Commentary In American Life

COMMENTARY IN AMERICAN LIFE

COMMENTARY IN AMERICAN LIFE Edited by Murray Friedman

Temple University Press PHILADELPHIA

Temple University Press 1601 North Broad Street Philadelphia PA 19122 www.temple.edu/tempress Copyright © 2005 by Temple University All rights reserved Published 2005 Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.49-1992 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Commentary in American life, edited by Murray Friedman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-59213-105-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-59213-106-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Jews—United States—Politics and government. 2. Jews—United States—Intellectual life. 3. Commentary (New York, N.Y.). I. Friedman, Murray, 1926– E184.36.P64C66 2005 296′.05—dc22

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Contents

Introduction Commentary: The First Sixty Years, by Murray Friedman

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1 “America Is Home”: Commentary Magazine and the Refocusing of the Community of Memory, 1945—1960, by Nathan Abrams

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2 Commentary: The Early Years, by Nathan Glazer

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3 The Jewishness of Commentary, by Ruth R. Wisse

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4 Commentary and the City: Getting It Right, Getting It Wrong, by Fred Siegel

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5 What They Talked About When They Talked About Literature: Commentary in Its First Three Decades, by Thomas L. Jeffers

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6 Commentary and the Common Culture, by Terry Teachout

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7 Norman Podhoretz and the Cold War, by Richard Gid Powers

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8 Joining the Ranks: Commentary and American Conservatism, by George H. Nash

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9 Commentary's Children: Neoconservatism in the Twenty-First Century, by John Ehrman

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Notes

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About the Contributors

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Index

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Introduction Commentary: The First Sixty Years Murray Friedman

I

t was Irving Kristol, Ruth Wisse reminds us, who said that Commentary was 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 life of the United States.” The Commentary we are most familiar with today is widely seen as an organ of American political conservatism. Although this is so, from its beginning the magazine had broader scope and purposes, as indeed it continues to have today. Commentary was founded by the American Jewish Committee in 1945 as a monthly journal of “significant thought and opinion, Jewish affairs and contemporary issues.” It was modeled on the Partisan Review, a magazine of somewhat similar style and sensibility, although the latter had no formal Jewish institutional ties. A youthful Nor1

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Introduction

man Podhoretz once asked Commentary’s first editor, Elliot E. Cohen, what the difference was between the two magazines. Cohen responded that Commentary was a consciously Jewish magazine, but although the Partisan Review was Jewish because of its leadership and contributors, it didn’t know it. Although institutionally sponsored, Commentary won complete editorial freedom early on—a rare occurrence in organizational life. The magazine has gone through three stages and is in the midst of a fourth, roughly paralleling the incumbency of its three editors. The first stage (1945–1960) began with the appointment of Cohen as editor. The second phase saw the accession of Norman Podhoretz, who continued in the post until his retirement in 1995. Finally, in the third stage, Podhoretz’s long-time associate and close collaborator, Neal Kozodoy, took over with the special responsibility, as it turned out, of moving the publication into the post–Cold War era. Each of these editors faced unique challenges. As its first, Cohen had to deal with a Jewish community, and most especially its intellectual and cultural leadership, that was attempting to assimilate into American life. For most, this meant adhering to a vague, universalistic Socialism coupled with the Freudian modernism that was then fashionable. Both philosophies taught that religion and group identity were forms of primitivism that people outgrew as they became more knowledgeable and enlightened. In the immediate postwar years, Cohen set out to nurture the development of a proud American Jewish community that embraced modernity but found room within it to maintain a distinct Jewish spirit and cultural identity. At the same time, he sought to reach out to a broader public with serious observations on the central issues of the times. To accomplish these objectives, Cohen assembled a group of extraordinary editors and writers including Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Clement Greenberg, and Robert Warshow. Among Commentary’s special characteristics was that although it was created as a “specialist” Jewish magazine, it devoted so many of its pages to “general” affairs. Another special attribute was that, given its “heavyweight” editors and writers, it had a down-to-earth quality that included reporting on the day-to-day life of everyday Jews. A highly popular section that ran for many years was “From the American Scene.” Cohen later said

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this section was closest to the heart of its purposes: “It was our thought,” he wrote, “to use many methods to help bring American Jews and their concerns into their own and public view with fuller knowledge and insight then generally obtains—historical reconstruction, intellectual analysis, reportage, religious reflection, sociological and other scientific study, [and] fiction.” As Thomas Bell Jeffers points out in this book, Commentary welcomed and helped to advance the careers of writers who were then little known, including such figures as Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Norman Mailer, and Joseph Heller, not to mention the extraordinary Yiddish-into-English achievement of Isaac Bashevis Singer. In the dedication to her book of short stories, The Pagan Rabbi, Ozick even paid tribute to Podhoretz as her guiding spirit. Following the appearance of her short story, “Envy,” in the magazine, Ozick says, her career took off. “Very clearly, Commentary was able to avoid all of the second-rate Jewish fiction that was being published at the time,” literary critic Susan Klingenstein says. “It is amazing how well the fiction of these years . . . stand[s] rereading now.” All of these writers, not incidentally, have wrestled with the problem of what it means to be a Jew in American life. By 1950, Commentary had become the leading journal in American intellectual life and thought. In the process, Terry Teachout notes in his chapter, Commentary developed a style of communication that made it a “must-read” for intellectuals but that was “equally accessible to ordinary educated people,” or the “common reader” as Teachout calls them here. Podhoretz once said he sought to publish essays like those that would be written by historians much later, when greater insight and information would be more readily available. Commentary, in short, has sought to avoid becoming a prisoner of its times: It tries to take a longer view of the subjects it examines. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Commentary is often ahead of its time. To take an example at random, while developing this Introduction, I stumbled on a Commentary essay written by a twentysix-year-old, little-known writer, Daniel Pipes, in August 1981: “The Politics of Muslim Anti-Semitism.” In this piece, Pipes developed a theme that is front and center today: the use of anti-Semitism as part of the politics of the present-day Arab/Israel encounter. “Hardly a

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Introduction

mishap occurs in the Arab world,” Pipes wrote twenty-three years ago “which does not get blamed on the Jews. . . . In brief, the Arabs have managed to make Israel a pariah in international politics.” Starting in the late 1940s and 1950s, while still operating within the framework of the Left, Commentary recognized the aggressive designs of the Soviet Union on the world and the threat it posed to the West. Commentary proceeded to challenge vigorously the efforts, both at home and abroad, of those who still thought of that country as the land of the future—or who at least hesitated to take up the burden of confrontation for fear of nuclear catastrophe. This challenge was a task the magazine pursued relentlessly until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990. Simultaneously, Commentary remained steadfast in its liberal orientation but grew restless with the formulas of the welfare state. However useful when first formulated and implemented, these formulas had grown stale and needed an infusion of new analysis and thought. Commentary’s movement to a neoconservative posture took place over a period of time and was highlighted in 1972 by George McGovern’s race for the presidency. Whatever may have been its literary and cultural accomplishments, Commentary will no doubt continue to be best thought of as a prime architect of neoconservatism. (The other such vehicle was Irving Kristol’s journal, The Public Interest, which was created in 1965.) Curiously, Podhoretz did not start out as a neoconservative when he took over the magazine in 1960. Indeed, at first he made it a vehicle of the New Left. He published pieces by such figures as Edgar Friedenberg and Christopher Lasch, as well as putting forth much of the New Age thought that came to characterize the period. Before long, however, Podhoretz became concerned about the dangers the Left posed to the West, and especially to the embattled State of Israel. Even as it went through this Left phase, Commentary never lost faith in America. If there is a continuing theme in the magazine’s history, it is the enormous pride it takes in the United States and the great promise of personal freedom and material well-being this country offers to our citizens and to the rest of the world. In the late 1960s and 1970s, Commentary also came to challenge the excesses of rebelling students in elite institutions across the land, many of whom viewed this country then and now as a repressive, imperial power.

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Commentary could be trusted, the literary critic Alexander Bloom has written, to tell its readers what was right with American society more than what was wrong. Even in his own rebellious period, as he took up the reins of Commentary, Podhoretz rejected for publication the Port Huron statement—the guiding document of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the New Left—prepared by activist Tom Hayden, as not being thought through well enough. Podhoretz felt that the statement encouraged extremist behavior, which of course is exactly what happened. In the second phase of Commentary’s history, the magazine and its stable of writers came also to review its earlier posture with regard to the welfare state and the role of government in alleviating poverty. As the urban rioting of the 1960s developed, signaling the breakdown of the social order and the various wild schemes intended to improve it, as Fred Siegel notes here, the issue for Commentary became not whether the country and its cities had a special obligation to help but, rather, how to help effectively. This was not so much a break with the magazine’s older liberalism as a reflection of the exhaustion of that body of thought and action and the need to develop new ways of thinking about how to deal with the urban crisis. Thus, alongside its battle against Soviet imperialism, Commentary’s neoconservative posture was born. Commentary’s role in the Cold War came at an especially propitious moment. The fortunes of anticommunism were at a low ebb as a result of the war in Vietnam (which Podhoretz opposed early on as the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time). The mood that had developed in much of the country was that battling the spread of Communism abroad led inevitably to that war, and presumably other terrible disasters, and that we as a nation should refrain from such efforts. Many of our intellectual, political, and cultural elite had become paralyzed with regard to the continuing threat posed by the Soviet Union. It was at this moment, as Richard Gid Powers indicates in his chapter here and in his book, Not Without Honor: The History of American Anti-Communism, that Commentary picked up the fallen banner of anticommunism. In article after article by Commentary writers, as well as in his book, The Present Danger, Podhoretz and the magazine helped to renew the focus on the struggle with the Soviet Union. Commentary

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Introduction

and the neoconservative movement, which the magazine came to embody, sought to move beyond de´tente. The latter, however, accepted the status quo in Eastern Europe and only mildly resisted aggressive Soviet designs on the world. Commentary set out to undermine what Ronald Reagan later called an “evil empire.” Although there is a sharp debate presently underway in academic circles on the forces that led to the demise of the Soviet Union, Commentary’s efforts, which represented the intellectual and ideological heartland of the anticommunist movement, along with the internal weaknesses of that totalitarian state itself, helped to bring it down. Commentary also viewed with growing dismay the collapse of a number of universities and other institutions in the face of New Left pressures. As James Q. Wilson, then at Harvard, wrote in the magazine’s June 1972 issue, it is “within higher education that one finds today many . . . of the most serious threats to certain liberal values— the harassment of unpopular views, the use of force to prevent certain persons from speaking, the adoption of quota systems either to reduce the admissions of certain kinds of students or enhance the admissions of other kinds, and the politicization of the university to make it an arena for the exchange of manifestos rather than a forum for the discussion of ideas.” As early as 1964, Podhoretz published an essay by Nathan Glazer, who was then teaching at the University of California at Berkley, on free speech, following the famous campus eruption there. It was a mild piece but marked the beginning of a full-blown effort by Commentary and others to challenge “political correctness” in the broader society. Its writers used Commentary’s pages to condemn the cowardice of many of our leading universities and other institutions and to encourage them to stand strong against threats to the values of a free society. Glazer challenged the notion that student radicals were rebels against unjust authority; they were in fact “red diaper” babies, Glazer argued, emulating their parents but coming from another direction. More recently, these ideas have found support in broader circles including, not incidentally, liberal circles, as marked by the publication of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (1991) and by New York Times cultural writer Richard Bernstein’s Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for

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America’s Future (1994). The phrase “politically correct,” more often than not today, has become a form of mockery as well as a description of a social phenomenon. Much as it had done with literary figures earlier, George Nash writes in this book, Commentary “opened a door to a new generation of conservative Jewish writers not just by publishing some of their work . . . but by the compelling example of its history.” As the nation enters a new and dangerous era, marked by an unprecedented war on terrorism, “Commentary’s Children,” as John Ehrman writes here, including William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, and David Brooks, now a regular Op-Ed columnist at the New York Times and many other publications, have come to play a critical role in shaping the nation’s thought and policies. With the end of the Cold War, the direct influence of the publication may have diminished somewhat. The world has changed significantly since those halcyon days. Once a lonely voice in the wilderness, it has been joined by a number of similarly minded magazines including The Public Interest, First Things, The National Interest, and The Weekly Standard, which, along with “Commentary’s Children,” view things from much the same perspective. Under Kozodoy, Podhoretz’s successor (and his collaborator for many years), the magazine has remained much the same in style and substance, though unlike Podhoretz, Kozodoy has let the magazine speak entirely for itself and has not joined personally in the ideological wars that left Podhoretz with a trail of what he calls “ex-friends.” As the war on terrorism has heated up, Commentary, under Kozodoy’s direction, has published some of the most thoughtful and penetrating analyses of the direction it is taking, including the work of Josh Muravchik, Arthur Waldron, Andrew C. McCarthy, and Norman Podhoretz, without which it is not possible to fully understand this new dimension in American life. See especially Podhoretz’s thirty-eight-page essay, “World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win,” in the September 2004 issue. This book was undertaken because Commentary has received little scholarly attention from historians. Although not speaking of Commentary directly, historian Michael Kazin has written in the American Historical Review that, “like most people, historians are reluctant to

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sympathize with people whose political opinions they detest.” Overly cosmopolitan in their cultural tastes and liberal or radical in their politics, scholars of modern American history have largely eschewed “research projects about past movements that seem to them either bastions of a crumbing status quo or the domain of puritan, pathological yahoos.” When cultural historians explore the subject of important cultural influences at mid-century and beyond, most have focused on the Partisan Review. As indicated, the Review preceded Commentary and initially served as its model, especially in the Review’s hard-line early anti-Soviet policies. Later, however, the Review’s editors shifted ground and became a voice not unlike that of the New Left. In any case, the Partisan Review has ceased to exist even as Commentary continues to endure and even to prosper. This book represents the first attempt to place this journal under historical scrutiny and to measure the role it has played for almost sixty years. The essays published here were commissioned, and most of them were delivered at a symposium convened by the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History at Temple University in Philadelphia in cooperation with the American Jewish Committee and the graduate school at City College of New York on March 10 and 11, 2003. It was our hope that both the conference and this book would stimulate further studies of this magazine and closer examination of the leading figures associated with it over the years. Commentary’s greatest asset, Ehrman has suggested in this book, is its consistency. “It’s arguments,” he adds, “will continue to build on the same themes it has used until now adding the threats of terrorism and Middle East desperatism to its memories of the struggles against Fascism and Communism.” It will continue, he concludes “to carry out its important institutional role, sending its adherents into the world of intellectual debate and politics to put their ideas into action.”

