Leon Wieseltier

Leon Wieseltier (b June 14, 1952) is a 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 the Yeshivah of Flatbush, 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.

Joshua Muravchik calls Wieseltier a "liberal thinker," and George Packer calls him one of the "ideas men of the liberal intellegentsia."

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.[1] Andrew Sullivan has said that 'Wieseltier is a connoisseur and cultivator of personal hatred' [2].