Norman Podhoretz was born and raised in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Podhoretz's family was leftist, with his elder sister joining a socialist youth movement. He attended Boys High School in the borough's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, ultimately graduating third in his class in 1946; his classmates included the prominent Assyriologist William W. Hallo and advertising executive Carl Spielvogel. Admitted to Harvard University and New York University with partial tuition scholarships, Podhoretz ultimately elected to attend Columbia University after receiving a full Pulitzer Scholarship.
In 1950, Podhoretz received his BA degree in English literature from Columbia, where he was mentored by Lionel Trilling. He concurrently earned a second bachelor's degree in Hebrew literature from the nearby Jewish Theological Seminary of America; although Podhoretz never intended to enter the rabbinate, his father (who only attended synagogue on the High Holidays) wanted to ensure that his son was nonetheless conversant in "the intellectual tradition of his people" as "a nonobservant New World Jew who… treasured the Hebraic tradition". After being awarded the Kellett Fellowship and a Fulbright Scholarship, he later received a second BA in literature with first-class honors and an MA from Clare College, Cambridge, where he briefly pursued doctoral studies after rejecting a graduate fellowship from Harvard. He also served in the United States Army (1953–1955) as a draftee assigned to U.S. Army Security Agency.
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