Remembering Marshall Breger z”l (1946-2025)

A voice that was always reframing leaves a legacy of principled common ground.

Marshall Breger columns
By | Aug 20, 2025

The last time I talked to Marshall Breger, Moment’s longtime columnist who passed away August 3, he was eagerly describing a column he wanted to write about Zohran Mamdani. 

The young Muslim New York mayoral hopeful had come out of nowhere, and the Jewish community was in an uproar. It was a controversy right up Marshall’s alley, and, as a conservative intellectual who’d also been a political operative, he had strong views. First, that condemning statements by Mamdani as antisemitic, and ruling him out as a potential New York mayor based on the judgment that his views on Israel were unacceptable, was exactly the wrong way for Jews to handle this dynamic young political phenomenon. Second, and more generally, that blanket condemnation in general was a terrible way to deal with antisemites, whether or not Mamdani qualified as one. It was bad on principle, he felt—Marshall loathed anything resembling cancellation—and also bad strategy. 

We thought of him as one of our conservative columnists, but Marshall never peddled dogma or retailed anyone else’s talking points. He was always reframing.

It was a classic Marshall argument, in line with principles he’d returned to often over his 30 years as a Moment columnist: the need to engage people you disagree with rather than writing them off; the destructive effect of demanding that everyone in the community toe a party line. But I never got a chance to see how he’d construct it, because Marshall died a couple of weeks later. When we spoke, he’d just weathered a prolonged medical crisis and had seemed to be on the upswing; I’d called to congratulate him on winning, yet again, a Rockower Award from the American Jewish Press Association (the “Jewish Pulitzer”) for his 2024 opinion columns, and I was pleased that he was feeling well enough to mull over his next one. We agreed I’d call him after he got home from rehab and he’d dictate the column, if he felt up to it. But it wasn’t to be. 

Instead, we’re left with appreciation for what Marshall gave Moment; a legacy of thoughtful work mapping out a principled common ground between left and right that now seems almost imaginary. He’d been writing his column since 1994, long before the start of my tenure as opinion editor (or Nadine Epstein’s as editor in chief). Before that, he’d been liaison to the Jewish community in Ronald Reagan’s White House, the first Orthodox Jew to hold that post, at a time when so few Jews identified as Republican that the group later known as the Republican Jewish Coalition went by a nonpartisan label to avoid raising hackles. 

His most notorious adventure in that job was his presence at Reagan’s side during the Bitburg controversy, which, for those not versed in 1980s political trivia, was an enormous political flap caused by Reagan’s decision to make a stop, on a trip to Germany, at a cemetery that turned out to contain SS graves. Marshall, as liaison, got caught in the crossfire between the White House and Jewish leaders begging the president not to make the visit; a Moment profile of him in 1985 was titled “Marshall Breger and the Worst Job in Washington.” But he remained a Reagan Republican and a conservative thinker, moving from the White House to the Heritage Foundation and then to Catholic University, where he taught law for three decades. 

Marshall BregerWe thought of him as one of our conservative columnists, but Marshall never peddled dogma or retailed anyone else’s talking points. He was always reframing. His first column for Moment was about how liberal Jews (then, as now, the overwhelming majority) could and must communicate better with the ascendant religious right. The piece is characteristically even-handed, urging evangelical right-wingers to offer secular rationales, not just appeals to faith, for its policy choices, but concluding that Jewish fear and hostility are also part of the problem: “Only when Jews treat the Religious Right with respect can we demand pluralism and tolerance in return.” 

As Republican politics shifted rightward, Marshall kept writing columns about the rule of law, especially international law, and the separation of church and state. He was no fan of efforts to cordon off the Holocaust as an event that cannot even be mentioned in comparison with other horrors, writing in 2000, “We do not cheapen the enormity of the Shoah by comparing and contrasting it to other examples of human evil run amuck. The horrendous events of the Shoah are part of human history and must be studied as such.” One gripping column described a trip in which he accompanied a group of imams to Auschwitz. 

A recognized expert in the property laws governing religious sites, he wrote a 2023 column on conflicting claims to the Temple Mount, laughing good-naturedly when we gave it the headline “Mine, Mine, All Mine!” It won yet another Rockower.  

Principles aside, Marshall was Moment family. Readers will appreciate just how much if they check this adorable video clip, in which Marshall and his wife Jennifer meet Reagan in the Oval Office and present their baby daughter, Sarah—now Moment’s editor. (The Bregers appear at 8:15).

And his days as a political strategist never entirely left him. As we chatted about Mamdani, his tone changed and he mused, “I could come up with a list of ten things he could do to soothe people’s fears and mend fences with the Jewish community. First, get someone to take him to the Rebbe’s grave.” 

“Oh, write about that!” I cried, as editors do, and he chuckled and agreed. Alas, the last nine action items on the list will remain a mystery.

One thought on “Remembering Marshall Breger z”l (1946-2025)

  1. Deborah Kaplan says:

    After reading about Marshal Berger I was prompted to immeadiately subscibe to Moment Magazine for the two year all digital access. I want to be able to go back and read all of his columns. I am sorry I was not familiar with his wisdom prior to today. May is memory be for a blessing

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