NEW YORK (AP) — Norman Podhoretz, the boastful, hard-line editor and author whose books, essays and stewardship of Commentary magazine marked a political and deeply personal break from the left and made him a leader of the neo-conservative movement, has died. He was 95.
Podhoretz died “peacefully and without pain” Tuesday night, his son John Podhoretz confirmed in a statement on Commentary's website. His cause of death was not immediately released.
“He was a man of great wit and a man of deep wisdom and he lived an astonishing and uniquely American life,” John Podhoretz said.
Norman Podhoretz was among the last of the so-called “New York intellectuals” of the mid-20th century, a famously contentious circle that at various times included Norman Mailer, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag and Lionel Trilling. As a young man, Podhoretz longed to join them. In middle age, he departed. Like Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb and other founding neo-conservatives, Podhoretz began turning from the liberal politics he shared with so many peers and helped reshape the national dialogue in the 1960s and after.
The son of Jewish immigrants, Podhoretz was 30 when he was named editor-in-chief of Commentary in 1960, and years later transformed the once-liberal magazine into an essential forum for conservatives. Two future U.S. ambassadors to the United Nations, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick, received their appointments in part because of essays they published in Commentary that called for a more assertive foreign policy.
Despised by former allies, Podhoretz found new friends all the way to the White House, from President Ronald Reagan, a reader of Commentary; to President George W. Bush, who in 2004 awarded Podhoretz the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, and praised him as a "man of “fierce intellect” who never “tailored his opinion to please others.”
Podhoretz, who stepped down as editor-in-chief in 1995, had long welcomed argument. The titles of his books were often direct and provocative: "Making It," "The Present Danger," "World War IV," "Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer." He pressed for confrontation everywhere from El Salvador to Iran, and even disparaged Reagan for talking to Soviet leaders, calling such actions "the Reagan road to detente." For decades, he rejected criticism of Israel, once writing that “hostility toward Israel” is not only rooted in antisemitism but a betrayal of “the virtues and values of Western civilization.”
Meanwhile, Podhoretz became a choice target for disparagement and creative license. New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani called “World War IV” an “illogical screed based on cherry-picked facts and blustering assertions.” Ginsberg, once a fellow student at Columbia University, would mock the heavy-set editor for having “a great ridiculous fat-bellied mind which he pats too often.” Joseph Heller used Podhoretz as the model for the crass Maxwell Lieberman in his novel “Good as Gold.” Woody Allen cited Podhoretz's magazine in "Annie Hall," joking that Commentary and the leftist Dissent had merged and renamed themselves Dysentery.
Podhoretz never doubted he would be famous. Born and raised in a working class neighborhood in Brooklyn, he would credit the adoration of his family with giving him a sense of destiny. By his own account, Podhoretz was “the smartest kid in the class,” brash and competitive, a natural striver who believed that "One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan."
He would indeed arrive in the great borough, and beyond, thriving as an English major at Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1950, and receiving a master's degree in England from Cambridge University. By his mid-20s, he was publishing reviews in all the best magazines, from The New Yorker to Partisan Review, and socializing with Mailer, Hellman and others.
He was named associate editor of Commentary in 1956, and given the top job four years later. Around the same time, he married the writer and editor Midge Decter, another future neo-conservative, and remained with her until her death in 2022.
In childhood, Norman Podhoretz’s world was so liberal that he later claimed he never met a Republican until high school. When Podhoretz took over Commentary, founded in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee, the magazine was a small, anti-Communist publication. Podhoretz's initial goal was to move it to the left — he serialized Paul Goodman's "Growing Up Absurd," published articles advocating unilateral disarmament — and make it more intellectual, with James Baldwin, Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe among the contributors. Subscriptions increased dramatically.
But signs of the conservative future also appeared, and of his own confusion over a world in transition. He was a prominent critic of Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and other Beat writers, dismissing the upstart movement in 1958 as a “revolt of the spiritually underprivileged” and branding Kerouac a “know-nothing." In a 1963 essay, Podhoretz admitted to being terrified of Black people as a child, agonized over "his own twisted feelings," wondered whether he, or anyone, could change and concluded that "the wholesale merging of the two races is the most desirable alternative for everyone concerned."
"Making It," released in 1967, was a final turning point. A blunt embrace of status seeking, the book was shunned and mocked by the audience Podhoretz cared about most: New York intellectuals. Podhoretz would look back on his early years and conclude that to advance in the world one had to make a “brutal bargain” with the upper classes, in part by acknowledging they were the upper classes. Friends urged him not to publish “Making It,” his agent wanted nothing to do with it and his original publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, refused to promote it (Podhoretz gave back his advance and switched to Random House). Even worse, he was no longer welcome at literary parties, a deep wound for an author who had confessed that “at the precocious age of 35 I experienced an astonishing revelation: It is better to be a success than a failure."
