Word: podhoretzes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...imperfect Israel has no right to exist. Fortunately, they acted somewhat more carefully than Sharfstein. Israel's "Declaration of Independence" explicitly states that the creation of the new state would destroy age-old double standards by "lifting the Jewish people to equality in the family of nations." As Normon Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary magazine writes, "the purpose of Israel was to normalize the Jewish people, not to perfect them. The Jewish state was to create not a utopia but a refuge from persecution...
...sentiment was sufficiently unsettling to provoke the editor of Commentary to retaliate in his syndicated newspaper column. In the process, Podhoretz showed himself incapable of relating to the main point of Brodsky's lecture--that there is an ideal higher than the democratic state...
...Podhoretz began by comparing Brodsky's claims to "the most notorious American example of professional deformation in the realm of politics--Charles Wilson's "What's good for the country is good for General Motors and vice versa." He argues that like Wilson, "Brodsky's statement attributes a wildly disproportionate role to his own field of endeavor...
Here is the source of Podhoretz's ire. Poets like Brodsky belong to that group of people who have little time for such political questions as the value of capitalism, and are interested in something more intangible, more transcendent, such as the condition of the human imagination...
...Podhoretz, since communists as surely as fascists can write, it's better to view literature as something which provides a variety of tame and nebulous things such as enjoyment and pleasure. Quite simply, after a good day's work at the office, Podhoretz instructs, go home and read a book. You'll enjoy...