Kristol's departure from Commentary coincided with a shift in his interests from religion and theology to politics and culture. His brief tenure as executive director of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom was followed by five years in London as co-founder and co-editor of Encounter magazine; then, back in New York, he became editor of the Reporter and, in 1965, founder and co-editor of the Public Interest. These journals placed him at the heart of the controversies provoked first by the Cold War, then by the culture wars and socio-political wars that by the late 1960s and early 1970s would provoke the emergence of neoconservatism. Kristol did not cease to think about Jews and Judaism in these years; he was an ardent supporter of Israel and followed its history with intense interest and anxiety. But he did cease to write about them, so that the bibliography of his Judaica shows a gap of two decades.

In 1972, Kristol resumed writing about Judaism, often in the context of politics and culture. It is interesting that in that year, his first article in the Wall Street Journal (inaugurating a three-decade stint as a monthly contributor) was "Why Jews Turn Conservative". Datelined Jerusalem — this was one of several visits to Israel — it deals with the persistent predisposition of Jews, in Israel as in America, toward liberalism. Might this be changing, Kristol hopefully suggests? If so, it was not because Jews were turning rightward but because the Left was becoming more aggressively leftist. A dozen years later, in Commentary, Kristol was less sanguine, despite the fact that there were good reasons for a rightward turn in America — "Great Society" programmes that had adverse effects on society and the economy, affirmative-action programmes that imposed quotas antithetical to liberal ideals (and to Jews), anti-Semitism among blacks whom Jews had so staunchly supported. Nor were Jews moved by the emergence of a vigorous pro-Jewish and pro-Israel tendency among conservative evangelicals. "The Political Dilemma of American Jews", as the title put it, was a dilemma of their own making, an inability to confront the new realities of American life.

Kristol's final article on the subject, delivered in Jerusalem in 1999 under the audacious heading, "On the Political Stupidity of the Jews," was even more unforgiving. At stake now were not only domestic issues affecting Jewish interests in the US and Israel — the economy, society, and the role of religion in civic life — but pressing issues of international policy as well, bearing on the security and indeed the very existence of the state of Israel. It was a "daunting task," Kristol concluded, but a necessary one, to overcome the utopianism that had so long afflicted Jewish political thinking:

American Jewry will not survive without Israel, and Israel cannot survive without the Jews of the United States. And neither community can survive without the development of a sound Jewish political tradition, which will teach us to think realistically about our politics, our economics, and our foreign relations.