This is a hell of a good season for audacity. If you haven't tuned in to Joe Klein's fight with the smarmy bullies of the Jewish Right, here's what you've been missing. Last month, Joe Klein posted in his Time blog as follows:

The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives--people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary--plumped for this war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel.

Now, of the efforts of Messrs. Perle, Lieberman, Feith, Scheunemann, Wolfowitz, Podhoretz, & Co. to catapult the U. S. into the crazy, hideous, and disastrous war in Iraq, there is not the slightest doubt. That the chief perpetrators of the war were not Jewish, and that they had other ideas besides "making the world safe for Israel," is also doubtless--Foxman duly pointed this out, telling Klein something that he, Klein, had doubtless figured out on his own. I wish Klein had put this directly and not hidden behind the euphemism of "raising the question of divided loyalties": As he also well knows, and has written, the problem with the neocons is not that they care about Israel but that their ideas about how to implement that care are desperately wrongheaded and dangerous.

In any event, subtlety is not Foxman's strong suit. Sailing out into non sequitur waters, he went on:

Whether or not one feels that America's war on Iraq was justified, the charge that it is being fought by the United States on behalf of Israel is both offensive and categorically false.

I missed the part where Klein "charged" that the Iraq war "is being fought by the United States on behalf of Israel." There is no such part. And so Klein rightly fired back that he "never said that Jewish neocons were the primary reason we went to war in Iraq." And then he upped the ante, charging that

there is now, in my opinion, an even more dangerous tendency among Jewish neoconservatives to encourage a pre-emptive attack on Iran's nuclear program. Their gleeful, intellectual warmongering--given the vast dangers and complexities of an attack on Iran--is nauseating.

What's more, Klein proceeded to speak unminced words that rarely bust through into the light of Time or the NYT or the WP or the NewsHour or CNN or any of the august channels where respectable opinion casts its pieties:

I find your "outrage" particularly galling because the people you defend are constantly spewing canards against those who favor talking to the Palestinians, or who don't favor witless bellicosity when it comes to Iran. Their campaign of defamation has cost people jobs, damaged reputations and careers. I am very tired of having reasonable people accused of being "soft on terrorism" or "unpatriotic" or favoring "surrender"--Joe Lieberman's favorite--by Jewish neoconservatives who seem to have a neurotic need to prove their toughness. They, and you, should know that most Jews disagree with their politics and many Jews are disgusted with their behavior. They, and you, should know that the tendency to "cry wolf" about antisemitism does real harm to the Jewish community--indeed, in this case, it is laughable.

Foxman blasted back that "if you consider the history that has seen Jews vilified as a group that keeps to itself, is conspiratorial and has dual loyalties, you will better understand our concern." (Obviously the charge that Jews keep to themselves is a canard. If only Perl, Feith, Wolfowitz, Scheunemann et al. had kept to themselves and refrained from talking up their idea of a dandy little war with Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld & Co., the guys with the troops.)

And then, although Klein had said nothing about anybody's religious views, Foxman proceed to take up his position behind a favored redoubt--the privacy of religion:

None of the issues you raise has anything to do with a person's religion or religious beliefs. None of the neo-conservatives, whether Jewish or of another faith (or no faith), has expressed his or her views about foreign policy in terms of religion.

Enough of Foxman's non sequiturs, and let's get serious. As everybody knows, there is a Jewish establishment that for years has carried holy water for the Israeli Right. It is not "pro-Israel"--it is pro-bellicosity. (That means sometimes pro-Likud and sometimes pro-bellicosity, including its Labor wing, which seems to be in Ehud Barak's care at the moment.) The ADL, which stands, or sits, mute on the routine defamation of liberal American Jews as "self-hating," plays in this league. So, disgracefully, does The New Republic, much of whose staff knows far better but which nonetheless lends itself to smears against the liberal Jewish J Street lobby and its blogger-supporters Eric Alterman, Matt Yglesias, and Ezra Klein. (See Eric's rundown here, and latterly Ezra Klein on the outrages of TNR's Jamie Kirchick. On the Joe Klein-Foxman contretemps, also see Matt , Ezra and Daniel Levy.)

Confrontations like these between Joe Klein and Abe Foxman are going to become more frequent, even more intense, as the Bush lockdown on the Middle East expires. Who knows, it might even happen that some liberal Jewish money might embolden itself to fight the regnant alternative--the blowhard billions of the right-wing gambling tycoon Sheldon Adelson and friends. Should Obama get to the White House, factions will gather, hover, contend, and clash by day and night. The absurdity of a united "Jewish community" will break down--as it needs to. That's not anti-Semitism, it's politics.

For now, congratulations to Joe Klein for stepping up and out. I have not always agreed with him over the years, but who cares?