Know Your Enemy #13: What Happened to Norman? with David Klion
Know Your Enemy #13: What Happened to Norman? with David Klion
To plumb the depths of the neoconservative soul, Matt and Sam read Norman Podhoretz’s 1967 memoir Making It with David Klion of Jewish Currents.
Know Your Enemy is a podcast about the American right co-hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. Read more about it here. You can subscribe, rate, and review to the show on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher, and receive bonus content by supporting the podcast on Patreon.
We’re back with our first episode of 2020! To plumb the depths of the neoconservative soul, we read Norman Podhoretz’s 1967 memoir Making It with our friend David Klion of Jewish Currents (and Twitter.com).
Making It is Norman Podhoretz’s 1967 memoir about his journey from the working-class neighborhood of Brownsville, Brooklyn to his heady ascent in the New York literary scene of 1950s and ’60s. It’s also a fascinating psychological study of a man on the cusp of converting from Cold War liberalism to what came to be known as neoconservatism—a shift driven, at least in part, by the cool reception of this book. Making It proves a fascinating text through which to understand not just one conservative mind, but multiple generations of New York intellectuals, the neoconservative movement, and the politics of grievance, self-pity, and narcissism that have come to define much of conservatism in the Trump era.
Further reading:
- David Klion, “The Making and Unmaking of the Podhoretz Dynasty,” Jewish Currents, Dec 19, 2017
- Norman Podhoretz, “My Negro Problem — And Ours,” Commentary, Feb 1963
- Janet Malcolm, “‘I Should Have Made Him for a Dentist’“ New York Review of Books, Mar 22, 2018
- Louis Menand, “The Book That Scandalized the New York Intellectuals,” The New Yorker, Apr 24, 2017
- Benjamin Moser, “My Podhoretz Problem — And Ours,“ Jewish Quarterly, Dec 5, 2018
- Lee Smith, “Making It,“ Tablet, Jan 16, 2019
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