Jewish Journalist Marty Peretz Is Not Done Arguing
Marty Peretz, whose new memoir “The Controversialist” is now out, has lived a thoroughly charmed and thoroughly charming life. He made friends with a large number of people who were worthy of friendship — and a small number who weren’t — and made enemies with a large number of people who were worth having as enemies, and a few who weren’t.
Over the course of 84 years (and still going strong), his politics changed, his style and tastes changed, his sexuality changed, yet somehow his essential Marty-ness stayed the same — faithful to a core set of principles, to a steady aesthetic of ambition, skepticism, loyalty, and a sense of humor about it all. He managed to be both at the center of everything while remaining, in essence, an observer from the outside. This was, as his critics loved pointing out, partly a result of marrying into money.
But it was so much more than that. Marty Peretz’s outside-in relationship to culture and power is a product of the times he lived in. He is old enough to have lived in an America where Jews were locked out of an old establishment, and he has survived long enough to see their declining role in it.
In between those bookends was roughly half a century where Jews enjoyed an outsize role in American cultural life, which was mostly good for the Jews and certainly great for America.
These were the years when Jews burst into the Ivy League, the legacy media, the arts world, and both chambers of Congress. When Jewish intellectuals were on the (temporarily) winning side of the major political arguments, whether it was mid-century welfare liberalism, civil rights, 1960s radicalism, late 20th century neo-conservatism, or 1990s Third Way centrism.
To be Marty Peretz in this era meant — like being a wave and a particle — finding a way to always be at the middle of the action while simultaneously standing just outside and observing. It’s how he lived in academia — 50 years of teaching at Harvard without being a professor — and how he related to all the political drama of his generation, from civil rights to the rise of Reagan. It’s also how he related to the issue that was his passion, Israel: a visitor, a donor, a friend of prime ministers and generals, but never an Israeli, and never wanting to become one.
The ultimate Marty Peretz role, the job he was born to do, was the one that his money and his timing made possible. This, of course, was the nearly four decades he spent as publisher of the weekly American opinion magazine The New Republic (TNR).
TNR made American liberalism smart, analytically sophisticated, unafraid, and interesting at a time when the other brands were full of resentment and self-pity. Two, maybe three, generations of brilliant American thinkers on politics got their start when Marty plucked them from obscurity and gave them a platform that was often way bigger than what over-smart 22-year-olds should be given.
Peretz’s connection to events — always being where the action was, but still somehow just watching through the glass — ends up being the tragic description of the politician whose success he was perhaps most invested in, Al Gore.
Like Peretz, Gore spent an entire adulthood, from Harvard onward, trying to find a sane liberalism that wasn’t always eager to be found. And like Peretz, Gore too had his pet issue that he took deadly seriously, didn’t compromise on, and for which he earned the unending enmity of people he couldn’t hide his entirely justified contempt for.
Gore’s defeat in 2000 is a giant “what-if” moment for America and the world — and for Marty too. It’s the point in his autobiography where Peretz seems to start losing interest in the magazine he’s running, in the marriage he’s living, and in the restraints he has placed on himself as a public and private figure.
TNR in the post-9/11 years was no longer pricking the bubble of Reaganite delusions or pompous liberal pieties, as in its glory days with Mike Kinsley and Rick Hertzberg. Instead it was riding the tiger, supporting the Iraq War, and losing its voice at just the time that the Internet and its promise of free content was wiping out traditional magazines and newspapers the world over.
Peretz does a good job dissecting his own changes of heart about the Iraq War and Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, as well as other issues where he has changed his mind. He is unsparing in his criticism of himself, which becomes yet another subject he manages to study from the outside while actually being inside.
Some of the most illuminating passages of the book are his descriptions of his own evolving views. There is something both intimate and dispassionate about an author painstakingly justifying a view he no longer holds or describing how he came to reassess. The Peretz Position — at the center and looking in — makes it uniquely possible.
Most of the rehashing of earlier controversies makes for compelling reading, though at least two fall flat (for me, I should say). “The Bell Curve” episode is the most obvious one. I read the description carefully and still couldn’t figure out what the urgency was in giving that book’s author, Charles Murray, such a platform, especially when, as Peretz himself details, there was a much better option available of running simultaneous reviews and commentary.