1 “America Is Home” Commentary Magazine and the Refocusing of the Community of Memory, 1945–1960 Nathan Abrams

A magazine helped revive and focus the community of memory.1 –Howard M. Sachar

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he 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 bohemian lifestyles forever. Recognizing these developments, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) became a major agent both in institutionalizing these intellectuals and in reconciling them with their communities of origin through the establishment of a new intellectual magazine, Commentary, under the editorship of Elliot E. Cohen. As Howard Sachar has observed of the postwar era, Commentary 9

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“America Is Home”

helped to “revive” the community of memory as well as refocus it around constructing a viable Jewish American discourse. Commentary provided the vehicle and voice through which a whole new generation of alienated and untried Jewish writers, thinkers, and poets, such as Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Delmore Schwartz, Lionel Trilling, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Irving Howe, Sidney Hook, and Leslie Fiedler, would move back into their community of origin after World War II. Now, more than at any time in their history, Jewish intellectuals became committed to constructing a new Jewish American community complete with its own Jewish American memories.2 Commentary magazine became one of America’s most celebrated periodicals. Under Cohen, it developed into the premier postwar journal of Jewish affairs, attracting a readership far wider than its Jewish community of origin. Commentary soon became a central organ of the group that was subsequently labeled the “New York Intellectuals,” and consequently assumed a leading position in American intellectual life from the mid-1940s onward. The magazine still occupies an important place in both American and Jewish political and cultural thought today. Commentary, however, has suffered from a conspicuous lack of academic attention. Although a great deal has been written about the New York Intellectuals and their publications, these studies have overwhelmingly focused on the Partisan Review (PR); thus, the scholarship surrounding Commentary is still surprisingly and inexplicably thin.3 I intend to begin filling this vacuum by examining Commentary’s prehistory, in which a group of young Jewish intellectuals who had previously rejected their community of origin became an institutionalized feature of American Jewry. I concentrate on the magazine’s formative years, from 1945 to the end of the 1950s, and examine the concept of “editorial freedom” in particular. In doing so, I show how this literary and cultural initiative led to the formation of a new intellectual community with its own new and particular brand of discourse—a Jewish American discourse of America as “home.” The American Jewish Committee is the oldest existing Jewish defense agency in America. Founded in 1906 in response to the pogroms and the worsening condition of Jews in Eastern Europe, it was an elite organization of middle- and upper-class American German–Jewish

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philanthropic and community leaders. The AJC differed from those defense organizations that followed it, the Anti-Defamation League (1913) and the American Jewish Congress (1918), in the scope of its operations: It was dedicated to protecting the civil and religious rights of the global, rather than simply the American, Jewish community.4 The committee’s founders believed in the promise offered by American democracy of producing a new vision of Jewish life in the Diaspora that would supersede all others that had preceded it. This expression of belief would influence the whole of the AJC’s operations. According to its official historian, Oscar Handlin, this “article of faith” remained “fixed,” and the “complex of these ideas was gradually to define the character of the American Jewish Committee in the next half-century.”5 The committee urged American diplomatic intervention to assist Jews abroad and protested against immigration quotas, which would limit the number of Jews allowed into the United States. Although the AJC remained elitist in nature, it continued to promote its self-imposed function as the mouthpiece for the entire Jewish community. In doing so, the committee worked covertly with government authorities at the highest level, favoring the traditional “court Jew” approach of quiet mediation rather than outright protest. Moving away from the proactive promotion of Jewish rights, the AJC adopted a reactive fight against anti-Semitism, initiating a campaign in 1939 to curb bigotry in America. Its aim in that period was the representation of Jews as “real” Americans. The AJC also took a firm non-Zionist line, as manifested by its decision—in contrast to every other major American Jewish organization—not to join the American Jewish Conference in 1943, which umbrella organization sought to work toward the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. “By the very nature of their ideals,” wrote Oscar Handlin, “the founders of the Committee had opposed any ideology that considered the United States as exile.”6 The AJC therefore devoted its full energies to the promotion of a Jewish American ethic rather than to the establishment of a homeland elsewhere. The committee, however, never shook off its early influences. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, it was accused by the increasing numbers of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, who felt excluded, of being “autocratic and undemocratic” and the “instrument of a small

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“America Is Home”

self-appointed group of families who wished to control the whole community.”7 The AJC lacked wider communal support, and in 1943 it acknowledged that this support would have to be developed. The new executive vice president, John Slawson, was given the responsibility of implementing this reorganization through the establishment of local chapters. The New York chapter, however, remained the dominant chapter, as the apportioning of delegates to the governing bodies was defined according to the size of the population covered by the chapter rather than by the chapter’s size.8 In the aftermath of World War II, the AJC’s size and function were expanded. The death of the founding generation led to the succession of individuals such as Judge Joseph M. Proskauer, Jacob Blaustein, and Irving M. Engel. This paved the way for a broader base of membership than hitherto expressed, which was filled by second-generation, acculturated Jews of Eastern European origin. It now took upon itself the obligation of strengthening the foundations of a pluralistic democratic society. The committee had long since learned that the most efficacious approach to fighting anti-Semitism was not to argue for the rights of Jews alone so much as to defend the equality of all Americans, including Jews. World War II did not produce any change in the committee’s attitude toward Zionism, however. Without accepting the condemnation of Israel pouring out of the American Council for Judaism, a more extreme anti-Zionist splinter group, the committee stuck to its principle that the United States provided a home for Jews. The AJC was very committed to its American homeland and to constructing a viable Jewish American community.9 As a part of this effort, the AJC envisaged the leadership of a cultural vanguard, or an “informed constituency who would lead others” toward the full “adjustment as American citizens of the Jewish religio-cultural identity.”10 Out of this initiative grew Commentary magazine. Commentary appeared at the very point when it would be most accepted by Jewish intellectuals: 1945.11 Before this time, Jewish intellectuals were characterized by their attempts to escape from overt ethnic identification through an embrace of the universalism of Marxism and its variant forms. During the 1920s and 1930s, a strata of Jewish intellectuals emerged in America. Rejecting the orthodoxy and observance of their parents and exploiting the new spaces opened up

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to them, these intellectuals sought to accommodate themselves within the mainstream of American culture. As youngsters, many of them had attended public schools that had attempted to acculturate these Jews into American society by “civilizing” them into becoming Americans. Allied to this Americanizing impulse was the powerful appeal of secular American culture and its promise of the full active participation of Jews as citizens in society, rather than as the parasites they had been considered in the Old World. Young Jewish intellectuals, therefore, sought to take advantage of this new and unprecedented freedom, which American seemed to promise.12 As they sought to move into the American mainstream, however, they found their advance blocked by anti-Semitism, which had greatly increased during the decade following World War I as the result of a potent combination of fashionable pseudoscientific racist thought and as an effect of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The experience worsened during the 1930s, which was an extremely formative period for those Jewish intellectuals who wanted to move into the American mainstream. Opportunities for Jews were increasingly hard to find, and Jewishness was found to be both a handicap and an impediment, particularly in academia. Because of an increasing perception of a “Jewish problem,” the major Ivy League schools introduced quota systems to bar Jews.13 For those Jews who were affected, the answer to anti-Semitism lay outside of their communities of origin. They had learned that although their Jewishness restricted their opportunities, their communities could not provide outlets for their creative impulses either. Instead, such Jews began to look outside the Jewish communities and found solutions within those communities that stressed universalism rather than ethnic particularism. In their search for “place,” young Jewish intellectuals overtly rejected particularistic ethnic characteristics and embraced the new concepts of cosmopolitanism and universalism promised by Marxism and its variant forms. Not only did these theories explain the roots of the economic crash that had destroyed their aspirations, but they were also perceived to be the solution to the problem of “homelessness” or “alienation” for which Jews were considered to be the central symbol.14 The experiences of anti-Semitism led to a marked intellectual shift away from the Jewish community. Where many had contributed to

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“America Is Home”

the overtly Jewish Menorah Journal, they now wrote for Marxist organs. The problem of Jewish identity, it was felt, could be solved not through a particularistic communal identification as Jews but through their positions as universal citizens. The embrace of Marxism was part of the Jewish intellectuals’ search for a community to replace the Jewish one they denied and the American one denied to them. Furthermore, membership in the Communist Party offered those concrete advantages denied to them by the lack of institutional affiliation, most importantly, access to the wider world through small magazines. Rejecting their immigrant backgrounds and rejected by America, young Jewish intellectuals discovered a new community in which they were accepted, it seems, without prejudice. Marxism offered a “sense of belonging.”15 Jews were welcomed as equals and were comforted by the promise of egalitarianism, further nourished by the Soviet experiment, which initially appeared to be the very model of an egalitarian society, spurning anti-Semitism and discrimination. More important, according to Terry Cooney, Marxism and the radical movement “promised acceptance, belonging, opportunity—a home and a career.”16 At last, it seemed, these alienated intellectuals had found a home and a community. These feelings of security, however, were soon to be destroyed for many. The community of organizational Marxism became unacceptable for the young Jewish intellectuals, just as the Jewish community had been before it. Although distaste for the Communist Party was felt throughout the 1930s, for many it provided the only significant force for organization, and hence retained their continued allegiance. This distaste, however, soon began to develop into desertions. Rather than offering solutions to anti-Semitism, communism seemed to exacerbate it. Stalin manifested increasingly anti-Jewish impulses as his denouncements of the Bolshevik old guard progressed, compounded by his persecution of Leon Trotsky. Accordingly, the earliest conversions away from the Party to anti-Stalinism began to occur in 1933– 1934, following news of the Moscow Trials. Other desertions followed with the second round of the Moscow Trials, which were reported in America during 1936–1937. The experience of the Spanish Civil War, and finally the Nazi–Soviet pact of 1939, convinced many others who had not yet left the party to do so. Not only had communism not

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destroyed anti-Semitism but it had allied itself to those who most actively and openly advocated it.17 Eventually abandoning organized Marxism and the Communist Party, the young Jewish intellectuals regrouped around the newly reformulated PR. Although PR had been launched under the auspices of the John Reed Club, a Communist Party organization dedicated to promoting the creation of a proletarian literature and the training of radical writers, its editors had from the beginning made it clear that they did not share the party’s cultural assumptions. The editors of PR objected to the party’s domineering behavior and to its attacks on avant garde literature. Around the time of the second wave of desertions, the editors had drawn up plans for a new, autonomous PR. These plans were announced in 1937, and issues of the new PR appeared soon after. PR subsequently developed into the focal point for those leftist but anti-Stalinist intellectuals who had abandoned the party. The magazine became an independent publication of Marxist opinion. In spite of its “new start,” however, PR still continued to manifest clearly Marxist modes of thought, which primarily took the form of Trotskyism. Trotskyism represented a good vehicle for anti-Stalinism and for criticism of the party because Trotsky’s estrangement from Stalin meant that he was free of stigma and of responsibility for the nature of the violent regime that had developed in the Soviet Union. Although the Communist Party and its official organs were abandoned, Marxism per se was not.18 The result of this move away from party was the establishment of Jewish literary, rather than Halakic, communities. Bereft of the services offered by the Communist Party, and in the absence of any other institutional sponsor, PR in effect began to discharge the functions of a sponsor, shaping a distinctive communal identity. Appearing among the pages of PR signified community membership and was a badge of acceptance.19 The PR circle had to mark itself off from the American mainstream, Stalinism, and the Jewish community, as well as produce its own peculiar brand of discourse based on notions of marginalization, detachment, separation, and independence.20 The overt abandonment of Marxism led to a subsequent investment in Modernism because it privileged the outsider, autonomy, and critique of bourgeois society. In this way, PR attempted to build a “commu-

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nity of discourse”21 that rejected Jewishness as a central defining feature. Much of this circle was also drawn in by a shared anti-Stalinism, which served to bind the group together. The PR circle stood for a cosmopolitanism that advocated an expansive and comprehensive culture based on an open society that valued free discussion and the interchange of ideas in a meritocratic environment, whereby no individual or group was to be excluded on the grounds of heritage. Instead, ethnic and other differences were viewed as contributing to the general outlook of the group, and bigotry and insularity were rejected in the name of cosmopolitanism. Jews, by this view, should support the notion of an open democratic society and should thus oppose both fascism and Stalinism. This approach did not require the abandonment of Jewishness; rather, it valued the contributions that particular ethnicities could make to the broader, more universal culture.22 Throughout these transitions, however, these Jewish intellectuals never lost a sense of community. Their cultural wanderings through the 1930s constituted a search for a community to replace those they did not want or could not have. The effect of World War II and the extermination of European Jewry persuaded many Jewish intellectuals to reconsider their Jewishness. The cumulative effect of anti-Semitism, culminating in the Holocaust, led to a drastic reawakening of Jewish memories in the late 1940s. These intellectuals were always searching for a place in American intellectual life outside of their own Jewish community. Having been alienated (once or twice), as they believed they were, they wanted to solve the problem of rootlessness and find a home. The attempted solutions of Marxism, cosmopolitanism, and modernism had all failed and misled them, as none of these philosophies had prevented Hitler. Instead, the war had increased their sense of identification with both the American and the Jewish communities.23 Through service in the U.S. Army or in federal wartime agencies such as the Office of Strategic Services, Jewish intellectuals felt a greater identification with the national community because it offered a more effective form of comradeship than the party membership card, as individual fates were bound with that of the national community.24 The postwar period witnessed a resurfacing of Jewish identity, which may have been at least in part a direct result of the Holocaust.

