Commentary (magazine) - History

History

Commentary was the successor to the Contemporary Jewish Record. When the Record's editor died in 1944, its publisher, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) consulted with New York intellectuals including Daniel Bell and literary critic Lionel Trilling. They recommended the AJC hire Elliot Cohen (1899–1959) to start a new journal. He had been an editor of a Jewish cultural magazine and was now a fundraiser.

Commentary had the mission of being a nonpartisan journal focusing on Jewish affairs and other contemporary issues—a sort of Jewish Harper's, only more scholarly. Cohen designed the new magazine to reconnect assimilated Jews and Jewish intellectuals with the broader, more traditional and very liberal Jewish community. At the same time Commentary would bring the ideas of the young Jewish 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 American culture and values.

Cohen stated his grand design in the first issue:

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.

As Podhoretz put it, Commentary was to lead the Jewish intellectuals "out of the desert of alienation...and into the promised land of democratic, pluralistic, and prosperous America."

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. Commentary paid well and published such rising stars as Hannah Arendt, Daniel Bell, Sidney Hook, and Irving Howe.

Although many or even most of the editors and writers had been socialists, Trotskyites or Stalinists in the past, that was no longer tolerated. Commentary articles were anti-Communist—but also anti-McCarthyite; it identified and attacked any perceived weakness among liberals on cold war issues, giving full backing to President Harry Truman's new Cold War policies such as the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and NATO. The "soft-on-Communism" position of the CIO and Henry Wallace came under steady attack.

Liberals who vehemently 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. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing."