Moving from left to right

The saga of the transformation of American Jewry’s most influential magazine.

By YAËLLE AZAGURY
commentary (photo credit: jerusalem post archives)
commentary
(photo credit: jerusalem post archives)
“IF YOU’RE NOT A LIBERAL AT 20 YOU HAVE no heart, if you are not a conservative at 40 you have no brain,” Winston Churchill noted famously.
He was talking about what he viewed as an inevitable transformation of the human mind, and in Benjamin Balint’s book “Running Commentary,” the premise applies to the magazine Commentary, created in 1945 by the leftist children of Jewish immigrants to the United States, only to morph, 40 years later, at the height of the Reagan years, into the tribune for neoconservative doctrine.
In this refreshingly impartial examination of one of the 20th century’s most influential magazines that gave America novel insights into politics, culture and literature, Balint, himself a former assistant editor at Commentary who has written both for Haaretz and the Wall Street Journal, paints with precise brush strokes a nuanced and honest picture, offering readers a comprehensive study of an important chapter of Jewish American intellectual history.
In prose as vivid as it is elegant, Balint proves himself worthy of Commentary’s stylistic and intellectual heritage. He firstly reconstructs Commentary’s roots, taking us back to the 1920s to City College in New York, the “Harvard of the proletariat,” where most of the Commentary crowd came from. Free of the quotas for Jews that plagued other institutions of learning, City College was, in the 1920s and 1930s, almost three quarters filled with Jews bound by a common language (Yiddish) and frame of reference. Their parents, Eastern European Jewish immigrants who had come to America between 1880 and 1924, were peddlers, tailors, shoemakers, but also religious men with a tradition of study. Many, rebelling against the harsh conditions in the sweatshops, were radicals who pioneered socialism and the labor movement.
The “Family,” as the Commentary crowd would later be called, originated from dissident, anti-Stalinist Trotskyists, a minority on the Left. Their unifier, the creator and first editor of Commentary from 1945 to 1959, was Elliot Cohen, not a City College alumnus (he was admitted to Yale at age 14): His vision birthed a new kind of Jewish magazine, liberated, in Balint’s words, from “provincialism, defensiveness, sectarianism, sentimentality and self-congratulation.”
Although Cohen will remain less famous than Commentary’s second and longest-serving editor Norman Podhoretz, Balint sheds welldeserved light onto the man who freed Jewish culture from the confinements of parochialism, bringing alienated immigrant Jews from the periphery to the center, and integrating them into modern American culture while simultaneously finding room for their Jewishness. He also credits him with setting Commentary’s tone, brilliant, acidtongued, argumentative, and its style, “learned, deft, discursive, commanding, self-assured,” and with grooming a stable of young writers, fast-talking, merciless controversialists.
It was on Cohen’s watch that Commentary distinguished itself and thrived. It covered the Holocaust extensively, publishing, for instance, survivor accounts, historian Lucy Dawidowicz’s writings on the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and a condensed serialization of “The Diary of Anne Frank.” Commentary’s pages also featured Jewish historian Salo Baron urging Jews to integrate into American life and philosopher Hannah Arendt voicing her coolness towards Zionism (a coolness shared by most of the magazine’s staff at the time).
COMMENTARY ALSO PRESIDED OVER THE RISE OF A new kind of Jewish literature that broke loose from sentimentalized clichés and picturesque stereotypes: Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth formed a new Golden Triangle. Cohen’s magazine also acted as a hothouse for a new age of literary criticism with the likes of Lionel Trilling, Isaac Rosenfeld and Irving Howe, who innovated by considering criticism as another form of literary expression in its own right. Rather than viewing literature as a self-referential, self-contained aesthetic object like the New Critics did, they saw it as life itself. Literary criticism was social criticism. Thus, they started examining American fiction as part of their own identity.
Cohen’s periodical also unveiled Soviet crimes, publishing for instance firsthand accounts of a slave-labor camp. It also commissioned Michael Harrington’s landmark 1959 article “Our Fifty Million Poor,” which helped spark president Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty program. In short, Commentary was a first-rate publication, hailed by then-senator John F. Kennedy in 1959 as “one of the most stimulating and well-edited periodicals that have come to my attention.” As Philip Roth put it, “Commentary furnished a whole education, a way of being Jewish and intelligent and American – all at once.”
The Commentary crowd and its readership also migrated towards an anti-Communism of the left, taking their cue from Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” (1951), which showed that Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union were in essence two sides of the same totalitarian coin. And while the Family would always feel that Jews were inherently liberals, they also started to view Jewishness as “20th century Americanism,” and began to express an abiding love for America’s democratic principles while moving away from their Communist origins. Although discreet in his allegiances, Balint obviously considers this initial phase as Commentary’s Golden Age.
COMMENTARY’S SLOW TURN TO THE RIGHT COINcided roughly with Norman Podhoretz’s tenure as editor from 1960 to 1995. Neoconservatives are “liberals mugged by reality,” as Irving Kristol put it famously. The first mugging was the rise of the counterculture of the 60s, which the Commentary crowd considered a frivolous rebellion without a cause, a hunger for simplicity. The Movement – that was its name – considered the very idea of intellectual standards as reactionary. The second blow was the radicalization of the Black Movement, fracturing the old solidarity between Blacks and Jews. And in the wake of the 1967 Six Day War, a new anti- Semitism emerged in the form of virulent attacks against Israel. Coming to Israel’s defense, Commentary inaugurated a new and lasting pro- Israel stance for the magazine. It was the beginning of the end for the old coalition of the Left, which would never recover. From then on, Commentary started to counter the counterculture. But first it had to find a new label for itself.
