Liberals who hated Joseph McCarthy were annoyed when Irving Kristol wrote at the height of the controversy that "there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. The "soft-on-Communism" position of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and Henry A. Commentary articles were anti- Communist and also anti- McCarthyite it identified and attacked any perceived weakness among liberals on Cold War issues, backing President Harry Truman's policies such as the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and NATO. Īlthough many or even most of the editors and writers had been socialists, Trotskyites, or Stalinists in the past, that was no longer tolerated. Commentary published such rising stars as Hannah Arendt, Daniel Bell, Sidney Hook, and Irving Howe. Cohen brought on board strong editors who themselves wrote important essays, including Irving Kristol art critic Clement Greenberg film and cultural critic Robert Warshow and sociologist Nathan Glazer. and into the promised land of democratic, pluralistic, and prosperous America". With Europe devastated, there falls upon us here in the United States a far greater share of the responsibility for carrying forward, in a creative way, our common Jewish cultural and spiritual heritage.to harmonize heritage and country into a true sense of at-home-ness.Īs Podhoretz put it, Commentary was to lead the Jewish intellectuals "out of the desert of alienation. Cohen stated his grand design in the first issue: It demonstrated that Jewish intellectuals, and by extension all American Jews, had turned away from their past political radicalism to embrace mainstream U.S. At the same time the magazine would bring the ideas of the young Jewish New York intellectuals to a wider audience. Cohen designed Commentary to reconnect assimilated Jews and Jewish intellectuals with the broader, more traditional and very liberal Jewish community. When the Record 's editor died in 1944, the AJC consulted with New York intellectuals including Daniel Bell and Lionel Trilling: they recommended that the AJC hire Elliot Cohen, who had been the editor of a Jewish cultural magazine and was then a fundraiser, to start a new journal. History Founding and early years Ĭommentary was the successor to the Contemporary Jewish Record, which was published by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and ran from 1938 to 1945. As Podhoretz shifted from his original ideological beliefs as a liberal Democrat to neoconservatism in the 1970s and 1980s, he moved the magazine with him to the right and toward the Republican Party. Besides its coverage of cultural issues, Commentary provided a voice for the anti-Stalinist left. Norman Podhoretz edited the magazine in its heyday from 1960 to 1995. The periodical strove to construct a new American Jewish identity while processing the events of the Holocaust, the formation of the State of Israel, and the Cold War.
Cohen, editor from 1945 to 1959, Commentary magazine developed into the leading postwar journal of Jewish affairs. Founded by the American Jewish Committee in 1945 under Elliot E. 11 issues / year (monthly, but with a combined July–August issue)Ĭommentary is a monthly American magazine on religion, Judaism, and politics, as well as social and cultural issues.
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