Tensions at the New Republic revealed in open email to historian

When John Judis, a longtime senior editor at The New Republic, published a book examining the role of the pro-Zionist lobby in persuading President Harry S. Truman to support the founding of the Jewish state in 1948, he expected strong criticism, and he has certainly gotten it.

Since the book, “Genesis: Truman, American Jews and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict” appeared in February, it has drawn sometimes sharply negative assessments in The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, The National Interest and elsewhere. An invitation to speak at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York was rescinded, then reinstated.

But perhaps the most stinging response came from one of his own colleagues. The New Republic’s longtime literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, sent an email to the historian Ronald Radosh, praising his review in The Jewish Review of Books that said Mr. Judis had distorted history to write “a profoundly anti-Zionist book.”

The book, Mr. Wieseltier wrote, is “shallow, derivative, tendentious, imprecise and sometimes risibly inaccurate.” Mr. Judis, he added, “is a tourist in this subject. Like most tourists, he sees what he came to see.”...