"(..) At a talk in Brooklyn, Levi, asked for his opinion on Middle East politics, started to say that ‘Israel was a mistake in historical terms.’ An uproar ensued, and the moderator had to halt the meeting. Later that year, Commentary, raucously pro-Israel by now, commissioned a 24-year-old wannabe neocon to launch venomous attacks on Levi. By Levi’s own admission, this intellectual thuggery (bitterly regretted by its now anti-Zionist author) helped extinguish his ‘will to live’.
