NEW YORK (AP) — Norman Podhoretz, the Jewish intellectual and boastful, hardline editor and author whose books, essays and stewardship of Commentary magazine marked a political and deeply personal break from the left and made him a leader of the neoconservative movement, has died. He was 95.

Podhoretz died “peacefully and without pain” Tuesday night, his son John Podhoretz confirmed in an essay on Commentary’s website. His cause of death was not immediately released.

“He was a man of great wit and a man of deep wisdom and he lived an astonishing and uniquely American life,” John Podhoretz, now Commentary’s editor, wrote. “His knowledge extended beyond literature to Jewish history, Jewish thinking, Jewish faith, and the Hebrew Bible, with all of which he was intimately familiar and ever fascinated. He made the life of the mind a joyous sport.”

Norman Podhoretz was among the last of the so-called “New York intellectuals” of the mid-20th century, a famously contentious and largely Jewish circle that at various times included Norman Mailer, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag and Lionel Trilling.

As a young man, Podhoretz longed to join them. In middle age, he departed. Like Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb and other founding Jewish neoconservatives, Podhoretz began turning from the liberal politics he shared with so many peers and helped reshape the national dialogue in the 1960s and after.

The son of immigrants, Podhoretz was 30 when he was named editor-in-chief of Commentary in 1960, and years later transformed the once-liberal magazine into an essential forum for conservatives. Two future US ambassadors to the United Nations, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick, received their appointments in part because of essays they published in Commentary that called for a more assertive foreign policy.

Despised by former allies, Podhoretz found new friends all the way to the White House, from former president Ronald Reagan, a reader of Commentary, to former president George W. Bush, who in 2004 awarded Podhoretz the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, and praised him as a “man of “fierce intellect” who never “tailored his opinion to please others.”

Podhoretz, who stepped down as editor-in-chief in 1995, had long welcomed argument. The titles of his books were often direct and provocative: “Making It,”........

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