Commentary (magazine)

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 Records 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 ideas of the young Jewish New York intellectuals 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:

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 quality sagged, as Cohen suffered from mental illness and committed 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".

The emergence of the New Left, which was bitterly hostile to Johnson, to capitalism and to universities, angered Podhoretz for what he perceived as its shallowness and hostility to Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. Articles attacked the New Left on questions ranging from crime, the nature of art, drugs, poverty, to the new egalitarianism; Commentary said that the New Left was a dangerous anti-American, anti-liberal, and anti-Semitic 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) non-profit 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 has been referred to in three Woody Allen films:

• In 1971, in Bananas, an issue of Commentary is first seen on a rack in a pornographic bookshop, and later, as an old lady is threatened on a subway car, Allen hides his face by holding up the issue of the magazine in an image now featured at the New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn Heights.

• In 1977, in Annie Hall, Allen, as character Alvy Singer, makes a pun by saying 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, stand-up comedian Richard Lewis was often shown holding or reading a copy of Commentary.

Reception and influence

American-Israeli journalist Benjamin Balint and former editor at Commentary described the magazine as the "contentious magazine that transformed the Jewish left into the neoconservative right". Historian and literary critic Richard Pells said that "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

• Podhoretz, Norman. Breaking Ranks (1979), memoir
• Nathan Glazer, Thomas L. Jeffers, Richard Gid Powers, Fred Siegel, Terry Teachout, Ruth R. Wisse et al. in Commentary in American Life, ed. Murray Friedman. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005

Bibliography

• Balint, Benjamin. Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine That Transformed the Jewish Left Into the Neoconservative Right (PublicAffairs; 2010) 290 pages
• Ehrman, John. "Commentary, the Public Interest, and the Problem of Jewish Conservatism", American Jewish History 87.2&3 (1999) 159–181. online in Project MUSE, scholarly article by conservative historian
• Franczak, Michael. "Losing the Battle, Winning the War: Neoconservatives versus the New International Economic Order, 1974–82," Diplomatic History, Volume 43, Issue 5, November 2019, Pages 867–889, Losing the Battle, Winning the War: Neoconservatives versus the New International Economic Order, 1974–82.
• Jeffers, Thomas L. Norman Podhoretz: A Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2010)

References

1. Frank, T.A.. (January 25, 2018). "Why conservative magazines are more important than ever". Washington Post.
2. Abrams, Nathan. (2009). "Norman Podhoretz and Commentary magazine: the rise and fall of the neocons". Continuum.
3. Abraham Moses Klein. (2011). "The Letters: The Letters". University of Toronto Press.
4. "Guide to the Records of the American Jewish Committee Executive Offices (EXO-29), Morris Waldman (1879-1963). Files 1905-1963, RG 347.1.29".
5. "EBSCO Locate".
6. Ehrman, John (June 1, 1999) [https://www.questia.com/read/1G1-63090926 "Commentary, the Public Interest, and the Problem of Jewish Conservatism"], ''American Jewish History''
7. Pells, Richard H.. (1989). "The liberal mind in a conservative age: American intellectuals in the 1940s". Wesleyan University Press.
8. Thomas L. Jeffers, ''Norman Podhoretz: A Biography'' (2010) pp. 20, 62, 129, 145.
9. Yair Rosenberg. (6 June 2014). "Commentary Opens its Archives". Tablet Magazine.
10. Sam Tanenhaus. (September 1, 2009). "The Death of Conservatism". Random House Publishing Group.
11. "Commentary, American Jewish Committee Separate". The New York Sun.
12. (February 2007). "To Our Readers".
13. (September 19, 2011). "Commentary Magazine Archive Given to University of Texas". [[The New York Times]].
14. See [http://hnn.us/roundup/41.html#141959 announcement] {{Webarchive. link. (August 23, 2013)
15. (2010). "Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine That Transformed the Jewish Left Into the Neoconservative Right". PublicAffairs.
16. Patricia Cohen. (June 11, 2010). "Commentary Is All About Commentary These Days". The New York Times.
17. Quoted from Murray Friedman (ed.): ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=s0pIx9ODf5UC ''Commentary'' in American Life]'', Philadelphia 2005, p.1, Temple University Press.