Commentary In American Life

Introduction: Commentary: The First Sixty Years

Introduction Commentary: The First Sixty Years Murray Friedman I t was Irving Kristol, Ruth Wisse reminds us, who said that Commentary was one of the most important magazines in Jewish history. This may be an exaggeration, but not by much. Literary critic Richard Pells writes more soberly, “While other magazines have certainly had their bursts of glory—even Golden Ages—in which one has had to read them to know what was going on in New York, or Washington , or the world—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.” The Commentary we are most familiar with today is widely seen as an organ of American political conservatism. Although this is so, from its beginning the magazine had broader scope and purposes, as indeed it continues to have today. Commentary was founded by the American Jewish Committee in 1945 as a monthly journal of “significant thought and opinion, Jewish affairs and contemporary issues .” It was modeled on the Partisan Review, a magazine of somewhat similar style and sensibility, although the latter had no formal Jewish institutional ties. A youthful Nor1 2 Introduction man Podhoretz once asked Commentary’s first editor, Elliot E. Cohen, what the difference was between the two magazines. Cohen responded that Commentary was a consciously Jewish magazine, but although the Partisan Review was Jewish because of its leadership and contributors, it didn’t know it. Although institutionally sponsored, Commentary won complete editorial freedom early on—a rare occurrence in organizational life. The magazine has gone through three stages and is in the midst of a fourth, roughly paralleling the incumbency of its three editors. The first stage (1945–1960) began with the appointment of Cohen as editor . The second phase saw the accession of Norman Podhoretz, who continued in the post until his retirement in 1995. Finally, in the third stage, Podhoretz’s long-time associate and close collaborator, Neal Kozodoy, took over with the special responsibility, as it turned out, of moving the publication into the post–Cold War era. Each of these editors faced unique challenges. As its first, Cohen had to deal with a Jewish community, and most especially its intellectual and cultural leadership, that was attempting to assimilate into American life. For most, this meant adhering to a vague, universalistic Socialism coupled with the Freudian modernism that was then fashionable . Both philosophies taught that religion and group identity were forms of primitivism that people outgrew as they became more knowledgeable and enlightened. In the immediate postwar years, Cohen set out to nurture the development of a proud American Jewish community that embraced modernity but found room within it to maintain a distinct Jewish spirit and cultural identity. At the same time, he sought to reach out to a broader public with serious observations on the central issues of the times. To accomplish these objectives, Cohen assembled a group of extraordinary editors and writers including Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Clement Greenberg, and Robert Warshow. Among Commentary’s special characteristics was that although it was created as a “specialist” Jewish magazine, it devoted so many of its pages to “general” affairs. Another special attribute was that, given its “heavyweight” editors and writers, it had a down-to-earth quality that included reporting on the day-to-day life of everyday Jews. A highly popular section that ran for many years was “From the American Scene.” Cohen later said Murray Friedman 3 this section was closest to the heart of its purposes: “It was our thought,” he wrote, “to use many methods to help bring American Jews and their concerns into their own and public view with fuller knowledge and insight then generally obtains—historical reconstruction, intellectual analysis, reportage, religious reflection, sociological and other scienti fic study, [and] fiction.” As Thomas Bell Jeffers points out in this book, Commentary welcomed and helped to advance the careers of writers who were then little known, including such figures as Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Norman Mailer, and Joseph Heller, not to mention the extraordinary Yiddish-into-English achievement of Isaac Bashevis Singer. In the dedication to her book of short stories, The Pagan Rabbi, Ozick even paid tribute to Podhoretz as her guiding spirit. Following the appearance of her short story, “Envy,” in the magazine, Ozick...