If you want to understand the moral collapse of the left in America these days, consider the shame of Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg. He is a distinguished scholar and historian, a longtime spiritual leader of a suburban conservative synagogue, who has served Jewish organizational life as president of the American Jewish Congress and a vice president of the World Jewish Congress, years during which he emerged as one of the most articulate doves on the world scene.

Yet the other day, this paragon of American liberalism gave an interview to a well-known extremist magazine that operates on the quack fringe of the political spectrum, the Executive Intelligence Review, which is linked to Lyndon LaRouche. And what does this vaunted rabbi say in EIR? He launches a harsh attack on the president of his own country, George W. Bush, and hints darkly that Mr. Bush’s political inspiriter, Natan Sharansky, was a Soviet communist agent.

I don’t know whether that shocks you, but it certainly shocked me. I have known Rabbi Hertzberg for years and long considered him an ally in the great political battles of our day, Jewish and secular. I am currently employed by the same American Jewish Congress he once served as president. Before you give EIR the benefit of the doubt, consider the following: EIR blamed September 11 on the Mossad working with a “rogue” element in American intelligence; defended the Sudan against charges of slavery and discrimination against the Nubian population; called Leo Strauss the “Fascist Godfather of the Neo-Cons”; exposed Mr. Bush as a “Drug Kingpin,” and reserved some of its choicest language for Ariel Sharon, who, it claims, aims at “a ‘final solution’ to the ‘Palestinian problem,’ through the mass expulsion and/or extermination of the more than 3 million Palestinians and Arabs now living in Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights.”

Rabbi Hertzberg’s interview with the LaRouche organ was so astounding to me that I telephoned him at his New Jersey synagogue office. And what I got left me as disturbed as when I had first placed the call. When I asked the rabbi about the cognitive dissonance of reading him in the pages of EIR, Rabbi Hertzberg at first maintained that he had been duped into the interview. Such ignorance was hard to square with the EIR interviewer’s multiple references to LaRouche and his program, and Rabbi Hertzberg’s concluding reference to looking forward to his next lunch with LaRouche. Moreover, I pointed out, this was the second interview Rabbi Hertzberg had given EIR in the less than a year.

On second reflection, Rabbi Hertzberg admitted to knowing that EIR was a LaRouche-linked publication and that, indeed, he had met with LaRouche once, getting the impression that the former extremist was attempting to “atone for his past sins.” Indeed, Rabbi Hertzberg thought (and was no doubt encouraged to think) that LaRouche was eager to move toward Rabbi Hertzberg’s position, rather than sidling up to the Jewish leader in order to gain a measure of respectability, without sacrificing his positions or prejudices. As we spoke, Rabbi Hertzberg further acknowledged that he now understood that LaRouche “is the same anti-Semite he always was,” adding his anger at having been the victim of “dirty pool,” or manipulation.

But we are still left with the question of Rabbi Hertzberg’s message. In his interview in the February 11 EIR, Rabbi Hertzberg reasserted his faith in securing a peace with the Palestinians. Fair enough, though he appeared not to have taken any note whatsoever of the collapse of the Oslo process. But he promptly debunked Mr. Bush’s adoption of Mr. Sharansky’s thesis of spreading democracy (on which reasonable people can disagree) after suggesting that Mr. Sharansky may have been a double agent, repeating this outrageous canard as if it was no more than Hollywood gossip.

The earlier conversation, which ran in the April 23, 2003 EIR, came days after Mr. Bush and Mr. Sharon exchanged letters committing Israel to the Gaza Plus withdrawal and America to opposing the Palestinian right of return and Israel’s goal to modify the 1967 borders. Rabbi Hertzberg’s reaction? “Both of them will fry in hell for what they did yesterday.”

The underlying problem here is not the error in judgment Rabbi Hertzberg made with regard to his evaluation of LaRouche, as flawed as that was. The real problem is that this veteran leader of dovish Zionist opinion should entertain the notion that there are no enemies on the left, that anyone combining support for the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel with harsh criticism of the Israeli right, must be all right.

This is no small thing for people like me, who over the years found much logic and idealism on the left. With much trepidation, I voted for Mr. Bush on foreign policy grounds, though most people that I know voted for Senator Kerry and could not fathom why I wasn’t following their lead. I neither question their motives nor condemn their candidate to everlasting damnation. When I hung up the phone with my old friend and teacher Rabbi Hertzberg, I sat back and thought it is just a sad thing to see a onetime hero of mine so repulsed by the president I voted for clinging to the likes of Lyndon LaRouche. And that’s a shame.

Mr. Twersky is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.