Especially for those of us exercised by so-called Jewish ethics, “The Sins of Leon Wieseltier” which you can read here by Joseph Epstein at the Weekly Standard is cruel and painful reading, excellent for the take down of a sexual predator while getting at what for us here was an emblem of contemporary Jewish thought. What stands out is not just the man’s preening and ambitious arrogance, but the character of a moral bully whose example marks out the limits of Jewish ethics. Epstein marks out the “moral diatribes,” claims to “[deep] moral imagination,” calling out the “moral idiocy” of others, assuming to be the “moral conscience of the intellectuals, the Jews, the nation at large,” the “high moral dudgeon,” the “moralizing tone,” the “moralizing, the portentousness, the pomposity.” Maybe it’s true that what Wieseltier only ever cared about literariness, not ethics and certainly not humility, the cardinal virtue in “the Jewish tradition.” He knew how to dress it up, putting Jewish morality on show before the literary set. For those of you regretting with sadness his passing from the scene, one should consider the damage done first to people and then to ideas.