Dual Loyalty And The New Republic Supporting Israel becoming litmus test for the left. by Jonathan Mark Eric Alterman, the media analyst, has always been sensitive, touchy even, on the question of “dual loyalty,” the belief that somewhere an anti-Semite is keeping tabs on the extent to which an American Jew’s support for Israel justifies Jew hatred. Few anti-Semites, though, have been as persistent, even merciless, in exploring dual loyalty as has Alterman, a Jew who admits to a dash of dual loyalty all his own. A columnist for The Nation, and a professor of journalism at Brooklyn College, in 2003 he essayed a column on Iraq in which he was concerned that the “primary intellectual architects” of the Iraq war “are all Jewish neoconservatives. So, too, are many of its prominent media cheerleaders,” prompting “the ‘Jews control the media’ problem.” Jewish “hard liners” on Iraq appeared, said Alterman, “at least from a distance, to be behaving in accordance with traditional anti-Jewish ste...