Commentary Magazine
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| Editor | John Podhoretz |
|---|---|
| Frequency | 11 issues / year (monthly, but with a combined July–August issue) |
| Circulation | 33,000 / month |
| First issue | 1945 |
| Company | Commentary Inc. |
| Country | New York, United States |
| Language | English |
| Website | commentarymagazine.com |
| ISSN | 0010-2601 |
| OCLC number | 488561243 |
Commentary is a monthly American magazine on religion, Judaism, and politics, as well as social and cultural issues.
Founded by the American Jewish Committee in 1945, it was edited by Norman Podhoretz from 1960 to 1995. Besides its strong coverage of cultural issues, Commentary provided a strong voice for the anti-Stalinist left. Podhoretz, originally a liberal Democrat turned neoconservative, moved the magazine to the right and toward the Republican Party in the 1970s and 1980s.
Commentary has been described by Benjamin Balint as the "contentious magazine that transformed the Jewish left into the neoconservative right", while, according to historian and literary critic Richard Pells, "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." According to Commentary itself, "Irving Kristol once called [it] the most influential magazine in Jewish 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 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. 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 would bring the 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 American culture and values. Cohen stated his grand design in the first issue:
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