Commentary (magazine)

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 died in 1944, the AJC consulted with New York City intellectuals including Daniel Bell and Lionel Trilling, who recommended that 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:[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.

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. 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."[5]

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.[6] 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.

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.[7]

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.

Norman Podhoretz served as editor-in-chief until 1995, was editor-at-large until January 2009.

Neal Kozodoy, who was at Commentary since 1966, succeeded Podhoretz as editor in 1995 and served in the capacity until January 2009, when he was appointed editor-at-large of the magazine. He was replaced as editor by John Podhoretz, son of Norman Podhoretz.

The magazine ended its affiliation with 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.