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Irving Howe recalled how many grew increasingly interested in Jewish concerns and “timid reconsiderations of what it meant to be Jewish.”25 Some manifested this resurgence in the form of practice, holding the traditional Seder ceremony,26 and Alfred Kazin reflected this change in his attitude when describing the effect of listening to the radio in 1945: “I heard the liberated Jewish prisoners in Belsen say the Shema—‘Hear O Israel the Lord our God the Lord is One.’ Weeping in the rain, I said it with them. For a moment I was home.”27 Midge Decter summed up the change for many young Jewish intellectuals when she said, “To put it much too crudely, Hitler taught them that they were Jews.”28 To which Howe added, “We knew but for an accident of geography we might also now be bars of soap.”29 As a result of the Holocaust, these Jewish intellectuals discovered that they could not escape from their inscribed Jewishness whether they actively chose to or not, acknowledging the irreversibility of their identities. The Holocaust reawakened the Jewish impulses that they had tried to suppress for so long. It came to be realized, therefore, that Jewishness was almost somatic, as if marked on their bodies, which Norman Podhoretz referred to as “Hitler’s altogether irrefutable demonstration of the inescapability of Jewishness.”30 Jewish intellectuals convinced of their inescapable Jewishness began to use it as the materials for a renewed self-fashioning. They looked to the traditions and memories of Judaism as the available discourses and community in which they could position themselves. The postwar period witnessed a reawakening of interest in Jewish culture, heritage, and history. The abandonment of organized Marxism had left a void in the aftermath of World War II, and many of the intellectuals who had been involved in Marxism felt that the combination of intellectualism and Jewishness could fill it. The AJC presciently sensed this change: In 1944, it ran a symposium in its journal, the Contemporary Jewish Record (CJR) entitled, “Under Forty: A Symposium on American Literature and the Younger Generation of American Jews,” to which many young Jewish intellectuals formerly associated with the PR community contributed.31 The CJR asked questions about the relationship between the Jewish writer and his or her heritage and asked whether there were any notable distinctions between Jews and Gentiles engaged in literary endeavors. The symposium it-

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self was a manifestation of the Jewish intellectuals’ renewed sense of Jewish identification. As Stephen Longstaff has put it: “in even deigning to answer the CJR questions, they were acknowledging (backhandedly, to be sure) their own tenuous Jewish ties.”32 Before this event, almost no one associated with PR had written for the CJR, with the exception of Hannah Arendt. With the appearance of the symposium, however, Jewish intellectuals, such as Sidney Hook, Harold Rosenberg, Saul Bellow, Delmore Schwartz, Isaac Rosenfeld, David Bazelon, Nathan Glazer, and Clement Greenberg, began to contribute to and edit the magazine. Perhaps the shrewdest acknowledgment of this change was the decision of its editor, Adolph S. Oko, to hire Philip Rahv, a former editor of PR, as Managing Editor. Fully appreciative of Rahv’s links to the PR community, Oko hired him in an attempt to bring these “alienated” Jewish intellectuals back into the Jewish community,33 yet the AJC did not consider this measure far-reaching enough. The AJC also acknowledged “the need for a journal of significant thought and opinion on Jewish affairs,” proposing a new publication, Commentary, to provide for that need.34 The relationship of Jewish intellectuals to their community of origin, however, was not initially a harmonious one. They scorned what they perceived as the middle-class, liberal, bourgeois institutions of the Jewish community, and this sense of distrust was mutual, producing a distance between the two groups. As a consequence, many Jewish intellectuals did not claim to speak for their communities or its official institutions. The AJC’s initiative in forming Commentary to replace the earlier CJR was an attempt to build that bridge and to overcome mutual differences. Norman Podhoretz wrote of Elliot Cohen’s “dream” to arrange “reconciliation” between the intellectuals and the Jewish community:35 Cohen called for greater collaboration between the Jewish intellectuals and the Jewish community to create a more symbiotic relationship. He acknowledged that “the future of Jewish heritage in America” is primarily dependent on the intellectuals, and only secondarily on the “community elders and our institutions.” Although the intellectual displays a “hunger for some group attachment” she or he also exhibits a reticence that “such communities, if they exist, will welcome him.”36

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Many of the intellectuals, it seemed, could be persuaded (under the right conditions) to move back into the Jewish fold and away from the universalism that had failed them—and many did so under the aegis of Commentary magazine. The AJC thus became a major agent in this institutionalization, through its magazine, as Commentary dispensed the functions of an academic community, providing both careers and opportunities for publishing. This reawakened community was revitalized and refocused around Commentary, and a new community of discourse was constructed that accounted for the new realities of the postwar world following the devastation of Europe and the emergence of the United States as a new world superpower. Commentary first appeared in November 1945 and superseded the CJR, which had been published by the AJC since 1938. CJR had been a bimonthly small-scale operation, whereas it was desired that Commentary would be “a new magazine, coming out more frequently, monthly, with a larger appeal, less scholarly, less a record of events and more a magazine,” and that would appeal to a wider readership than that of the CJR.37 John Slawson, the vice president of the AJC, recalled that “when we created Commentary, we wished to have a journal of the highest quality that could be concerned with matters of a universal import but that would also include a considerable number of articles on Jewish content and specifically, of Jewish concern.”38 To this end, in his first editorial statement, Elliot Cohen placed great stress on Jewish tradition. He later expressed the primary change: “The main difference between Partisan Review and Commentary is that we admit to being a Jewish magazine and they don’t.”39 Commentary was theoretically allowed to operate with intellectual autonomy. It was never explicitly intended to function as either a public relations journal for the AJC or as a forum for its philosophies. According to Norman Podhoretz, who later replaced Cohen as editor, “the AJC understood that unless the editor of the new magazine 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.”40 Instead, Podhoretz recalled, “the AJC’s mandate to Cohen had been to produce ‘a journal of opinion on Jewish affairs and contemporary issues’ that would be nonpartisan with regard to the often bitter politics of the Jewish community but that would also

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square with ‘the Committee’s own program to fight bigotry, protect human rights, and promote Jewish cultural interest and achievement in America.’ ”41 Podhoretz concluded that, “What the AJC probably envisaged was a kind of Jewish Harper’s, only more scholarly.”42 As a consequence, the AJC granted full “editorial freedom” to Commentary’s editor and staff. 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 magazine.”43 The journal has been seen as a unique enterprise in this respect: No other organization has sponsored a publication and then left it to operate independently. Although the magazine was a creation of the AJC and was funded by it, both parties assert that the editorial board has always been autonomous. This claim of “editorial freedom” is valid to a point, in that the AJC never exercised any direct control over the publication in terms of its content. However, the term belies the true nature of the relationship between Commentary and its institutional sponsor, the exact nature of which will be delineated below, as it is essential to understanding the space in which the magazine was allowed to operate and how this affected its content. Commentary was established as a separate administrative arm of the AJC, yet it was still part of the committee. A Publications Committee, which was largely responsible for the magazine’s business affairs, oversaw the magazine and was also responsible to the AJC’s Budget and Evaluation Committee. The Publications Committee acted in a purely advisory capacity. It was composed of lay members who met infrequently—as little as once a year. It had no policy-making role and concerned itself largely with the business and budgetary matters of the magazine.44 Throughout this period, the magazine was funded by the AJC and represented a significant proportion of the committee’s expenditures. Many executive members of the AJC who questioned that spending did not unhesitatingly accept this state of affairs. It was the role of the Publications Committee to defend the magazine at budget hearings and to ensure that the AJC’s money was well spent.45 Initially, Elliot Cohen, the first editorial appointment, was offered “complete administrative autonomy and was not to be a member of

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the staff of the Committee.”45 Slawson, who was also a member of the Publications Committee, however, found this state of affairs unacceptable. He insisted that “if the journal was to be part of the AJC, the person in charge would have to be part of the administrative structure of the Committee and therefore the editor would have to be responsible to me.”47 The relationship between “the Editor of Commentary and myself,” insisted Slawson, was to be “what it is with everyone else,” and he added almost as an afterthought, “with the proviso, of course, of editorial freedom.”48 Thus, as editor of Commentary, Cohen was considered to be a member of the AJC’s staff, with all the attendant responsibilities. Slawson also remained heavily involved in the magazine’s affairs, constantly “want[ing] to know what we were up to” said Cohen. This involvement added a centralized dimension that the term “editorial independence” excludes.49 While working as a contributing editor under Martin and Clement Greenberg (the composite figure of “The Boss” in the following extract) in Cohen’s absence, Podhoretz recalled: The Boss, as he himself once exasperatedly told me, was also trying to be “responsible.” Responsible? I asked innocently. To the Jewish community, he said, to the AJC. But Commentary, I answered, has editorial independence; the AJC isn’t supposed to interfere or exert pressure. That doesn’t, he shot back, mean we can do what we want; just remember it’s their magazine, not ours.50

From this Podhoretz concluded that the “Boss was running Commentary not to please himself but to please the AJC.”51 His own experience as editor confirmed this assertion: If I had never worked at Commentary before, I would probably have still been innocent enough to think that once the AJC had agreed to giving me a completely free hand, that would be that; but I had learned from my observation of The Boss in action that there were subtleties to the relationship between Commentary and the AJC which could not be comprehended within the simple phrase “editorial independence.” The editor of Commentary, like any chief executive of any operation owned by others, only had as much freedom—which is to say power—as he was willing to risk exercising.52

The only protection against this was a “willingness to get fired” because the committee could terminate the editor’s appointment at will.53 Slawson, referring to the position of editor, stated the situation

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thus: “At the point where we found that it was inimical to our goals, we would simply replace him.”54 However, many within the AJC considered Commentary to be more than a mere administrative arm. The AJC’s Alan Stroock referred to it as “our most successful tool,” and Irving Engel, chair of the executive committee, called it “one of our great instruments.”55 Both of these references were made publicly, and thus it was deemed to be no secret or shame that Commentary was perceived as the cultural/literary arm of the AJC. Indeed, Engel announced that, “We are proud of that magazine and consider it a unique example of what the AJC does to further its objectives,” and elsewhere he recommended it “as one important means of interpreting the AJC.”56 Commentary was frequently used by the AJC to further its own objectives. One confidential internal memorandum suggested that “Commentary publish appropriate articles dealing with the dangers of Communism to the security of Jews and Americans.”57 AJC staff members frequently contributed to Commentary. This was neither a new nor a shocking development, as the same had been done with Commentary’s predecessor, the CJR. One such article was written by staff researcher Lucy Dawidowicz, who worked under the AJC’s Rabbi Solomon Andhil Fineberg. Her article was a brief encapsulation of the many memoranda that had circulated throughout the AJC on the need to discredit the National Committee to Secure Justice on the Rosenberg Case, to downplay the charges of anti-Semitism, and to dissociate Jews from communism.58 Such articles were then reprinted and distributed at the expense of the committee.59 It was reported that during the period from 1947 to 1950, “certain concrete steps were taken pursuant to the Executive Committee mandate.”60 Significantly, these steps included many articles published by Commentary “on the incompatibility of Judaism and Communism, as well as the genuine threat of Communism to freedom-loving people everywhere.” This reflected the AJC’s “continuing concern with the unwarranted association of Jews and Communism in the public mind” and fitted snugly into their program to achieve “wider acceptance of the AJC’s democratic, Americacentered approach to Jewish life.”61 Staff researcher Solomon Fineberg noted with pride:

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Although the editorial policy of Commentary is entirely independent of that Staff Committee on Communism and while there is no credit whatsoever due to the staff members of AJC, other than those of Commentary for Commentary articles, in a report dealing with the total AJC contribution to combating Communism, it should be noted that since January 1st, Commentary maintained its reputation as an outstanding source of current information concerning the Communist menace to the domestic and the international security of the US.62

So, although Engel can claim with some credibility that “Here we sponsor and make possible a great journal of opinion, yet we exercise no thought control over it, and allow its editors and contributors complete freedom of expression,” Commentary was too indispensable to the AJC’s cultural program to be left to its own devices without any exercise of oversight.63 It is very hard to believe that the AJC would continue to pour funds into such an enterprise if it could not speak of it so proudly. The committee quite clearly derived pride from its magazine, and the above sentiments leave no doubt that this was due to the result of Commentary’s consistent statement of the AJC’s principles. Years later, Slawson recalled that the AJC had deliberately set the boundaries of editorial freedom to be as broad as possible, so that Commentary “furthered our goals,”64 and this was not unpalatable to Cohen and his peers. In 1952, Cohen wrote to Slawson, “And I daresay that there isn’t one of us that doesn’t want to make some contribution to furthering the AJC; its work, its spirit, and its reputation.”65 As a consequence, it is clear that the AJC used Commentary for propagating its own philosophies despite numerous claims to the contrary, and in turn the committee thus strove to increase as much as possible the subscriptions to the magazine.66 The AJC did not need to exercise overt editorial control over Commentary, because the magazine’s opinions and outlook were so similar to the committee’s that any sort of direction was redundant. Every political position espoused by Commentary was tacitly approved by the AJC, as attested to by the numerous internal memoranda and other statements emanating from the committee that praised the good work of the magazine. The consistent coincidence and the marked similarity of the outlooks of both the AJC and Commentary indicate that this was no accident. Indeed, the AJC prudently insured itself against any

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other outcome. The editor was selected “carefully on the basis of our understanding and knowledge of his philosophy and general orientation.”67 Cohen was no stranger to organized Jewish politics. He had edited the Menorah Journal, the publication of the Menorah Society founded by Horace Kallen in 1906 in response to the social discrimination suffered by Jews at Harvard, and he had worked as director of public information of the New York Federation of Jewish Philanthropists for many years—his views must have been well known. It appears that Cohen was chosen as Commentary’s first editor not only for his proven ability in this area but also because he espoused views clearly favorable to the AJC. Furthermore, Cohen was expected to regularly attend staff meetings, at which the committee’s position was made clear. He was frequently listed as having attended these staff meetings, and he did assume a role within the AJC as a departmental head.68 It was then left to his discretion to exercise his editorial responsibility in determining both the content of Commentary and who would write its contributions. Cohen’s choices reflected the AJC’s sentiments: He selected individuals whom he personally knew shared both the AJC’s and his sentiments. Many of Commentary’s editorial appointments reflected this, as did his selection of its regular contributors. Cohen was well acquainted with many such individuals from his time as editor of the Menorah Journal and his experience with the radical movement.69 Irving Kristol recalled that he, along with the others, “had been hired because our views (including, of course, our political views) and talents were congenial to the sponsoring organization.”70 Kristol himself conceded that he expressed his political views so often that they were considered reliable by the AJC thus rendering prior censorship “superfluous.”71 Even so, to make doubly sure of the material published, Cohen exercised a high degree of editorial intervention. Taking advantage of the supposed editorial independence accorded to him by the AJC, he ruled the journal as an “autocrat.”72 As Irving Kristol put it: “It was Elliot’s magazine, he was the boss.”73 All articles had to pass through his editorial scrutiny. Podhoretz wrote that, “virtually no article ever appeared in Commentary without some trace of his hand.”74 Diana Trilling recalled how: “Everyone was intimidated by Elliot.” He domi-

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nated Commentary. “In fact,” she wrote, “he so thoroughly intruded himself into the articles he commissioned that he might often be regarded as virtually their coauthor.”75 One of his editorial staff remembered, “A lot of writers hated his guts because he would stick his fingers into the article. The great charge against Commentary, you know, is that it was over-edited. It was too rewritten.”76 Kristol summed up the situation: “He would commission an article, it would come in, I would edit it, he would edit it, the author would approve the editing, and then at the last minute, before going to the printer, Elliot Cohen would decide he wanted to rewrite the whole thing himself, making quite a different point.”77Cohen had established a tradition that would survive long after he had left Commentary. Theodore Solotaroff, who worked as an associate editor under Podhoretz, reckoned that: “In the course of giving it the Commentary look the prose did tend to become homogenized. . . . Now this standard did not begin with Norman.”78 Because Cohen had attended staff meetings, he knew what the AJC wanted. Podhoretz was in no doubt that Cohen shaped articles to fit certain “political necessities,” indicating that Cohen was “extremely mindful of the Committee’s needs, desires, [and] problems.”79 This was especially important in Commentary’s early years, when its survival was by no means assured. Elements within the AJC could not see the usefulness of Commentary or justify such funds for its purpose. As a consequence, Cohen had to heed the committee’s wishes very carefully not to further alienate those who wished to close the magazine down. Cohen, however, was guilty of one major editorial oversight that clearly delineated the relationship between the magazine and its sponsor. This was the well-publicized case of Isaac Rosenfeld’s Freudian rendition of the laws of Kashrut, entitled “Adam and Eve on Delancey Street,” which offended orthodox sensibilities by its comparison between kashruth and sex.80 The article was occasioned by the advent of kosher bacon (Kosher Fry Beef), the slicing of which drew crowds standing at the window, “oblivious of the burden of parcels, of errands and of business; no comments are made, they stand in silence, not to interfere with one another’s contemplation, as they followed the course of the slices, from the blade to the box.” In seeking to explain the allure of the spectacle, Rosenfeld argued that the

