Martin Peretz
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Martin Peretz (also Marty Peretz) is a Harvard lecturer who is co-owner and editor-in-chief of The New Republic, which he purchased in 1975. Under his leadership, the magazine has generally taken hawkish and pro-Israel stances in foreign affairs, while advocating liberal and neoliberal positions on economic and social issues. Critics have accused Peretz of steering TNR towards neoconservatism. However, Peretz has long supported Democrats over Republicans, including being a major behind-the-scenes benefactor of Eugene McCarthy's primary presidential bid in 1968. (Some see this as ironic given the antipathy some TNR writers expressed towards outspokenly antiwar presidential candidate Howard Dean)
In 1995, Peretz made headlines when he successfully pressured Vice President Al Gore to rescind his offer to Harvard historian and Tennessee writer Richard Marius to be a White House speechwriter. Peretz accused Marius of anti-Semitism, citing a 1992 book review in which Marius compared the tactics of the Israeli secret police searching for Palestinian terrorists in the occupied territories to the Nazi Gestapo in occupied Europe during World War II. Gore, a former student of Peretz's at Harvard in the 1960s, complied with his request. Many defenders of Marius – who had written a major Holocaust speech for Gore to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising and who criticized Martin Luther in a biography for the Reformation figure's anti-Semitic writings – said Peretz's charge was without merit.
In the movie Shattered Glass, which portrays the unmasking of writer Stephen Glass' serial fabrications in the pages of The New Republic, Peretz was presented as a capricious figure who regularly fired his top editors and who once degraded the magazine's staff by ordering them to circle every comma in an issue of the magazine. He was played by well-known Canadian director Ted Kotcheff.
Quotes
- "I have been in love only three times in my life. I was in love with my college roommate. I am in love with the state of Israel and I love Gene McCarthy." (told to Blair Clark in 1968; quoted in Washington Babylon, p. 6)
- Arabs live in "societies that cannot make a brick let alone a microchip." 1996
- "Israel should do to the Palestinians what Hussein did to the Kurds... crush them." 1985
References
Notes
External links
- [TNR biography]
- [The New Republic] - TNR Online
- [The Street]
- [The Marker]
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