Thursday, November 15, 2007
Who's Who Of Knickerbocker Village: Leon Wieseltier
I'm not 100% sure, but I trust Marty's memory that this guy lived among us at KV. Certainly there was a Wieseltier family and they were big. Marty recalls a memorable episode where the Wieseltier dad took on a group of local toughs and beat the crap out of them. He may have been a Holocaust survivor. Looks like Leon might be a "friend" of Mona Charen as he wrote a letter of support for his pal Scooter Libby. See his bio below. He may have been born in Brooklyn, but the family could have moved to Knickerbocker Village later on.
Leon Wieseltier (b June 14, 1952) is an American writer, critic, and magazine editor. Since 1983 he has been the literary editor of The New Republic.
Wieseltier was born in Brooklyn, New York and attended Columbia University, Oxford University, and Harvard University, and was a member of Harvard's Society of Fellows from 1979-1982.
Wieseltier has published several fictional and non-fictional books. Kaddish, a National Book Award finalist in 2000, is a genre-blending meditation on the Jewish prayers of mourning. Against Identity is a collection of thoughts about the modern notion of identity.
Wieseltier also edited and introduced a volume of works by Lionel Trilling entitled The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent and wrote the foreword to Ann Weiss's The Last Album: Eyes from the Ashes of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a collection of personal photographs that serves as a paean to pre-Shoah innocence. Wieseltier's translations of the works of Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai have appeared in The New Republic and The New Yorker.
During Wieseltier's tenure as literary editor of The New Republic, many of his signed and unsigned writings have appeared in the magazine.
Wieseltier served on the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. "I am in no sense a neoconservative, as many of my neoconservative adversaries will attest," Wieseltier wrote in a May 2007 letter to Judge Reggie Walton, seeking leniency for his friend Scooter Libby.
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