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mostly Jewish crowd were actually peeping into the “whole world of forbidden sexuality, the sexuality of the goyim.” He suggested that food taboos were actually sex taboos: Milchigs, having to do with milk, is feminine; fleshigs, meat, is masculine. Their junction in one meal, or within one vessel, is forbidden, for their union is the sexual act. (The Jewish joke about the man with cancer of the penis bears this out. He is advised by the doctor to soak his penis in hot water. His wife, finding him so engaged, cries out, “Cancer shmancer. Dos iz a milchig tepple!—Who cares about cancer? You’re using a milchig pot.”)81

The dietary laws were thus defined as injunctions against forbidden sexual practices: The careful circumscription of food mirrored Jewish sexual repression. Unsurprisingly, this statement offended many within the American Jewish community. It was agreed among Commentary’s former editorial staff that the article had created “the biggest problem” between the AJC and Commentary.82 Irving Kristol recalled this was because it was “the only article in my memory for which Elliot had to write an apology in the magazine.”83 In his apology, Cohen admitted to “a lapse in editorial watchfulness, which the Editor deeply regrets,” thus implying that his reprimand from the AJC had been severe.84 Jacob Blaustein, who was then president of the AJC, was incensed that Commentary had offended so many Jewish sensibilities. He felt moved to write a formal complaint, which appeared in Commentary, stating: “I feel certain that your [publication] committee will repudiate this article as not at all representing the aims of Commentary, and that it will take steps to insure that there will be no repetition of this unfortunate episode.”85 This last sentence acted as a public warning to Cohen and Commentary. The Rosenfeld episode occasioned a letter-writing campaign instigated by Dwight Macdonald. The protests that emerged from individuals such as Macdonald, Howe, Mary McCarthy, Rahv, and Rosenfeld himself combine to problematize the notion of editorial independence. Macdonald felt that Blaustein’s letter “serves notice that henceforth the editors have, under duress, agreed not to print articles” that might offend the AJC’s sensibilities. He felt that the letter represented a “tasteless” example of “the power of the purse to give a public spanking to an editorial board.”86 Echoing Macdonald, Mary

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McCarthy saw Blaustein’s pressure as “suggest[ing] the ukase of a warden in a house of correction,” and she added the following warning: “There can be no editorial freedom for Commentary in the future if Mr. Blaustein and his co-officials are not, in their turn, subjected to public censure for this excess of administrative ardor.”87 Howe believed the AJC’s reaction represented “subvention,” and a former AJC employee and editor, Philip Rahv, termed it as “medieval.”88 Cohen’s response as editor also revealed a great deal about the magazine–sponsor relationship. Cohen felt a need to apologize publicly. Clearly, Commentary’s editor felt cowed into submission by the public rebuke he received from the AJC. This extended as far as extinguishing any public discussion of the matter. The letter-writing campaign that protested the AJC’s action had been organized purely on Macdonald’s initiative without Cohen’s prior consent, and Cohen refused to print any of the letters in the magazine.89 As a consequence, Macdonald accused him of pusillanimity and weakness, and Howe felt that it was “disturbing,” as he could see no reason for an apology.90 In response to the protests, Cohen rather meekly stated, “After a good deal of discussion here, we have decided that little constructive good would be served by reopening the controversy at this point.”91 Cohen’s reaction is all the more interesting in view of his fiery and strongwilled character—he did not take criticism at all well. In the words of Macdonald, the lack of editorial response beyond an apology reinforced “the fact that there can only be one view printed in Commentary.”92 The magazine seemed to have heeded Blaustein’s warning. Although Commentary did print articles at odds with AJC sensibilities, after the controversy caused by Rosenfeld’s article both the committee and Cohen were far more circumspect. Longstaff observed a definite shift in Commentary’s tone, noting a more cautious treatment of religious sensibilities that “in itself was symptomatic of a general softening of the magazine’s antipathy towards the American community’s traditional leadership.”93 Even Irving Kristol’s far more infamous and controversial 1952 article, “ ‘Civil Liberties,’ 1952—A Study in Confusion: Do We Defend Our Rights by Protecting Communists?” which was widely discussed, received less flak from the Committee.94 Potentially, his piece on civil liberties explored a far more explosive issue because it concerned a

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highly charged political issue and a matter at the heart of the AJC’s philosophies. Kristol, who served as an editor of Commentary during the early 1950s, attacked those liberals whose anticommunism, he felt, was insufficiently hardline: “For there is one thing that the American public know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing. And with some justification.”95 Kristol argued that it was necessary to limit civil liberties to defend freedom; that constitutional rights should not be extended to communists and fellow-travelers. Indeed, it was for the protection of these rights that the AJC had been established in the first place. Yet Kristol recalled that, although the article received both negative and positive reactions within the AJC, it did not create enormous problems between the committee and Commentary—certainly none on the scale of that caused by Rosenfeld’s piece.96 Given the lack of open criticism of the article by the AJC when compared to that of the Rosenfeld case (no formal complaints by the AJC or apologies by the editor) and the amount of responses it generated, one is led to conclude that the AJC generally tacitly agreed with its major premises. In spite of Cohen’s best efforts to maintain a physical and professional distance between the magazine and its sponsor, there was considerable interaction. Informally, many of the magazine’s editors knew AJC staff members very well. Kristol’s brother-in-law was AJC staffer Milton Himmelfarb,97 there was a great deal of contact between Commentary’s staff and the staff of the AJC’s research and library divisions,98 and many met under the aegis of Cultural Cold War organizations such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. As a consequence, Cohen’s efforts at physical removal were largely superfluous and added to the illusion of Commentary’s complete editorial freedom from the AJC. It was a symbolic gesture that, in reality, amounted to nothing. The relationship between the AJC and Commentary was subtle: It did not consist of overt or even covert censorship. The Jewish community’s intellectuals had been screened through careful selection and then were coopted by the AJC. Cohen was the perfect choice to advance the AJC’s philosophies. He had moved from a position of alienation from the organized Jewish

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community in the 1920s to becoming one of its most respected figures by the 1940s. Having once worked as a managing editor at the Menorah Journal, by 1945 Cohen exhibited a viewpoint that fiercely stressed the interconnection of Judaism and Americanism. The Journal’s founder, Horace Kallen, was well known for expounding his notion that the Jews should contribute to America as an instrument does to the harmony of the symphony orchestra. It was the aim of the Menorah Journal, according to Podhoretz, “to explore the Jewish cultural heritage for the purpose, one might say, of proving to the world that there really was such a thing as a respectable (by the genteel standards of Harvard University) Jewish culture.”99 It sought to “forge a liberal Jewish cultural movement under the aegis of ‘cultural pluralism,’ ” wrote Alan Wald, and thereby mark out “the place of the Jew in the modern world.”100 The Menorah group sought to move into the American mainstream on Jewish terms via a process of cultural negotiation with the dominant culture. As Robert Alter observed, its purpose was to “validate Jewish cultural phenomena by assimilating them to Western analogues.”101 From his experience at the Menorah Journal, Cohen heeded and carried with him a piece of advice from Lionel Trilling that was to be later applied to Commentary: “It seems to me that the whole purpose of practical Jewish endeavor is to create a community that can read the Menorah Journal.”102 At Commentary, Cohen attempted to create that very community, as Midge Decter recalled: “They were intellectuals who lived in—or you might say they were creating—an intellectual community.”103 Cohen’s memories of anti-Semitism led him to believe that Jewish writers needed to become more involved in American culture. Cohen was educated at Yale, an elite university that was permeated with prejudice. The Ivy League college experience was not congenial to Jewish students. According to Leonard Dinnerstein, it was “at times merely offensive, at others, painful.”104 Max Lerner recalled that at Yale, “We were kept out of everything. Not in any formal way, but in how we were treated.”105 Jews experienced social ostracization and barring from clubs, positions on student newspapers, and fraternities. Another Jewish student felt that “a ‘Cohen’ has as much chance to be the editor of Harvard Crimson as I have to be the Pope.”106 There was little desire for the employment of Jewish faculty members. Aca-

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demic opportunities for Jews were almost nonexistent, especially in the disciplines of English and history, where it was thought impossible for a Jew to transmit or comprehend the culture and traditions of an Anglo-Saxon, Christian society. When Max Lerner told a college instructor that he would like to teach English at a university, his colleague replied: “Max, you can’t do this. You can’t teach literature. You have no chance of getting a position at any good college. You’re a Jew.”107 English departments generally considered themselves to be the “bastions of Anglo-Saxon culture,” and it was not until 1939 that Lionel Trilling became the first Jew to be appointed an assistant professor of English at Columbia University. Although he graduated with a “brilliant” record, Cohen felt that academic opportunities would be closed to him. According to Daniel Bell: “he had a passionate devotion to English literature, and his chief desire was to teach English there. Yet he was told by one of the great figures there, ‘Mr. Cohen, you are a very competent young man, but it is hard for me to imagine a Hebrew teaching the Protestant tradition to young men at Yale.’ ”108 As a consequence, after several years at Yale’s graduate school, Cohen began to look in other directions for a career. After years of working as director of public information of the New York Federation of Jewish Philanthropists, Cohen was appointed editor of Commentary. In his first contribution to the Menorah Journal, in 1923, Cohen had argued for an approach that did not treat the Jew as a separate entity, but as an inextricable element in the matrix of socioeconomic and psychological forces that also influenced others.109 His belief was also transmitted onto the pages of Commentary. According to Neil Jumonville, “More than any theme other than persistent anticommunism, Cohen’s advice about the interaction with American culture characterized the tradition of Commentary.”110 Cohen exhibited a fierce identification with America. Although the intellectual responses to World War II were neither uniform nor monolithic, and Cohen did not serve in the U.S. Army, he emerged into the postwar years with a firm belief that America was the community to which Jewish intellectuals should contribute. Echoing the AJC’s philosophy of the compatibility of Americanism and Judaism, Cohen sought to fuse the two discourses on the pages of Commentary. According to Podhoretz, this represented

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Cohen’s “Grand Design” “to lead the family out of the desert of alienation in which it had been wandering for so long and into the promised land of democratic, pluralistic, prosperous America where it would live as blessedly in its Jewishness as in its Americanness, safe and sound and forevermore, amen.”111 Commentary was to be a document of Jewish American memory, as encapsulated in its very name, which had clear links to a Jewish classical tradition. The name explicitly linked itself to a long tradition of exegesis, of which the Gemara is a prime example. Commentary, however, became more than just a magazine of contemporary Jewish affairs and current concerns: It became an agency for the refocusing of the community of memory by its refashioning of Jewish memories. Commentary began to fill the void of communal focus for many intellectuals, the void that had been created after the scholars had abandoned Marxism. This intellectual community, together with the wider Jewish communities, was then revived through identification with America and a new Jewish American identity. Commentary’s editors exploited the new era and rewrote discourses of Jewishness to fit into the new Jewish American space. Indeed, the magazine’s new name reflected the change: “commentary” implied an active critical agency, whereas “record” signified only a passive recording of events. Cohen’s first editorial statement reflected both his positioning within two existing discourses and the simultaneous construction of a new specifically Jewish American discourse. From the very outset, Cohen evoked a sense of Jewishness that bonded past with present: “As Jews, we are of an ancient tradition that, in a very specific sense, keeps a vigil with the past . . . we . . . remain the people of the Book. We believe in the Word.”112 With these words, Cohen wove a traditional discourse around Commentary, but one which would, he promised, “reach back for the riches of the past” to become a “record, a history, a memoir.”113 As it “memorialize[d] with words,” Commentary itself was to become part of that memory.114 Interwoven with these strands were the threads of a discourse of Americanism— “Commentary is an act of faith in our possibilities in America”—that produced a discourse of a specifically Jewish American nature. “With Europe devastated,” Cohen continued, “there falls upon us here in the US a far greater share of the responsibility for carrying forward,

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in a creative way, our common Jewish culture and spiritual heritage.” The result, he hoped, will be to “harmonize heritage and country into a true sense of homeness in the modern world.”115 The very opening editorial statement of Commentary constructed a Jewish American discourse, as traditional notions of Jewishness were positioned within the idea of America as home, indicating a greater identification with America than ever before. The use of history within this new discourse resounded throughout the pages of Commentary. To naturalize, privilege, and contain its particular, contingent, and specific memories over all others, Cohen attempted to locate them within a context of Jewish history. Commentary was positioned as “the strongest link” with Jewish tradition and heritage.116 Cohen explicitly stated that “historical reconstruction” was one of the “many methods” used by the magazine to foreground its new Jewish American concerns.117 Cohen resurrected the Jewish tradition of a “covenant,” which was subsequently re-remembered and reconstructed as “a double covenant”: “our ancient one and that which we feel crystallizing in the American firmament.”118 Cohen explicitly appealed to Jewish memories drawn from the past and located them within a new American context, producing a radical new covenant to be formed between America and its Jewish intellectual community. With the Jewish communities of Europe devastated, Cohen hoped that America would become the center and focus of Diaspora Judaism to which all thinking Jews would turn. The new covenant would replace the old: America would replace Jerusalem, and just as every Jew faced the Temple Mount, now they would countenance the City on the Hill. The old covenant had not been forgotten; rather, it had been revived and renewed in the present: [W]e knew we could never resign from the old contract with the past, our long history bonded by memory and always annealed in the present. But it was New York we were prepared for, and New York, half-Jewish which took us in. New York! Ghetto of Eden! We go back always where we came from, in memory, to and from ourselves.119

Lionel Abel later articulated these sentiments: “I had no desire to get to Jerusalem . . . My whole aim was to live in New York.”120 Commentary extended this notion of covenant even further, announcing that American Jews should prepare for “permanence.” America

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was no longer to be regarded as Galut (Diaspora) because “we—and our children and our children’s children—are here to stay . . . this is home!”121 America, it was felt, offered the best opportunity for a symbiotic relationship between Jewish culture and the world. In this way, it was hoped that America would become the site and occasion for a new Golden Age for Jews, paralleling that of medieval Spain. The belief in America’s possibilities was based on the assumption that the United States had granted a freedom to Jews that was unprecedented in the history of the Diaspora. Therefore, Commentary sought to inculcate the notion that America provided the freest environment for the development of Jewish culture. As a consequence, the potential inherent in American freedom was a key pillar of Commentary’s discourse of memory. The contours of history then had to be reshaped to fit this memory. Commentary’s memory of America was a product of selective amnesia that re-presented the country in a more positive light. The recent history of American anti-Semitism was forgotten and blurred in the reconstruction of Jewish American memory, which demonstrated the United States as inherently tolerant of difference and others. Commentary sought to produce a new type of Jew, and it sought to construct a new Jewish American discourse that was at once Jewish yet at “home” in America, in which the individual could position himself or herself to produce his or her identity. Jewish discourses of community and American ones of individualism were not seen as incompatible; rather, complete participation in all aspects of American life was deemed possible with a full sense of Jewishness. Commentary led the way in postwar “self-fashioning.”122 The period after 1945 was one of constructions and reconstructions, as second-generation American Jews sought to fashion their identities in light of the Holocaust, the establishment of the State of Israel, and the new situation arising from the onset of the Cold War. As identity construction proceeded, there was an almost unavoidable redefinition of Jewishness that had to take into account the new social and political realities. This selffashioning or positioning, however, is locatable within a wider context. The mass relocation of urban Jews into suburbia brought them for the first time into close proximity with Christian neighbors. This proximity was coupled with an increasing definition of Jews as a “reli-

