Reconstruction 8.4 (2008)
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Consistently Controversial: Commentary Magazine, 1945 to the Present / Nathan Abrams
Abstract: By studying the example of Commentary magazine today, we can learn much about how a magazine operates. It is instructive as a model for editorship, the relations between a sponsor and editor, and between the editor and his/her staff and contributors. It shows how a small but astutely run magazine can tap into the prevailing political, cultural and intellectual currents to become a major player in the international scene and speak to power. It demonstrates how large circulation figures are not necessary for a magazine's longevity or level of influence, as Commentary's figures have never been great (60,000 at their peak). It is a paradigm of good writing style and how editorship can produce it. At the same time, we can learn from Commentary, which celebrated its sixtieth birthday in November 2005, the pitfalls of becoming too closely aligned with a particular political movement – neoconservatism – and the consequences thereof in terms of loss of contributors, prestige, power, intellectual range and influence.
<1> "The first time she brought a copy into the house, I sounded like a Fundamentalist minister face-to-face with a copy of Hustler. 'I don't want this around here,' I told her. 'I don't want it around the kids!'" [1] What magazine is being referred to here? The answer is Commentary. It would be fair to say that no magazine in America since 1945 has consistently aroused as much controversy as Commentary. Commentary was launched in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the oldest and most conservative Jewish defense organization in the United States. In sponsoring Commentary, the AJC aimed "to meet the need for a journal of significant thought and opinion on Jewish affairs and contemporary issues." [2]
<2> Its first editor, Elliot E. Cohen, was a Southern-born Jew who had gone to Yale and had previously edited the celebrated Menorah Journal. Under Cohen, Commentary was a general and authoritative magazine of the highest quality that was lively and relevant to the basic and most pressing issues on the national and the world scene and which reached a wide, if numerically small, audience. It covered matters of both universal interest but also of specifically Jewish concern, in a non-Zionist intellectual, broad-based Reform Jewish contemporary tone. Cohen guided Commentary from a small, unknown periodical in 1945 into a significant magazine of opinion and influence that Norman Podhoretz took over in 1960. Cohen established its main concerns and set the precedent of an intellectual and Jewish magazine that spoke to power for the first time. But Cohen only hinted at the possibilities of an influential policy magazine; it was Podhoretz who took the hint and turned it into a full-blown reality.
<3> Uniquely for an institutionally-funded Jewish magazine in the 1940s, the editor was granted editorial freedom. Although the philosophy of the Committee was to be implicit in the magazine's contents ("The sponsorship of Commentary by the Committee is in line with its general program to enlighten and clarify public opinion on problems of Jewish concern, to fight bigotry and protect human rights, and to promote Jewish cultural interest and creative achievement in America"), it was not intended to be a house organ ("The opinions and views expressed by Commentary's contributors and editors are their own, and do not necessarily express the Committee's viewpoint or position"). Instead it aimed to be nonpartisan with regard to the Jewish community politics and either factional or parochial in its approach, but broad and far-ranging. "With a perspicacity rare in voluntary organizations, Jewish or otherwise," wrote Podhoretz, "the AJC understood that unless the editor of the new journal were given a free hand and protected from any pressures to conform to the Committee's own line, the result would be a pretentious house organ and nothing more." And which no one would read. The AJC had no intention of "doing anything that would parochialize the journal," or limit its appeal. It never explicitly intended the magazine to function as a public relations magazine, or as a forum for its philosophies ("Its pages will be hospitable to diverse points of view and belief"). [3]
<4> According to Podhoretz, this editorial independence "consisted simply in this: no person except the editor or anyone he might voluntarily wish to consult could read articles in advance of publication or could dictate what should or should not appear in the journal." It meant that the AJC concerned itself only with Commentary's budget, but did not interfere with the contents of the magazine. The magazine has been seen as an exceptional enterprise in this respect: no other organization has so generously sponsored a publication and then left it to operate independently. [4] Taking full advantage of this editorial independence, Commentary's editors (and there have been only four – Podhoretz was replaced by his protégé Neal Kozodoy who in turn was succeeded by Podhoretz's son, John) and turned the magazine into an extension of themselves.
<5> For sixty years, Commentary was one of the most influential magazines in America. It was widely read and discussed among America's cultural, intellectual, and political elites. It was seen at the highest levels of American government, including the President himself. It discovered, published, and nurtured novelists, poets, critics, journalists, politicians, and thinkers. Names like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, James Baldwin, Bernard Malamud, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Noam Chomsky, Hannah Arendt, Norman Mailer, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Elliot Abrams, Daniel Bell, Dwight Macdonald, Lionel Trilling, CP Snow, Delmore Schwartz, Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Leslie Fiedler and many more appeared on its pages. These were people who were or would become household names in America. Its influence extended far beyond the confines of the "New York Intellectuals" for whom it served as a mouthpiece. The actual number of subscribers was always disproportionate to their power to influence national debate. Its authority far outweighed its subscriber list: it was a "must read" for American conservatives, as well as their ideological adversaries. The magazine excelled at stirring up controversy and setting the agenda for public policy issues, including feminism, "political correctness," affirmative action, and issues touching on American-Israeli relations. Ideological and cultural struggles were fought out on the pages of the magazine over the decades. Inside its covers, internecine debates raged about a variety of topics – the Cold War, Vietnam, Civil Rights, art and culture, literature, film, and so on – as its contributors argued, often bitterly, about the course America was taking. Probably a stronger anthology could be assembled from it than from any other magazine in the last half of the twentieth century.
<6> Its influence always extended beyond its circulation. No other magazine over the past half-century was so consistently influential and important in shaping, and shifting, the national agenda. It put in play the core issues of the day, sharpening the national debate and causing those who disagreed with it to respond with the same quality of thought. Whether right or wrong, it made important contributions to American political thought. It kept close to the hub of national debate, often helping to chart the course of the wider political consciousness and discourse. A large number of its articles were seminal. It informed decision makers on matters from national security to education to religion and the arts. As its website put it, its subscribers have been known for their "influence, affluence, culture and education."
<7> Since the 1950s the magazine was a constant mainstay of American intellectual life, enriching and enlightening it. According to Ruth Wisse, it reinvented the intellectual calling. It provided the vehicle and voice for many young intellectuals through its willingness to publish the works of new generations of untried writers, thinkers, and poets. According to one study it has had more influence on the thinking of US intellectuals than all but the New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. [5] It informed teaching at secondary, community college and university level. But it was far more than just a magazine of intellectuals for intellectuals. It occupied the middle ground between the closed world of academia and that of ordinary people. Its community of writers was broad, embracing academics, professionals, intellectuals, writers, journalists, poets, artists, critics, politicians, and so on. Its community of readers was even broader. Thus, can it only be said to be an "intellectual" magazine in the widest sense, in that expansive meaning which Antonio Gramsci suggested went beyond the "traditional and vulgarised type of intellectual" such as "the man of letters, the philosopher, the artist" to include every individual engaged in "some form of intellectual activity," or, as Edward Said has put it, "everyone who works in any field connected either with the production or distribution of knowledge." [6] Those who wrote for it were "public intellectuals" in the way that Russell Jacoby described: "writers and thinkers who address a general and educated audience. Obviously, this excludes intellectuals whose works are too technical or difficult to engage a public." [7]
<8> Commentary has had a profound impact on American history, helping to shape its writing. Historians, sociologists, political scientists, and others have used (and still continue to do so) it as a research tool, as a barometer of postwar society, for reading both wider American and Jewish currents, and for measuring the state of both. [8] In 1973, the then editor of Response magazine, William Novak, wrote of the magazine: "[a] proper study of it and its positions could easily occupy several volumes. A great deal could be learned by the study of the magazine since its inception twenty-eight years ago, but such an undertaking would require a close reading of over three hundred volumes, each of which is the size of a substantial book. But such an effort would be, to say the least, an illuminating approach to the history both of American Jewry and American culture in general in the third quarter of the twentieth century." [9]
<9> It has had a profound influence in and on the Jewish community. It made important contributions to Jewish intellectual and political thought. Out of the approximately 25,000 Jewish publications across the world since the first Jewish newspaper was printed in Amsterdam in the 17th century, according to The Andrea and Charles Bronfman Center for the Media of the Jewish People, it has been the most influential. It became the first Jewish magazine in history to speak directly to those in power, while trying to protect Jewish interests as it defined them. It showed how American Jews and especially Jewish intellectuals had come of age in the two decades after the war. It demonstrated that Jews had both a strong intellectual tradition of their own and a really significant place in the pluralist environment of American liberalism, as well as in the creative surge that followed the war. It was on the coffee table of most Jewish homes, as a vocal and contentious family member, a "secular Talmud" almost. [10]
<10> In doing so it became an indispensable magazine, a crucible in which neocon arguments, especially on foreign policy, were annealed and honed. Commentary was the womb in which neoconservatism was conceived and gestated. It projected the elements that would form neoconservatism: staunch anti-Stalinism and liberal anti-Communism, pro-Americanism, pro-New Dealism, pluralism and secularism, iconoclasm, anti- Jewish Establishmentism, and, perhaps above all, confidence, because Commentary exemplified and exuberated confidence. These provided the props for the neoconservative model. It became the hub of a neocon imperium.
