Why the NY Review of Books Attacks Paul Berman

In almost half a century at the helm of The New York Review of Books, Robert Silvers has crafted the essential journal for America’s liberal intellectual elite. Silvers is celebrated by his distinguished writers as a scrupulous, old-fashioned editor who fusses over their every word. The British historian Timothy Garton Ash tells of receiving a transatlantic phone call from Silvers just as his family was sitting down to Christmas dinner: the editor wanted to discuss a dangling participle he had spotted in the galley of Garton Ash’s next article. Silvers subjects manuscripts to “pitiless” scrutiny, says New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus. So the last thing you would expect to see in The New York Review is a factually challenged hit job on a serious contemporary writer—and a writer of the left and former New York Review contributor, at that. Yet that’s exactly what appeared in the Review’s August 19 issue in the guise of a review of, among other books, Paul Berman’s The Flight of the Intellectuals.