Commentary (magazine)

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Jump to navigationJump to search
Commentary
Commentary logo.svg
Commentary magazine cover.png
Editor John Podhoretz
Frequency 11 issues / year (monthly, but with a combined July–August issue)
Circulation 26,000 (2017)[1]
First issue 1945; 76 years ago
Company Commentary Inc.
Country United States
Based in New York City
Language English
Website commentarymagazine.com
ISSN 0010-2601
OCLC 488561243
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 the editorship of 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. In
its heyday, the magazine was edited by Norman Podhoretz from 1960 to 1995. Besides
its strong coverage of cultural issues, Commentary provided a strong voice for the
anti-Stalinist left. Podhoretz, originally a liberal Democrat turned
neoconservative, moved the magazine to the right and toward the Republican Party in
the 1970s and 1980s.[2]

Commentary has been described by Benjamin Balint as the "contentious magazine that
transformed the Jewish left into the neoconservative right",[3][4] while, according
to historian and literary critic Richard Pells, "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."[5]

Contents
1 History
1.1 Founding and early years
1.2 Norman Podhoretz
1.3 Recent years
2 Popular culture
3 Contributors
4 Notes
5 References
6 Bibliography
7 External links
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.[6] 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 American
culture and values. Cohen stated his grand design in the first issue:[7]

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".[7] 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.[8]

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."[9]

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.[10]
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.[11] 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.[12]

In 2011 the journal announced plans to give its archives from 1945 to 1995 to the
Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.[13]

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.

Contributors

This section contains embedded lists that may be poorly defined, unverified or
indiscriminate. Please help to clean it up to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Where appropriate, incorporate items into the main body of the article. (March
2012)
Over the decades the magazine has attracted top American intellectuals—many of them
Jewish. The magazine's home page lists 1,072 different authors,[14] including:

