Norman Podhoretz was born on January 16, 1930, in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York. His father, Julius Podhoretz, had come to America in 1912 at age sixteen, his mother Helen in 1920 at age seventeen. They were distant cousins, introduced by relatives in America. Nearly everyone in the extended family entered into traditionally brokered wedlock with some cousin or other, but the Julius–Helen marriage in 1923 was a newfangled love-match. The family came from Galicia, which during World War I had been conquered by Cossacks and occupied by Russians. Helen, the oldest of five children, had to take care of everyone, including her mother, “a useless woman” who, Podhoretz has written, “made a habit of passing out every Friday night before the onset of the Sabbath, thereby leaving my humiliated but brassy preteen mother to run shouting through the village, ‘Mama just fainted again, please come help.’” The anecdote gives a glimpse of the travails undergone by a girl whose father (“a mean prick,” according to his grandson) had emigrated to America just before the war broke out.

The “prick” was M'shitzik Woliner, “a bayzer Yid, an angry Jew,” a Hasid who never smiled. He grew more devout with age, and Norman would later joke that “since the 613 commandments binding upon a pious Jew were not enough for him, he had invented new ones, like a prohibition against whistling, which he was firmly convinced had been ordained by God.