By the end of the decade, Podhoretz was sympathizing less with the young leftists of the 1960s than with the way of life they were opposing. Like other neo-conservatives, he remained supportive of Democrats into the 1970s, but allied himself with more traditional politicians such as Edmund Muskie rather than the anti-Vietnam War candidate George McGovern. He would accuse the left of hostility to Israel and tolerance of antisemitism at home, with Gore Vidal (who called Podhoretz a “publicist for Israel”) a prime target. Echoing the opinions of Decter, he also rejected the feminist and gay rights movements as symptoms of a "plague" among "the kind of women who do not wish to be women and among those men who do not wish to be men."
“Tact is unknown to the Podhoretzes,” Vidal wrote of Podhoretz and Decter in 1986. “Joyously they revel in the politics of hate.”
Podhoretz was close to Moynihan, and he worked on the New York Democrat's successful Senate run in 1976, when in the primary Moynihan narrowly defeated the more liberal Bella Abzug. From 1981 to 1987, during the Reagan administration, Podhoretz served as an adviser to the United States Information Agency and helped write Kirkpatrick's widely quoted 1984 convention speech that chastised those who "blame America first." He was a foreign policy adviser for Republican Rudolph Giuliani's brief presidential run in 2008 and, late in life, broke again with onetime allies when he differed with other conservatives and backed Donald Trump.
“I began to be bothered by the hatred against Trump that was building up from my soon to be new set of ex-friends,” he told the Claremont Review of Books in 2019. “You could think he was unfit for office — I could understand that — but my ex-friends’ revulsion was always accompanied by attacks on the people who supported him. They called them dishonorable, or opportunists or cowards — and this was done by people like Bret Stephens, Bill Kristol, various others.
“And I took offense at that. So that inclined me to what I then became: anti-anti-Trump.”
FILE - Norman Podhoretz receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civil award, from President Bush during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House, June 23, 2004. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)
SYDNEY (AP) — An accused gunman in Sydney’s Bondi Beach massacre was charged with 59 offenses including 15 charges of murder on Wednesday, as hundreds of mourners gathered in Sydney to begin funerals for the victims.
Two shooters slaughtered 15 people on Sunday in an antisemitic mass shooting targeting Jews celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach, and more than 20 other people are still being treated in hospitals. All of those killed by the gunmen who have been identified so far were Jewish.
A country reeling from its deadliest hate-fueled massacre of modern times turned to searching questions, growing in volume since the attack, about how it was able to happen. As investigations unfold, Australia faces a social and political reckoning about antisemitism, gun control and whether police protections for Jews at events such as Sunday’s were sufficient for the threats they faced.
Naveed Akram, the 24-year-old alleged shooter, was charged on Wednesday after waking from a coma in a Sydney hospital, where he has been since police shot him and his gunman father at Bondi. His 50-year-old father Sajid Akram died at the scene.
The charges include one count of murder for each fatality and one count of committing a terrorist act, police said.
Akram was also charged with 40 counts of causing harm with intent to murder in relation to the wounded and with placing an explosive near a building with intent to cause harm.
Police said the Akrams' car, which was found at the crime scene, contained improvised explosive devices.
Akram's lawyer did not enter pleas and did not request his client's release on bail during a video court appearance from his hospital bed, a court statement said.
Akram was represented by Legal Aid NSW which has a policy of refusing media comment on behalf of clients.
He is expected to remain under police guard in hospital until he is well enough to be transferred to a prison.
Families from Sydney's close-knit Jewish community gathered, one after another, to begin to bury their dead. The victims of the attack ranged in age from a 10-year-old girl to an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor.
The first farewelled was Eli Schlanger, 41, a husband and father of five who served as the assistant rabbi at Chabad-Lubavitch of Bondi and organized Sunday's Chanukah by the Sea event where the attack unfolded. The London-born Schlanger also served as chaplain in prisons across New South Wales state and in a Sydney hospital.
“After what happened, my biggest regret was — apart from, obviously, the obvious – I could have done more to tell Eli more often how much we love him, how much I love him, how much we appreciate everything that he does and how proud we are of him,” said Schlanger's father-in-law, Rabbi Yehoram Ulman, who sometimes spoke through tears.
“I hope he knew that. I’m sure he knew it,” Ulman said. "But I think it should've been said more often.”
Outside the funeral, not far from the site of the attack, the mood was hushed and grim, with a heavy police presence. Jews are usually buried within 24 hours from their deaths, but funerals have been delayed by coroner's investigations.
