The Trouble with Hitchens

And there is the rub. While we are told not to speak ill of the dead, it is no less crucial to have the record of their lives straight. Critics’ personal affection for Hitchens should not obscure the fact that he had a troubling bête noire in Judaism and indulged freely in some of the most barbarous and defamatory stereotypes about the Jewish people. One year ago, Benjamin Kerstein laid bare Hitchens’s views of Judaism, the Jewish people, and the Jewish state in Jewish Ideas Daily. We reprint his essay (originally titled “Christopher Hitchens’s Jewish Problem”) here, in hopes that readers will see the mixed legacy of this most epicurean epikorus for what it is.

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2011/12/16/main-feature/1/the-trouble-with-hitchens/e