S. Y. Agnon
Elliott Abrams
Hannah Arendt
Robert Alter
Paul Auster
James Baldwin
Daniel Bell
Saul Bellow
William Bennett
David Berger
Peter Ludwig Berger
Allan Bloom
Harold Bloom
Max Boot
Robert Bork
Peter Brimelow
David Brooks
William Buckley
Mona Charen
Gordon Chang
Linda Chavez
Eliot A. Cohen
Frederick Crews
Seth Cropsey
David G. Dalin
Lucy Dawidowicz
Midge Decter
Alan Dershowitz
James Delingpole
Dinesh D'Souza
Joseph Epstein
Douglas J. Feith
Leslie Fiedler
David Frum
Francis Fukuyama
Frank Gaffney
Herbert J. Gans
Sir Martin Gilbert
Nathan Glazer
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Allegra Goodman
Paul Goodman
Clement Greenberg
John Gross
Boris Gulko
Ernest van den Haag
Hillel Halkin
Albert Halper
Oscar Handlin
Victor Davis Hanson
Michael Harrington
Jeffrey Hart
David Hazony
Joseph Heller
Richard Herrnstein
Arthur Hertzberg
Gertrude Himmelfarb
Milton Himmelfarb
Richard Hofstadter
Sidney Hook
David Horowitz
Irving Howe
H. Stuart Hughes
Samuel P. Huntington
Carol Iannone
Tamar Jacoby
Josef Joffe
Daniel Johnson
Paul Johnson
Donald Kagan
Frederick Kagan
Robert Kagan
Efraim Karsh
Leon Kass
Jacob Katz
Alfred Kazin
Alan Keyes
Jeane Kirkpatrick
Martin Kramer
Charles Krauthammer
Irving Kristol
Bill Kristol
Walter Laqueur
Christopher Lasch
F. R. Leavis
Michael Ledeen
Michael Levin
Bernard Lewis
Guenter Lewy
Seymour Martin Lipset
John Lukacs
Dwight Macdonald
Heather MacDonald
Norman Mailer
Bernard Malamud
Thomas Mann
Leo Marx
Andrew C. McCarthy
Scott McConnell
Hans J. Morgenthau
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Joshua Muravchik
Charles Murray
Richard John Neuhaus
Jacob Neusner
Reinhold Niebuhr
Robert Nisbet
Michael Novak
Michael B. Oren
George Orwell
John O'Sullivan
Amos Oz
Cynthia Ozick
Martin Peretz
Richard Perle
Joan Peters
William Pfaff
Daniel Pipes
Richard Pipes
Steven Plaut
John Podhoretz
Norman Podhoretz
Norman Ravitch
Mordecai Richler
Paul Craig Roberts
Peter W. Rodman
Henry Roth
Philip Roth
Noah Rothman
Giuseppe Sacco
Jean-Paul Sartre
Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr.
Gabriel Schoenfeld
Sam Schulman
Delmore Schwartz
Stephen Schwartz
Daniel Seligman
Nathan Sharansky
Fred Siegel
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Susan Sontag
Thomas Sowell
Bret Stephens
Leo Strauss
George Szamuely
Philip Taft
Amir Taheri
Terry Teachout
Judd L. Teller
Dorothy Thompson
Nathan Thrall
Michael J. Totten
Hugh Trevor-Roper
Diana Trilling
Lionel Trilling
Robert C. Tucker
Robert W. Tucker
Leopold Tyrmand
David Twersky
Ron Unz
John Updike
Ben J. Wattenberg
George Weigel
Elie Wiesel
James Q. Wilson
Ruth Wisse
Robert S. Wistrich
A. B. Yehoshua
Karl Zinsmeister
Notes
"Why conservative magazines are more important than ever". Washington Post.
January 25, 2018. Retrieved September 5, 2020.
Nathan Abrams, Norman Podhoretz and Commentary magazine: the rise and fall of the
neocons (2009) "Introduction"
Benjamin Balint, Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine That Transformed the
Jewish Left Into the Neoconservative Right (2010). New York: PublicAffairs. ISBN 1-
586-48749-3.
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.): Commentary in American Life, Philadelphia 2005,
p.1, Temple University Press.
Abraham Moses Klein (2011). The Letters: The Letters. University of Toronto Press.
p. 356. ISBN 978-1-4426-4107-5.
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.
Richard H. Pells, The liberal mind in a conservative age: American intellectuals
in the 1940s (1989) 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.
See announcement Archived August 23, 2013, at the Wayback Machine
See Commentary search Archived March 12, 2012, at the Wayback Machine
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)
External links
Official website
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]
Weekly Standard article on Commentary
"What Does Reform Judaism Stand For?". Commentary. Published June 2008.
Commentary Finding Aid at the Harry Ransom Center
vte
Jews and Judaism in the United States
vte
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Commentary (magazine)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to navigationJump to search
Commentary
Commentary logo.svg
Commentary magazine cover.png
Editor John Podhoretz
Frequency 11 issues / year (monthly, but with a combined July–August issue)
Circulation 26,000 (2017)[1]
First issue 1945; 76 years ago
Company Commentary Inc.
Country United States
Based in New York City
Language English
Website commentarymagazine.com
ISSN 0010-2601
OCLC 488561243
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 the editorship of 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. In
its heyday, the magazine was edited by Norman Podhoretz from 1960 to 1995. Besides
its strong coverage of cultural issues, Commentary provided a strong voice for the
anti-Stalinist left. Podhoretz, originally a liberal Democrat turned
neoconservative, moved the magazine to the right and toward the Republican Party in
the 1970s and 1980s.[2]

Commentary has been described by Benjamin Balint as the "contentious magazine that
transformed the Jewish left into the neoconservative right",[3][4] while, according
to historian and literary critic Richard Pells, "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."[5]

Contents
1 History
1.1 Founding and early years
1.2 Norman Podhoretz
1.3 Recent years
2 Popular culture
3 Contributors
4 Notes
5 References
6 Bibliography
7 External links
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.[6] 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 American
culture and values. Cohen stated his grand design in the first issue:[7]

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".[7] 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.[8]

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."[9]

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.[10]
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.[11] 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.[12]

In 2011 the journal announced plans to give its archives from 1945 to 1995 to the
Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.[13]

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.

