Gelernter All The Time

There's no way out of this now; today's YDN includes me vs. a professor with an endowed chair:

For Gelernter, it would have been enough simply to embrace such a slur against Jews and neoconservatives alike -- without assuming this perspective, his argument is unintelligible. [I.e., the notion that "Jewish conservative" and "neoconservative" are equivalent.] But discontent, he further uses it to motivate a positively volkish glorification of Jewishness as a racial category and semi-plausibly attributes that view to Disraeli in order to coat his own inverted racialism with a patina of respectability. (How bad does it get? Without flinching, Gelernter takes himself to be scoring moral points by valorizing the Disraeli maxim: "All is race … there is no other truth.") This is where Gelernter's piece should have reached its nadir.

Improbably, however, Gelernter manages to descend even further into the muck by maligning the philosopher Isaiah Berlin. Were I as inclined as Gelernter to trade in unfalsifiable, categorical generalizations, I would say that he has wittingly defamed the rest of the Jewish intellectual tradition by extension.