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Commentary (magazine)

January 19, 2023

Commentary is a monthly American magazine on religion, Judaism, and politics, as well as social and cultural issues. Founded by the American Jewish Committee in 1945 under Elliot E. Cohen, editor from 1945 to 1959, Commentary magazine developed into the leading postwar journal of Jewish affairs. The periodical 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 in its heyday from 1960 to 1995. Besides its coverage of cultural issues, Commentary provided a voice for the anti-Stalinist left. As Podhoretz shifted from his original ideological beliefs as a liberal Democrat to neoconservatism in the 1970s and 1980s, he moved the magazine with him to the right and toward the Republican Party.[2]

Commentary
Cover of November 2021 issue
EditorJohn Podhoretz
Frequency11 issues / year (monthly, but with a combined July–August issue)
Circulation26,000 (2017)[1]
First issue1945; 78 years ago (1945)
CompanyCommentary Inc.
CountryUnited States
Based inNew York City
LanguageEnglish
Websitecommentary.org
ISSN0010-2601
OCLC488561243

History

Founding and early years

Commentary was the successor to the Contemporary Jewish Record, which was published by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and ran from 1938 to 1945.[3] When the Record's editor[who?] died in 1944, the AJC consulted with New York intellectuals including Daniel Bell and Lionel Trilling: they 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.[citation needed] At the same time the magazine would bring the 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:[4]

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.

As Podhoretz put it, Commentary was to lead the Jewish intellectuals "out of the desert of alienation ... and into the promised land of democratic, pluralistic, and prosperous America".[4] Cohen brought on board strong editors who themselves wrote important essays, including Irving Kristol; art critic Clement Greenberg; film and cultural critic Robert Warshow; and sociologist Nathan Glazer. Commentary published such rising stars as Hannah Arendt, Daniel Bell, Sidney Hook, and Irving Howe.[5]

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; it 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.[citation needed] 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."[6]

Norman Podhoretz

In the late 1950s the magazine sagged, as Cohen suffered from mental illness and committed suicide. A protégé of Lionel Trilling, Norman Podhoretz took over in 1960, running the magazine with an iron hand until his retirement in 1995.[7] Podhoretz reduced the space given to Jewish issues and moved Commentary's ideology to the left. Circulation rose to 60,000 as the magazine became a mainstay of the Washington liberal elite in the heyday of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

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.[8] The shift helped define the emerging neoconservative movement and gave space to disillusioned liberals.

As the readership base shifted to the right, Commentary filled a vacuum for conservative intellectuals, who otherwise were reliant on William F. Buckley Jr.'s National Review. In March 1975 Moynihan's article "The United States in Opposition" urged America to vigorously defend liberal democratic principles when they were attacked by Soviet Bloc and Third World dictatorships at the United Nations. Moynihan was appointed ambassador to the UN by President Gerald Ford in 1975 and was elected to the United States Senate in 1976. Jeane Kirkpatrick's November 1979 denunciation of the foreign policy of President Jimmy Carter, "Dictatorships and Double Standards", impressed Ronald Reagan, who defeated Carter in 1980. In 1981 Reagan appointed Kirkpatrick ambassador to the United Nations and Commentary reached the apogee of its influence.

Recent years

Norman Podhoretz, who served as editor-in-chief until 1995, was editor-at-large until January 2009. Neal Kozodoy, at Commentary since 1966, was editor between 1995 and January 2009; he is the magazine's current editor-at-large. Since January 2009 the journal has been edited by John Podhoretz, Norman's son.

The magazine ceased to be affiliated with the AJC in 2007, when Commentary, Inc., an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit enterprise, took over as publisher.[9]

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.[10][11]

Commentary prints letters to the editor that comment on various articles three issues earlier. The more critical and lengthy letters tend to be printed first and the more praiseful letters last. The author of the article being discussed almost always replies in a follow-up to his critics. Each issue has several reviews of books on varying topics. Commentary usually assigns a review to books written by notable contributors to the magazine.

Popular culture

Commentary has been referred to in several Woody Allen films. In Annie Hall (1977), Allen (as character Alvy Singer) makes a pun by saying that he heard that Dissent and Commentary had merged to form "Dysentery." In Bananas (1971), as an old lady is threatened on a subway car, Allen hides his face by holding up an issue of Commentary. This image is featured at the New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn Heights. In Crimes and Misdemeanors, an issue of Commentary lies on a character's bedside table.