<11> Curiously, for such a singular publication, Commentary suffered from a conspicuous lack of attention for reasons unknown. It has suffered from a conspicuous lack of attention for reasons unknown. A great deal has been written about the "New York Intellectuals" and their publications, but most studies have tended to focus on the magazine Partisan Review. This overwhelming emphasis within current scholarship has been detrimental to the study of other, no less important magazines like Commentary, the study of which, as a consequence, has floundered in its shadow. Only one book length study exists to date that examines Commentary in the same light as Partisan Review. [11] While other, smaller publications such as Dissent, Encounter, The New Leader, and politics have recently become the subjects of study, the scholarship surrounding Commentary magazine is still surprisingly and inexplicably thin. [12]
<12> Moreover, where such books have mentioned Commentary, they have usually done so simply as part of the wider intellectual movements of the time. This includes the work of Alan Wald, Alexander Bloom, Richard Pells, and Neil Jumonville, while Mark Gerson, Gary Dorrien, Lee Edwards, John Ehrman, George Nash, Peter Steinfels, and J. David Hoeveler, Jr. all of whom situate Commentary within the rise of political conservatism/neoconservatism, and hence their material on Commentary not only tends to ignore anything that does not contribute to this discussion, but also is heavily balanced towards political material. As a consequence, they disregard the magazine's very important cultural dimension. In many of these books, Commentary may just as well not be a Jewish magazine. Thus, the important cultural and Jewish aspects of the magazine are ignored. Furthermore, while there are a few brief references to the layout, none of these works treat Commentary as a magazine, tending to ignore elements such as design, graphics, font, advertising and so on. Yet again, therefore, Commentary is not examined in enough detail and hence the scope and impact of the magazine are not fully considered. [13]
<13> There is also a sizeable body of autobiography and memoir written by the "New York Intellectuals" themselves, including former Commentary staff. [14] However, these texts are often self-serving and highly subjective which makes the task even harder. Indeed, one could say that, as a result, a mythology about the New York Intellectuals has grown up around them. And historians of intellectual life in twentieth-century America have largely been content to write within the constraints imposed by the New York Intellectuals' memories of their own lives. As a consequence, some of the histories are unforgivably partisan, either berating the New York Intellectuals and Commentary from the Left for "selling out" or congratulating them from the Right for nurturing the nascent neo-conservative movement. The latter often smack of sycophancy as echoed in titles like The Conservative Revolution or The Neoconservative Vision. Such laudatory and often polemical perspectives have little academic value at times.
<14> Even many of the current books and articles on neoconservatism overlook Commentary despites its vital role in moulding both neoconservatism and Bush's agenda. It was in Commentary that the props of Bush's neocon foreign policy were refined. Once it had become clear that Saddam Hussein and Iraq would not be permanent enemies after the first Gulf War, the magazine filled the vacated space by eagerly evoking a new category of threats: radical Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism, as well as their sponsors like Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Syria. It focused on the need to confront the new transnational enemy from the East, what Charles Krauthammer called the "global intifada." As far back as 1989, Commentary argued that the terrorist threat posed by a radical, vengeful interpretation of Islam was the most urgent and ominous security threat and called for an immediate, intensified, and global confrontation of it. It warned of the threat Islamic militant fundamentalists posed to Western values, as signaled by the Salman Rushdie affair. It pointed out that Mohammed Aidid's successful defiance of the United States in Somalia in 1993 might be only one small taste of things to come. And following the bombing of the World Trade Center in February of 1993, it characterized Islamic fundamentalism as the clearest present danger and ominously predicted that, as the "fundamentalist struggle continues," the "kind of vitriol [they preach] against America" and the "systemic preaching of hatred eventually will produce violence." Even more darkly prophetic was its observation: "Manhattan's own nightmare could recur…" for the "World Trade Center bombing suggests, the conduct even of those fundamentalists who were once American allies and clients cannot be predicted, even in the short term." [15]
<15> The Wilsonian ideal of making the world safe for democracy found much support and space in Commentary, which revived a Wilsonian streak fairly early on, dating back to the mid-1970s. In the wake of the Cold War, Commentary sought to ensure that the United States continued to play the part of a world power and remain involved overseas. It was part of a group of academics, intellectuals, and commentators who styled themselves as "democratic internationalists," who emphasized the necessity of American leadership in a newly unipolar world to create the conditions for peace and security through the defense and advance of democracy, and who were skeptical of international organizations and institutions. They saw the post-Cold War task of the United States was to defend democratic allies and resist aggression by fanatical states, promoting democratic transitions where possible, and supporting democratic consolidation elsewhere. After the first Gulf War, in particular, Commentary pushed the United States to encourage liberalization and democratization in the Middle East in order to prevent the rise of another Saddam. It called for a refashioned American crusade for world democracy in which America would be globally active.
