[From the Republican Jewish Coalition] The conservative movement lost one of its most eloquent and influential spokesmen this week with the passing of former editor-in-chief of Commentary magazine, Norman Podhoretz.
Podhoretz was a long-serving member of the Jewish Policy Center Board of Fellows and was connected to the Republican Jewish Coalition.
Senator Tom Cotton wrote an excellent remembrance of the man and his impact:
Not many men truly change the course of history. Those who do usually do it through their actions, like General U.S. Grant’s brilliant military campaigns in the Civil War. Fewer still do it with a combination of words and actions, like Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps rarest of all are men like Norman Podhoretz, who change history with mere words.
And what words they were. Norman was not only the long-time legendary editor and soul of COMMENTARY, but also a prolific author of a dozen books, hundreds of essays, articles, and columns, and no telling how many speeches. He could turn out 10,000 words of elegant, sparkling, cogent prose seemingly at a moment’s notice while identifying for his readers the deeper meaning of the day’s news.
Norman was also an original neoconservative, and proud to be so. These days, some historically illiterate podcasters and so-called influencers use the term “neocon” as an all-purpose slur for anything they don’t like. But the neocons were just that—new conservatives—a collection of anti-communist liberals between World War II and the Vietnam War who were, as the saying goes, mugged by reality, in this case the reality of the New Left’s turn against America.
Norman followed this path and blazed it for others…
He taught multiple generations not just to love our country, but also why we should love it and how to defend it. His words reached into the United States Congress, into the Oval Office, and into the councils of nations.
Without Norman and the little magazine he led, the course of history—the Reagan Revolution and the Cold War in particular—might indeed have been very different. I therefore join Norman’s family not only in mourning the loss of this great man, but also in celebrating the highly consequential life of a true American patriot.
