The original question, however, remains. Why have British Jews not also developed this neoconservative insight and the urgent impulse to try to stem the anti-Western, post-moral tide?

Well here's a theory. While the great neocon "conspiracy" beloved of the "Bush lied, people died" crowd is a fiction, there is surely a case for saying that neoconservatism is a movement infused with Jewish ethical values. 

Despite its founding fathers' secularism, it is all about reasserting the moral codes of the Hebrew Bible which underpin Western culture: individual freedom, human equality, self-restraint in the interests of others — and above all, a passion for justice at every level of human society.

And here's why it plays differently on different sides of the pond. When Jewish immigrants arrived in Britain a century or so ago, they were absorbed into an ancient culture that expected them to fit in. They went to English grammar schools, learned to play cricket and (absurdly) wore top hats in their synagogues.

But the American Jews had a very different experience. The Commentary intellectuals were educated as often as not in the City College of New York — considered the "Harvard of the proletariat" — where they tended to be taught by other brilliant Jewish intellectuals.

Schooled in the sense of their own particularity, the Commentary writers came to realise that America was a society formed in large measure by outsiders. They found that alienation was not a Jewish disease. Yet paradoxically, as they came to identify Jewishness with America itself, this perpetuated their sense of themselves as a distinctive group bound by shared values and experiences.

Podhoretz's famous jibe that American Jews earn like Presbyterians but vote like Puerto Ricans should thus be expanded: they also think like Jews. And that was surely what led people like him and Kristol and the rest to mount their heroic defence of Western civilisation of which Commentary — despite the fact that its glory days may now be past — remains the beacon and shining star.