Commentary In American Life

2. Commentary: The Early Years

2Commentary The Early Years Nathan Glazer I served on the staff of Commentary magazine from its beginning in 1945 until I left in 1953. I also worked on its predecessor magazine, the Contemporary Jewish Record (CJR), for a year or so. I would first like to say a few words about this predecessor journal, as it shaped what was to become the new Commentary and the circle that was to form around the new magazine in a number of ways. I The CJR was a bimonthly journal published by the American Jewish Committee (AJC). My path to it was rather indirect and was made possible both by my political activities in college, as a member of the official student Zionist organization Avukah and as the editor of its journal, and by my nascent connections with the group that came to be known as “the New York Intellectuals.” Looking for a job in 1944 after graduating from City College and leaving the University of Pennsylvania, where I was engaged in a wartime language project, I consulted with Daniel Bell, then editor of The New Leader. I knew Bell because I had written for 38 Nathan Glazer 39 The New Leader while I was a student at City College. Bell did seem to know everything that was going on in New York, and one thing he knew was that Max Horkheimer, of the exiled Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, was, I thought surprisingly, then working for the AJC on studies of anti-Semitism. Not many people in the United States could have known who Horkheimer was and what his Institute for Social Research did, but through my political activities in Avukah, I had gained some acquaintance with the institute, its journal, and its outlook. Avukah was not only a Zionist organization but also had at its core a group of young radicals who were certainly Zionists but who also were committed to versions of socialism somewhat to the left of the socialism of Norman Thomas. We thought of ourselves as part of the anti-Stalinist left, and our City College members might be found in the lunchroom alcove this group of Trotskyists, socialists, and social democrats favored. In the style of the day, our Avukah group met and read classic socialist books and articles, and through the elders of this group, we discovered the work of the Institute for Social Research, which seemed to be pushing Marxism both into empirical research and into a more sophisticated understanding of social change that included psychoanalysis and other post-Marxist developments. We read articles in the institute ’s journal and were aided in understanding them, I recall, by young German Jewish refugees of our group, who could read German. We would also troop up to Columbia to hear Horkheimer and Leo Lowenthal, a younger member of the institute, lecture on the institute ’s distinctive view of the problems of modern society. It did not seem to be the kind of group to which the AJC, the most conservative of the major Jewish defense organizations, would be attracted, and I don’t know how the two connected. So in 1944, having completed my academic work at the University of Pennsylvania, I went to meet with Horkheimer and Lowenthal and was offered the job of “reader of American social science” for Horkheimer. Horkheimer felt the need to be briefed on relevant current American empirical work in sociology and psychology, and as I knew something of their political and social scientific orientation (few American social scientists at the time did) and was studying American sociology—I was taking graduate courses at Columbia at the time—I seemed qualified for the position. 40 Commentary: The Early Years Across the hall from where I worked at the AJC was the CJR, which was then undergoing a crisis. Its long-time editor, Adolph Oko, had died, and the journal had been left surprisingly in the hands of Clement Greenberg, who knew nothing of Jewish affairs. How had Clement Greenberg, who was then an editor of Partisan Review and also writing art criticism for the Nation, become managing editor of the CJR? It seems Oko, whom I never met, had a penchant for Greenwich Village intellectuals. Before Greenberg, a young writer from Chicago, Isaac Rosenfeld, had served as an editor, and Philip Rahv, one of the cofounders of Partisan Review, had preceded Greenberg as managing editor of...