Leon Wieseltier (; born June 14, 1952) is an American critic and magazine editor. From 1983 to 2014, he was the literary editor of The New Republic. He was a contributing editor and critic at The Atlantic until October 27, 2017, when the magazine fired him following allegations and an admission by Wiesenltier of multiple instances of sexual harassment. He is currently the editor of Liberties. Life and career Wieseltier was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Stella (Backenroth) and Mark Wieseltier, who were Holocaust survivors from Poland. He attended the Yeshiva of Flatbush, Columbia University, Oxford University, and Harvard University. He was a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows (1979–82). During his tenure as literary editor of The New Republic, Wieseltier played a central role in the increased stature of its "back of the book" or literary, cultural and arts pages, which he edited. The magazine's owner, Marty Peretz discovered Wieseltier, then working at Harvard's Society of Fellows, and installed him in charge of the section. Wieseltier reinvented the section along the lines of The New York Review of Books, allowing his critics, many of them academics, to write longer, critical essays instead of simple book reviews. Media critic Eric Alterman has called the selection of Wieseltier "probably [...] Peretz's single most significant positive achievement" in running the magazine. During other changes of editors, Wieseltier remained as cultural editor. Under him the section was "simultaneously erudite and zestful." Wieseltier has published several books of fiction and nonfiction. Kaddish, a National Book Award finalist in 2000, and a National Jewish Book Award winner in the Nonfiction category in 1998, is a genre-blending meditation on the Jewish prayers of mourning. Against Identity is a collection of thoughts about the modern notion of identity. Wieseltier also edited and introduced a volume of works by Lionel Trilling entitled The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent and wrote the foreword to Ann Weiss's The Last Album: Eyes from the Ashes of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a collection of personal photographs that serves as a paean to pre-Shoah innocence. Wieseltier's translations of the works of Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai have appeared in The New Republic and The New Yorker. Wieseltier served on the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and was a prominent and outspoken advocate of the Iraq War. "I am in no sense a neoconservative, as many of my neoconservative adversaries will attest," Wieseltier