multi-generational media presence. Reiner’s story is much the same. And Reiner, who was a generation younger, made an even longer and stranger journey.

Born in the Bronx in 1945, Reiner worked as a child actor, then studied at the University of Los Angeles’ film school in the late Sixties. Like Podhoretz, Reiner had a serious work ethic. While at ULCA, he doubled as a bit-part actor and, with Steve Martin, a gag-writer for TV comedy shows.

Unlike Podhoretz, Reiner moved to the Left Coast and remained a liberal. He campaigned for children and families, and for preschools and the environment.

Podhoretz was committed to Judaism in thought and deed. Reiner described himself as a Jewish atheist who liked Buddhism and said “I believe in the teachings of Jesus.”

Everyone makes mistakes. Podhoretz backed the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and Sarah Palin as the Republican vice-presidential nominee in 2008—watersheds marking American overreach abroad and the hollowing of populism at home.

But Podhoretz was right that the Iranian nuclear programme was a threat to the world, a case he made as early as 2007.

In 2004, Podhoretz received the ultimate American honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, from President George W. Bush. Two years later, when Arnold Schwarzenegger was the Republican candidate for governor of California, Reiner was floated as a possible Democratic alternative.

In their final decade, the political polarity between Podhoretz and Reiner became even sharper. In 2016, Podhoretz broke with many Jewish conservatives and endorsed Donald Trump. No wonder he called an essay collection The Bloody Crossroads: Where Literature and Politics Meet.

Trump’s win sent Reiner down the rabbit hole. He promoted conspiracy theories about Donald Trump being a Russian plant in documentaries and on social media. That explains, but doesn’t justify, Trump celebrating the news of Reiner’s death.

When Podhoretz wrote a book called Why are Jews Liberals? in 2009, he could have had Reiner in mind. But these two talented, argumentative, infuriating, earnest and witty Jews had plenty in common.

Podhoretz loved America with the passion of an immigrant. Obviously, he wrote a book about it called, obviously, My Love Affair with America.

Reiner’s movies are an extended love letter to America. The children in Stand By Me are the innocence of 1950s America. The hapless rockers in Spinal Tap are the spirit of the clueless Sixties. The courtroom drama A Few Good Men pursues the very American and very Jewish virtue of justice.

Neither Podhoretz nor Reiner feared touching the third rail of American politics, either.

Podhoretz’s autobiographical 1963 essay “My Negro Problem—And Ours” foresaw how the Civil Rights alliance of Jewish liberals and African American activists would sour.

Another of Reiner’s courtroom dramas, 1996’s Ghosts of Mississippi, reconstructed the trial of a white supremacist who assassinated the black civil rights activist Medgar Evers in 1963.

So, only in America? For comparison, consider a pair of brilliant Jewish wordsmiths that Britain lost this year, Viennese-born David Pryce-Jones (1936-2025) and Czechoslovakian-born Tom Stoppard (1937-2025).

Stoppard’s long journey as a British-adopted immigrant carried him to the heights of British life, but he remained an outsider. The critics who praised his intellectual brilliance also found his plays too clever by half.

The son of a Welsh father and an Austrian Jewish mother, Pryce-Jones grew up inside the British establishment: Eton, Oxford and the Guards. Yet when David wrote about the pro-fascist mood in the 1930s British aristocracy, he was accused as a class traitor.

Stoppard and Pryce-Jones were both taken more seriously in America than in Britain.

Will the America of the future resemble the America of Podhoretz and Reiner, where Jews could rise on merit as equals and know that their country reciprocates their love—or will the future American resemble the Britain of the recent past?

What we can say is that Jews are the leaven in the loaf, and that the quartet we lost this year leave us all much flatter.

A few years ago, Roger Kimball of the New Criterion and Encounter Books hosted a small dinner at the Metropolitan Club in New York for David Pryce-Jones, one of his authors. Podhoretz was also an Encounter author, and he was there, seated at David’s right elbow.

It was one of those evenings when, as the coffee arrives, the guest of honour is asked to say a few words. Your palms start to sweat, because everyone is expected to add something to the conversation.

David began to deliver a typically sharp and wide-ranging analysis of global affairs—no notes, of course. The rest was commentary, from Norman.

David wasn’t going to stop. Norman couldn’t stop commenting. At times, it was like watching a Catskills routine in a DC think tank.

So few Jews, so many words, so much passion and intellect.