 | |
 Cover of November 2021 issue | |
| Editor | John Podhoretz |
|---|---|
| Frequency | 11 issues / year (monthly, but with a combined July–August issue) |
| Circulation | 26,000 (2017)[1] |
| First issue | 1945; 80 years ago (1945) |
| Company | Commentary Inc. |
| Country | United States |
| Based in | New York City,New York, U.S. |
| Language | English |
| Website | commentary.org |
| ISSN | 0010-2601 |
| OCLC | 488561243 |
Commentary is a monthly American magazine on religion,Judaism,Israel and politics, as well as social and cultural issues. It is currently headed byJohn Podhoretz. Founded by theAmerican Jewish Committee in 1945 underElliot E. Cohen, editor from 1945 to 1959,Commentary magazine developed into the leading post-World War II journal ofJewish affairs. The periodical strove to construct a new American Jewish identity while processing the events of theHolocaust, the formation of the State ofIsrael, and theCold War.Norman Podhoretz edited the magazine from 1960 to 1995.
Besides its coverage of cultural issues,Commentary provided a voice for theanti-Stalinist left. As Podhoretz shifted from his original ideological beliefs as aliberalDemocrat toneoconservatism in the 1970s and 1980s, he moved the magazine with him to the right and toward theRepublican Party.[2]
Commentary was the successor to theContemporary Jewish Record, which was published by theAmerican Jewish Committee (AJC) and ran from 1938 to 1945,[3] when its editor, AJC executive secretaryMorris Waldman, retired.[4][5]
In 1944, with theRecord's editor retiring, the AJC consulted with New York City intellectuals includingDaniel Bell andLionel Trilling, who recommended that AJC hireElliot Cohen, who had been the editor of a Jewish cultural magazine and was then a fundraiser, to start a new journal. Cohen designedCommentary 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 was designed to bring ideas of the young JewishNew 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:[6]
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 beensocialists,Trotskyites, orStalinists 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 onCold War issues, backing PresidentHarry Truman's policies such as theTruman Doctrine, theMarshall Plan, andNATO. The "soft-on-Communism" position of theCongress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) andHenry A. Wallace came under steady attack.[citation needed] Liberals who hatedJoseph 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."[7]
In the late 1950s, the magazine quality sagged, as Cohen suffered frommental illness and committedsuicide.
A protégé ofLionel Trilling,Norman Podhoretz took over in 1960, running the magazine with an iron hand until his retirement in 1995.[8]
Podhoretz said,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".[6] Cohen brought on board strong editors who themselves wrote important essays, includingIrving Kristol; art criticClement Greenberg; film and cultural criticRobert Warshow; and sociologistNathan Glazer.Commentary publishedHannah Arendt,Daniel Bell,Sidney Hook, andIrving Howe.[9]
The emergence of theNew Left, which was bitterly hostile to Johnson, tocapitalism and to universities, angered Podhoretz for what he perceived as its shallowness and hostility toIsrael in the 1967Six-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 usedCommentary to attack theWatts riots and liberals who defended it as a just revolution.[10]
In 2007, the magazine ended its affiliation with AJC when Commentary, Inc., an independent501(c)(3) non-profit enterprise, took over as publisher.[11][12]
In 2011, the journal donated its archives from 1945 to 1995 to theHarry Ransom Center at theUniversity of Texas at Austin. These included letters and essay revisions.[13][14]
Commentary has been referred to in threeWoody Allen films:
Between 1989 and 1992, in theABC sitcomAnything but Love, stand-up comedianRichard Lewis was often shown holding or reading a copy ofCommentary.
American-Israeli journalistBenjamin Balint and former editor atCommentary described the magazine as the "contentious magazine that transformed the Jewish left into the neoconservative right".[15][16] 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."[17]