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gious” rather than “national” group, which led to a greater sense of Judaism as a religion alone. Jews could be good Americans because their practices and beliefs constituted a religious denomination rather than making them a separate, exiled group. This shift gave rise to a new discourse of Judaism: Conservative Judaism that stressed the purely religious characteristics of Jewishness. Commentary took a leading role in this redefinition of Jewishness by publishing the work of writers such as Bernard Malamud, Leslie Fiedler, Lionel Trilling, and Saul Bellow, who made it their task to demonstrate that Judaism was a religion like any other.123 Commentary attempted to construct a specifically Jewish American discourse and identity through a series of negotiations between both cultures—but this was no simple assimilationism. Although feelings of community and solidarity with all Jews—as well as the importance of inherited memories, traditions, and heritage—were expressed, so too were acquisitions accrued from American culture. Commentary believed that Jews could fully participate in all aspects of American life as Jews, but this belief must be based on a series of negotiations and renegotiations between Jewish and American culture. This negotiation, in turn, required “a redefinition of values, an appraisal of the content of Jewishness.”124 Jewish identity had to be refashioned to fit the American model, which did not mean that Judaism had to be drained of its Jewish content but, rather, that the “secular” aspects had to be stressed to benefit this adaptation. Although this new Jewish community would be distinct and different, it would be composed of individuals who all contributed to their local and the wider communities. Commentary had thus reworked the twin notions of the American ethic of the free, self-directing individual, actively contributing to and participating in all aspects of American life, and the traditional Jewish norm of community to produce a new discourse of mutual responsibility between America and its Jews. Commentary emerged as the primary agent for constructing a new Jewish American discourse. Indeed, it manifested a “contemptuous disdain” toward “European-Yiddish values.”125 Rejecting a nostalgic tie to their Eastern European roots, Commentary’s editors sought to demonstrate that their future lay in the United States and nowhere else by constructing a native Jewish American culture. This new, hy-

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bridized culture would be clearly American rather than Biblical, medieval, Yiddish, or Zionist. To this end, Cohen established a new department, “From the American Scene,” which he felt was “nearest of all to the heart of the magazine’s purpose” because it was drawn from memories of the American “landscape.”126 This feature represented his impulse to construct an indigenous Jewish American literature rather than simply relying only on the Yiddish imports from the Old World.127 The majority of Commentary’s articles expressed identification with America through specific Jewish American problems. This identification, for reasons that will be examined in later chapters, became markedly affirmative, to the extent that the magazine seemed to criticize America very little indeed. Irving Howe, an early contributor to Commentary, stopped writing for the magazine during the 1950s because it had “become an apologist for middle-class values, middleclass culture and the status quo.”128 This direction was reinforced by the recollections of Norman Podhoretz, that Commentary “could always be trusted to tell its readers what was right with American society more frequently than what was wrong.” From Commentary, Podhoretz continued, “one got the impression that the United States of America, for all its imperfections (the persistence of discrimination against Jews and Negroes being the main one), was the best society a human nature beset and limited by its own built-in imperfections was likely to be able to build.”129 Identification with America to the point of extreme affirmation was an important element in the refocusing of Jewish memory through the use of willed forgetting and selective amnesia. This tone reached its apotheosis in September 1954, which marked the tercentenary of the arrival of Jews in America. The year proved to be an assertion of Jewish communal memory and collective commemoration of the specifically Jewish American experience. Banquets were held to mark the event as an important date in Jewish American memory. In Jewish tradition, feasts celebrated holy days; indeed, the Hebrew word for a festival (hag) means just that. Thus, the feast in 1954 was inscribed as a new festival for Jewish Americans, to be observed like a religious/national holiday. The most important of these banquets was the National Tercentenary Dinner held on October 20 in New York City, at which President Eisenhower was the guest of

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honor.130 According to Leon A. Jink, “Every Jewish publication was full of self-congratulation and of pietistic praise of ‘our ancestors.’ ”131 Commentary was no exception. To celebrate the event and to participate in this act of collective remembering, Commentary published several articles commemorating the occasion. This was very much in keeping with the attitude of its parent organization, the AJC. Within this context, Commentary’s editorial rather tellingly stated: The tercentenary celebrations, so we understand, will celebrate America, and the freedom and opportunity enjoyed by Jews, as by all, in America, rather than the achievement or “contributions” of the group—though we may expect that the extent to which Jews have shared in the responsibilities and creative endeavors of the common society will be mentioned with proper pride.132

This extract betrays a markedly affirmative attitude. The community of America as a whole, rather than its particularistic Jewish community, became the focus of attention. This move typified the attitude of the AJC in the 1950s, an attitude that was also characterized by a selective amnesia. Conspicuous by its absence was any reference to the events of a decade earlier. Leon A. Jink noted that the recent history of the Holocaust was not allowed to mar the festivities surrounding the three hundredth anniversary of Jewish settlement in America133 because it recalled a period in which many felt that the Roosevelt Administration and the organized American Jewish community did little or nothing to assist the persecuted European Jewish communities. Arthur Miller recalled how the “American Jewish community did not dare to demand that rescue efforts be put in motion, such was the fear of exacerbating the American people’s hostility not only to Jews but to foreigners in general.”134 Interestingly it was at the exact point of the celebration of the tercentenary, 1954, that a counter-journal to Commentary was established by one of its former contributors: Irving Howe stopped contributing to the magazine during the 1950s, even after writing in 1949 that “it allows a great diversity of opinion to be expressed in its pages.”135 Wishing to depart from the sentiments of Commentary, Howe and Lewis Coser set up a rival journal called Dissent. Their very first editorial stated the intention “to dissent from the bleak atmosphere of conformism that pervades the political and intellectual life of the US;

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to dissent from the support of the status quo now so noticeable on the part of many former radicals and socialists.”136 Dissent was designed to provide an opposing viewpoint to that of Commentary, which, in Howe’s and Coser’s opinion, had become so affirmative that it was felt that it had lost its critical perspective: “were one to read a journal like Commentary today, one would hardly be aware that there is a serious threat to civil liberties in America.” It was thus the task of Dissent to “raise the traditional banner of personal freedom.”137 Nonetheless, Elliot Cohen had established a “tradition of discourse” through Commentary that would be put to great use in the coming years.138 This discourse in time dominated the magazine, its editors, its contributors, and ultimately Cohen himself. Commentary’s contributors became submerged in this discourse until Norman Podhoretz eventually changed the magazine’s tone in 1960. In this way, Cohen became what Michel Foucault called a “founder of discursivity,”139 for he had succeeded in establishing a distinct community of discourse as the focus for Jewish American intellectuals for years to come. It was no coincidence that, in the words of Podhoretz, “No single article was ever featured, and the subject of each piece was always stressed above the name of its author, even when the author was a figure like Thomas Mann or John Dewey or Jean-Paul Sartre.”140

2 Commentary The Early Years Nathan Glazer

I

served on the staff of Commentary magazine from its beginning in 1945 until I left in 1953. I also worked on its predecessor magazine, the Contemporary 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 new Commentary and the circle that was to form around the new magazine in a number of ways.

I The CJR was a bimonthly journal published by the American Jewish Committee (AJC). My path to it was rather indirect and was made possible both by my political activities in college, as a member of the official student Zionist organization Avukah and as the editor of its journal, and by my nascent connections with the group that came to be known as “the New York Intellectuals.” Looking for a job in 1944 after graduating from City College and leaving the University of Pennsylvania, where I was engaged in a wartime language project, I consulted with Daniel Bell, then editor of The New Leader. I knew Bell because I had written for 38

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The New Leader while I was a student at City College. Bell did seem to know everything that was going on in New York, and one thing he knew was that Max Horkheimer, of the exiled Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, was, I thought surprisingly, then working for the AJC on studies of anti-Semitism. Not many people in the United States could have known who Horkheimer was and what his Institute for Social Research did, but through my political activities in Avukah, I had gained some acquaintance with the institute, its journal, and its outlook. Avukah was not only a Zionist organization but also had at its core a group of young radicals who were certainly Zionists but who also were committed to versions of socialism somewhat to the left of the socialism of Norman Thomas. We thought of ourselves as part of the anti-Stalinist left, and our City College members might be found in the lunchroom alcove this group of Trotskyists, socialists, and social democrats favored. In the style of the day, our Avukah group met and read classic socialist books and articles, and through the elders of this group, we discovered the work of the Institute for Social Research, which seemed to be pushing Marxism both into empirical research and into a more sophisticated understanding of social change that included psychoanalysis and other post-Marxist developments. We read articles in the institute’s journal and were aided in understanding them, I recall, by young German Jewish refugees of our group, who could read German. We would also troop up to Columbia to hear Horkheimer and Leo Lowenthal, a younger member of the institute, lecture on the institute’s distinctive view of the problems of modern society. It did not seem to be the kind of group to which the AJC, the most conservative of the major Jewish defense organizations, would be attracted, and I don’t know how the two connected. So in 1944, having completed my academic work at the University of Pennsylvania, I went to meet with Horkheimer and Lowenthal and was offered the job of “reader of American social science” for Horkheimer. Horkheimer felt the need to be briefed on relevant current American empirical work in sociology and psychology, and as I knew something of their political and social scientific orientation (few American social scientists at the time did) and was studying American sociology—I was taking graduate courses at Columbia at the time—I seemed qualified for the position.

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Across the hall from where I worked at the AJC was the CJR, which was then undergoing a crisis. Its long-time editor, Adolph Oko, had died, and the journal had been left surprisingly in the hands of Clement Greenberg, who knew nothing of Jewish affairs. How had Clement Greenberg, who was then an editor of Partisan Review and also writing art criticism for the Nation, become managing editor of the CJR? It seems Oko, whom I never met, had a penchant for Greenwich Village intellectuals. Before Greenberg, a young writer from Chicago, Isaac Rosenfeld, had served as an editor, and Philip Rahv, one of the cofounders of Partisan Review, had preceded Greenberg as managing editor of the CJR. Scattered through the Record’s pages, one could find reviews or articles by Harold Rosenberg, Lionel Trilling, Isaac Rosenfeld, Sidney Hook, Hannah Arendt, and others connected with Partisan Review. With Oko’s death, Clement Greenberg was left alone to manage the CJR, assisted by another young writer from Chicago who had recently moved to New York, Evelyn Shefner, who had succeeded Isaac Rosenfeld, her friend, as editorial assistant. Neither Greenberg nor Shefner knew anything about Jewish affairs. At this juncture it seemed that I could be helpful. I at least knew Zionist politics. Further—though I wonder whether Greenberg had any inkling of this when he hired me—at this moment of extraordinary crisis in Jewish history, in Europe and in Palestine, there was some degree of compatibility between the kind of Zionism to which the radicals of Avukah adhered and the position of the AJC on the future of Palestine and its Jewish community. Our group at Avukah opposed a Jewish state, which was then on the program of the official Zionist movement. Our socialism led us to call for a binational workers’ state, if any state at all. The AJC, on its part, was critical of Jewish nationalism and of any political tendency that would cast doubt on the full commitment of American Jews to the United States. The AJC had always been a non-Zionist organization and was the most important of the Jewish groups in the United States taking this position. Had I been fully committed to a Jewish state, it might have been harder for me to fit into the journal of the AJC. So I moved across the floor to the CJR, positioned to move on to its successor magazine, about which we had then heard only rumors.

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As you will learn from Nathan Abrams’s chapter, at this time a committee was already mulling over the fate of the CJR. I assume it was considered a rather stuffy affair, a suitable partner in periodical form to the very sober American Jewish Year Book, which was also published by the AJC. Looking recently at the last issues of the CJR, on which I was listed as “editorial assistant” and in which I wrote book reviews, I have become rather attached to its solidity, its lengthy and full chronicles of the Jewish world and matters affecting it, its comprehensive listings of books and magazine articles, and its rather sober and scholarly articles, often written by German Jewish refugees. However, the committee that was looking into its future had decided something that could reach a wider audience was desirable, and CJR was to be transformed into something else. Our little editorial staff awaited the transformation in ignorance and trepidation. The change came in the form of a new editor, Elliot Cohen, who was to engineer the creation of the successor magazine while retaining some of the virtues and features of the CJR. Cohen knew the circle around Partisan Review. He was particularly close to Lionel Trilling, who had written for him when Cohen was managing editor of The Menorah Journal, back in the 1920s, and was making it a very interesting magazine. In the depression, Cohen formed part of a group of intellectuals close to the Communist Party, but whatever his past as an intellectual of the left, of which we young editors heard only rumors, his immediate past was as the head of public relations for the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. That seemed very far from Greenwich Village indeed.

