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OF ALL CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POLITICAL fiGURES, few are viewed so negatively by Jews as Patrick J. Buchanan.1 This is not merely because of the columnist's position on such matters as immigration, multiculturalism, the "cultural war," church-state relations, foreign trade, and overseas military involvements. What impresses Jews, rather, are his attitude toward the Holocaust, Israel, and his Jewish critics. They believe his comments on these topics reflect more than foolishness, stubbornness, an excessively polemical and pugnacious style, and what William F. Buckley,Jr. described as "clumsy forensic manners," an attraction "to mischievous generalizations," and "an iconoclastic temperament." They are,Jews believe, the rantings of an anti-Semite.2
It is doubtful that a man as politically experienced and astute as Buchanan ever believed that he would become the Republican Party's nominee for President. Rather, as he has indicated on several occasions, his ultimate objective has been to control the American conservative movement. The tensions between Buchanan and American Jews are thus part of a larger story-the quarter of a century long struggle between "neo-conservatives" and "paleo-conservatives" over the future of American conservatism.
Neo-conservative intellectuals view Buchanan with contempt. Norman Podhoretz, former editor of Commentary, the leading neo-conservative publication and now its Editor-at-Large, wrote that Buchanan was part of a conservative faction which "would release into the political air the viruses of xenophobia and nativism, and the derivative diseases of anti-Semitism and old fashioned racism." For Podhoretz, Buchanan has put the conservative movement at risk. "Having been carried triumphantly into the mainstream by Ronald Reagan," a Buchanan political victory would drag the movement "back into a marginal sectarian status with very little appeal to anyone outside its own fever swamps."3
Buchanan, for his part, is a longtime opponent of the neo-conservatives, and his leading supporters have been drawn from the ranks of the paleoconservatives. Since the emergence of neo-conservatism-a name and movement defined by Irving Kristol in the 1960s-paleo-conservatives have claimed that the neo-conservatives were not true conservatives. They were simply liberals who, without relinquishing their liberal mindset, had moved to the right as a result of the excesses of the Great Society and the perilous status of the state of Israel. Russell Kirk, the leading traditionalist conservative intellectual, described the neo-conservatives as "a little sect, distrusted and reproached by what...