An Endangered Species." As Chronicles editor Scott Richert described it, [One line] helped define the emerging struggle between Neoconservatives and Paleoconservatives. "Not seldom has it seemed," Kirk declared, "as if some eminent Neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States." A few years later, in another Heritage Foundation speech, Kirk repeated that line verbatim. In the wake of the Gulf War, which he had opposed, he clearly understood that those words carried even greater meaning. Neoconservative commentator Norman Podhoretz, called Kirk's line "a bloody outrage, a piece of anti-Semitism by Kirk that impugns the loyalty of Neoconservatives." She claimed that Kirk "said people like my husband and me put the interest of Israel before the interest of the United States, that we have a dual loyalty." She had previously denounced Joseph Sobran and the Intercollegiate Review symposium as anti-Semitic as well. She told The New Republic, "It's this notion of a Christian civilization. You have to be part of it or you're not really fit to conserve anything. That's an old line and it's very ignorant." Conversely, Paleocon Samuel Francis called Kirk's "Tel Aviv" remark "a wisecrack about the slavishly pro-Israel sympathies among Neoconservatives." He called Decter's response untrue, "reckless" and "vitriolic." 1989: The Rockford Institute Another defining incident came on May 5, 1989, when the Rockford Institute fired Richard John Neuhaus, who went on to launch the religious journal First Things. One issue between them was that Neuhaus claimed that Chronicles, Rockford's magazine, tilted toward nativism and was "insensitive to the classic language of anti-Semitism." Allan Carlson, then Rockford's president, called the allegations "egregious and potentially damaging." Fourteen years later, Neuhaus called Chronicles "racist and anti-Semitic," joked about "Schadenfreude" and said he holds a "gala staff luncheon" every year to commemorate his termination. John Judis, a left-wing author and journalist, described the incident: Under the Rockford Institute's name and funding, Neuhaus published a regular newsletter out of his Center for Religion and Society in New York. But in March 1989, Neuhaus and Podhoretz took strong exception to two articles published in Rockford's glossy journal, Chronicles. In one of them, Chronicles editor Thomas Fleming called for stricter quotas to prevent the United States from "being dominated by Third World immigrants," and in the other, novelist Bill Kauffman defended Gore Vidal, who had earlier attacked Podhoretz for putting Israel's interests before America's. In a letter, Podhoretz wrote Neuhaus,