Nor was I convinced by Peretz’s description of the magazine’s efforts to derail Hillary Clinton’s giant health care reform package in 1994, in particular, an infamous hit piece about the reform by Betsy McCaughey, who would later go on to serve as Lieutenant Governor of New York. “I don’t know that I’m proud of the article, but I’m proud of the outcome,” is how Peretz summarizes the affair in typically brutal honesty.
Part of the story, obviously, is Peretz’s dislike of Hillary Clinton the person. That’s clear from the rest of the book.
It’s the story of one man’s life, not a policy book, and a life as colorful and boisterous and frankly fun as Marty’s is going to have some likes and dislikes on the way. The reader never really gets why some of the dislikes are so intense (Hillary, the Kennedy family). At the same time, a number of characters pop up at the magazine and elsewhere who genuinely betray Peretz’s trust, and he is remarkably forgiving. If there is some grand unifying theory for why Marty holds on to some grudges but gives the benefit of the doubt to people who don’t seem to deserve it, I couldn’t find it in this biography.
The most personal and most compelling chapters of the book are near the beginning, with Peretz describing his arrival at Harvard. His description is almost that of an explorer arriving at a foreign country, but for the reader in 2023, the Harvard of his retelling — of the “before” years — is something of a foreign country, too. Harvard, together with the rest of America’s elite institutions, would be remade by the wave of Jews flooding its gates in the postwar decades. For Peretz, the story of middle class Jews breaking down barriers in academia, media, the arts, and elsewhere is the story of how one minority cracked open a citadel of privilege so that, in due time, everyone else could come in and enjoy its benefits.
Peretz comes back to this tale throughout the book, and it’s certainly a plausible way of connecting the dots across the last seven or eight decades of American life: white Protestant men in popped collars and pastel shirts rule the roost, but once they have to start letting Jews in, they eventually have to open the doors to women, Blacks, and everyone else.
It’s a pleasing story, but it’s not the only way of making sense of the American elite’s transformation, nor of the rise-and-fall trajectory of its Jewish presence roughly around the 50 years from 1960 to 2010. Another way of looking at it, is to see the rapid Jewish decline of the last decade as an elite purge no different from the ones that preceded it, led by people who view the elite they are now deposing with the same contempt as those like Peretz once had for its predecessors.
Peretz tells his story, not his generation’s, so he doesn’t need to give much thought to just how much things like the #MeToo movement and the racial protests of 2020 and earlier, removed Jews from prominent places in media and culture. His own “cancellation” at Harvard in 2010 was, if anything, the opening shot of both the loud assault of Cancel Culture and its much quieter ethnic targeting.
A second theme that is under-explored in the book is the role of finance in the changing cultural and political environment. There is a sublimated lament about “industry” being replaced by “consumption,” and an even subtler romanticization of the kind of wealth his wife’s family made — by selling sewing machines — as compared to the decidedly less socially productive world of high finance.
The lament is sublimated throughout, but gone completely in a six-page section where the transformation of New York and American capitalism is discussed explicitly. Some of the leading figures in this transformation are friends of Marty’s, and if there’s a reason why his kind of muscular liberalism — the kind that didn’t sacrifice working people’s interests for pious shibboleths of the educated class — was able to sustain itself on a weekly print schedule, it was in many cases due to the generosity and common concern of some of Peretz’s more successful Wall Street friends.
But these transformations are there — and so are the tensions — and they are a huge part of the story of American liberalism, as well as of TNR as a magazine and Marty Peretz as a man. That TNR under Peretz’s tutelage didn’t succumb to elitist diversify-the-boardroom-and-outsource-the-labor symbolic liberalism, to say nothing of luxury-dissident foreign policy, is a testament to his convictions. One only needs to see what has become of TNR since he left (and especially since the last vestiges of Peretz’s imprint were purged in 2014) to gauge how bad it could have been.
Shany Mor is a research fellow at the Institute for Liberty and Responsibility at Reichman University, where he also lectures in political thought.
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