II Elliot Cohen was planning to create something quite new on the American scene and on the Jewish scene. Commentary would be a Jewish magazine—after all, the AJC was paying for it—but it was at the same time to be a general magazine. It would deal not only with Jewish issues but with all the issues that impinged on Jews, and what issues, after all, did not? The first issue started off with an article by the distinguished Jewish historian Salo Baron on the prospects of rebuilding Jewish spiritual life in devastated Europe. The fate of the surviving Jews of Europe

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was to be a major concern of the magazine in its first years, which was in part a reflection of Cohen’s—and the AJC’s—commitment to the idea that the Jews had a future not only in the United States and Palestine but also, despite the destruction of most of European Jewry, in Europe. There was an article by James Rorty, a veteran journalist, on would-be American fuehrers, anti-Semitic demagogues who were then being studied as part of the anti-Semitism research of the Horkheimer group. American anti-Semitism was also to be one of our major concerns, though it did not loom as large in our consciousness as it did in the program of the AJC. There was an article by a distinguished Yale professor of international law, Percy Corbett, on the new United Nations and the protection of human rights. There was an article by Louis Kronenberger on the decline of the (American) theater; an article by a German Jewish refugee writer, Hertha Pauli, on Emma Lazarus and the Statue of Liberty; an article by George Orwell on the British general election, which had just recently replaced Winston Churchill with Clement Attlee; and Meyer Levin wrote about a heroic Jewish chaplain, killed in the war. There were book reviews by, among others, Randall Jarrell, Theodor Gaster, Harold Rosenberg, and Mary McCarthy. It was an odd mix. Commentary brought together writers for Partisan Review, German Jewish e´migre´s, Ivy League professors, and a varied group of left freelance writers. These groups were not as closely connected then as they were later to be—Partisan Review was still outside any central orbit of American culture or academia, the German e´migre´s were then looking for jobs rather than holding chairs in distinguished colleges and universities, and unattached writers and poets did not then have the many opportunities to teach in colleges and universities that were to open later. One could notice non-Jewish as well as Jewish writers in the new Commentary, which would have been a surprise to readers of a Jewish magazine at the time (though the CJR also had some non-Jewish writers), and non-Jewish as well as Jewish topics, which was an equal surprise. Indeed, specifically Jewish topics overall were rather thin on the ground. But what, after all, was a Jewish or non-Jewish topic? George Orwell on the election in Great Britain? The new government of Great Britain would determine the fate of Palestine and its Jewish commu-

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nity. The issue of international human rights? It was at the heart of Jewish concerns. Broadway theater? Well, that was connected to American Jewish culture too, was it not? What was noticeably absent from the line-up of writers at the new Commentary was anyone who had some connection with or inside knowledge of Jewish institutional life, whether political, religious, educational, cultural, or civic, and that was to be a recurrent issue in the early years of Commentary, not to mention its later years. We showed little sympathy for Jewish institutional leaders, rabbis and writers who made the largest appeal to American Jews. We seemed—and were— outside of established Jewish institutional life. Elliot Cohen did know Jewish institutional life. He had spent some years working in a major Jewish organization. He handled the difficulties that our distance from this world sometimes led us into with the assistance of an editorial committee of leaders of the AJC who loyally supported him. But Elliot Cohen did not share his problems with the organized Jewish community with us. There were no general editorial meetings at which such issues could be discussed. We would meet with Cohen one on one. For the younger editors like myself, Robert Warshow, and Irving Kristol, it was something like a relationship with a father, as there was such a large age gap between us and Elliot Cohen. Greenberg did not interact much with any of us. We were a very small group at the beginning of the new Commentary. Clement Greenberg remained as associate editor but was soon to go on half-time. His reputation as an acerbic and radical critic of new American art was rising, but his influence on American art and art criticism was still in the future. I was the only other member of the starting editorial team who was retained. Elliot Cohen proposed and put me in charge of a new column, The Study of Man, which was to cover the social sciences in their relevance to Jewish issues, taking the broad definition of such issues that was the hallmark of the magazine. In those early postwar days, Jewish defense organizations were deeply concerned with understanding fascism, anti-Semitism, and the rise and awful career of Adolf Hitler, and the nascent social sciences offered hope of a better understanding of these phenomena. The AJC had launched major studies of anti-Semitism under the leadership of Max Horkheimer and his colleagues. The American Jewish Congress

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matched it by sponsoring studies by another German e´migre´, the social psychologist Kurt Lewin. Looking back, I wonder now how our small group could have managed to turn out a large monthly magazine. Robert Warshow joined us only in July 1946, for the ninth issue of Commentary, and he was yet another editor who knew nothing of Jewish issues and Judaism. Irving Kristol did not come on the staff, as I discovered to my surprise looking over the early issues, before September 1947, almost two years after the magazine began publication, and in him one could note once again an addition to the editorial staff who had had no contact at all with official or organized Jewish life before joining Commentary. Kristol was already interested in theology, however, and it was no long stretch from his involvement with European thinkers who had tussled with theological issues to Jewish thinkers, perhaps more of them European than American. In the documentary movie “Arguing the World,” in which Kristol and I figure, along with Daniel Bell and Irving Howe—both, by the way, contributors to the early Commentary—Kristol remarks that he became specialized at Commentary in dealing with rabbis and rabbis’ contributions. He also indicates considerable disdain for them.

III This brings up one of the two large questions that my looking back at the early years of Commentary has raised in me, and on which I hope to throw some light. How were we connected, if at all, to Jewish life—to Jewish issues? As I have noted, the connections of the editorial staff to Jewish life was thin. I doubt that a single one of us was a member of a synagogue or any Jewish organization. Cohen had been in charge of public relations for the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, and in the 1920s he had been the forceful managing editor of The Menorah Journal. I had been the editor of the student Zionist newspaper, but our student group was steadily in conflict, because of our leftism, with the senior Zionist organization that supported us. Greenberg, Warshow, and Kristol had no connection to organized Jewish life. Looking back at those early issues, I wonder in amazement who among us had the capacity to continue the regular feature

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The Cedars of Lebanon, taken over from the CJR, which reprinted classics of Jewish thought. None of us knew Jewish literature well enough to find or select such classics. Somehow or other, we managed to continue the column and to put out the magazine. Perhaps it was because in those days there were many more freelance writers without regular jobs. The great drama of those years was the issue of Palestine and the founding of the Jewish state. What role did that play at Commentary? All but one of us had had no previous connection with this issue or any obvious great involvement with it. The lone Zionist on the staff was an aberrant one who came from a group that opposed a Jewish state. I still clung, weakly, as I recall, to that socialist illusion of a binational state based on the Jewish side on the then-powerful socialist complex of trade unions, kibbutzim, and parties that dominated the Yishuv, and on the Arab side on something that did not exist but that we hoped could be created. The AJC itself was in transition from being the leading American Jewish non-Zionist organization to being a supporter—like all of American Jewry—of the nascent state. Where were we at Commentary? Our position was ambiguous to say the least. Elliot Cohen had continued the tradition of putting out a regular monthly column chronicling events of Jewish concern, which had been a feature of the CJR. Now, however, it was to be less of a dry chronicle and more of an integrated account of the developments of the past month, and it was to be extended to covering the larger range of world events and their bearing on Jewish interests. We were moving from a simple record of events to a unified presentation by a writer with a point of view. That writer was Sidney Hertzberg, a veteran journalist who was of socialist inclinations and who was rather more involved in and interested in the parallel struggle to create an independent nation in India than in affairs in Palestine. He looked coolly, to say the least, on Jewish nationalism. The same was true of his successor, Maurice Goldbloom. You will find more emotion in Goldbloom’s treatment of the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi, which leads off his column in the March 1948 issue, than in his treatment of any Jewish issue. One can see in The Month in History the first hints of a characteristic that was to define most sharply the later Commentary: its strong anti-

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communism, or as we would have put it at the time, its anti-Stalinism. This is the second issue raised in my mind by looking at the early Commentary. Anticommunism has been one of the defining features of Commentary for the past thirty years, but it did not make itself sharply evident in the early years. Certainly we were all—despite our pasts as Trotskyists, Communists, left socialists, and right socialists—hostile to the Soviet Union and fully aware of its character as a dictatorship suppressing all political and cultural freedom, but we had just completed a great war, with the Soviet Union as our ally. Little in the early issues suggested the strong stance against Soviet Communism that was shortly to develop and characterize Commentary. I notice in the issue of July 1946 an article by Louis Fischer, “A Peaceable Answer to the Russian Challenge,” but there is nothing that could be considered really critical until Harry Schwartz’s article in February 1948, “Has Russia Solved the Jewish Problem?” which I considered daring at the time, I recall, in raising the issue of Soviet antiSemitism. Very soon, however, our coverage of Russia and the Communist satellites became sharper as the Cold War became the defining feature of postwar politics and as the Soviet Union under Stalin moved to a full-fledged anti-Semitism. In April 1948, we published under the general heading, “The Threat to Europe’s Liberty,” articles on the Prague coup, which overthrew Masaryk and Benes, and on the feared Communist victory in Italy. Soon our premonitions as to Stalin’s intentions for the Jews were realized in show trials in Prague and in preparations made for them in Moscow. In January 1952, we published Melvin Lasky’s article, “Why the Kremlin Extorts Confessions”; in July 1952, we published Peter Meyer’s article, “The Jewish Purge in the Satellite Countries”; in January and February 1953, further articles by Peter Meyer, “Stalin Follows in Hitler’s Footsteps” and “Soviet Anti-Semitism in High Gear” were seen; in March we had George Lichtheim, a Commentary regular, on “Will Soviet AntiSemitism Teach the Lesson?”; and then Stalin died. In May 1953, Franz Borkenau asked, “Was Malenkov Behind the Anti-Semitic Plot?” We at Commentary could have been considered in the general context of American intellectual life premature anticommunists. We suf-

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fered from no illusions, even when the Soviet Union and its satellites backed the formation of a Jewish state at the UN, as to Communism’s malign intentions and its effects for democracy and for Jews, but at least in the early days I seem to recall a hesitation in making a fullblown attack on Communism. Perhaps we were inhibited by the idea that, as a Jewish magazine, a criticism of Communism legitimately fell within our purview only when it affected Jews. Commentary in later years was known not only as a critic of Communism, which was, after all, no great shakes—who was not?—but also as a critic of those who were insufficiently critical of Communism, insufficiently open-eyed and aware of all its terrible consequences. In other words, what was unique about Commentary in later years was its sharp-eyed searching out of signs of anti-anticommunism, of liberals who considered Communism part of the legitimate left. The most controversial article we ran in those early years opened up this vein of criticism. It was Irving Kristol’s article in March 1953 on Senator McCarthy and the liberals, and its most provocative passage ran: “There is one thing Americans know about Senator McCarthy: He, like them, is unequivocally anticommunist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism they feel they know no such thing, and with some justification.” This was a powerful article indeed, so powerful that I felt I had to rush to assure our readers we were on the right side when it came to Senator McCarthy, and so I wrote a particularly fierce attack on him for a subsequent issue. What this first article illustrated, I think, is that we were not yet confident enough to go all out against those whom we considered soft on Communism. Shortly after the article’s publication, Irving left to start Encounter for the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was part of a grand effort to make anticommunism fully legitimate among intellectuals.

IV It is rather more complicated to define our stance to the other great issue of the time for us: Palestine, and the future of the nascent Jewish state forming within it. Our chief writers on the crucial developments in Palestine—at the time, the term had a purely geographical

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meaning and was not the name of an aspiring Arab nation and country—were Hannah Arendt, Robert Weltsch, and Moshe Smilansky, all opponents of the Jewish state. The latter two were connected with the Magnes-Buber group Ihud, which opposed a Jewish state in part because they saw the difficulties of creating a Jewish state in a country in which two-thirds of the population were Arabs. But aside from practical considerations, many members of this group believed that to create a state like all other states, the vision of Herzl and Zionism, did not fully respond to Jewish particularity and spirituality. Who needed another small nation in view of all the terrible things that had been done in the name of nation, nationalism, and state? As to what was to replace the British mandate, then under armed attack by Jewish terrorists (the term was then used freely in Commentary, and elsewhere, for Jews carrying out assassinations), our writers were not very clear. Certainly there should be a Jewish homeland and spiritual and culture center, but with what political form? Various solutions were proposed in the pages of the new Commentary. The most obvious one—the Jewish state—was looked at askance. It was not until the sixth issue, in April 1946, that we ran a straightforward Zionist article, “No Hope But Exodus,” by Shlomo Katz, and the editorial note introducing it reads peculiarly today: “To many the thesis presented here will seem purely personal. But it represents a point of view held by many Jewish leaders”—not exactly an endorsement. It seemed to suggest that support for the exodus from Europe of the surviving Jews and for the establishment of a Jewish state was an extreme position. In August 1946, a lead article by Ernest Munz was titled, “Nationalism is the Enemy: Has Zionism Taken the Wrong Road?” and in February 1947, we ran an article by Robert Weltsch, “The End of the Biltmore Road”—the Biltmore program had committed the Zionist movement to a Jewish state. On the eve of the declaration of the Jewish state, and with the Yishuv at war, Hannah Arendt wrote a grim warning of the fate we might expect for it in an article titled, “To Save the Jewish Homeland.” She predicted the new Jewish state would face unbending Arab hostility and would be continually at war, and it seemed doubtful from her perspective that the Jewish state could survive. Hannah Arendt was right about the situation Israel would face for the next fifty-five years—and who knows how many thereafter—but she was wrong about its survival.

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Some years later, Gershon Scholem was to condemn Hannah Arendt, in the wake of her book on Eichmann, as deficient in love of the Jewish people. A similar charge could have been leveled at the editors of Commentary. We did not think much of the representative Jewish leaders in the United States, and if love there was for the Jewish people—and I believe there was—it was a crude and limited love. Some of our writers, including Isaac Rosenfeld, Saul Bellow, and Irving Howe, knew something of and loved Yiddish literature, but no member of the editorial staff knew or read modern Hebrew. None of us had ever been to Palestine, I believe, and I do not recall that in my years there any of us visited Israel. Irving Kristol did suggest to me that we (he and I—none of the other editors seemed likely candidates) should learn something of the Talmud, and the two of us did have some lessons in reading and understanding Talmud with Seymour Siegel of the Jewish Theological Seminary. For a while, Irving and I, together with Dan Bell, Gertrude Himmelfarb—Irving Kristol’s wife, Milton Himmelfarb, and some others, read the Mishneh Torah with the young and strange Jewish scholar Jacob Taubes. The Himmelfarbs had studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Milton was a formidable Jewish scholar. We had been introduced to Taubes by Ernst Simon, a Jewish educator then visiting the United States from Israel. He was one of the circle around Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig in Germany in the 1920s, and he hoped to awaken in an American group the kind of attachment and commitment to Jewish learning that they had created in Germany. It didn’t take with us. Our group shortly went on, at Taubes’s suggestion, to read Jung. We were perhaps lead astray by Taubes, who was something of a misleader. Our editorial group at Commentary reflected a divorce between Jewish writers and intellectuals and Jewish life—Jewish issues—that would be unimaginable today. A few years before, the CJR had published a symposium of young Jewish writers titled “Under Forty” (February 1944). It was a remarkable demonstration of the almost total distancing of young Jewish writers from anything that could be called Jewish. For example, Alfred Kazin wrote: “I learned long ago to accept the fact that I was Jewish without being part of any meaningful Jewish life or culture.” Clement Greenberg, shortly to become managing editor of the CJR and to continue for many years thereafter

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as a senior editor of Commentary, wrote: “This writer has no more of a conscious position toward his Jewish heritage than the average American Jew—which is to say, hardly any. Perhaps he has even less than that.” One can ponder how this situation came about, and the best guess I can make was that it was the result of our effort to embrace modernity and modern thought and culture. We could see no connection between the Judaism and the Jewish life we knew—none of us came from educated Jewish homes—and the culture, politics, and civilization to which we aspired. Twenty years ago, in 1984, writing for a symposium on the fiftieth anniversary of Partisan Review, I pondered why PR, despite its many Jewish editors and writers, had published nothing on Jewish issues during the years of its greatest influence. I wrote then: “One felt [in reading Partisan Review] that Jewish topics entered only if they passed a test of universal significance. . . . Hebrew and Yiddish writers [and, I would add, Jewish writers in English] would have to enter through gates kept by a universal literary sensibility, political issues of concern to Jews . . . would have to demonstrate a universal significance.” It was as if T. S. Eliot would determine what Jewish issues, if any, might concern those of advanced culture and taste.

