It was Irving Kristol, Ruth Wisse reminds us, who said thatCommentarywas 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, “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 Washington, 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...

The year 1945 marked a period of disruption for American Jewry, and for New York’s community of Jewish intellectuals in particular. The end of World War II, with the full revelations of the Nazi genocide in Europe, the possibility of a Jewish state in Palestine, and the shift of focus from Europe toward America, had a disorientating effect on American Jews. As they emerged from the war, many young Jewish intellectuals felt the need to seek institutional alignment not only to overcome a sense of alienation but also as a solution to a new economic reality that had destroyed their...

I served on the staff ofCommentarymagazine from its beginning in 1945 until I left in 1953. I also worked on its predecessor magazine, theContemporary Jewish Record (CJR), for a year or so. I would first like to say a few words about this predecessor journal, as it shaped what was to become the newCommentaryand the circle that was to form around the new magazine in a number of ways.

TheCJRwas a bimonthly journal published by the American Jewish Committee (AJC). My path to it was rather indirect and was made possible both by...

The Center for the Documentation of the Jewish Press in Tel Aviv has catalogued over 15,000 Jewish publications, and estimates that there have been as many as 25,000 in various languages.¹ Some of these publications continued for over a century, and many had a profound effect on Jewish life and culture, yet Irving Kristol was probably right when he asserted at one of its annual dinners thatCommentaryhas been the most influential Jewish magazine in history. Last spring I was introduced to the director of an American studies program at one of Poland’s major universities, who told me that...

The 1990s should have been banner years forCommentaryand its critique of urban liberalism. For a quarter-century,Commentaryand its young nephewThe Public Interesthad engaged in a sustained critique of what might be described as the Great Urban Leap Forward of the 1960s. As in China, the attempt to rapidly engineer a vast social transformation had ended in disaster, with the consequent need to cover over the failure with re-education.

In the early 1960s,Commentaryresponded to the foibles of urban liberalism from within a liberal perspective, but gradually, as its disenchantment with the fruits of liberal...

When, in late 1945, the American Jewish Committee entrusted Elliot E. Cohen with the editorship of a new magazine, it charged him “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.”¹ To do all that, Cohen’s writers would have to address a formidable range of issues, from the significance of the Holocaust, the essence of Judaism as a religion, the qualities of Jewish intellect, and the social status of American Jews; to American foreign policy, race relations, the creation of...

Nearly two decades after I started writing forCommentary, I can still remember how excited I was to see my name on the cover of that notoriously hard-to-crack magazine for the first time. I remember no less vividly what it felt like to readCommentary, long before it occurred to me that I might possibly write for it someday. Though I’d only visited Manhattan once, midway through sophomore year in college, I was already so curious about the New York intellectuals that I read everything by them that I could find in the library—meaning, above all,Commentary. I didn’t...

In my history of American anticommunism, I assigned Norman Podhoretz a leading part in the final scenes of the drama of the Cold War—I love the notion of being able to assign historical roles, like Peter Quince parceling out the parts in the “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” (“Strobe Talbott, you will present the Berlin Wall—don’t let anyone tear it down. President Carter, you will present the Man in the Moon.”) I wrote that after the catastrophes of Vietnam and Watergate—and after the repudiation of anticommunism in American leadership circles, symbolized by President Carter’s 1977 “freedom from the inordinate...

Probably no American journal of opinion has been more praised and pilloried in the last thirty years thanCommentaryhas, under the editorship of Norman Podhoretz and Neal Kozodoy, and no political tendency or ideology has been more analyzed and remarked on than the phenomenon called neoconservatism, with whichCommentaryhas been identified since the early 1970s. On the subject of neoconservatism, at least four full-length books have been written, along with several dissertations, numerous anthologies and memoirs, and uncounted newspaper and magazine articles—not to mention a stream of “background” works, as it were, about the “New York Intellectuals.”¹...

Commentaryis synonymous with neoconservatism. Although neoconservatism was born in 1965, in the pages of Irving Kristol’s journal thePublic Interest, it was not until editor Norman Podhoretz usedCommentaryin June 1970 to state his opposition to the New Left that the movement began to attract attention. Indeed,Commentary’s long-established position as a major liberal intellectual journal, Podhoretz’s flair for attracting publicity, and the stridency of the magazine’s attacks on its opponents virtually ensured that the ideological shift would make a big splash among intellectuals. In the two decades that followed,Commentary’s influence spread well beyond the intellectual community....