At the age of 40, Norman Podhoretz had a revelation—the revelation “that Judaism was true.” What was the Judaism that was true, to Norman Podhoretz? At its core, it was a Judaism of obligation and joy in equal measure. Such a combination was anathema to most public intellectuals of the 1960s and ’70s, but not to Norman Podhoretz, whose life was defined by the seamless blending of such contradictions.   Podhoretz was born in Brooklyn but spoke the Galician Yiddish of his parents as a first