V Whatever the explanation, that was the tone of the early Commentary, but while this might well be decried, Commentary was able to build a connection between Jewish life, in all its aspects, and the larger culture that no other orientation available then—not the apologetic, nor the defensive, nor the obstreperously insistent—could have engineered at the time. It brought Jewish life and Jewish issues centrally into American life, and brought our situation in America centrally into Jewish life, and in time, as we know now, the odd deficiency in knowledge and love of Judaism and the Jewish people of the early Commentary was fully repaired. Shortly after Irving Kristol left to start Encounter, I left to work with Jason Epstein on his newly founded paperback series, Anchor Books, at Doubleday—a series that was to revolutionize American publish-

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ing. I had already edited for its Anchor edition the book The Lonely Crowd, on which I had worked with David Riesman, and which was to become one of Anchor’s greatest successes. The little editorial group which had done so much to make the early Commentary was dispersing. When I told Elliot Cohen I was leaving, the dismay and shock evident on his face was so great that I was shaken, and overwhelmed with guilt. It was as if he were a father losing his son. I should have been more aware of how much we meant to him, but like so many sons, I was not. I only realized later how much I properly owed to him and to the unique institution he had created.

3 The Jewishness of Commentary Ruth R. Wisse

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he 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 that Commentary has 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 since the 1970s, Commentary had served his intellectual circle as the guide to a democratic polity that need not be leftist. In Jerusalem recently, the editor of a new Israeli opinion magazine told me that its seed was planted during her childhood in Chile, when she saw how avidly her father read Commentary every month. Some Americans used to quip that Daniel P. Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick had found their jobs through Commentary, having come to the attention of members of the administration in Washington through articles they had published in the magazine. Commentary was exceptional among Jewish publications in affecting intellectual and political life far beyond the Jewish community from which it derived. 52

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The magazine could not have aspired to such wide influence in any other language, location, or time. A magazine in English as opposed to a Jewish language had a potentially global as well as American reach. America is an open society that permits and intermittently encourages the self-affirmation of its national and religious minorities. Unlike many of their European counterparts, the Jewish intellectuals who came of age in the Jewish sections of major cities in the late 1930s stayed identifiably, even cliquishly, Jewish. In the New York circles from which the magazine drew its editors and many of its writers, it was the occasional non-Jew, like William Barrett, who “became assimilated” to the Jewish majority.2 As for its timing, Commentary was founded in New York in 1945, after America’s defeat of Nazi Germany. The liberation of the death camps focused attention on the Jews as the main victims of Nazi evil. In that moment of postwar exuberance, America was disinclined to tolerate, let alone practice, anti-Semitism. If Jews thought they had something to say—perhaps something to prove—to their fellow Americans, many Americans were at that time likely to listen. That the magazine should have aspired to such wide influence is a result of its three extraordinary editors—the late Elliot Cohen and, wishing them long years, Norman Podhoretz and Neal Kozodoy— each of whom aspired to put out the best magazine in the country. Because each editor worked on the magazine before his succession to the position of editor—Neal Kozodoy assumed editorial responsibilities in 1966—a seamless transition allowed each editor to build on the ideas and achievement of his predecessor. It is therefore possible to talk about the magazine as a coherent entity while recognizing that it changed substantially over time. In this chapter, I propose that in addition to its language, location, timing, and the genius of its editors, Commentary achieved its preeminence because of the way it chose to fulfill its mandate as a Jewish magazine. The magazine’s most obvious challenge was how to balance being “American,” “intellectual,” “independent,” and “Jewish.” Commentary broke new ground precisely in the ways that it struck that balance. Before the Commentary era, Jewish writers and readers had their choice of two venues: magazines like The Menorah Journal or Jewish Frontier, which dealt almost exclusively with Jewish issues, and

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magazines like Partisan Review or The New Republic, in which Jewish contributors wrote about general matters. The nineteenth-century Jewish Enlightenment’s conceptual distinction between the Jew “in his home” and the Jew “in the street” still prevailed. According to this model of acculturation, modern Jews distinguished between functioning “internally,” within the community, and “externally,” in interaction with the surrounding world. Commentary substituted for this image of cultural bifurcation an integral idea of the American Jew who felt no more divided in his identity than a Jewish soldier did defending his country in the American armed forces. “We have faith,” wrote Elliott Cohen, “that, out of the opportunities of our own experience here, there will evolve new patterns of living, new modes of thought, which will harmonize heritage and country into a true sense of at-home-ness in the modern world.”3 It is not that there were not differences between Americanism and Judaism, and different problems facing Jews and other Americans— America was also home to other minorities, whose competing priorities might create intramural friction—but just as America in World War II proved truest to its ideals when it fought on the side of the Jews, so could Jews serve America best in honest pursuit of their collective interests. Commentary assumed that this confluence of interests was not accidental but derived from basic values that were held in common by the two peoples. Insofar as Jews had a certain experience of the world and a valuable, compelling, variegated culture, Jewish writers and thinkers would benefit the rest of America if they brought their perspectives to bear on debates over the public good. No less consequential than this confidence in the integral American Jew was Commentary’s new expectation of the Jewish intellectual. A year before its founding, when Commentary’s forerunner, the Contemporary Jewish Record, featured a symposium of leading members of the young Jewish intelligentsia, most of these intellectuals recorded their alienation from the Jewish community and their contempt for its middle-class parochialism.4 With their own sights set on entry into the universities and into American high culture, they dismissed as “dreary middle-class chauvinists” those who championed a Jewish state in Palestine. Rather than credit their Jewish heritage for their collective intellectual energy, they claimed it had deteriorated into “less than

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nothingness.”5 And though most of the Marxists among them had lost their ideological fervor, they retained Marxism’s hostility or indifference to the national aspirations of the Jewish people. As youths, they had traded in their Judaism for leftism. When they later cast off Marxist authority, they prided themselves on standing free of both alike. Thus, Commentary began as an unlikely merger between two constituencies with opposing mandates. The intelligentsia was intent on maintaining its “independence,” whereas the American Jewish Committee (AJC) was charged with the protection of Jewish interests. In an attempt to reconcile these differences, editorial autonomy was guaranteed and was pretty much maintained throughout the course of the partnership. The American Jewish Committee did not dictate editorial policy, and the editors did not have to submit the contents of the magazine for approval. The editors did, however, agree to publish a decidedly “Jewish magazine,” advertising their identity and affiliation, if not their opinions, in collective terms. At the very least, the association of a Jew with Commentary implied some relation to the American Jewish polity. Over the course of time, Commentary went much further than this: In trying to be honest and truthful, it found itself confronting the actual situation of the Jews, which brought about a shift of direction that neither the AJC nor the editors had ever anticipated. This shift of political and cultural direction, which included a new definition of the intellectual calling, occurred in conditions of maximal freedom, without any direct Jewish institutional pressure, and without the kind of anti-Semitic coercion that had affected Jewish intellectuals in other times and places. To begin at the beginning: The question of Palestine was by far the most urgent matter on the Jewish national agenda in 1945. “On this point at least there was no conflict between the magazine and the American Jewish Committee, which in those days answered to the label of “non-Zionist” (to distinguish itself from the unambiguously anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism).”6 In keeping with its agnostic editorial policy, most of the opinion pieces and reportage in Commentary between 1945 and 1948 featured the dangers of and objections to establishing a Jewish state. A lead article in the second issue of the magazine—“Must the Jews Quit Europe?”—argued that

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Zionists would have to temper their ideal of gathering in the exiles and address the Jewish question through compromise and accommodation, because there was no need for wholesale emigration from Western Europe and no possibility of an exodus from the Soviet Union.7 To another such question—“Is America Exile or Home?”— Israel Knox answered that the overemphasis on Zionism obscured the viability of American Judaism, and since America emphatically was home to a thriving community of Jews, Jewish education must be strengthened to ensure its continuity.8 Hannah Arendt weighed in with a critique of Herzl that, though not completely dismissive of Zionism, compared its founder unfavorably with the failed messiah Shabbetai Zevi.9 A regular contributor from within Palestine, Moshe Smelansky, who was a member of the Ichud group formed around Judah Magnes, promoted that group’s agenda of a binational state: “Political independence is not indispensable to a people’s existence and development. . . . Cultural independence, too, can be realized by a people’s own efforts, regardless of the size and physical powers of that people.”10 So, too, in the Cedars of Lebanon section of the magazine, which was devoted to translated passages from the Jewish classics, Franz Rosenzweig and Shimon Dubnow expressed their reservations about Zionism—the former on philosophical and the latter on historiographical grounds.11 Despite the preponderance of such negative opinion, the intellectual energy of the debate pushed so strongly in the other direction that the objective historian might well conclude with Michael Kimmage that Commentary was a Zionist magazine even before the founding of Israel.12 For one thing, the magazine’s permanent sense of “crisis,” reinforced by repeated use of the term, conveyed the need for extraordinary measures. However heterodox, the magazine contained articles on Palestine and on Zionism that for the most part assumed that the fate of the Jews would depend on what happened not in America, but in Palestine. Articles on the destruction of European Jewry underscored the dilemma of a stateless people in a world of murderous anti-Semitism. When Meyer Levin wrote of the British police, “never in Germany did I see so tight and wary an occupation as they established in Tel Aviv,” he undermined the scenario that had been proposed elsewhere in the magazine for a continuing British protectorate in Palestine.13 A stream of reports about Arab hostility in

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Palestine and the fascist sympathies of Arab leaders contradicted the expressions of trust in binational cooperation. There were also arguments in favor of Zionism in the years before the creation of Israel. Shlomo Katz demonstrated that, contrary to the claims of the earlier article, Jewish refugees were fleeing Europe. His epigram from Karl Marx, “The invitation to abandon illusions regarding [a] situation is an invitation to abandon a situation which has need of illusions,” was aimed at those who refused to credit the realities of the Jewish refugee crisis. Although representatives of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration might not like the aspersions that the image of a Jewish “exodus” cast on Europe, and Jewish advocates of Diaspora nationalism in the Yiddish press continued to press the case for minority rights in Poland and elsewhere, “persons reasoning thus are evidently more concerned with their peace of mind than with the welfare of the Jews.”14 Katz showed the impracticality and immorality of anything short of mass emigration to a Jewish state. “A destination for the exodus has . . . been created by historical pressures.” The dreamers and self-deceivers were not the Zionists who urged on the exodus from Europe, but those who pretended that one could settle for anything less. A short story by Irving Kristol advanced this argument in a different key. At the Zionist headquarters in Marseilles, an American Jewish soldier is emotionally bullied by a seventeen-year-old refugee into providing him with clothes and a gun so that he can get back to Poland, find his father who is still alive, and go with him to Eretz Israel. After struggling with his conscience, the soldier accedes to the boy’s request because he knows this “child” has earned the right to his hard-won conclusions. The soldier feels humiliated by the incident. “Who did he think he was? And why had I played the innocent, timid American?”15 Yet with whatever hesitation, the American defers to the refugee. The story set up the same dichotomy as Shlomo Katz did between liberal sentiment and Jewish survival. Likewise, in publishing such items, the magazine seemed to admit that it had been won over against its will by the practical and moral urgency of the case for Zionism. Beyond the case for Jewish statehood, which was constantly reinforced by information about the Holocaust and the Jewish community of Palestine, the sheer magnitude of such coverage during the first

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decade of Commentary implied that the Jewish intellectual bore a responsibility for the fate of the Jewish people. This represented not a shift but a revolution in attitude, for the same people who now appeared on the masthead and in the pages of Commentary had completely ignored this subject before joining the magazine. Indeed, the worse things got for European Jewry in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and the more desperate the struggle of the yishuv in Palestine, the less attention the magazine devoted to Jewish politics, as though its disinterest grew in reverse proportion to the national crisis. Nathan Glazer was to marvel on the fiftieth anniversary of Partisan Review that its largely Jewish body of contributors had paid no attention to Zionism.16 Sidney Hook in his intellectual autobiography cited the underestimation of Zionism as one of the two great miscalculations of his generation (the other was their underestimation of capitalism).17 In the pages of Commentary, however, these same thinkers now debated the subjects they had been avoiding in Partisan Review, as, for example, Philip Rahv and Nathan Glazer dueled over the merits of Arthur Koestler’s Zionist novel, Thieves in the Night.18 The Zionism of Commentary was not solely political: it had a cultural and historical dimension. As Marxism lost its centrality in the lives of these thinkers, it made room for other concerns. Commentary filled some of this space with reflections on the American Jew and with reports on what it was like to be an Israeli Jew. It also mined the common Jewish heritage that nursed both these communities alike. In presenting the treasures of Yiddish and Hebrew literature and, to a lesser degree, Jewish religious thought, Commentary made it clear that authors like Sholem Aleichem and Chaim Nahman Bialik were no less worthy of scrutiny than Sherwood Anderson or Ezra Pound. In 1949, Leslie Fiedler turned the intellectual assumptions of his cohort inside out with his article, “What Can We Do About Fagin?” using the first person plural pronoun to goad his fellow Jewish intellectuals into recognizing that they had been trying to penetrate the English literary tradition without acknowledging its hostility to them. Fiedler suggests that as intellectuals, Jews were obliged to confront their literature’s negative myth of themselves and to try to develop new myths to supplement and counteract the ones supplied by some of the greatest English writers and poets. He does not mention in

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his article that he is writing a year after the British withdrawal from Palestine.19 I have not found in either the magazine or the memoirist literature any acknowledgment of the link between the two phenomena, yet it seems clear that the new Jewish cultural self-assertiveness accompanied the establishment and successful defense of Israel. Norman Podhoretz’s assumption of the editorial reins in February 1960 seemed to augur a dilution of the Jewish character of the magazine. In one of two tributes Commentary ran to the late Elliot Cohen, Lionel Trilling eulogized the former editor as “the only great teacher I have ever had,” without mentioning any Jewish aspect of his life or achievement.20 In the other tribute, Podhoretz praised his predecessor for putting out a magazine “that found a way of being both Jewish and non-parochial,”21 suggesting by that term that in-house Jewishness was guilty of insularity until proven innocent. The new editor said that he would no longer dutifully set aside a monthly column for the Jewish classics or Jewish vignettes “from the American Scene” but would henceforth judge the Jewish and general submissions by identical standards of general interest. “[If] in its first phase Commentary had been primarily a Jewish magazine (but with wider and more general interests than Jewish magazines usually displayed), in its second phase under Podhoretz it became primarily a general magazine (but still identifiably Jewish both in its preoccupations and in the traditions of intellectual discourse to which it remained loyal).”22 Along with becoming more general than Jewish, Commentary encouraged the development of a new radicalism that, although remaining anticommunist and pro-Israel, as in the past, adopted a sharpened adversarial approach to the status quo. Podhoretz felt that in its “celebrations of American virtue” the magazine had become too “predictable”—the same reproach that would be leveled against Commentary when it turned more conservative in the 1970s. He complained of having been “a young fogey,” the exemplary good boy of exacting parents and teachers. Now was the time to seek out writers with an edge, like Paul Goodman and Norman Mailer, and to join them in shaking up local politics, social policy, and culture. I don’t think anyone, and certainly not I, can improve on the description Podhoretz gives in Making It of the magazine he took over

