The Other McCain

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‘Forgetting Is Sin’: Some Thoughts on the Life and Career of My Friend Jeff Dunetz

Posted on | July 26, 2025 | 2 Comments

Tuesday my friend Jeff Quinton sent me a message saying he heard that our blog friend Jeff Dunetz had died after suffering a fall. I quickly reached out to Warner Todd Huston, and to Jeff’s daughter Alexa, and learned that Jeff was still on life support, but he died Thursday. At Jeff’s blog, Warner Todd Huston posted the obituary:

Jeff Dunetz, the creator and operator of LidBlog, passed away on Thursday, July 24.
Dunetz passed after a series of medical issues that have struck him over the last year. He was 67 years of age.
Jeff, a life-long New Yorker, was a man of good humor and even temperament and even during his late illnesses and health scares, he was always upbeat and ever ready with a quip or two, ofen at his own expense.
A graduate of Oceanside High School in Oceanside, New York, Jeff studied political science and government at the State University of New York at Oswego, then went on to earn a BA in political science at the University of Albany, and later an MBA in business at Hofstra University.
Jeff spent much of his professional life in magazine marketing and advertising working for such companies as Disney Publishing, Nickelodeon, Discover Magazine, MTV, and Marvel Comics.
But it was blogging and commentary on current events that was Jeff’s real passion. Dunetz was one of the early blogging leaders and commentators when the world of center-right blogging really caught fire in the early part of the 2010s. And by 2013 he had formally started the LidBlog to deliver news and views on U.S. and Israeli politics and history. And in doing so, Jeff became one of the leading self-made bloggers appearing on TV, Radio, Podcasts, and the Internet throughout the media.
Dunetz leaves a strong and important legacy of writings and commentary about Israeli history and American politics and left us with stories and information that remain to this day invaluable to all of us.
Along with his LidBlog, the indefatigable writer’s work appeared at The Jewish Press, Aish.com. The Jewish Star, Breitbart News, MRCTV.org, the Daily Caller, PJM, The Washington Times, and Hot Air, and many, many more.
He also hosted the Lid Radio Show which ran for some time on the SHR and High Plains Talk Radio networks.
He leaves behind his wife, Lois, and his son Perry and daughter Alexa. He also leaves behind his first and only grandchild, Benjamin.
Jeff will be missed by literally millions of people who have read and appreciated his work over the years.

Yesterday, I messaged Alexa — who just recently gave birth to Jeff’s first grandchild — and said, “I’m sure your dad would be glad to know he got an Instalanche,” of which he’d had many over the years.

Like most of my Old School blogging friends, including HotAir’s Ed Morrissey, I’d first met Jeff Dunetz at CPAC. Back in the day, Jeff’s blog was called Yid With Lid, as he was always vehemently proud to be a Jew. When I went searching for our previous links to his old Blogspot site, one of them involved a memorable spat with Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs. That was 15 years ago, my friends, and while digging down that rabbit hole, I came across this video from CPAC 2012, where Andrew Breitbart posed for a photo with Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, quipping: “This is the Charles Johnson special.”

 

“Memories, light the corners of my mind . . .”

Some of y’all kids — by which I mean, folks who haven’t been following the blogosphere for 20 years — may not get Breitbart’s joke.

Circa 2004, Charles Johnson’s LGF was one of the most influential right-wing blogs, but within a few years, Charles started getting crazy. The first big hint was when he began attacking Geller as a “fascist,” because of her association with such European figures as Geert Wilders. Johnson also went after Spencer on the same grounds, and two years later — September 2009 — was when the Great LFG Blog War finally burst into the open, and Charles got his ass kicked so badly that he announced he had “parted ways” with conservatives. I bring this up in connection to Jeff Dunetz because in 2011, Jeff threw down on the Southern Poverty Law Center after they hate-listed Pamela Geller.

Alexa was pleased when I told her that her dad got a shout-out from John Podhoretz, which is pretty doggone big league. Speaking of Jeff being “a fighter for his people,” he went to bat for me when my @rsmccain account got banned from Twitter in February 2016:

My friend Stacy has fallen victim to a problem with most social media today, which is they do their damndest to censor conservatives. It’s up to all of us to fight to get him back on twitter–because if Twitter is allowed to get away with banning Stacy McCain for free speech, they will be able to ban any of us for basically anything.
So I support the #FREESTACY movement not just because Stacy McCain is a friend, but because what happened to him could happen to any of us.

If “the memory of Jeff Dunetz [is to] be for a blessing,” of course, this requires us to remember Jeff Dunetz, which calls to mind the phrase I used in the headline: “Forgetting is sin.” It was about 30 years ago, when I lived in Rome, Georgia, that I heard a Presbyterian minister speak on that theme. And when I say “Presbyterian,” I mean a hard-core old-fashioned Calvinist, not one of these worthless Laodicean liberals.

The minister was talking about why history is so important in understanding who we are, and he referenced the prophet Jeremiah: “Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls.” A respect for history and tradition — following “the old paths” — is not merely about finding “rest for your souls,” but is essential to preserving a sense of identity. The minister pointed out how we, as Chritians, read the history of ancient Israel and are astonished by how quickly they could forget all the miracles God had wrought for them. He sent plagues on Egypt, parted the Red Sea, fed them with manna from heaven and yet, somehow, they forgot all He had done for them and decided instead to make a golden idol they could worship.

