Historian, social activist, and a prolific writer, Murray Friedman was appointed as vice chair of the US Civil Rights Commission in Washington, D.C. by Preisdent Ronald Reagan and acting chair following the death of the chairman. He will be honored in 2005 by Temple University which will announce the creation of the Murray Friedman Chair in American Jewish History at that time. In 2003, he served in a State Department delegation representing the US in Vienna at a Conference on Racism, Xenophobia, and Discrimination. Dr Friedman has written and edited numerous books including What Went Wrong? The Creation and Collapse of the Black Jewish Alliance (1995), several volumes on Philadelphia history, and The Utopian Dilemma: American Jews and Public Policy. In addition, he has written articles in Commentary, The Atlantic Monthly, The Weekly Standard, and The New Republic as well as professional journals such as American Jewish History.

Introduction; 1. Jews and the making of the cosmopolitan culture; 2. The premature Jewish Neoconservatives; 3. Forgotten Jewish godfathers; 4. The Liberal civil war; 5. The modernization of American conservatism; 6. The Liberal meltdown; 7. The rise of the Neoconservatives; 8. Neoconservatives and the Reagan revolution; 9. Nicaragua: the cold war comes to this hemisphere; 10. Irving Kristol and a new vision of capitalism; 11. The Neoconservative assault on the counterculture; 12. Jews and the Christian right; 13. Epilogue.