It’s about Peter Beinart’s relationship with Zionism, and anti-Zionism… look, the title is “House Jew, Field Jew.” With all of the historical connotations that such a title implies, and with Beinart being identified as being one of the former. It’s a harsh piece – and this is me saying that: I despise Beinart for casually and serially violating The New Republic over several years, all for the sake of a bankrupt antiwar ideology that nobody credible takes seriously*. Whether it’s a fair piece… up to the reader, really. Certainly there are things in Kerstein’s piece that I would have felt constrained not to write; whether that’s because they weren’t correct, or weren’t politically correct, for me to write is a surprisingly hard question to answer.
Assessing the impact of cultural taboos can be like that.
Moe Lane
*I nearly wrote ‘any more,’ but that would imply that credible people ever took the antiwar movement’s ideology seriously.