“But how are we any better?” the minister then asked. When we look at the history of America, and consider all the earnest prayers of our ancestors, who proclaimed their gratitude to God for the many blessings He had bestowed upon them — for how else could a few settlers have survived on the wilderness frontier, and flourished into a great nation? — are we any less guilty of forgetting than were those ancient Israelites?

“Forgetting is sin!” The minister’s words have stuck with me through all the intervening years, and perhaps readers now understand better why I sometimes dwell on historic themes (e.g., “Of Declarations and Independence” on the Fourth of July, and “The Meaning of Thanksgiving” last November). The remembrance of history is a religious obligation, a debt we owe to God, and certainly in this matter, Christians would be wise to study the example of the Jews.

Jeff Dunetz knew who he was. His sense of identity was a source of inspiration, as well it should be. Not all of my acquaintances share my admiration of the Jews (note the tactful understatement) and among the criticisms one sometimes hears is about how “those Jews all stick together” — like that’s a bad thing, or something. Far from disapproving of such tribalism, I consider it a trait worthy of emulation.

Here, I must my mention my friend Pete Da Tech Guy, who is as proudly Sicilian as Jeff Dunetz was proudly Jewish. While we were covering Scott Brown’s 2010 Senate campaign, Pete and I were in the North End of Boston when he insisted we step into an Italian cafe. After we’d gotten our coffee, Pete pointed out how the little old ladies in the place had stopped speaking English, switching their conversations to sotto voce Italian when we walked in. Clannish and distrustful of outsiders? Oh, gosh, the Sicilians are as notorious for that as . . . Well, some of my backwoods Southern ancestors, now that I think about it.

An appreciation for tradition — following “the old paths,” as the minister reminded us — ought to be part of what unites us as conservatives, no matter what our particular ethnic identity may be. And this is why it is so important to remember history. Five years ago, I wrote an American Spectator column called “The High Price of Forgetting,” about Al Sharpton’s sordid history, and guess whose work I cited?

The rampage of violence against Jews in Crown Heights [in 1991] has been called a “pogrom,” and many have pointed the finger of blame at Sharpton. What began as a tragic automobile accident, in which a car in a Hasidic rabbi’s motorcade struck and killed a seven-year-old child, turned into a three-day riot. Businesses were burned or looted, more than 150 police officers and nearly 40 civilians were injured, and a 29-year-old graduate from Australia, Yankel Rosenbaum, was fatally stabbed by a gang of black teenagers. . . .
Sharpton has vehemently disclaimed any responsibility for the riots or the murder of Rosenbaum, but what happened after the riots ended is beyond dispute. At the funeral of Gavin Cato, the boy killed in the accident, Sharpton “gave an anti-Semitic eulogy, which fueled the fires of hatred,” as Jeff Dunetz recounted:

“The world will tell us he was killed by accident. Yes, it was a social accident.… It’s an accident to allow an apartheid ambulance service in the middle of Crown Heights.… Talk about how Oppenheimer in South Africa sends diamonds straight to Tel Aviv and deals with the diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights. The issue is not anti-Semitism; the issue is apartheid.…
“All we want to say is what Jesus said: If you offend one of these little ones, you got to pay for it. No compromise, no meetings, no kaffe klatsch, no skinnin’ and grinnin’. Pay for your deeds.” …
Sharpton and the lawyer representing the Cato family counseled them not to cooperate with authorities in the investigation and demanded a special prosecutor be named.
When Sharpton was asked about the violence, he justified it:
“We must not reprimand our children for outrage, when it is the outrage that was put in them by an oppressive system.”
The first Sabbath after the funeral, Sharpton tried unsuccessfully to kick up tensions again by marching 400 protesters in front of the Lubavitch of Crown Heights shouting “No Justice, No Peace.”

Shouldn’t a man of God be expected to know the commandment, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour”? By defaming the Jews as perpetrators of “apartheid,” a word deliberately chosen to inflame racial hatred, Sharpton earned the permanent contempt of every decent American.

As long as Jeff Dunetz lived, that history would never be forgotten, and if we wish to honor Jeff’s memory, we ought to do what we can to preserve the legacy of his valuable work. All of us owe a debt to God, which must be paid in the currency of remembrance, and forgetting is sin.



 

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2 Responses to “‘Forgetting Is Sin’: Some Thoughts on the Life and Career of My Friend Jeff Dunetz”

  1. Saturday's Final Word - Stand Up Republican
    July 26th, 2025 @ 11:05 pm

    […] Jeff Dunetz knew who he was. His sense of identity was a source of inspiration, as well it should be. Not all of my acquaintances share my admiration of the Jews (note the tactful understatement) and among the criticisms one sometimes here is about how “those Jews all stick together” — like that’s a bad thing, or something. Far from disapproving of such tribalism, I consider it a trait worthy of emulation. […]

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    August 3rd, 2025 @ 8:09 pm

    […] ‘Forgetting Is Sin’: Some Thoughts on the Life and Career of My Friend Jeff Dunetz Hot Air Standup Republican A View From The Beach EBL 357 Magnum […]