One mourner, Dmitry Chlafma, said as he left the service that Schlanger was his longtime rabbi.
“You can tell by the amount of people that are here how much he meant to the community,” Chlafma said. “He was warm, happy, generous, one of a kind.”
Among others killed were Boris and Sofia Gurman, a husband and wife aged in their 60s who were fatally shot as they tried to disarm one of the gunmen when he got out of his car to begin the attack. Another Jewish man in his 60s, Reuven Morrison, was gunned down by one shooter while he threw bricks at the other, his daughter said.
Many children attended the Hanukkah event, which featured face painting, treats and a petting zoo. The youngest killed was Matilda, 10, whose parents urged attendees at a vigil on Tuesday night to remember her name.
“It stays here,” said Matilda's mother, who identified herself only as Valentyna, pressing her hand over her heart. "It just stays here and here.”
Authorities believe that the shooting was “a terrorist attack inspired by Islamic State,” Australia's federal police commissioner Krissy Barrett said Wednesday.
The Islamic State group is a scattered and considerably weaker group since a 2019 U.S.-led military intervention drove it out of territory it had seized in Iraq and Syria, but its cells remain active and it has inspired a number of independent attacks including in western countries.
The authorities have said that Naveed Akram came to the attention of the security services in 2019 but have supplied little detail of their previous investigations. Now authorities will probe what was known about the men.
That includes examining a trip the suspects made to the Philippines in November. The Philippines Bureau of Immigration confirmed Tuesday that the two suspected shooters traveled to the country from Nov. 1 to Nov. 28, giving the city of Davao as their final destination.
Groups of Muslim separatist militants, including Abu Sayyaf in the southern Philippines, once expressed support for IS and have hosted small numbers of foreign militants from Asia, the Middle East and Europe in the past. Philippine military and police officials say there has been no recent indication of any foreign militants in the country’s south.
The younger suspect was Australian-born. Indian police on Tuesday said the older suspect was originally from the southern city of Hyderabad, migrated to Australia in 1998 and held an Indian passport.
The news that the suspects were apparently inspired by the Islamic State group provoked more questions about whether Australia's government had done enough to stem hate-fueled crimes, especially directed at Jews. In Sydney and Melbourne, where 85% of Australia's Jewish population lives, a wave of antisemitic attacks has been recorded in the past year.
After Jewish leaders and survivors of Sunday's attack lambasted the government for not heeding their warnings of violence, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese vowed Wednesday to take whatever government action was needed to stamp out antisemitism.
Albanese and the leaders of some Australian states have pledged to tighten the country’s already strict gun laws in what would be the most sweeping reforms since a shooter killed 35 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania, in 1996. Mass shootings in Australia have since been rare.
Albanese announced plans to further restrict access to guns, in part because it emerged the older suspect had amassed six weapons legally. Proposed measures include restricting gun ownership to Australian citizens and limiting the number of weapons a person can hold.
Meanwhile, Australians seeking ways to make sense of the horror settled on practical acts. Hours-long lines were reported at blood donation sites and at dawn on Wednesday, hundreds of swimmers formed a circle on the sand, where they held a minute's silence. Then they ran into the sea.
Not far away, part of the beach remained behind police tape as the investigation into the massacre continued, shoes and towels abandoned as people fled still strewn across the sand.
One event that would return to Bondi was the Hanukkah celebration the gunmen targeted, which has run for 31 years, Ulman said. It would be in defiance of the attackers' wish to make people feel like it was dangerous to live as Jews, he added.
“Eli lived and breathed this idea that we can never ever allow them not only to succeed, but anytime that they try something we become greater and stronger,” he said.
“We’re going to show the world that the Jewish people are unbeatable."
Graham-McLay reported from Wellington and McGuirk from Melbourne.
Family react at the coffin of Rabbi Eli Schlanger, a victim in the Bondi Beach mass shooting, during his funeral at a synagogue in Bondi on Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2025, in Sydney, Australia. (AP Photo/Mark Baker, Pool)
Rabbi Yehoram Ulman, father-in-law of Rabbi Eli Schlanger, a victim in the Bondi Beach mass shooting, speaks at his funeral at a synagogue in Bondi on Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2025, in Sydney, Australia. (AP Photo/Mark Baker, Pool)
Rabbi Yossi Friedman speaks to people gathering at a flower memorial by the Bondi Pavilion at Bondi Beach on Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2025, following Sunday's shooting in Sydney, Australia. (AP Photo/Mark Baker)
Family react at the coffin of Rabbi Eli Schlanger, a victim in the Bondi Beach mass shooting, during his funeral at a synagogue in Bondi on Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2025, in Sydney, Australia. (AP Photo/Mark Baker, Pool)
