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Murray Chotiner
Biography of Murray Chotiner
A feed for Chotinerings, in honor of New Yorker staff writer Isaac Chotiner BlueskyFeedCreator.com Info & Donate: https://blueskyfeedcreator.com/p/joshuajfriedman.com/thechotinering#donate
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In 1956 it was reported Mickey Cohen, one of the leaders of the mob in Los Angeles, raised funds for Nixon's 1950 campaign. Cohen signed a confession in October 1962, that he raised $75,000 in return for political favors. Arranged via Murray Chotiner.
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Chotiner's review is superb overall. I'd have to read Moser's to see if Moser is acting like he invented the wheel or if Chotiner read that as Moser's argument alone (that Nazism and Zionism both sought to make Europe Juden-rein). In either case, Chotiner's critique of that argument is excellent.
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"To say that Nazism and Zionism both emerged from an anti-cosmopolitan idea is important because it clarifies the problem, which is the aspiration to the separation of ‘races.’"
www.theideasletter.org/es….
![Arendt disrupted an emerging Israeli origin story, and so—as Moser chronicles—a vicious campaign was organized, casting her as an anti-Semite in an early instance of a now-familiar sequence. She was not alone in seeing this similarity (Zeev Sternhell, the Israeli historian of fascism, suggested that “labor Zionism” was an analogue to “national socialism”) but Moser knows the Nazi connection is still the most challenging for many. Reviewing the book in The New Yorker––where Arendt first published her thoughts on Eichmann—Isaac Chotiner leveled the central charges of Manicheanism and solipsism while adding a long demolition job on the empirical claims about Nazi-Zionist collaboration in the Arendt chapter. Chotiner is widely celebrated as a forensic fact-finder whose interviews since October 2023 have skewered various apologists for Israeli violence. He brings that skill to bear in dissecting Moser’s quotations, and he finds many of them wanting. The wider politics of his intervention are more muted, but also perhaps more interesting. He contrasts Moser’s book with another answer to the “what went wrong?” question, from the Israeli genocide scholar Omer Bartov, which finds democratic thoughts jostling with colonial ones in the history of Zionism. Connecting Zionism to Nazism, by contrast, seems to move against this kind of nuance. But one important similarity is that Nazism, like Zionism, has been removed in popular Western readings from its wellspring. The Holocaust is commemorated as a unique evil outside history, or inserted within a history of anti-Semitism alone. [the post continues for another few sentences: the quotation is from the Barnaby Raine article linked to in post above]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:k3okprkp6mqdikp4xrowxb5x/bafkreienht6cv27a3f7avqbsufsrfdsqq5hdbfymljzowmyxn3wlpjxnli)
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Chotiner: And the hero, this “Peter Grant”. He is mixed race.
Bush: Well, that seems a little reductive, honestly. People can identify with characters who are very different from them.
Chotiner: And how different would you say ‘Grant’ was from you? In terms of, say, his football club
Bush: Now, look
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Chotiner: So these books are set in…
Bush: North London, predominantly.
Chotiner: Where you live?
Bush: Well, look, I was actually born in east London.
Chotiner: Which is north of the river
Bush: Now, hold on.
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Well, as a historian and academic developmental editor, I think that if the book really says the things that Chotiner says it says, then it’s probably not worth reading. And Chotiner isn’t some raging pro-Israel person. Plus, I respect him as a reporter and writer.
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I think Isaac Chotiner's dismantling of Benjamin Moser's book depicting Zionism as the ultimate evil is all the more scathing because Chotiner is very obviously not a Zionist himself.
(And you're not dreaming. Moser, a Pulitzer prize winning author, cites TONY GREENSTEIN as an authoritative source)
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PEYTON: Not a throw you want to make with that kinda safety look. Alright Eli, why don’t you introduce our next guess.
ELI: Yeah, Peyt, excited to welcome on New Yorker magazine staff writer Mr. Isaac Chotiner.
PEYTON: Wait—
CHOTINER: Hey Eli. Peyton, in February 1996—
PEYTON: Wait wait wait—
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