So what is Neoconservatism, an improvised term that was first coined as an insult by democratic socialist Michael Harrington in a 1973 Dissent magazine article until Irving Kristol accepted the label in the mid-70s? Perhaps Balint is a bit elliptical on the principles of Neoconservatism. His approach follows the emergence of this new political theory in a pragmatic, chronological fashion: a more theoretical analysis would have been useful. Yet, in pointing at the right questions he shows us the path to a definition.
Balint notes one interesting name inversion: “Nineteenth-century liberalism, with its emphasis on free markets, was now called conservatism; nineteenth-century conservatism was now labeled liberalism.” Names and definitions are in flux. Could that mean that Left and Right are also obsolete labels in our post-postmodern world, or will that very duality be a perennial feature of the oscillating pendulum of the human mind?
To extend Balint’s reflection, one more paradox, subsumed from today’s political climate, is helpful: the Left’s 19th century universalism, its impulse to spread democratic principles to the world, is now replaced by its defense of relativism, and its almost solipsistic retreat into ethnic origins and religious belonging. Thus, as Balint reminds us, one of the tenets of the Neoconservative Right, consistently upheld by Commentary from the 70s on, is the right to spread the principles of American democracy by foreign intervention, to shed a “light unto the nations.” Hence, the Bush Doctrine: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were seen as necessary campaigns in the dissemination of democracy.
Balint detects one other baffling inversion: In the 19th century as well as in the first half of the 20th century, anti-Semitism was located on the Right. It has now mostly deserted the Right to find a welcoming home on the Left: the old wine is now in the new bottle of anti-Zionism.
As a consequence of this recasting of values, Commentary’s vision, notes Balint, changed and became less generous: with Podhoretz, its style turned more adversarial. Affirmative action was criticized as racist; culture in general was considered to be in a phase of decadence (a classic conservative theme); there was a new emphasis on “family values” and a “retreat to the tribe” as the magazine became more concerned with Jewish interests. Even its fiction lost its edge. Neal Kozodoy, Podhoretz’s loyal friend and the magazine’s editor from 1995 to 2008, merely perpetuated his predecessor’s legacy, and when Norman’s son, John Podhoretz, became editor in 2008, it was, notes Balint, the beginning of a debacle. The magazine underwent, in John Podhoretz’s words, a “dramatic redesign,” adding ornamentation (Elliot Cohen favored austere, sober columns with no illustrations), instituting a monthly Jewish jokes department, and retiring the “Books in Review” section. Articles seem repetitive, even in their titles.
IN HIS EPILOGUE, BALINT DEPLORES WHAT HE CALLS an impoverishment of the magazine’s literary and political “imagination,” the loss of its inclusive embrace, and laments moreover that the Commentary crowd could be found in the corridors of power, especially under Reagan and Bush, rather than on its margins. Having become hofjuden, or court Jews, its intellectuals are now insiders and thus useless in society’s reformation.
Aquick glance at an issue of Commentary will suffice to show that it has indeed lost its past rigor and grandeur. It has adopted a view, notes Balint, which is too consistently bellicose, lacking the dissenting voices that give a publication its tension and complexity.
On the second issue however, let me ask whether an intellectual always has to be alienated to be effective? Are intellect and power mutually exclusive? Should Barack Obama’s administration be discredited by the fact that it was and continues to be supported by myriad intellectuals, writers, journalists, thinkers? And are the latter necessarily discredited now that they are themselves insiders? Finally isn’t there also a long and praiseworthy historical tradition of Jewish counselors to kings, including Maimonides, among others?
Another kind of alienation seems more puzzling: As Commentary drifted to the Right, American Jewish voters overwhelmingly kept voting for the Left. As Milton Himmelfarb, one of Commentary’s founding fathers noted: “America’s Jews are the only group who earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.” With the one exception of the 1980 election where Reagan received 39 percent of the Jewish vote, the highest of any Republican candidate since 1928, American Jews consistently vote for the Democrats (the Jewish vote for Obama was 77 percent). What does that mean? How can we account for the discrepancy between Commentary and its audience?
As “counterers of the counterculture,” Commentary still holds on to its subversive roots as an original voice that will not rest satisfied with the status quo. And as American culture has in the last 50 years moved to a diluted leftism of sorts, Commentary is back on the sidelines, if not in the margins, striving in its own eyes – albeit imperfectly – to stay true to its original values. Neoconservatism was formulated by people who came from the Left, and who held on to the Old Left’s humanist impulses. It can not merely be equated with traditional conservatism.
In judging Commentary’s intellectuals, historical context is lacking. Perhaps we should place them in a global perspective, and compare them to other intellectuals of the same generation, such as for instance, the New Philosophers in France – Bernard-Henri Lévy, André Glucksman, and Alain Finkielkraut – who, having witnessed the same historical changes, subdued the leftist ardors of their youth, disillusioned by what they too view as the same cheapening of values.
Every Jew in the Diaspora has hopefully been confronted at least once in his life with the desire to find that point of perilous equilibrium between who he is for himself as a Jew, and who he is for others outside of his religious denomination.
Balint, an American Jew who moved to Israel, made a choice and thus found his own way of striking a balance. Commentary, which succeeded for a long time in this acrobatic exercise, has most likely, according to Balint, lost that ability. Let us hope that, following the Jewish tradition of Talmudic interpretation that grants endless transformations to a text, and thus, to the human mind, it will, once again, be “mugged by its own reality,” resist the temptations of fossilization and continue to transform itself.

Dr. Yaëlle Azagury is a freelance cultural reporter living in the United States who writes primarily on French and Sephardi culture.