In his 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".[12][13] 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."[14]

Notes

  1. ^ Frank, T.A. (January 25, 2018). "Why conservative magazines are more important than ever". Washington Post. Retrieved September 5, 2020.
  2. ^ Abrams, Nathan (2009). "Introduction". 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. p. 356. ISBN 978-1-4426-4107-5.
  4. ^ a b Ehrman, John (June 1, 1999) "Commentary, the Public Interest, and the Problem of Jewish Conservatism", American Jewish History
  5. ^ Yair Rosenberg (June 6, 2014). "Commentary Opens its Archives". Tablet Magazine. Retrieved February 15, 2019.
  6. ^ Pells, Richard H. (1989). The liberal mind in a conservative age: American intellectuals in the 1940s. Wesleyan University Press. p. 296.
  7. ^ Thomas L. Jeffers, Norman Podhoretz: A Biography (2010) pp. 20, 62, 129, 145
  8. ^ Sam Tanenhaus (September 1, 2009). The Death of Conservatism. Random House Publishing Group. p. 72. ISBN 9781588369482. Retrieved October 18, 2013.
  9. ^ "Commentary, American Jewish Committee Separate". The New York Sun.
  10. ^ Cohen, Patricia (September 19, 2011). . The New York Times. Archived from the original on September 27, 2011.
  11. ^ See announcement August 23, 2013, at the Wayback Machine
  12. ^ Balint, Benjamin (2010). Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine That Transformed the Jewish Left Into the Neoconservative Right. PublicAffairs. ISBN 978-1586487492.
  13. ^ Patricia Cohen (June 11, 2010). "Commentary Is All About Commentary These Days". The New York Times. Retrieved February 14, 2019.
  14. ^ Quoted from Murray Friedman (ed.): Commentary in American Life, Philadelphia 2005, p.1, Temple University Press.

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)

Further reading

  • Weekly Standard article on Commentary
  • The New York Sun article on who attends the annual Commentary-hosted gathering
  • 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 Finding Aid at the Harry Ransom Center

