Martin Peretz

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Martin H. Peretz, also known as Marty Peretz, (born December 6, 1938), is an American publisher and Harvard University lecturer. He owned The New Republic from 1975 to 2007, ^[1] and served for many years as its editor-in-chief. In 2007, he sold his shares to CanWest Global Communications Corporation but retained his editor-in-chief position.

Contents 1 Personal 2 Editorial stance 3 Controversies 4 Quotations 5 References 5.1 Notes 6 External links

[edit] Personal

Peretz is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science. He received his B.A. degree from Brandeis University in 1959, and M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University, going on to lecture in social studies. Additionally, Peretz has seven honorary doctorates, and in 1982 received the Jerusalem Medal.

Peretz is married to Anne Labouisse Farnsworth Peretz, heiress to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune and daughter of H.R. Labouisse and Elizabeth Scriven Clark. Her wealth is widely credited as having given Peretz the means to buy The New Republic.

[edit] Editorial stance

Under the leadership of Peretz, the magazine has generally maintained liberal and neoliberal positions on economic and social issues, and assumed hawkish and strong pro-Israel stances in foreign affairs. Some 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. Peretz is a strong supporter of Al Gore and advocates for his candidacy in 2008.

Peretz has been accused by several critics of being stridently anti-Arab and anti-Muslim. Glen Greenwald, a lawyer and author, reviewed a month's worth of Peretz's New Republic blog, The Spine, and found that "his blog, and apparently his political worldview, are devoted primarily to one argument -- that Arabs and Muslims are primitive savages and barbarians, and that the notion of a 'moderate Muslim' or even a civilized Arab is all but a myth. The majority of Peretz's posts, with varying degrees of explicitness, is devoted to bolstering that claim." [1]

Media critic Jack Shafer has described Peretz as a "self-promoter, braggart, Arab-hater, name-dropper, and bad writer." Shafer's 1991 examination of the 90-plus pieces Peretz inserted into The New Republic found Peretz repeatedly explaining his theory that there are no "Arab nations," only violent tribal groups with no allegiance to their countries.^[2] He also noted frequent press-bashing of media outlets and personalities Peretz perceives as enemies of Israel, ranging from the Washington Post to Peter Jennings.

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.

[edit] Controversies

In a November 28, 2006 posting on his TNR blog 'The Spine,' Peretz referred to former United States President Jimmy Carter, writing: "That's how he will go down in history: as a Jew hater." [2] On February 16, 2007 he added: "...he (Carter) is animated by a very strong animus towards Jews." [3]

Peretz's commentaries rarely mesh with the moderate opinions and analysis expressed by the The New Republic's writing staff. 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.)

On September 8, 2006 Peretz joined the Libby Legal Defense Trust as an Advisory Committee Member. [4]

[edit] Quotations

• "I actually believe that Arabs are feigning outrage when they protest what they call American (or Israeli) "atrocities." They are not shocked at all by what in truth must seem to them not atrocious at all. It is routine in their cultures. That comparison shouldn't comfort us as Americans. We have higher standards of civilization than they do." The Plank, "The New Republic", Nov. 19, 2006

• "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)

• "[N]onviolence is foreign to the political culture of Arabs generally and of the Palestinians particularly. It is a failure of the collective imagination for which no one is to blame." Diarist, The New Republic, March 10, 1986.

• "[The Lebanese] fight simply because they live. And the culture from which they come scarcely thinks this is odd. Their men fight on and on, and the women and children bleed." The New Republic, March 19, 1990.

• "One cannot discuss at any respectable dinner table what many respectable people are thinking themselves. This is the matter of where do Arab Americans really stand on terror. It's a question that Kenneth Chadwell, assistant U.S. attorney for the Detroit area, asked about the Lebanese Shia who make up about 30,000 of the 100,000 people in Dearborn, Michigan: 'Are they loyal to the United States or to this group Hezbollah?' The answer is not simple. Still, the question is not simple at all. … They have not really left the "old country" behind, and some of them are making themselves at home by committing criminal acts." The Plank, The New Republic, July 31, 2006

• "(Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad) Siniora seems to have changed his mind about Hezbollah. Or is he simply speaking with the forked tongue that defines the political culture from which he has emerged?" The Plank, The New Republic, July 20, 2006

• "For years (William Shawcross) was an eminence on the north-Atlantic left, first in Great Britain and then in the United States. Then he changed his own mind. Or, rather, he was converted by the fascists of Islam and other demonic forces." The Plank, The New Republic, August 15, 2006

• "Had (George Soros) been tried in a de-Nazification process for having been a young cog in the Hitlerite wheel, he would have felt that, since other people would have confiscated the same Jewish property and delivered the same deportation notices to the same doomed Jews, it was as if he hadn't done it himself." The New Republic, Feburary 12, 2007.

[edit] References

[edit] Notes

[edit] External links

• TNR biography
• The New Republic - TNR Online
• "The Perpetually Perfervid Peretz," Slate
• "Marty Peretz's Word Power", Slate
• "DEPAUL'S DISGRACE", by Martin Peretz, New Republic blog, 10.09.2006