<16> Nonetheless, in getting to this point, Commentary had made a series of compromises which led to its eventual marginalization. It spoke only for a splinter group. It lost and alienated its core Jewish constituency. American Jews were simply not prepared to read a magazine that consistently articulated positions contrary to their own. Commentary had singularly failed to break the paradigm whereby the vast majority of American Jews remain liberal Democrats and regard neoconservatism as, at best, an eccentric minority. Commentary may still exist but it no longer comprised an intellectual focus in the way it once did. It has aged and is suffering from, as one former editor put it, "a slight arterial sclerosis." [16]
Notes
[1] Harry Stein, How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (and Found Inner Peace) (New York: Perennial, 2001), 63. [^]
[2] This quote is taken from a "Statement of Aims," which the AJC placed in every issue of Commentary. [^]
[3] "Statement of Aims," Commentary; Podhoretz, Making It, pp. 128, 133. [^]
[4] Norman Podhoretz, Making It (New York: Random House, 1967), 299 and quoted in Philip Ben, "Commentary: An American Monthly with Jewish Roots," draft article for Maariv (January 27, 1978), AJC, YIVO. While it was never explicitly intended that Commentary would function neither as a forum for the Committee's philosophies nor as an exercise in public relations, the term "editorial freedom" belies the exact nature of the relationship between the magazine and the AJC. However, where Commentary has been the subject of academic attention, these studies have not really challenged this notion of "editorial freedom." I challenge the claims to full editorial independence: the actual relationship between magazine and sponsor was perhaps more complex than suggested by the term "editorial freedom." Without going into too much detail, I will say here that complete editorial autonomy was never achieved. [^]
[5] "How and Where to Find the Intellectual Elite in the United States," Public Opinion Quarterly (1971). [^]
[6] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), p. 9; Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual (London: Vintage, 1994), 7. [^][7] Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 5. [^]
[8] Mark Shechner, After the Revolution: Studies in Contemporary Jewish-American Imagination (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 20; David Hollinger, "Ethnic Diversity, Cosmopolitanism and the Emergence of the American Liberal Intelligentsia," American Quarterly 27 (May 1975), 133. [^]
[9] William Novak, "Commentary and the Jewish Community: the Record Since 1960," Response 7:3 (Fall 1973), 66. [^]
[10] Ruth Wisse, "Is Commentary a Jewish Magazine?" Paper delivered to the "Commentary Magazine in the American Jewish Community and American Culture" conference, 10 March 2003; Morris Dickstein, email to author, 21 December 2001; Steven Gorelick, remarks made at the "Commentary Magazine in the American Jewish Community and American Culture" conference, 10 March 2003. [^]
[11] Nathan Abrams, Commentary Magazine 1945-1959: 'A journal of significant thought and opinion' (London and Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006). [^][12] Naomi W. Cohen, Not Free to Desist: A History of the American Jewish Committee 1906-1966 (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1972). [^]
[13] Alan Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989; 2nd edn.); Neil Jumonville, Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Mark Gerson, The Neoconservative Vision: From the Cold War to the Culture Wars (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1997); Gary Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993); Lee Edwards, The Conservative Revolution: The Movement that Remade America (New York: The Free Press, 1999); John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs 1945-1994 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995); George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1976); Peter Steinfels, The Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are Changing America"s Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979); J. David Hoeveler, Jr. Watch on the Right: Conservative Intellectuals in the Reagan Era (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1991); Paul Gottfried, The Conservative Movement (New York: Twayne, 1993, rev. edn.); and Sidney Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1986). [^]
[14] Norman Podhoretz, Making It (New York: Random House, 1967), Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer (New York: The Free Press, 1999); My Love Affair with America: The Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative (New York: The Free Press, 2000); Diana Trilling, The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling (New York and London: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1993); William Phillips, A Partisan View: Five Decades of the Literary Life (New York Stein and Day, 1983); Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Biography (London: Secker & Warburg, 1982); Irving Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative: Looking Back, Looking Ahead (New York: Basic Books, 1983); William Barrett, The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals (New York: Doubleday, 1982); Ted Solotaroff, Truth Comes in Blows: A Memoir (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998); Midge Decter, An Old Wife"s Tale: My Seven Decades in Love and War (New York: Regan Books, 2001). [^]
[15] Daniel Pipes, "The Ayatollah, the Novelist, and the West," Commentary 6:6 (June 1989), 9-17; AJ Bacevich, "Learning from Aidid," Commentary 96:6 (December 1993), 30-33; Martin Kramer, "Islam & the West (including Manhattan)," 96:4 (October 1993), 33-37 and "Islam vs. Democracy," Commentary 95:1 (January 1993), 25-42. [^]
[16] Podhoretz, Ex-Friends, p. 221; Werner Dannhauser, interview by author, August 22, 2003. [^]
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