January 19, 2023
commentary, magazine, commentary, monthly, american, magazine, religion, judaism, politics, well, social, cultural, issues, founded, american, jewish, committee, 1945, under, elliot, cohen, editor, from, 1945, 1959, commentary, magazine, developed, into, leadi. Commentary is a monthly American magazine on religion Judaism and politics as well as social and cultural issues Founded by the American Jewish Committee in 1945 under Elliot E Cohen editor from 1945 to 1959 Commentary magazine developed into the leading postwar journal of Jewish affairs The periodical 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 in its heyday from 1960 to 1995 Besides its coverage of cultural issues Commentary provided a voice for the anti Stalinist left As Podhoretz shifted from his original ideological beliefs as a liberal Democrat to neoconservatism in the 1970s and 1980s he moved the magazine with him to the right and toward the Republican Party 2 CommentaryCover of November 2021 issueEditorJohn PodhoretzFrequency11 issues year monthly but with a combined July August issue Circulation26 000 2017 1 First issue1945 78 years ago 1945 CompanyCommentary Inc CountryUnited StatesBased inNew York CityLanguageEnglishWebsitecommentary orgISSN0010 2601OCLC488561243 Contents 1 History 1 1 Founding and early years 1 2 Norman Podhoretz 1 3 Recent years 2 Popular culture 3 Reception and influence 4 Notes 5 References 6 Bibliography 7 Further reading 8 External linksHistory EditFounding and early years Edit Commentary was the successor to the Contemporary Jewish Record which was published by the American Jewish Committee AJC and ran from 1938 to 1945 3 When the Record s editor who died in 1944 the AJC consulted with New York intellectuals including Daniel Bell and Lionel Trilling they 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 citation needed At the same time the magazine would bring the 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 4 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 As Podhoretz put it Commentary was to lead the Jewish intellectuals out of the desert of alienation and into the promised land of democratic pluralistic and prosperous America 4 Cohen brought on board strong editors who themselves wrote important essays including Irving Kristol art critic Clement Greenberg film and cultural critic Robert Warshow and sociologist Nathan Glazer Commentary published such rising stars as Hannah Arendt Daniel Bell Sidney Hook and Irving Howe 5 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 it 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 citation needed 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 6 Norman Podhoretz Edit In the late 1950s the magazine sagged as Cohen suffered from mental illness and committed suicide A protege of Lionel Trilling Norman Podhoretz took over in 1960 running the magazine with an iron hand until his retirement in 1995 7 Podhoretz reduced the space given to Jewish issues and moved Commentary s ideology to the left Circulation rose to 60 000 as the magazine became a mainstay of the Washington liberal elite in the heyday of Presidents John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson 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 8 The shift helped define the emerging neoconservative movement and gave space to disillusioned liberals As the readership base shifted to the right Commentary filled a vacuum for conservative intellectuals who otherwise were reliant on William F Buckley Jr s National Review In March 1975 Moynihan s article The United States in Opposition urged America to vigorously defend liberal democratic principles when they were attacked by Soviet Bloc and Third World dictatorships at the United Nations Moynihan was appointed ambassador to the UN by President Gerald Ford in 1975 and was elected to the United States Senate in 1976 Jeane Kirkpatrick s November 1979 denunciation of the foreign policy of President Jimmy Carter Dictatorships and Double Standards impressed Ronald Reagan who defeated Carter in 1980 In 1981 Reagan appointed Kirkpatrick ambassador to the United Nations and Commentary reached the apogee of its influence Recent years Edit Norman Podhoretz who served as editor in chief until 1995 was editor at large until January 2009 Neal Kozodoy at Commentary since 1966 was editor between 1995 and January 2009 he is the magazine s current editor at large Since January 2009 the journal has been edited by John Podhoretz Norman s son The magazine ceased to be affiliated with the AJC in 2007 when Commentary Inc an independent 501 c 3 non profit enterprise took over as publisher 9 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 10 11 Commentary prints letters to the editor that comment on various articles three issues earlier The more critical and lengthy letters tend to be printed first and the more praiseful letters last The author of the article being discussed almost always replies in a follow up to his critics Each issue has several reviews of books on varying topics Commentary usually assigns a review to books written by notable contributors to the magazine Popular culture EditCommentary has been referred to in several Woody Allen films In Annie Hall 1977 Allen as character Alvy Singer makes a pun by saying that he heard that Dissent and Commentary had merged to form Dysentery In Bananas 1971 as an old lady is threatened on a subway car Allen hides his face by holding up an issue of Commentary This image is featured at the New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn Heights In Crimes and Misdemeanors an issue of Commentary lies on a character s bedside table In his sitcom Anything but Love stand up comedian Richard Lewis was often shown holding or reading a copy of Commentary Reception and influence EditAmerican 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 12 13 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 14 Notes Edit Frank T A January 25 2018 Why conservative magazines are more important than ever Washington Post Retrieved September 5 2020 Abrams Nathan 2009 Introduction Norman Podhoretz and Commentary magazine the rise and fall of the neocons Continuum Abraham Moses Klein 2011 The Letters The Letters University of Toronto Press p 356 ISBN 978 1 4426 4107 5 a b Ehrman John June 1 1999 Commentary the Public Interest and the Problem of Jewish Conservatism American Jewish History Yair Rosenberg June 6 2014 Commentary Opens its Archives Tablet Magazine Retrieved February 15 2019 Pells Richard H 1989 The liberal mind in a conservative age American intellectuals in the 1940s Wesleyan University Press p 296 Thomas L Jeffers Norman Podhoretz A Biography 2010 pp 20 62 129 145 Sam Tanenhaus September 1 2009 The Death of Conservatism Random House Publishing Group p 72 ISBN 9781588369482 Retrieved October 18 2013 Commentary American Jewish Committee Separate The New York Sun Cohen Patricia September 19 2011 Commentary Magazine Archive Given to University of Texas The New York Times Archived from the original on September 27 2011 See announcement Archived August 23 2013 at the Wayback Machine Balint Benjamin 2010 Running Commentary The Contentious Magazine That Transformed the Jewish Left Into the Neoconservative Right PublicAffairs ISBN 978 1586487492 Patricia Cohen June 11 2010 Commentary Is All About Commentary These Days The New York Times Retrieved February 14 2019 Quoted from Murray Friedman ed Commentaryin American Life Philadelphia 2005 p 1 Temple University Press References EditPodhoretz 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 2005Bibliography EditBalint 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 amp 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 Further reading EditWeekly 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 EditOfficial website Commentary Finding Aid at the Harry Ransom Center Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Commentary magazine amp oldid 1113563041, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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