Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine that Transformed the Jewish Left into the Neoconservative Right (review)

Running Commentary is the story of a magazine and also of the people who created it, nurtured it, quarreled about it, shaped or (according to detractors) misshaped it, sometimes abandoned and attacked it, during its long history. Balint calls these New York (mostly Jewish) intellectuals by the name Norman Podhoretz invented: "[They] resembled nothing so much as a loosely knit, self-formed Family . . . bound by a common language and frame of reference, a shared ordering of values, and an intense crisscrossing alertness to one another's judgments. They were kinsmen of a common cause, a common past, and a common set of ancestors" (p. 6).

The title of Balint's critical history derives from Elliot Cohen's "Act of Affirmation" in the inaugural issue of November 1945. "Commentary means a 'running comment.' We will keep abreast of the march of events. Commentary also means 'interpretation.' . . . . But there is also a traditional Jewish meaning of commentary . . . which we as editors cherish. Our ancient scribes and sages . . . only wrote commentaries on the revelation which was the Law. But we know that these ever-changing interpretations of the past by the men of wisdom and men of insight of each generation, became for that generation more than merely commentaries. [They] became the truth that men lived by."

1945 marked "an epoch in world history" because World War II had just ended, the age of nuclear destruction had (in August) just begun, and the destruction of European Jewry ("slaughtered like cattle") was now common knowledge. Although Cohen believed that "the great Nazi secret weapon of World War II" had been an anti-semitism (a word he never actually uses) that few European voices protested, few European hands opposed, his hopes were as great as his fears, in large part because the center of gravity of the Jewish world was now America, and not the European graveyard. (He did not mention the yishuv in Palestine; and nobody on the staff could speak Hebrew.) "Commentary," he declared, "is an act of faith in our possibilities in America." This belief in one crucial aspect of American exceptionalism—its resistance to political antisemitism—eased the movement of Cohen and his main writers from Marxism to an Americanism that has characterized the magazine throughout its history with the exception of the years 1960-68, when Podhoretz pushed it far to the Left. As Balint, with characteristic precision, says: "By teaching that there need be no contradiction between Jewish particularism and full participation in the larger culture, Commentary showed Jews how to weave the strands of Jewishness into the texture of American life" (p. 210).

Although Cohen understood that for Jews survival would long remain more crucial than self-definition (an American-Jewish obsession), he nevertheless believed that as Commentary stalwart Ruth Wisse would later say, it was the duty of American Jews to judge The New York Times by the standards of Judaism, not Judaism by the standards of the Times: "We suffer our own special questionings, which . . . we believe humanity should share with us, possibly for the common good." He also raised, at least by implication, the question that (so Balint believes) besets the magazine to this day: how to realize in its contents the moral poise of "the two perfectly balanced parts" of Rabbi Hillel's teaching: "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am for myself alone, what am I?" (p. 133).

As managing editor of the Menorah Journal, a forerunner of Commentary, Cohen expressed the view that the intellect of American Jews had failed to keep pace with their economic and political progress. "Judaism cannot survive if intelligent Jews come to despise it" (p. 14). Among the writers he drew to that magazine was Lionel Trilling (1905-75), who said that he had never before seen a Jewish publication "that was not shoddy and disgusting" (p. 15), but by 1929 had...