a writer and editor for the Nazi newspaper Das Reich from 1940 to 1942. Noelle-Neumann's response to the article was to claim that "texts written under a dictatorship more than 50 years ago cannot be read as they were in 1937, 1939 or 1941. Severed from the time and place where they were written, they are no longer real, for reality is in part based on time and place." As chairman of Chicago's political science department at the time, Mearsheimer sat down with Noelle-Neumann to discuss the article and the allegations. After meeting with her for over three hours, Mearsheimer publicly declared, "I believe that Noelle-Neumann was an anti-Semite," and he spearheaded a campaign to ask her for an apology. He joined other University of Chicago faculty in writing a joint piece for Commentary that reacted to Noelle-Neumann's reply to the accusation against her. They declared that "by providing rhetorical support for the exclusion of Jews, her words helped make the disreputable reputable, the indecent decent, the uncivilized civilized, and the unthinkable thinkable." Mearsheimer said, "Knowing what we know now about the Holocaust, there is no reason for her not to apologize. To ask somebody who played a contributing role in the greatest crime of the 20th century to say 'I'm sorry' is not unreasonable." The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy In March 2006, Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, the former academic dean and professor of international relations at the Harvard Kennedy School, published a working paper and a London Review of Books article discussing the power of the "Israel lobby" in shaping U.S. foreign policy. They define the Israel lobby as "a loose coalition of individuals and organizations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction." They state that it is not appropriate to label it a "Jewish lobby" because not all Jews feel a strong attachment to Israel, and because some of the individuals and groups who work to foster U.S. support for Israel are not Jewish. According to Mearsheimer and Walt, Christian Zionists also play an important role. Finally, they emphasize that the lobby is not a cabal or a conspiracy but simply a powerful interest group, like the National Rifle Association or the farm lobby. Their core argument is that the policies pushed by the lobby are not in the national interest of the US or ultimately of Israel. Those pieces generated