Did someone say “prophetic”? There’s no point denying it: neocons tend to be Jewish. There are plenty of prominent exceptions  William Bennett, the former education secretary, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late United States senator, diplomat, White House aide and sociologist, were both Roman Catholics  but neoconservatism’s priorities, which range from strong support for Israel to vehement opposition to affirmative action, are heavily influenced by the values, interests and collective historical memory of the Jewish people. Heilbrunn carries this conceit to the outermost boundaries of good taste by dividing his book into sections whose names are derived from the Old Testament: “Exodus,” “Wilderness,” “Redemption” and “Return to Exile.”

Heilbrunn, a senior editor at The National Interest, is himself a lapsed neocon who spent the 1990s writing hard-line foreign policy articles for that magazine, then but no longer a neocon redoubt, and also for The New Republic, a centrist-liberal magazine somewhat sympathetic to neoconservative arguments, especially concerning the cold war and the Middle East. (Truth in book reviewing compels me to note that I worked there a decade before Heilbrunn did, but we’ve never met.)

Heilbrunn confesses in the book’s prologue that he found neoconservatism “supplied me with a beguiling but ultimately artificial clarity about the world that was hard to shake.” His front-row seat gives him an easy familiarity with his subject, but in this case that seems less help than hindrance, because the author’s disillusioned perspective feels a tad insular, and occasionally shades into snideness, the most egregious example being a labored postscript set eight years in the future (the former undersecretary of defense for policy, Douglas Feith, “had become dean of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, where he had instituted a new course on the British Empire and Winston Churchill”). In addition to indulging in such inside jokes, Heilbrunn can’t resist turning some of the neocons’ more tendentious rhetorical devices (example: “It is no accident that ...”) on the neocons themselves. This may constitute just deserts, but it has the unfortunate side effect of punishing the reader.

The first half of Heilbrunn’s book relates neoconservatism’s origins and its journey to the brink of political power in the late 1970s. It’s a familiar tale, told better in “The Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are Changing America’s Politics,” published in 1979 by Peter Steinfels (then the executive editor of Commonweal and now a columnist on religion for The New York Times). Steinfels came at the neocons from farther to the left than Heilbrunn and consequently was more critical. But the Steinfels book was also more rigorously analytic and, strangely, more generous in granting neocons their due as thinkers. Chalk it up to the narcissism of small differences. As best I can make out, Heilbrunn retains most of the foreign-policy views that he held before but applies them with greater judiciousness, and can no longer bear the sight of those who don’t. (The neocons’ domestic policies seem to interest Heilbrunn not at all; he scarcely mentions them.)

From both Steinfels and Heilbrunn, we learn that neoconservatism was the final stop of an ideological journey for a group of New York intellectuals, typically the children of Jewish immigrants, that began during the early 1940s in Alcove 1 of the cafeteria at City College. Alcove 1 was the gathering place for a group of brilliant young Trotskyists that included Irving Kristol, Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer and Melvin Lasky. Along with Irving Howe, who would later break with Trotskyism but not with the left, and Daniel Bell, who never accepted Marxist orthodoxies in any form, the Alcove 1 Trotskyists waged intellectual battle with the Stalinists in Alcove 2, who vastly outnumbered them.