Eric Breindel, 1955-1998
Eric Breindel, 1955-1998 /""""^nly on Yom Kippur f ldoes a shul get this V»_^^ crowded," someone murmured to me as the sanctuary at the Park Avenue Synagogue began to fill on Monday, March 9. It...
...my childhood fantasy that raindrops were God's tears again seemed literally true...
...Eric Breindel's funeral took more than two hours—there was so much to talk about...
...Eric Breindel had a personal interest in pogroms, and not just because he was himself a believing Jew...
...It was not, alas...
...And so he dedicated himself to the extirpation of the Soviet Union...
...Kennedy also noted Eric's fierce intelligence, as focused as a laser beam—the smartest guy at Harvard, he said...
...I'm tempted to rant like Jeremiah or Job, to demand an accounting of God for breaking His promise and breaking our hearts by shortening Eric Breindel's days upon this earth," the eulogist said, his voice breaking with emotion...
...It was, instead, a funeral for a 42-year-old man whose sudden death violates all sense of justice...
...Because he had not left his own issue to carry on his name after him...
...John Podhqretz...
...Eric was not only an anti-Communist...
...Robert Kennedy Jr., a friend since college despite their ideological differences, said that one of the first voices on his answering machine after the horrific death of his brother Michael a few months ago was Eric's: "Tell me where to go, and what to do, and I will be there...
...Pat Moynihan, whose student Eric was at Harvard, said he had taught Eric for two years and had learned from him for 20...
...Because he had bested cancer only a few years earlier...
...the people of Eric's father and mother, the people he devoted so much of his young life to defend-ing—with all the bravery of his heart, with all the devotion of his soul, and with all the power of his mind and pen...
...I will affirm my conviction that, in another sense, Eric's days . . . will be lengthened . . . in the continued life of Israel and the Jewish people...
...In they poured, along with the rain—Moynihan and D'Amato, Pataki and Giuliani, Kissinger and Koch, Zuckerman and Murdoch, and a thousand other people, so many of them from the glittering precincts of New York society that you might have thought the occasion a charity auction...
...These words were spoken by my father...
...By common consensus, the most powerful eulogy was one expressing anger at Eric's untimely death...
...Upon his death he was a senior official of News Corporation, the company that owns this magazine...
...Murdoch delivered the opening eulogy Monday...
...On such a day," he said, "one feels one should give one's son a hug...
...He was especially, and rightly, proud of the way he served as New York City's conscience when, in 1991, he insisted that the murderous anti-Hasidic riots in Crown Heights were nothing less than an American pogrom...
...His efforts to open the public's eyes to the evil in Crown Heights, together with his courageous advocacy of a lone Korean grocer in Brooklyn who found himself the object of a racist boycott, powerfully argued for ousting Mayor David Dinkins in favor of his 1993 challenger, Rudolph Giuliani...
...Because he had predeceased his own beloved parents...
...He was also a conservative whose words helped guide the city he lived in to a better path...
...His parents are both Holocaust survivors, a horrible truth that gave him an understandably voracious interest in the literature of totalitarianism and anti-Semitism...
...That evening, we found ourselves, my father and I, at another event in town...
...Personages not known for talking about such things in public dwelt in their eulogies on the love they felt for Eric— men like Henry Kissinger, Rudy Giuliani, Alfonse D'Amato...
...But I will not give in to that temptation...
...Eric thus made a signal contribution to the unexpected salvation of New York City in the 1990s— and to its continuing raffishness when he helped save the New York Post from going under in '93 by working some behind-the-scenes magic to restore ownership of the paper to Rupert Murdoch...
...And because it seemed, in the wake of his passing, that hundreds and hundreds of lives were going to be significantly poorer because he would no longer be a part of them...
...Eric Breindel, 1955-1998 /""""^nly on Yom Kippur f ldoes a shul get this V»_^^ crowded," someone murmured to me as the sanctuary at the Park Avenue Synagogue began to fill on Monday, March 9. It was a lousy, stormy morning...
...He made a special point of talking about Eric's absolute, unshakable loyalty, a quality that was indispensable to Eric's most extraordinary gift—the gift of his friendship...
...And though Nazism was long dead, there was an anti-Semitic totalitarian threat still loose upon the world—the Soviet Union...
...It was in the pages of the Post that Eric, who also wrote for The Weekly Standard as well as the New Republic and Commentary and many other publications, did his finest work...
...It also publishes the New York Post, where Eric served as editorial-page editor for 11 years and as a weekly columnist until his death...
...He saw me and threw his arms around me...
Vol. 3 • March 1998 • No. 27
