Commentary In American Life

1. “America Is Home”: Commentary Magazine and the Refocusing of the Community of Memory, 1945—1960

1“America Is Home” Commentary Magazine and the Refocusing of the Community of Memory, 1945–1960 Nathan Abrams A magazine helped revive and focus the community of memory.1 –Howard M. Sachar T he year 1945 marked a period of disruption for American Jewry, and for New York’s community of Jewish intellectuals in particular. The end of World War II, with the full revelations of the Nazi genocide in Europe, the possibility of a Jewish state in Palestine, and the shift of focus from Europe toward America, had a disorientating effect on American Jews. As they emerged from the war, many young Jewish intellectuals felt the need to seek institutional alignment not only to overcome a sense of alienation but also as a solution to a new economic reality that had destroyed their bohemian lifestyles forever. Recognizing these developments , the American Jewish Committee (AJC) became a major agent both in institutionalizing these intellectuals and in reconciling them with their communities of origin through the establishment of a new intellectual magazine, Commentary, under the editorship of Elliot E. Cohen. As Howard Sachar has observed of the postwar era, Commentary 9 10 “America Is Home” helped to “revive” the community of memory as well as refocus it around constructing a viable Jewish American discourse. Commentary provided the vehicle and voice through which a whole new generation of alienated and untried Jewish writers, thinkers, and poets, such as Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Delmore Schwartz, Lionel Trilling, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Irving Howe, Sidney Hook, and Leslie Fiedler, would move back into their community of origin after World War II. Now, more than at any time in their history, Jewish intellectuals became committed to constructing a new Jewish American community complete with its own Jewish American memories .2 Commentary magazine became one of America’s most celebrated periodicals. Under Cohen, it developed into the premier postwar journal of Jewish affairs, attracting a readership far wider than its Jewish community of origin. Commentary soon became a central organ of the group that was subsequently labeled the “New York Intellectuals,” and consequently assumed a leading position in American intellectual life from the mid-1940s onward. The magazine still occupies an important place in both American and Jewish political and cultural thought today. Commentary, however, has suffered from a conspicuous lack of academic attention. Although a great deal has been written about the New York Intellectuals and their publications, these studies have overwhelmingly focused on the Partisan Review (PR); thus, the scholarship surrounding Commentary is still surprisingly and inexplicably thin.3 I intend to begin filling this vacuum by examining Commentary ’s prehistory, in which a group of young Jewish intellectuals who had previously rejected their community of origin became an institutionalized feature of American Jewry. I concentrate on the magazine’s formative years, from 1945 to the end of the 1950s, and examine the concept of “editorial freedom” in particular. In doing so, I show how this literary and cultural initiative led to the formation of a new intellectual community with its own new and particular brand of discourse —a Jewish American discourse of America as “home.” The American Jewish Committee is the oldest existing Jewish defense agency in America. Founded in 1906 in response to the pogroms and the worsening condition of Jews in Eastern Europe, it was an elite organization of middle- and upper-class American German–Jewish Nathan Abrams 11 philanthropic and community leaders. The AJC differed from those defense organizations that followed it, the Anti-Defamation League (1913) and the American Jewish Congress (1918), in the scope of its operations: It was dedicated to protecting the civil and religious rights of the global, rather than simply the American, Jewish community.4 The committee’s founders believed in the promise offered by American democracy of producing a new vision of Jewish life in the Diaspora that would supersede all others that had preceded it. This expression of belief would influence the whole of the AJC’s operations. According to its official historian, Oscar Handlin, this “article of faith” remained “fixed,” and the “complex of these ideas was gradually to define the character of the American Jewish Committee in the next half-century.”5 The committee urged American diplomatic intervention to assist Jews abroad and protested against immigration quotas, which would limit the number of Jews allowed into the United States. Although the AJC remained elitist...