Commentary is a monthly American magazine on religion, Judaism, Israel, politics, and social and cultural issues. It is headed by John Podhoretz. Founded by the American Jewish Committee in 1945 under Elliot E. Cohen, editor from 1945 to 1959, Commentary magazine developed into the leading post-World War II journal of Jewish affairs. It strove to construct a new American Jewish identity while processing the events of the Holocaust, the formation of the State of Israel, and the Cold War. Norman Podhoretz edited the magazine from 1960 to 1995. Besides its coverage of cultural issues, Commentary provided a voice for the anti-Stalinist left. As Podhoretz shifted from a liberal Democrat to neoconservatism in the 1970s and 1980s, he moved the magazine with him to the right and toward the Republican Party.
History
Founding
Commentary was the successor to the Contemporary Jewish Record, which was published by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and ran from 1938 to 1945, when its editor, AJC executive secretary Morris Waldman, retired.
20th century
In 1944, with the Record’s editor retiring, the AJC consulted with New York City intellectuals including Daniel Bell and Lionel Trilling, who recommended that the AJC hire Elliot Cohen, who had been the editor of a Jewish cultural magazine and was then a fundraiser, to start a new journal. Cohen designed Commentary to reconnect assimilated Jews and Jewish intellectuals with the broader, more traditional, and very liberal Jewish community. At the same time, the magazine was designed to bring young Jewish New York intellectuals’ ideas to a wider audience. It demonstrated that Jewish intellectuals, and by extension all American Jews, had turned away from their past political radicalism to embrace mainstream U.S. culture and values. Cohen stated his grand design in the first issue:
With Europe devastated, there falls upon us here in the United States a far greater share of the responsibility for carrying forward, in a creative way, our common Jewish cultural and spiritual heritage…to harmonize heritage and country into a true sense of at-home-ness. Although many or even most of the editors and writers had been socialists, Trotskyites, or Stalinists in the past, that was no longer tolerated. Commentary articles were anti-Communist and also anti-McCarthyite; they identified and attacked any perceived weakness among liberals on Cold War issues, backing President Harry Truman’s policies such as the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and NATO. The “soft-on-Communism” position of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and Henry A. Wallace came under steady attack. Liberals who hated Joseph McCarthy were annoyed when Irving Kristol wrote at the height of the controversy that “there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing.” In the late 1950s, the magazine’s quality sagged, as Cohen became mentally ill and died by suicide. A protégé of Lionel Trilling, Norman Podhoretz took over in 1960, running the magazine until his retirement in 1995. Podhoretz said that Commentary was founded to lead the Jewish intellectuals “out of the desert of alienation…and into the promised land of democratic, pluralistic, and prosperous America”. Cohen brought on board strong editors who themselves wrote important essays, including Kristol; art critic Clement Greenberg; film and cultural critic Robert Warshow; and sociologist Nathan Glazer. Commentary published work by Hannah Arendt, Daniel Bell, Sidney Hook, and Irving Howe. The emergence of the New Left, which was bitterly hostile to President Lyndon B. Johnson, capitalism, and universities, angered Podhoretz with what he perceived as its shallowness and hostility to Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. Articles attacked the New Left on matters including crime, the nature of art, drugs, poverty, and the new egalitarianism; Commentary said the New Left was a dangerous anti-American, anti-liberal, and antisemitic force. Daniel Patrick Moynihan used Commentary to attack the Watts riots and liberals who defended it as a just revolution.
21st century
In 2007, the magazine ended its affiliation with AJC when Commentary, Inc., an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit enterprise, took over as publisher. In 2011, the journal donated its archives from 1945 to 1995 to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. These included letters and essay revisions.
Popular culture
Films
Commentary is mentioned in three Woody Allen films:
In 1971, in Bananas, an issue of Commentary is seen on a rack in a pornographic bookshop. Later, as an old woman is threatened on a subway car, Allen hides his face by holding up the issue of the magazine. That image is displayed at the New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn Heights. In 1977, in Annie Hall, Allen’s character Alvy Singer jokes that he heard that Dissent and Commentary had merged to form Dysentery. In 1989, in Crimes and Misdemeanors, an issue of Commentary lies on a character’s bedside table.
Television
Between 1989 and 1992, in the ABC sitcom Anything but Love, standup comedian Richard Lewis was often shown holding or reading a copy of Commentary.
Reception and influence
American-Israeli journalist and former Commentary editor Benjamin Balint has called it the “contentious magazine that transformed the Jewish left into the neoconservative right”. Historian and literary critic Richard Pells said, “no other journal of the past half century has been so consistently influential, or so central to the major debates that have transformed the political and intellectual life of the United States.”
Notes
References
Bibliography
Further reading
Weekly Standard article on Commentary The New York Sun article on who attends the annual Commentary-hosted gathering More bio bits on Cohen and Commentary history Vallentine Mitchell Publishers Forthcoming Titles Nathan Abrams, Commentary Magazine 1945–1959: ‘A Journal of Significant Thought and Opinion. Bio on Cohen and Commentary’s early history]
External links
Official website “Commentary Magazine: An Inventory of Its Records” at the Harry Ransom Center