Christopher Hitchens, the atheist and iconoclast who discovered in adulthood that he was of Jewish descent, has died.
Vanity Fair, where much of Hitchens’ work appeared, announced his Dec. 17 passing on Twitter. He was 62 and had esophageal cancer.
Hitchens, born in Britain but more recently naturalized as an American citizen, emerged from the British left in the 1970s, joining the New Statesman as a journalist.
Hitchens had a complicated and evolving relationship with Israel and Judaism. Regarding Israel, he allied himself in the 1970s and 1980s with Palestinian nationalists and called himself an anti-Zionist. Yet in later years he developed a grudging appreciation for Israel as a democracy in a region he saw as ridden with radical theocrats.
Hitchens was 38 when his maternal grandmother revealed to his younger brother, Peter, that she was Jewish.
In a 1988 essay, Hitchens wrote: “My initial reaction, apart from pleasure and interest, was the faint but definite feeling that I had somehow known all along.” Despite his rejection of religious precepts, Hitchens would make a point of telling interviewers that according to halachah, he was Jewish. — jta