"Commentary" in American Life

Introduction Commentary: The First Sixty Years Murray Friedman 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, I“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 Washing- ton, 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 lat- ter had no formal Jewish institutional ties. A youthful Nor- 1 2 Introduction man Podhoretz once asked Commentary’s first editor, Elliot E. Cohen, what the difference was between the two magazines. Cohen re- sponded 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 edi- torial 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 fash- ionable. 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, Co- hen 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 observa- tions 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 sci- entific study, [and] fiction.” As Thomas Bell Jeffers points out in this book, Commentary wel- comed 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 says, her career took off. “Very clearly, Commentary was able to avoid all of the second-rate Jewish fiction that was being published at the time,” literary critic Susan Klingenstein says. “It is amazing how well the fiction of these years...stand[s] rereading now.” All of these writers, not incidentally, have wrestled with the problem of what it means to be a Jew in American life. By 1950, Commentary had become the leading journal in American intellectual life and thought. In the process, Terry Teachout notes in his chapter, Commentary developed a style of communication that made it a “must-read” for intellectuals but that was “equally accessi- ble to ordinary educated people,” or the “common reader” as Teach- out calls them here. Podhoretz once said he sought to publish essays like those that would be written by historians much later, when greater insight and information would be more readily available. Com- mentary, in short, has sought to avoid becoming a prisoner of its times: It tries to take a longer view of the subjects it examines. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Commentary is often ahead of its time. To take an example at random, while developing this Introduction, I stumbled on a Commentary essay written by a twenty- six-year-old, little-known writer, Daniel Pipes, in August 1981: “The Politics of Muslim Anti-Semitism.” In this piece, Pipes developed a theme that is front and center today: the use of anti-Semitism as part of the politics of the present-day Arab/Israel encounter. “Hardly a 4 Introduction mishap occurs in the Arab world,” Pipes wrote twenty-three years ago “which does not get blamed on the Jews....Inbrief, the Arabs have managed to make Israel a pariah in international politics.” Starting in the late 1940s and 1950s, while still operating within the framework of the Left, Commentary recognized the aggressive de- signs of the Soviet Union on the world and the threat it posed to the West. Commentary proceeded to challenge vigorously the efforts, both at home and abroad, of those who still thought of that country as the land of the future—or who at least hesitated to take up the burden of confrontation for fear of nuclear catastrophe. This challenge was a task the magazine pursued relentlessly until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990. Simultaneously, Commentary remained steadfast in its liberal orientation but grew restless with the formulas of the welfare state. However useful when first formulated and implemented, these formulas had grown stale and needed an infusion of new analysis and thought. Commentary’s movement to a neoconservative posture took place over a period of time and was highlighted in 1972 by George McGovern’s race for the presidency. Whatever may have been its literary and cultural accomplishments, Commentary will no doubt continue to be best thought of as a prime architect of neoconservatism. (The other such vehicle was Irving Kris- tol’s journal, The Public Interest, which was created in 1965.) Curiously, Podhoretz did not start out as a neoconservative when he took over the magazine in 1960. Indeed, at first he made it a vehicle of the New Left. He published pieces by such figures as Edgar Friedenberg and Christopher Lasch, as well as putting forth much of the New Age thought that came to characterize the period. Before long, however, Podhoretz became concerned about the dangers the Left posed to the West, and especially to the embattled State of Israel. Even as it went through this Left phase, Commentary never lost faith in America. If there is a continuing theme in the magazine’s history, it is the enormous pride it takes in the United States and the great promise of personal freedom and material well-being this country offers to our citizens and to the rest of the world. In the late 1960s and 1970s, Commentary also came to challenge the excesses of rebel- ling students in elite institutions across the land, many of whom viewed this country then and now as a repressive, imperial power. Murray Friedman 5 Commentary could be trusted, the literary critic Alexander Bloom has written, to tell its readers what was right with American society more than what was wrong. Even in his own rebellious period, as he took up the reins of Commentary, Podhoretz rejected for publication the Port Huron statement—the guiding document of Students for a Dem- ocratic Society (SDS) and the New Left—prepared by activist Tom Hayden, as not being thought through well enough. Podhoretz felt that the statement encouraged extremist behavior, which of course is exactly what happened. In the second phase of Commentary’s history, the magazine and its stable of writers came also to review its earlier posture with regard to the welfare state and the role of government in alleviating poverty. As the urban rioting of the 1960s developed, signaling the breakdown of the social order and the various wild schemes intended to improve it, as Fred Siegel notes here, the issue for Commentary became not whether the country and its cities had a special obligation to help but, rather, how to help effectively.

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