As Professor Michael E. Staub observes in his magisterial study, Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) pp. 190-92, 340:

In February 1971, Commentary published the epitaph for the radical Jewish movement. Gathered under the heading, “Revolutionism and the Jews,” this group of essays collectively said in print about the American Jewish New Left “what no non-Jew could say without being thought prejudiced,” or so gushed William F. Buckley approvingly in a National Review editorial. Buckley was certainly perceptive, for in this issue of Commentary not just secular New Left Jews but also Jewish-identified New Leftists were attacked in the nastiest terms.

Professor Walter Laqueur, for example, of the Institute of Contemporary History in London, made fun of Jewish-identified New Leftists’ habit of professing “that they ‘identify strongly with Israel although not necessarily with her politics.’ ” From an Israeli point of view, he asserted, “the American-Jewish radical represents the Diaspora Jew par excellence: immature, irresponsible, tormented with sundry imaginary problems . . . restless, neurotic, faddish.” Laqueur styled himself amused that American Jewish radicals couldnot handle the “discipline” of a kibbutz, and came back from visits to Israel“declaring that the kibbutz is not radical enough” and eager to return to the“more glamorous struggle for liberation” as practiced in the U.S. Naming Jews for Urban Justice directly, as well as like-minded organizations in Berkeley, Ann Arbor, and Somerville, Massachusetts, Laqueur also assertedthat the “doctrines” of these groups “betray strange and contradictory ideological influences.” In his opinion, furthermore, “Jewish radicalism in America is, of course, a form of assimilation.” And he declared that the hope that young radicals of this generation will again become “good Jews” is a slender one, comparable perhaps with the hope of a psychoanalyst for the recovery of a patient with a weak ego structure or a serious intellectual deficiency. Individuals may rediscover their Jewish identity and consciousness, but a catastrophe of the magnitude of Nazism would be needed to effect a mass reconversion of people so far removed from Judaism.

In his contribution Nathan Glazer too invoked Nazism. Clarifying at length that “because so many intellectuals are Jews (even if most Jews are notintellectuals),” Glazer was concerned that Jews might be blamed for the trends of the recent past. Glazer found in the “potential conflict between the intellectuals and ‘Middle America,’ and therefore for Jews because of their prominence among the intellectuals” a forbidding “parallel between Weimar and America” that “cannot be dismissed.” After all, Glazer warned, Hitler had successfully blamed “the moral ‘degeneration’ of Germany on the influence of the Jews” and now in America a “potential backlash” represented the“greatest single danger to Jews in the next ten years.” It would be very easy, Glazer warned, for those in “the hinterland” to blame Jews for the strength of the antiwar movement, the prevalence of pornography and marijuana smoking, and the recent overthrow of “the traditional restraints—on sexual behavior, on anti-authoritarian behavior, on violent behavior in certain settings.” But in his conclusion Glazer turned, as had Laqueur, to questions of psychology. Aligning himself with “those of us concerned with Jewish interests,” Glazer argued strongly that radical Jews were displaying “anti-Jewish tendencies” and “the sticky phenomenon known as ‘self-hatred.”

Robert Alter, professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley, had even more to say about self-hatred. In his contribution, and in a spirit similar to Fackenheim, Alter took careful aim specifically at those Jewish radicals who drew on religious tradition to advance their political aims. Alter’s indictment of radical Jews focused on NJOP [National Jewish Organizing Project], which he accused of “that most dangerous form of intellectual promiscuity, the melodramatization of politics,” and above all on Waskow’sradical Haggadah, which he characterized as “surely the most bizarre instance of the tyranny of politics over religion among radical Jews.” Alter described Waskow’s work as “offensively shrill,” “profoundly un-Jewish,” and “so clearly the crude political rape of a religious tradition.” Yet he was most concerned not only to contest radical Jews’ claim to be building authentically on Jewish tradition but to identify their efforts expressly with self-hatred as well. Alter was appalled by what he saw as Waskow’s “self-effacement before black militancy,” not least because of “all peoples in a world that has lived through Auschwitz, Jews ought to be the last to accept mindlessly the propagandistic black-militant usage of ‘genocide.’ ” Strongly offended by“the renunciation of Jewish ties made in the name of a higher Judaism,” Alter also announced that “Waskow’s Haggadah is in a very literal psychological sense a perversion because it is a document of self-loathing and self-abasement masquerading as an expression of self-affirmation.”

Yet Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz found Alter to be too kind. Podhoretz thought the support given by “Balfour Brickner and other prominent rabbis” to Waskow’s Freedom Seder to be “most disgraceful.” Praising Alter and his “careful analysis” of the radical Haggadah in his editor’s column introducing the issue, Podhoretz found Alter’s points about “self-loathing and self-abasement” to be “a touch too gentle to do justice to the truly abominable case at hand.” Podhoretz, for his part, preferred to take “alead from Mr. Laqueur’s suggestive observation that New Left radicalism is for American Jews a form of assimilationism.” To say Waskow and his ilk were self-hating was to miss the severity of the danger they posed. In Podhoretz’s view Waskow was guilty not just of self-hatred but of “the sin of anti-Semitism.” The Jewish radical, to Podhoretz’s mind, was not pathetic but “wicked.”

. . . Balfour Brickner was especially outraged at Podhoretz’s charge that Jews like himself and Waskow were Jewish antisemites. Implicitly echoing the 1963 critique of Podhoretz written by Justine Wise Polier and Shad Polier, Brickner argued not only that Judaism did have “a particular social thrust” but also contended that the truly assimilationist and anti-Jewish Jews were those who,

“betray an unutterable chutzpah in presuming to judge who among their fellow Jews is “kosher” and who is “treif”—who falls within the pale and who has strayed beyond the Commentary line—who should be tolerated and who should be wiped out. Editor Podhoretz has the litmus paper, and he gives out the new Jewish seal of Good Housebroken Approval. An intellectual, pseudo-Jewish McCarthyism, presided over by Commentary, is something new and ugly under the sun! That is what is anti-Jewish, masking in the guise of Jewish affirmation.”

Brickner further suggested that “Love of Israel, commitment to the Zionist ideal, never did, and must not now, demand slavish silence, and one’s credentials as a Jewish self-affirmer must not be held suspect because he is sometimes pained by what he sees and who, because of this pain, cries out within the bosom of the Jewish family. Candor is often more important than popularity.”