Founding Commentary was the successor to the
Contemporary Jewish Record, which was published by the
American Jewish Committee (AJC) and ran from 1938 to 1945, when its editor, AJC executive secretary
Morris Waldman, retired.
20th century In 1944, with the
Records editor retiring, the AJC consulted with New York City intellectuals including
Daniel Bell and
Lionel Trilling; they recommended that the AJC hire
Elliot E. 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 was designed to bring young Jewish
New York intellectuals' ideas 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 U.S. culture and values. Cohen stated his grand design in the first issue: 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 and anti-
McCarthyite; they identified and attacked any perceived weakness among liberals on
Cold War issues, backing President
Harry Truman's policies such as the
Truman Doctrine, the
Marshall Plan, and
NATO. The "soft-on-Communism" position of the
Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and
Henry A. Wallace came under steady attack. Liberals who 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." Cohen brought on board strong editors who themselves wrote important essays, including Kristol; art critic
Clement Greenberg; film and cultural critic
Robert Warshow; and sociologist
Nathan Glazer.
Commentary also published work by
Hannah Arendt,
Daniel Bell,
Sidney Hook, and
Irving Howe. In the late 1950s, the magazine's quality sagged, as Cohen became mentally ill and died by suicide.
Norman Podhoretz, a protégé of
Lionel Trilling, took over in 1960, running the magazine until his retirement in 1995. Podhoretz said that
Commentary was founded to lead the Jewish intellectuals "out of the desert of alienation...and into the promised land of democratic, pluralistic, and prosperous America".
21st century In 2007, the magazine ended its affiliation with the AJC when Commentary, Inc., an independent
501(c)(3) nonprofit enterprise, took over as publisher. In 2011, the journal donated its archives from 1945 to 1995 to the
Harry Ransom Center at the
University of Texas at Austin. These included letters and essay revisions. ==Reception and influence==