It has been difficult for many people to get a handle on the Jewish-American intellectual Norman Podhoretz. When he started out as a writer in New York in the fifties, his friend, the novelist Norman Mailer, admiringly called him the “hanging judge” of literary criticism,while others – the novelist Saul Bellow and the poet John Berryman – thought him much too big for his britches. Fifty years on, neoconservatives – intellectuals who began as liberals but then changed their minds – regard him as an icon speaking truth, whether about democracy's struggle against totalitarians, the promise of America, the condition of Western culture, or the essence of Judaism. Liberal intellectuals, for their part, remain wedded to their idea of him as a warmonger – a “zany” hysteric, as one put it recently, with a “toughness problem.”