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The perceived marginalization of Jewish conservatives in the American political sphere has inspired some comical self-classifications -- Joseph Epstein called it "Thinking outside the lox" and former White House Jewish liaison Noam Neusner considers his ilk "the Jews of the Jews."

Historian of conservatism George H. Nash, however, has turned up high-profile Jews present at the creation of the conservative movement's flagship journal, the late William F. Buckley's National Review, and provides the story of these "Forgotten Founders" in his latest collection of essays on the American conservative movement, "Reappraising the Right: The Past and Future of American Conservatism". It is one of three essays in the book on Jewish conservatives, the other two exploring the American Jewish League Against Communism (AJLAC) and the neoconservative transformation of Commentary magazine under Norman Podhoretz.

"The militantly anticommunist tone of National Review at its founding was a source of common ground with some of the individuals whom I wrote about in my chapter on the American Jewish League Against Communism," Nash told The Jewish State in a phone interview Feb. 9.

Some Jewish conservatives played prominent roles in both AJLAC and National Review, such as Eugene Lyons, Alfred Kohlberg, and Marvin Liebman. Nash said the cause of anticommunism served as a bridge between the two groups. Both were supporters of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's public campaign against communism in the U.S.

Jewish conservatives vs. 'the mainstream'

The story of the relatively obscure AJLAC began with Yonkers, N.Y. Rabbi Benjamin Schultz in 1947. A vocal anticommunist, Schultz partnered with New York World-Telegram reporter Frederick E. Woltman to publish a series of articles in the World-Telegram collectively titled "Commies Invade the Churches," in which Schultz detailed what he believed to be the communist infiltration of the institutions of organized Judaism, Protestantism, and Catholicism. One of the Jewish officials named was Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, president of the American Jewish Congress.

It began a bitter public battle that would end with Schultz leaving his pulpit and the founding of AJLAC in November 1947 by Lyons, Kohlberg, Hearst columnist George Sokolsky, and Isaac Don Levine, with Schultz as its director. The Jewish rivalry between AJLAC and mainstream Jewish organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Jewish Committee (AJC) continued to play out publicly during Schultz's stewardship of AJLAC.

"I came to this as a historian of conservatism, and I was struck by the ferocity of the debate that went on in those early years between the American Jewish League Against Communism and some of the Jewish communal defense agencies like the AJC and others," Nash said. "It was noteworthy that there was a very tense argument occurring, and I tried to explain the context of that."

The tension between Jewish conservatives and the Jewish mainstream has existed, Nash said, since then. Former Commentary editor-in-chief Norman Podhoretz is but the most recent example of a prominent Jewish conservative often publicly at odds with those who claim to represent the vast majority of American Jews, who vote overwhelmingly for, and support the causes of, candidates affiliated with the Democratic Party.

"There has been a kind of adamantine resistance to conservatism among most American Jews for many years, and it's been into a kind of headwind that Podhoretz and Commentary in its later phase have run," Nash said.

Though their political beliefs may put them outside the mainstream, the persistence of Jewish conservatives in public life can serve as its own encouragement, Nash said.

"So I suppose if there's a lesson for a conservative who is Jewish," Nash offered, "you might say: 'Well, OK, I'm really a minority in the Jewish community as a Jewish conservative, but I can point to all these other cases in the past where people before me have held their conservative convictions and have persisted in them, and so I can do the same.' They might take that kind of a lesson in the courage to be a dissenter from the Right."

NR's Jewish founders

In his essay on the "Forgotten Founders" (which, just as his essay on AJLAC, came about through his friendship with the late Murray Friedman, the Jewish historian and onetime head of AJC's Philadelphia chapter), Nash writes that although few of the intellectuals to embrace National Review were Jewish, "a striking number of National Review's original luminaries were Jews. Indeed, without them the magazine might never have gotten off the ground, for if Buckley was the founding father of the journal, its unlikely godfather was an Austrian Jewish emigre journalist named William S. Schlamm."

Schlamm helped Buckley launch the magazine, while celebrated Hollywood screenwriter and playwright Morrie Ryskind helped National Review get off the ground financially, Nash writes. Lyons, a former Bolshevik sympathizer who became an anticommunist after a stint as a correspondent in Moscow, contributed to the magazine at its founding. Two other writers did the same: Communist-turned-libertarian Frank S. Meyer, and fellow libertarian and founder of the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists Frank Chodorov.

Nash chronicles the addition of Ralph de Toledano, a conservative editor at Newsweek, to the nascent magazine's ranks, as well as the early work of Liebman, then a Jewish public relations executive, on behalf of the journal.

Toledano believed that liberalism and communism had too much in common for a person to be associated with one without by logical extension supporting the other. He argued that "secular, relativistic liberals were tortured allies of the atheistic communists." It is a critique of liberalism heard from former communist spy Whittaker Chambers, and echoed today with regard to the Left and various collectivist ideologies.

