Commentary Magazine, 1945–59: "A Journal of Significant Thought and Opinion" (review)

The New York Jewish intellectual community has long been a popular field of study. Intellectual, literary, and political historians have produced numerous books and articles chronicling the rise and decline of the community during the mid-twentieth century, detailing the personal quarrels and shifting political leanings of its members, and assessing the influence of its two best-known journals, Partisan Review and Commentary. With so much having already been written, it would seem that there is little new to say about the New York intellectuals. Indeed, finding a fresh perspective is the fundamental challenge facing Nathan Abrams in his book Commentary Magazine, 1945–59, a detailed history of the magazine's first fifteen years.

Abrams believes that historians have not paid enough attention to Commentary. He argues that previous histories of Commentary have been short, narrowly focused, and highly partisan. In his view, however, the magazine has not only influenced American intellectual life, but it has also shaped modern American Jewish culture, as well as the general course of postwar American history, and so deserves a much more complete treatment. Abrams therefore sets out to write the "first detailed and critical study to focus exclusively on Commentary magazine itself, its history and impact" (xvi). He sets ambitious goals, promising to look not only at the content of its articles and the intellectual atmosphere in which they appeared, but even what may be learned from Commentary's layout, graphics, and advertising.

The strongest part of Abrams's narrative is his portrait of Elliot Cohen, Commentary's founding editor. Cohen (1899–1959) was a prodigy and an enormously talented editor—he graduated from Yale at eighteen, quickly made a name for himself as a critic of American Jewish culture, and was appointed managing editor of Menorah Journal before he was twenty-five. Cohen was also a tragic figure, for he lost his job at Menorah Journal during the Depression, suffered from a terrible case of writer's block, and eventually slid into mental illness and committed suicide. The outline of his life is well known, but Abrams adds many details to give us the most complete biography of Cohen to date. Abrams gives especially good descriptions of Cohen's ambition to make Commentary the magazine he had hoped to create at Menorah Journal. Cohen wanted Commentary to go beyond Jewish culture and issues to "interpret politics, problems of human rights and group relations, European developments, culture, literature, music and art" (52). These ambitions complicated Cohen's relationship with the American Jewish Committee (AJC), Commentary's financial sponsor. The AJC had promised Cohen editorial independence, and he and the AJC were in agreement on most matters, but Cohen still had to be careful not to offend the organization that paid his bills. The result was continuous, shrewd maneuvering by Cohen to please the AJC whenever possible, minimize the Committee's interference with Commentary, and still publish material with which the AJC was uncomfortable.

Unfortunately, whenever he leaves Cohen, Abrams finds little new to say about Commentary's first fifteen years. Abrams details the magazine's hard anti-Communism, its efforts to define Jewish life and culture in postwar America, and the evolution of its attitude toward Zionism from coolness to a warm embrace of Israel as a Cold War ally. Abrams also chronicles Commentary's relations with the New York intellectual community, the in-house quarrels, the publications of such notorious articles as Irving Kristol's "'Civil Liberties,' 1952—A Study in Confusion," and the rise of Norman Podhoretz as a young critic, editor, and Cohen's successor. While Abrams tells these stories well, they all have been told many times before; there is little need for Abrams to relate, to take but one example, Cohen's oft-cited quip that the difference between Commentary and Partisan Review was that "we admit to being a Jewish magazine, and they don't" (73). Indeed, works by Alexander Bloom, memoirs by Podhoretz...