Bill Buckley and the Jews

Was there any major American personality in the last half-century who seemed more remote from the sensibilities of most American Jews than William F. Buckley?

Buckley, who passed away last week at the age of 83, was the fervent Catholic patrician whose work helped create the modern American conservative movement in the 1950s at a time when nothing could have been more removed from the thinking of most Jews in this country than his National Review. . . .

[T]he fact that as much as any other person, Bill Buckley cleared the way not only for a conservative movement where Jews would be welcomed, but that it was his leadership that set the stage for an American politics in which anti-Semitism was confined to the fever swamps of the far right and far left.

As conservative columnist George Will has written, without National Review, which Buckley started in 1955, much of what followed in American politics - including Barry Goldwater's capture of the Republican nomination for president in 1964 and then the electoral victories of Ronald Reagan and the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 - is unimaginable. American conservatism as we have known it, with all of its subsequent ups and downs, has its origins in the pages of that magazine in which its editor helped create a coherent movement out of what had previously been a loose array of cranks.

In order to give life to that movement, Buckley specifically chose to rid its ranks of people who espoused the sort of anti-Semitism that once was inescapable on the American right.

A refershing and enlightening view of William F. Buckley. I'm glad to have read it - I hope you read all of it too.