Leon Wieseltier

Leon Wieseltier served as Literary Editor of The New Republic for 35 years from 1983 to 2014, the longest tenure in that role at one of the most intellectually prestigious magazines in American political journalism, and in that position shaped the way a generation of American liberal intellectuals engaged with Israel, antisemitism, Jewish identity, and the moral dimensions of the Middle East conflict. Born in Brooklyn in 1952 to immigrant parents who had survived the Holocaust, Wieseltier earned his undergraduate degree from Columbia University, studied at Oxford and Harvard, and produced a body of scholarly and critical writing that spans philosophy, religion, Jewish texts, poetry, and political commentary. His 1998 book "Kaddish," a year-long meditation on the prayer for the dead and its Jewish cultural meaning written during his father's death, is widely considered one of the finest works of Jewish literary nonfiction in American letters.

Wieseltier's significance to the pro-Israel intellectual tradition is that he articulated, for liberal audiences, a Zionism that was not apologetic, not subject to the demands of progressive political fashion, and not willing to treat Israel's enemies as morally equivalent partners in a conflict where moral distinctions mattered. His editorship of The New Republic coincided with the period in which the publication was the primary intellectual home of liberal Zionism — the conviction that Israel's establishment was just, that its security was worth defending, and that criticism of Israel's enemies was compatible with a liberal worldview. He fought that case inside the American liberal establishment from within, not from the right.

His editorial career ended in 2014 when a new ownership group substantially changed TNR's direction, and subsequent years have been complicated by workplace misconduct allegations that emerged in 2017 and that cost him an editorship at The Atlantic. His public presence has been more limited since, but his intellectual legacy — the essays, the arguments, the insistence on Jewish particularity in the face of universalist pressure — remains a reference point for liberal Zionist intellectuals. At Rank 45, Wieseltier represents the literary intellectual whose pro-Israel conviction was formed by serious engagement with Jewish history, philosophy, and civilization, and who gave that conviction its most aesthetically distinguished expression in American journalism.