Newsletter Special: Rabbi Meir Soloveichik in First Things magazine
David Shasha
Friends,
I recently received a First Things e-mail newsletter that contained links to two of their archived articles on the Hebrew Bible’s King David.
For those who might not be familiar with the publication, First Things is a Right Wing Fundamentalist Catholic journal, founded by the late Richard John Neuhaus:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Things
Veteran SHU readers are by now familiar with the honored place of Rabbi Meir Soloveichik and his hero Michael Wyschogrod in the journal:
In that special newsletter dedicated to the two atavistic Jewish primitives I included the late Wyschogrod’s May 2010 First Things article “A King in Israel,” which was previously posted in SHU 425, and Soloveichik’s November 2009 FT paean to his literalist hero.
But I was unaware that Soloveichik had written a companion piece to the Wyschogrod Jewish Monarchy article which was published by the journal in January 2017.
Upon discovering this, I decided to pull up MS’s First Things author page to see what else I might have missed.
Lo and behold, his first FT article “The Virtue of Hate” – a truly apt title for such a devoted future Trump supporter! – was actually included in SHU 46. Indeed, it shows that even before Soloveichik became a part of the putative “Sephardic” community – which he has helped to destroy with his Trumpist Neo-Con beliefs – he happened to be on my radar.
In addition to that article and the two pieces on Wyschogrod, I include here his other two FT articles, which both deal in a very interesting way with Christianity and its dogmas.
“No Friend in Jesus” presents a tortuous attempt to very carefully parse Christianity in light of Orthodox Judaism, in a way that strongly affirms the Biblical Fundamentalism and Neo-Conservatism of the two respective religions without antagonizing the Evangelical Christians.
That January 2008 article seems to have succeeded quite well, as Soloveichik continued to write for the journal, and his October 2010 entry “Torah and Incarnation” serves as a companion piece to the earlier “Jesus” piece.
Perhaps more than any other Jewish writer engaged by FT, Soloveichik has shown just how conversant he is with the debased language of the Radical Religious Right, which has become such a critical part of the Trumpworld Alt-Right alliance in the wake of Charlottesville and Pittsburgh. He certainly has fluency in the arcane discourse of the New Convivencia.
And while Soloveichik has moved on from FT and is now writing for The Tikvah Fund’s Mosaic magazine and is featured in a monthly column for the Norman Podhoretz-founded Commentary magazine, these First Things articles allow us to see his development both as a card-carrying member of the Radical Religious Right and as a reliable partner in Trumpworld Fascism as filtered through Wyschogrod’s Anthropomorphic Biblical Incarnationism.
These five articles open a very revealing window into the astonishing professional and institutional rise of the very ambitious Soloveichik, as he has briskly moved up the ladder from various prestige Synagogue pulpits and sundry Ivy League academic institutions to proudly become a prominent leader in the Neo-Conservative religious-intellectual hierarchy; which in its Jewish iteration now includes Tikvah, Commentary, and, sadly, formerly-Sephardic Congregation Shearith Israel.
He has become a formidable opponent of the classical Sephardic tradition and the noble values of Jewish Humanism as expressed in the Maimonidean literary canon. These articles show us a vigorous White Jewish Supremacy that is in active league with the Catholic extremism of First Things.
David Shasha
The Virtue of Hate
January 2003
No Friend in Jesus
January 2008
God’s First Love: The Theology of Michael Wyschogrod
November 2009
Torah and Incarnation
October 2010
King David
January 2017