Commentary (magazine)
Commentary is a monthly American magazine on religion, Judaism, Israel and politics, as well as social and cultural issues. Founded by the American Jewish Committee in 1945 under Elliot E. Cohen, editor from 1945 to 1959, Commentary magazine developed into the leading post-World War II journal of Jewish affairs. 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. Norman Podhoretz edited the magazine from 1960 to 1995.
Editor
11 issues / year (monthly, but with a combined July–August issue)
26,000 (2017)[1]
1945
Commentary Inc.
United States
New York City, New York, U.S.
English
Besides its coverage of cultural issues, Commentary provided a voice for the anti-Stalinist left. 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.[2]
History[edit]
Founding[edit]
Commentary was the successor to the Contemporary Jewish Record, which was published by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and ran from 1938 to 1945.[3]
Post-WWII[edit]
When the Record's editor died in 1944, the AJC consulted with New York City intellectuals including Daniel Bell and Lionel Trilling, who recommended that AJC hire Elliot Cohen, who had been the editor of a Jewish cultural magazine and was then a fundraiser, to start a new journal. Cohen designed Commentary to reconnect assimilated Jews and Jewish intellectuals with the broader, more traditional, and very liberal Jewish community.
At the same time, the magazine was designed to bring ideas of the young Jewish New York intellectuals to a wider audience. It demonstrated that Jewish intellectuals, and by extension all American Jews, had turned away from their past political radicalism to embrace mainstream U.S. culture and values. Cohen stated his grand design in the first issue:[4]
Popular culture[edit]
Commentary has been referred to in several Woody Allen films. In Annie Hall (1977), Allen (as character Alvy Singer) makes a pun by saying that he heard that Dissent and Commentary had merged to form "Dysentery." In Bananas (1971), as an old lady is threatened on a subway car, Allen hides his face by holding up an issue of Commentary. This image is featured at the New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn Heights. In Crimes and Misdemeanors, an issue of Commentary lies on a character's bedside table.
In his sitcom Anything but Love, stand-up comedian Richard Lewis was often shown holding or reading a copy of Commentary.
Reception and influence[edit]
American-Israeli journalist Benjamin Balint and former editor at Commentary described the magazine as the "contentious magazine that transformed the Jewish left into the neoconservative right".[12][13] Historian and literary critic Richard Pells said that "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."[14]