Contributors

This section contains embedded lists that may be poorly defined, unverified or
indiscriminate. Please help to clean it up to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Where appropriate, incorporate items into the main body of the article. (March
2012)
Over the decades the magazine has attracted top American intellectuals—many of them
Jewish. The magazine's home page lists 1,072 different authors,[14] including:

S. Y. Agnon
Elliott Abrams
Hannah Arendt
Robert Alter
Paul Auster
James Baldwin
Daniel Bell
Saul Bellow
William Bennett
David Berger
Peter Ludwig Berger
Allan Bloom
Harold Bloom
Max Boot
Robert Bork
Peter Brimelow
David Brooks
William Buckley
Mona Charen
Gordon Chang
Linda Chavez
Eliot A. Cohen
Frederick Crews
Seth Cropsey
David G. Dalin
Lucy Dawidowicz
Midge Decter
Alan Dershowitz
James Delingpole
Dinesh D'Souza
Joseph Epstein
Douglas J. Feith
Leslie Fiedler
David Frum
Francis Fukuyama
Frank Gaffney
Herbert J. Gans
Sir Martin Gilbert
Nathan Glazer
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Allegra Goodman
Paul Goodman
Clement Greenberg
John Gross
Boris Gulko
Ernest van den Haag
Hillel Halkin
Albert Halper
Oscar Handlin
Victor Davis Hanson
Michael Harrington
Jeffrey Hart
David Hazony
Joseph Heller
Richard Herrnstein
Arthur Hertzberg
Gertrude Himmelfarb
Milton Himmelfarb
Richard Hofstadter
Sidney Hook
David Horowitz
Irving Howe
H. Stuart Hughes
Samuel P. Huntington
Carol Iannone
Tamar Jacoby
Josef Joffe
Daniel Johnson
Paul Johnson
Donald Kagan
Frederick Kagan
Robert Kagan
Efraim Karsh
Leon Kass
Jacob Katz
Alfred Kazin
Alan Keyes
Jeane Kirkpatrick
Martin Kramer
Charles Krauthammer
Irving Kristol
Bill Kristol
Walter Laqueur
Christopher Lasch
F. R. Leavis
Michael Ledeen
Michael Levin
Bernard Lewis
Guenter Lewy
Seymour Martin Lipset
John Lukacs
Dwight Macdonald
Heather MacDonald
Norman Mailer
Bernard Malamud
Thomas Mann
Leo Marx
Andrew C. McCarthy
Scott McConnell
Hans J. Morgenthau
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Joshua Muravchik
Charles Murray
Richard John Neuhaus
Jacob Neusner
Reinhold Niebuhr
Robert Nisbet
Michael Novak
Michael B. Oren
George Orwell
John O'Sullivan
Amos Oz
Cynthia Ozick
Martin Peretz
Richard Perle
Joan Peters
William Pfaff
Daniel Pipes
Richard Pipes
Steven Plaut
John Podhoretz
Norman Podhoretz
Norman Ravitch
Mordecai Richler
Paul Craig Roberts
Peter W. Rodman
Henry Roth
Philip Roth
Noah Rothman
Giuseppe Sacco
Jean-Paul Sartre
Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr.
Gabriel Schoenfeld
Sam Schulman
Delmore Schwartz
Stephen Schwartz
Daniel Seligman
Nathan Sharansky
Fred Siegel
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Susan Sontag
Thomas Sowell
Bret Stephens
Leo Strauss
George Szamuely
Philip Taft
Amir Taheri
Terry Teachout
Judd L. Teller
Dorothy Thompson
Nathan Thrall
Michael J. Totten
Hugh Trevor-Roper
Diana Trilling
Lionel Trilling
Robert C. Tucker
Robert W. Tucker
Leopold Tyrmand
David Twersky
Ron Unz
John Updike
Ben J. Wattenberg
George Weigel
Elie Wiesel
James Q. Wilson
Ruth Wisse
Robert S. Wistrich
A. B. Yehoshua
Karl Zinsmeister
Notes
"Why conservative magazines are more important than ever". Washington Post.
January 25, 2018. Retrieved September 5, 2020.
Nathan Abrams, Norman Podhoretz and Commentary magazine: the rise and fall of the
neocons (2009) "Introduction"
Benjamin Balint, Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine That Transformed the
Jewish Left Into the Neoconservative Right (2010). New York: PublicAffairs. ISBN 1-
586-48749-3.
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.): Commentary in American Life, Philadelphia 2005,
p.1, Temple University Press.
Abraham Moses Klein (2011). The Letters: The Letters. University of Toronto Press.
p. 356. ISBN 978-1-4426-4107-5.
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.
Richard H. Pells, The liberal mind in a conservative age: American intellectuals
in the 1940s (1989) 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.
See announcement Archived August 23, 2013, at the Wayback Machine
 See Commentary search Archived March 12, 2012, at the Wayback Machine
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)
External links
Official website
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]
Weekly Standard article on Commentary
"What Does Reform Judaism Stand For?". Commentary. Published June 2008.
Commentary Finding Aid at the Harry Ransom Center
vte
Jews and Judaism in the United States
vte
Neoconservatism
Categories: 1945 establishments in New York (state)Conservative magazines published
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MediaWikiCommentary (magazine)
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Commentary
Commentary logo.svg
Commentary magazine cover.png
Editor John Podhoretz
Frequency 11 issues / year (monthly, but with a combined July–August issue)
Circulation 26,000 (2017)[1]
First issue 1945; 76 years ago
Company Commentary Inc.
Country United States
Based in New York City
Language English
Website commentarymagazine.com
ISSN 0010-2601
OCLC 488561243
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 the editorship of 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. In
its heyday, the magazine was edited by Norman Podhoretz from 1960 to 1995. Besides
its strong coverage of cultural issues, Commentary provided a strong voice for the
anti-Stalinist left. Podhoretz, originally a liberal Democrat turned
neoconservative, moved the magazine to the right and toward the Republican Party in
the 1970s and 1980s.[2]

