Neocons Cry Anti-Semitism Over the Pro-Trump ‘Renegade Jew’ Smear That They Popularized

This neoconservative hothouse has reflexively reverted to the “Renegade Jew” charge as a substitute for reasoned debate with critics of Israeli policies. When the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt published her famous essay on the Adolph Eichmann trial and the “banality of evil” in 1963, Norman Podhoretz led the crusade to publicly discredit her and bully her editors at the New Yorker into disowning her work. John Podhoretz has regularly re-enacted his father’s histrionics, albeit in much cruder form. He once took to Twitter to call me a “kapo,” or a Jewish guard in a Nazi concentration camp, then fired off the same insult against Eli Valley, a Jewish cartoonist whose send-ups of the pro-Israel political establishment have frequently appeared in the Jewish Daily Forward.

The next generation of character assassins

The son of first generation neocons Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb, William Kristol founded the Weekly Standard in 1995. The magazine functioned as a farm system for young right-wing writers like Matthew Continetti, who broke into the conservative movement through a group co-founded by Kristol’s father, the Institute for Collegiate Studies. That organization provided Continetti with his salary when he went to work for the Weekly Standard. It was there that Continetti was essentially handed his first book deal by William Kristol, The K Street Gang, assigning him an editor to help write his proposal, and then helping arrange for its sale and promotion. (Continetti’s second book, The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star, was a defense of the Republican vice presidential nominee in 2008 who Kristol discovered during a Weekly Standard cruise to her home state of Alaska. Palin employed Michael Goldfarb as a spokesman on her 2008 campaign).

In 2012, Continetti married Anne Kristol, the daughter of his boss.

That same year, Continetti helped found The Free Beacon with help from Kristol, who served as a board member of the Goldfarb-run shell organization whose sole function was presiding over the newborn magazine’s funding and publication. Vowing in the Free Beacon’s founding manifesto to conduct ruthless “combat journalism,” Continetti — the son of Catholic parents — proceeded to deploy the “Renegade Jew” smear with reckless abandon.

“Hughes Drops Jews,” the Free Beacon headline blared in January 2013. Chris Hughes, a Silicon Valley tech baron, had just purchased The New Republic, provoking an exodus of writers that included several unpaid contributing editors who had contributed almost nothing to the magazine for several years. Although only five of the twelve writers happened to be Jewish, the Free Beacon accused Hughes of leading the digital media equivalent of an anti-Semitic pogrom in collaboration with another person the Free Beacon considered a Renegade Jew: The New Republic’s then-editor-in-chief Franklin Foer.   

One of the most recent targets of a Free Beacon-crafted Renegade Jew smear was Simone Zimmerman, a founder of the left-wing Jewish protest group, If Not Now, and former campus activist for J Street. When she was appointed this year as Jewish outreach director by Senator Bernie Sander’s presidential campaign, Zimmerman came under ferocious attack from a host of right-wing pro-Israel organizations. The campaign culminated when Noah Pollack, the director of Kristol’s pro-Likud Emergency Committee for Israel, publicized a Facebook post in which Zimmerman wrote, “Fuck you, Bibi, for daring to insist that you represent even a fraction of Jews in the world…” Posted during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s military campaign against the Gaza Strip in 2014, Zimmerman’s item led to her suspension from the Sanders campaign.

Declaring Jewish liberalism a form of apostasy

A Free Beacon review of a diatribe against Jews who criticize Israel perfectly captured the magazine’s mindset. Headlined  “The Enemies Within,” the review provided fulsome praise for “Jews Against Themselves,” an obscure book that described both J Street and the left-wing Jewish Voice for Peace as “internal enemies” and accused them of embracing “the ‘sissy’ Jewish school of thought.”

The Free Beacon reviewer highlighted what he considered an “important suggestion” from the book: “Remember that exclusion is as much a function of human intellect as inclusion. And view them as apostates—Jews who, in Maimonides’s words, are indifferent to their people when they are in distress and therefore have no share in the World to Come.”

Now that Kristol has been branded as a Renegade Jew, his cadres appear mystified. “What does [David] Horowitz think Kristol has betrayed? And what does his being Jewish have to do with it?… I’m a little hazy,” the Free Beacon’s Matthew Walther wrote of the notorious Breitbart headline.

While Kredoexpressed horror that Kristol had been of “smeared with anti-Semitic slurs,” Jonathan Tobin, executive editor of the Commentary Magazine edited by John Podhoretz and a close ally of Kristol, berated Horowitz for daring to “wrap him[self] in the Star of David and to somehow brand his opponents as traitors to the pro-Israel cause.” Tobin, however, has been an avid user of the “Renegade Jew” smear. He deployed it, for example, in 2011 against New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, an occasional critic of Israel’s settlement enterprise, for supposedly trafficking in “a new form of anti-Semitism” as well as “feed[ing] off of traditional themes of Jew-hatred.”  

Ultimately, it was Kristol and his allies who popularized this vicious tactic and helped generate the smear they now decry. Yet they react with shock that their chickens have finally come home to roost.