By Leonard Fein from the Jewish Forward

'Norman Podhoretz won, after all," a dinner guest remarked the other evening. By which he meant that after years if not decades of being regarded with mere contempt by the Jewish intellectual establishment, which is resolutely left in orientation, Podhoretz and his extended family and their friends have become the public face of America's Jews, this at a time when the left's resolve has very substantially eroded. They are in the Defense Department, in the White House, in the Washington think tanks, and not only do people in power pay attention to them, they themselves are often the people in power. Podhoretz was among the founding members of Project for the New American Century, where the doctrine of preemptive attack was birthed, as was his wife, Midge Decter, his son-in-law, Elliot Abrams (now the National Security Council's senior director for Near East and North African affairs), as were Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld. If not exactly a coup d'etat, it is at least a coup de theatre.

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