Commentary has been described by Benjamin Balint as the "contentious magazine that
transformed the Jewish left into the neoconservative right",[3][4] while, according
to historian and literary critic Richard Pells, "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."[5]

Contents
1 History
1.1 Founding and early years
1.2 Norman Podhoretz
1.3 Recent years
2 Popular culture
3 Contributors
4 Notes
5 References
6 Bibliography
7 External links
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.[6] 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 American
culture and values. Cohen stated his grand design in the first issue:[7]

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".[7] 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.[8]

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."[9]

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.[10]
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.[11] 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.[12]
In 2011 the journal announced plans to give its archives from 1945 to 1995 to the
Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.[13]

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.

Contributors

This section contains embedded lists that may be poorly defined, unverified or
indiscriminate. Please help to clean it up to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Where appropriate, incorporate items into the main body of the article. (March
2012)
Over the decades the magazine has attracted top American intellectuals—many of them
Jewish. The magazine's home page lists 1,072 different authors,[14] including:

S. Y. Agnon
Elliott Abrams
Hannah Arendt
Robert Alter
Paul Auster
James Baldwin
Daniel Bell
Saul Bellow
William Bennett
David Berger
Peter Ludwig Berger
Allan Bloom
Harold Bloom
Max Boot
Robert Bork
Peter Brimelow
David Brooks
William Buckley
Mona Charen
Gordon Chang
Linda Chavez
Eliot A. Cohen
Frederick Crews
Seth Cropsey
David G. Dalin
Lucy Dawidowicz
Midge Decter
Alan Dershowitz
James Delingpole
Dinesh D'Souza
Joseph Epstein
Douglas J. Feith
Leslie Fiedler
David Frum
Francis Fukuyama
Frank Gaffney
Herbert J. Gans
Sir Martin Gilbert
Nathan Glazer
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Allegra Goodman
Paul Goodman
Clement Greenberg
John Gross
Boris Gulko
Ernest van den Haag
Hillel Halkin
Albert Halper
Oscar Handlin
Victor Davis Hanson
Michael Harrington
Jeffrey Hart
David Hazony
Joseph Heller
Richard Herrnstein
Arthur Hertzberg
Gertrude Himmelfarb
Milton Himmelfarb
Richard Hofstadter
Sidney Hook
David Horowitz
Irving Howe
H. Stuart Hughes
Samuel P. Huntington
Carol Iannone
Tamar Jacoby
Josef Joffe
Daniel Johnson
Paul Johnson
Donald Kagan
Frederick Kagan
Robert Kagan
Efraim Karsh
Leon Kass
Jacob Katz
Alfred Kazin
Alan Keyes
Jeane Kirkpatrick
Martin Kramer
Charles Krauthammer
Irving Kristol
Bill Kristol
Walter Laqueur
Christopher Lasch
F. R. Leavis
Michael Ledeen
Michael Levin
Bernard Lewis
Guenter Lewy
Seymour Martin Lipset
John Lukacs
Dwight Macdonald
Heather MacDonald
Norman Mailer
Bernard Malamud
Thomas Mann
Leo Marx
Andrew C. McCarthy
Scott McConnell
Hans J. Morgenthau
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Joshua Muravchik
Charles Murray
Richard John Neuhaus
Jacob Neusner