"What Chambers argued was that there was a philosophical continuity on the Left and that this was disabling to American liberalism, because it could not quite bring itself to have a vigorous enough response to the communists, because it supposedly shared -- that was his argument -- a kind of underlying world view, which was secular and relativistic," Nash said.

After 9/11, Nash said, the type of criticism Toledano leveled at the Left for its inability to fight communism effectively has been updated, with the communist threat replaced by the threat of militant Islam.

"They (conservatives) would say that in order to defeat an enemy of this ferocity and tenacity, one has to draw deeply on our cultural and even spiritual resources," Nash said. "Then conservatives look at liberalism and they think that it's wishy-washy or blind or not sufficiently alert to and responsive to the threat."

Nash does not, however, see the campaign to root out Islamism gaining the same momentum once enjoyed by the anticommunists. One reason for this, Nash said, is that the current conflict is viewed within the context of two competing paradigms. The discussion on whether and why admitted 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) should be tried in a civilian or military court, according to Nash, puts on prominent display the two paradigms: those of war and law enforcement.

"A war requires mobilization on many fronts; it involves very drastic responses that one would expect of a society under attack and engaged in a war," Nash said. "Whereas the paradigm that the conservatives are criticizing right now is the paradigm of law enforcement. That is to say, the idea that these terrorist actors are essentially lone wolves or bandit types engaged in criminal activity that can be best handled by police action or judicial action."

The Orthodox conservatives

As Nash details in the book, the libertarian politics of some of the Jewish conservatives drove them away from more observant Judaism, which puts a focus on communal activity. Today, however, Orthodox Jews are the most conservative voting bloc within American Jewry, having seemingly reconciled conservative politics with the Orthodox lifestyle.

Nash said the prominence of the "culture wars" has likely played a substantial role in that shift.

"I suspect that in our current context, if liberalism is perceived as the party or the ideology of relativism and 'anything goes,' then the Orthodox are going to look for a political party that at least nominally speaks differently," he said. "That tends then to draw them, it seems, to the Republican side of the political equation."

Politics, even -- and in some cases especially -- those related to social issues, are used by many people as public displays of personal identity, Nash said. In addition, the courts have often been favored over the ballot box as the field of play when it comes to enshrining social values in law, he said, referencing Roe v. Wade and now the effort to legalize gay marriage.

"So one side of the divide looks upon the landscape and says: What's going on here? These are not issues that are being resolved by cultural trends, accommodation, or generational change, but they are being forced into the public square by a small group of people, namely judges," Nash said. "And that has, I think, greatly inflamed the culture wars of the past generation, because the issues seem not to be resolvable democratically at the grassroots."

This has put many Orthodox Jews into the coalition of groups that make up social conservatives, he said.

Israel and the American Right

In the book, Nash recounts Meyer's embrace of Zionism, which he came to not via his Jewish identity, but rather as a conservative -- Meyer was one of the first to make the case for Israel as an outpost of democracy and Western civilization in a hostile, yet strategically important, region of the world.

This mode of thinking about Israel, Nash said, didn't really take off until the Six-Day War in 1967, and then again the Yom Kippur War in 1973, put Israel's very existence at stake just when it was perhaps needed most in the battle against Soviet communist expansion.

Nash said conservatives did defend Israel in the Suez Crisis of 1956, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower appeared to conservatives to be putting too much pressure on our allies while not pushing back against the Soviet move to reassert control in Hungary.

"So there was a Cold War interpretation there, but in that configuration of events the Israeli participation was, I think, secondary in conservative thinking," Nash said. "Then, of course, Buckley worked to overcome residual anti-Semitism on the Right. So it may be that in the 1940s and 1950s Israel didn't look that important for various reasons to people on the Right; it acquired importance as the Cold War went on."

With the increased "intellectual exchange" between Israel and American conservatives, politically active pro-Israel Christian groups, and the growth of Orthodox Jewry in America, Nash said the connection between conservatives and Israel has solidified, rather than faded, since the Cold War.

The future of Jewish conservatives

Despite still being a minority in the Jewish community, Jewish conservatives have increased their influence and organization since the days of the "Forgotten Founders," Nash said. He said in the early days of National Review, there weren't many Jewish conservatives beyond those in Buckley's circle.

"Now there are any number of people -- Jonah Goldberg, for example, Mona Charen, Bill Kristol, and various people at the Weekly Standard -- who comprise a kind of a post-Commentary generation of Jewish conservatives," Nash said. "The number of Jewish conservative voices has grown hugely in the last generation, but this doesn't necessarily mean that they reflect voting bloc behavior."

That may frustrate someone like Podhoretz, who is looking to influence voting patterns, but to Nash there's been an unmistakable shift in the Jewish political conversation.

"And that's thanks in part to the pioneering break of Podhoretz with left-liberal orthodoxy, and to the doors that he opened for people younger than he to march forward in the public square as Jewish conservatives -- unabashedly so," he said, adding that "the number of Jewish conservative voices continues to grow."