Steve Walt

For his Connecticut insurgency, Joe Lieberman amassed $13.8 million as of 9/30 (per the FEC). Ned Lamont was gasping away at about $9 million. Big stakes. One of Lieberman's more generous enablers is Robert Belfer, energy executive, who lives in New York. He and his wife Renee look to have given about 8 large to the diminutive power-mad son of a liquor-store-owner.

I wish I could take credit for my clever headline. I can't, the highly-influential New York Sun came up with it, last spring, a week after the Walt-Mearsheimer paper on the Israel lobby was printed by the London Review of Books. The Sun was calling Belfer out, because he's a big philanthropist to Jewish causes and also funds the Belfer center at Harvard's Kennedy School; Stephen M. Walt, one of the authors of the Israel lobby paper, holds the Robert and Renee Belfer chair in international relations there.

The Sun reported that Belfer was not pleased by Walt's scholarship, and had made a call about it. At the time I believe Belfer had no public comment. But the Sun and others were pressing Belfer to renounce Walt, take back his money, make Walt sit on a cold metal folding chair instead of a Belfer, etc. There was also talk that Walt was being asked not to use Belfer's name in public statements on the Israel lobby. Indeed, when Walt and Mearsheimer's National Press Club event was organized by the Islamic group CAIR in late August, CAIR's press release identified them simply as professors.

Big deal. Walt still holds the Belfer chair at Harvard. It does not appear that Robert Belfer has forced him to revoke anything, or has taken his money back. I imagine there's been a lot of pressure on Steve Walt, professional and social, at Harvard, and I hope we will read that story one day in his and Mearsheimer's book for FSG. But Belfer, too, has been pressured; and I'm going to take things at face value and say, People have behaved in a sophisticated and mature way here, even members of the Loose Coalition of Affinity for Israel (formerly known as the Israel lobby). Props to Robert Belfer.

As I went downtown on the subway Thursday I wondered whether I wasn't going to seem a fool for how excited I'd been in the days leading up to the debate. Then when I got there that selfconsciousness vanished, because the excitement was so palpable. The lines snaked all around Cooper Union. This had to do in part with the security measures to prevent anyone from blowing the place up, but more to do with the stormsurge of interest. All the tickets had been sold, and there were a couple hundred people on a line just to get extra seats. I had bought an extra ticket, and impetuously gave it to a girl on the line.

The hall was subterranean. You went down into one of the great spaces of New York, with arched wings of dressed brownstone going off the columns to the walls, and then the pleasure was the pleasure of intellectual seriousness. Later I learned that the Great Hall was the place where the NAACP and the women's suffragists' movement was born. I saw a great number of people I half-know, and it was evident that the ideas that Walt and Mearsheimer put forward are of tremendous interest to many serious people. Lewis Lapham was sitting behind me, Ham Fish was a row away. I saw Adam Shatz of the Nation, Michael Massing of NYRB, Mary Kay Wilmers, the editor of the LRB, and so on. Even my wife had come. It's hard to get her out.  read more »

Tonight's the big debate. I haven't been so excited since Norman Mailer and Germaine Greer and Susan Sontag squared off over feminism. As a pipsqueak, I was on the wrong side then (Mailer's), now I'm on the right one.

One cool thing about this event is you can play the West End in London or the Arena Stage in Washington forever, but nothing really matters till you come to New York. That's the function of a cultural capital. New York has suppressed these ideas for a long time, but thanks to the London Review of Books, it's taking them on tonight, as it should. As it provided the venue for Mailer and Greer, when they wrestled over the power of women.  read more »

The big question this time around is simple: Can we talk about the political power of Jews? I'm firmly in the yes camp.