Reinhold Niebuhr
Robert Nisbet
Michael Novak
Michael B. Oren
George Orwell
John O'Sullivan
Amos Oz
Cynthia Ozick
Martin Peretz
Richard Perle
Joan Peters
William Pfaff
Daniel Pipes
Richard Pipes
Steven Plaut
John Podhoretz
Norman Podhoretz
Norman Ravitch
Mordecai Richler
Paul Craig Roberts
Peter W. Rodman
Henry Roth
Philip Roth
Noah Rothman
Giuseppe Sacco
Jean-Paul Sartre
Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr.
Gabriel Schoenfeld
Sam Schulman
Delmore Schwartz
Stephen Schwartz
Daniel Seligman
Nathan Sharansky
Fred Siegel
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Susan Sontag
Thomas Sowell
Bret Stephens
Leo Strauss
George Szamuely
Philip Taft
Amir Taheri
Terry Teachout
Judd L. Teller
Dorothy Thompson
Nathan Thrall
Michael J. Totten
Hugh Trevor-Roper
Diana Trilling
Lionel Trilling
Robert C. Tucker
Robert W. Tucker
Leopold Tyrmand
David Twersky
Ron Unz
John Updike
Ben J. Wattenberg
George Weigel
Elie Wiesel
James Q. Wilson
Ruth Wisse
Robert S. Wistrich
A. B. Yehoshua
Karl Zinsmeister
Notes
"Why conservative magazines are more important than ever". Washington Post.
January 25, 2018. Retrieved September 5, 2020.
Nathan Abrams, Norman Podhoretz and Commentary magazine: the rise and fall of the
neocons (2009) "Introduction"
Benjamin Balint, Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine That Transformed the
Jewish Left Into the Neoconservative Right (2010). New York: PublicAffairs. ISBN 1-
586-48749-3.
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.): Commentary in American Life, Philadelphia 2005,
p.1, Temple University Press.
Abraham Moses Klein (2011). The Letters: The Letters. University of Toronto Press.
p. 356. ISBN 978-1-4426-4107-5.
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.
Richard H. Pells, The liberal mind in a conservative age: American intellectuals
in the 1940s (1989) 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.
See announcement Archived August 23, 2013, at the Wayback Machine
See Commentary search Archived March 12, 2012, at the Wayback Machine
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)
External links
Official website
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]
Weekly Standard article on Commentary
"What Does Reform Judaism Stand For?". Commentary. Published June 2008.
Commentary Finding Aid at the Harry Ransom Center
vte
Jews and Judaism in the United States
vte
Neoconservatism
Categories: 1945 establishments in New York (state)Conservative magazines published
in the United StatesJewish magazines published in the United StatesMagazines
established in 1945Magazines published in New York CityNeoconservatismPolitical
magazines published in the United States
Navigation menu
Not logged in
Talk
Contributions
Create account
Log in
ArticleTalk
ReadEditView historySearch
Search Wikipedia
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Languages
‫العربية‬
Deutsch
‫فارسی‬
Français
Italiano
Português
Türkçe
4 more
Edit links
This page was last edited on 16 January 2021, at 20:01 (UTC).
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License;
additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and
Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation,
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