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in 1960 and of the direction he set for it. Yet because this time was when I became an independent subscriber to Commentary, let me register my impression of the magazine that was hotly argued with my father and older brother, with my husband, and among our friends. It was the pivot of our intellectual life—we constituted a Commentary discussion group before that concept was officially introduced. We were thrilled to see a Jewish publication joining the public debate over what was best for America. Articles about schools, the unions, and intergroup tensions in the cities assumed that in a democratic system it was right and proper for any minority to offer its ideas of wrong and right. Every group was free to pursue its enlightened selfinterest, knowing that if all did so within the bounds of the law, all might ultimately be working together for the common good. These American Jews who were writing for Commentary seemed to have come of age in a way that we in Montreal could only envy. “Looking down on the cultural life of New York from here,” observed my fellow countryman, the late Mordecai Richler, “it appears to be a veritable yeshiva. I won’t even go into the question of Broadway or television, but from Commentary by way of Partisan Review to The Noble Savage . . . the Jewish writers seem to call each to each, editing, praising, slamming one another’s books, plays and cultural conference appearances.” Richler comments—where else but in Commentary—on how this New York intelligentsia takes for granted that its Jewishness is simultaneously of universal interest, whereas he in Montreal is always being asked to explain why he sticks to Jewish subjects instead of writing about “Canada.”23 In addition to its intellectual sophistication and range, I loved the magazine’s critical disposition. It showed by example that one had to prove rather than merely assert the difference between good thinking and bad. For example, we did not need the lead article in Commentary to tell us that Harvey Golden’s Only in America was, despite its popularity, a lousy book, but from Commentary we learned why the phenomenon of its popularity was important even if the book itself was not. Golden “represents with depressing clarity certain very real problems and conditions of our society in the past decade—a society characterized by its well-intentioned but soft, sloppy and equivocal thinking about itself.”24 The standards of literature were moral standards: Golden’s self-satisfaction was meant to obscure the problems and

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conditions we ought to be struggling to define and to address. Feelgoodism was a danger to both America and the Jews: the sloppiness ought to be resisted for both their sakes. Even as we reveled in Commentary, however, and took up its debates around the kitchen table, we wondered whether it really cared about perpetuating the Jewish way of life from which it had emerged. Missing from it were all the internal debates of the Jewish community, the concerns for Jewish education, aliyah to Israel, Yiddish versus Hebrew, synagogue and Federation politics, tensions between the secular and religious. Jewish issues were treated in the magazine only to the degree that they could become part of the general discourse. This indifference to the nuts and bolts issues sometimes felt to us like indifference to the substance of Jewish life. More disturbing than such omissions—which were, after all, the necessary trade-off for having a magazine of such universal appeal— was the occasional indication that the magazine was acculturating to America at an alarming pace. Consider Podhoretz’s 1963 essay “My Negro Problem—And Ours,” which was one of the most hotly debated articles that ever ran in Commentary. Drawing on his own past in a way that implied a Jew’s experience in America could be a paradigmatic American experience, Podhoretz claimed that far from blacks having much to fear from whites in the big cities of the North, it was he, a white boy, who ran scared of the black boys during all the years that he was growing up. In his analysis of racial tensions, he proposed that instead of developing black national consciousness, America should encourage miscegenation to get beyond the color barrier. Were one of his daughters to want to marry a black man, Podhoretz hoped that he would show the courage of his convictions by accepting her decision. What disturbed me in this piece was not the main line of the argument—I did not question whether miscegenation would actually solve America’s racial crisis—but that a Jewish parent would endorse intermarriage without even considering the priorities of the Jewish people. I was shocked that the editor could discuss his daughter’s marriage, however hypothetically, without asking whether his prospective black son-in-law intended to become a Jew.25 There was more: “In thinking about the Jews,” Podhoretz wrote, “I have often wondered whether their survival as a distinct group was worth one hair on the head of a single infant. Did the Jews have to

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survive so that six million innocent people should one day be burned in the ovens of Auschwitz? It is a terrible question and no one, not God himself, could ever answer it to my satisfaction.”26 Not the question was terrible, for many a passionate Jewish parent may have harbored similar doubts, but in the context of the article, it implied a negative answer: If intermarriage would solve America’s racial problem, why not the Jewish problem as well? As Robert Brustein wrote in a letter to the editor, Podhoretz had carried liberal thought to its inexorable conclusion:27 the highest achievement of intermarriage would be a meltdown of all particularisms. This was the side of Commentary that my family and I regretted, all the more because there was so much else in it to admire. Remembering these controversies, had I been asked about the Jewish nature of Commentary in the 1960s before I began reading in preparation for this book, I would have said that its real interests lay elsewhere. If asked to expatiate, I might have accounted for its indifference in the following terms: Israel was then at the peak of its popularity as a liberal cause, and its defenders were cast in the image of Paul Newman. The interests of America and the Jewish people seemed perfectly aligned against the Soviet Union in the Cold War and against Soviet oppression of national minorities. With the Eichmann trial of 1961, the story of the Holocaust began to penetrate mass culture. In that rare period of grace in Jewish history, Commentary may have felt it could afford to relax its vigilance. To my surprise, what I discovered on my review of past issues was a magazine quite different from my memory of it. In fact, those items that did deal with Israel, world Jewry, and American Jewish life—and no issue of the magazine was ever without one or, more often, several such pieces—were often as strong or stronger in their defense of Jewish interests than anything in the contemporaneous Jewish press. Commentary determinedly charted the history and legacy of the Holocaust while remaining vigilant against anti-Semitism on every front. The magazine ran an expose of the passion play at Oberammergau and a critique of Arnold Toynbee’s dismissive historical view of the Jews.28 It published Elie Wiesel and reviews of his books in the years when he was just becoming known, and put forth several haunting testimonies of the great destruction.29 In a departure from its usual

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style of digested writing for the general reader, the magazine featured Guenther Lewy’s study, with 102 footnotes, of Pope Pius XII’s wartime behavior toward the Jews. Lewy exposed the Pope not for his personal animus but for acting like a bureaucrat rather than a prelate. His findings that “the Vatican’s silence only reflected the deep feeling of the Catholic masses of Europe” still stands up well after the latest wave of books on the subject.30 Moreover, although the New Yorker published Hannah Arendt’s critique of the Eichmann trial that questioned Ben Gurion’s motives in conducting the trial in Israel, Commentary ran an article by her nemesis, the historian Jacob Robinson, justifying Israel’s jurisdiction in the trial.31 Podhoretz himself led the charge against Eichmann in Jerusalem, the book that emerged from Arendt’s reportage, calling the thesis about “the banality of evil” a study in “the perversity of brilliance.” “[In] place of the monstrous Nazi, she gives us the ‘banal’ Nazi; in place of the Jew as virtuous martyr, she gives us the Jew as accomplice in evil; and in place of the confrontation between guilt and innocence, she gives us the ‘collaboration’ of criminal and victim.”32 Offended by the moral imbalance between her exculpatory portrayal of antiSemitism and her denunciation of the Jewish leadership, Podhoretz was disturbed that Arendt would translate plain facts of mass murder into “the kind of terms that can appeal to the sophisticated modern sensibility.” This intellectual razzle-dazzle seemed especially odious when the reputation of the Jews was at stake. The same impatience with the cleverness of intellectuals marked Albert Memmi’s reflections on emigration from his native Tunisia, a move his socialist friends called “treason” because it abandoned the fight for North African independence. Memmi looked at the legacy of French colonialism from the perspective of Jews under Muslim rule who now wanted for themselves the same political liberation that the Arabs were seeking from Europe. “If anyone has given a false picture of what the Jews of North Africa think and feel, it is the Jewish intellectuals, particularly of the left, who have done nothing but intimate the kind of thinking characteristic of the French left in general.”33 Memmi defended the Jews who voted with their feet, praising their wisdom and far-sightedness over the calculations of those who presume to give them moral guidance.

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Of course, this is not the whole story of Commentary in the 1960s. For example, George Steiner’s reflections on “A Kind of Survivor” engages in just the sort of metaphorical intellectualizing that Podhoretz elsewhere opposed.34 Steiner prefers the abstraction of the homeless Jewish spirit to the “parochial” reality of a people trying to house its women and children. For the most part, however, the magazine remained alert to threats to the Jews’ physical security and tough on those—past and present—who neglected their plight. As Isaac Bashevis Singer, a frequent contributor, pointed out, one of the greatest miscalculations of the Jewish intelligentsia had been its enthusiasm for Communism, a system dedicated to the dissolution of its own people.35 A feature of Commentary’s anticommunism throughout the 1960s until 1991 was what became known as the struggle for Soviet Jewry, an international Jewish effort to help Soviet Jews escape to freedom in Israel. The magazine’s support for another exodus, like the one from postwar Europe in the late 1940s, integrated the struggle for Soviet Jewry into the rest of the Cold War. The tone for Jewish issues was set by the contributing editor, Milton Himmelfarb, who was the magazine’s most prominent writer on Jewish subjects between 1960 and the late 1970s. Like a number of those whom Irving Howe dubbed “The New York Intellectuals,” Himmelfarb was a graduate of City College; where he differed from his contemporaries was in taking Jewishness as his main area of interest and expertise. As director of information and research of the American Jewish Committee and editor of the American Jewish Yearbook, Himmelfarb kept himself apprised of whatever affected Jewish behavior, culture, politics, and religion. Because he took for granted the right of emancipated moderns to promote Judaism as a way of life, he tried to figure out why many of his fellow Jews instead remained indifferent to, or worked against, the interests of their group.36 Himmelfarb was often at one with the Commentary of the 1960s in exposing Jewish complacency and self-satisfaction, but his jabs at liberals and the assumptions that fueled their self-righteousness came from the Right rather than the Left. It disturbed him that instead of advancing their religious civilization, Jews fought more energetically than anyone else in America for “24-karat separationism” of Church and state.37 Himmelfarb argued that parochial schools that improve

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education are more beneficial to the polity as a whole than are public schools that don’t work—one of the many issues on which he felt that the Jewish liberals were harming rather than helping the disadvantaged. He wondered why, if Jews professed to care so much about Negroes, they did not try to attract a fair number of black people into their midst. “That would be good for them—so a Jew ought to assume—and especially good for us.” Why shouldn’t the Jews get serious about their religion and traditions? Why fatuously assume that benign intentions turn into good deeds instead of trying to turn moralizing into morality?38 Himmelfarb also pointed out how liberal ardor cools under the pressure of class. When it comes to opposing such practical issues as the city’s decision to place housing projects for the urban poor in Jewish neighborhoods, “[less] prosperous Jews do not think they are defecting from liberalism. They think they are being made to pay the bill for the limousine liberals’ kind of attention.”39 Although Himmelfarb grants “Ultra-Orthodoxy” its many deficiencies, and says that he would surely have joined the nineteenthcentury Enlighteners in fighting for the liberalization of Jewish religious practice, he reminds readers that in the moral hierarchy, the Jewish “reactionaries” fare ever so much better than some of their antagonists. Whereas some of the Bolsheviks who recited Hebrew poetry executed people in Russia’s prison cellars, and some of Heinrich Heine’s Aryan descendants may have been Nazis, “that cannot be said of the followers of Samson Raphael Hirsch”—the leader of Orthodox Jewry in Germany. Judging by the worst rather than the best of which each group was capable (itself a conservative, rather than liberal, habit of mind), Himmelfarb concludes that the so-called Jewish fundamentalists have far less to repent than the Jewish Enlighteners.40 Himmelfarb targeted opponents of Judaism of every variety. On Jewish universalists who detest parochialism and provincialism: “You have to deny the special propensity of Jews, because they are Jews, for the very values you cherish. Otherwise you would have to ask yourself, more insistently than you would like, how attached you yourself would be to those values if you had not been born to Jewish parents.”41 On Allen Ginsberg’s chanting a mantra to the accompaniment of finger cymbals: “For the [German] Jewish reformers, chant-

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ing (as of the Pentateuch and Prophets) was Oriental, so they did away with it.”42 On what rabbis should say to the children of their congregants: “It is best not to intermarry, but probably some of you will. If you do, try to persuade your fiance´(e) to become a Jew. Why withhold our tradition and religion from someone you want to marry?”43 Himmelfarb’s most quoted observation—that the Jews earned like Episcopalians but voted like Puerto Ricans—was made in the course of trying to explain how liberalism had become the American Jewish creed.44 Milton Himmelfarb was associated with the Conservative Movement of Judaism, but the Reform thinkers who appeared in Commentary were no less critical of liberal Judaism. Emil Fackenheim fretted that students in liberal synagogue schools were not being taught that their own moral and religious beliefs were more valid than any others. Fackenheim felt that Jewish religious instruction ought to make constructive use of rational argument in support of Jewish belief, but when the limits of such support were reached—as would inevitably happen—it ought to take a straightforward stand on behalf of basic Jewish belief.45 Rabbi Herbert Weiner, writing from Israel, did not share his movement’s belief that Reform was God’s gift to the Jewish State: “If Reform Judaism can prove itself ‘essential’ in Israel—as real in a man’s life as his worries about military security, or money, or food, or clothing—then and only then will it find a place. [Not] the Israelis . . . are being tested here, but Reform Judaism itself.”46 To these political and social demurrals from the liberal consensus should be added the essays of another contributing editor, the literary scholar and critic Robert Alter, who wrote regularly on Hebrew and Jewish literature. Although Alter’s critical inclination can hardly be called “conservative,” his informed discussion of modern Jewish culture set a much higher standard for knowledge of Hebrew and Jewish sources than had figured in the writing of the previous generation of American Jewish intellectuals. Whereas Elliot Cohen’s Commentary had published selections from the Jewish classics to upgrade the Jewish knowledge of its readership, Alter’s familiarity with those sources established the presence of a Jewishly literate American Jewish intelligenstia. He represented a new generation of American-educated Jewish intellectuals who could write about the Bible and the emerging

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literature of Israel as deftly as they could about Kafka or Fielding or Stendhal. In this way, Commentary demonstrated rather than preached the need for confident possession of the Jewish literary tradition. In sum, then, the Jewish component of Commentary promoted neoconservatism before the term came into use and before the rest of the magazine was prepared to conclude that the opposite of the Left would have to call itself the Right. It is well known that having encouraged a critique of American complacency, and a censure of some aspects of American foreign policy, including the war in Vietnam, Commentary was appalled by the rise in the late 1960s of the New Politics that attacked not America’s flaws but America itself. At that point, the editor (Podhoretz) conscientiously began revising some of his and the magazine’s earlier positions. One can find an adumbration of neoconservatism in earlier articles on Israel, Judaism, and the Jews, however, and I believe that it emerged earlier in that sphere because the threat to the Jewish polity and the Jewish future was more dire than the threat to America. This emergent Jewish conservatism did not hearken back to any sounder, better, or happier past, but warned that Judaism and the Jews had adjusted so completely to modernity that unless they now consolidated their practice they would evaporate altogether. This was not a conservatism that sought to preserve inherited institutions; it simply recognized that without stable and credible institutions, no civilization could hope to perpetuate itself. Just as the question of Palestine was the most urgent matter on Commentary’s agenda in 1945, so the defense of Israel became the driving engine of Commentary’s conservative tilt from the 1960s onward. This shift happened long before the Six-Day War of 1967; it has grown incrementally from the beginnings of Commentary to the present day. The State of Israel was the product of a dynamic—and perhaps revolutionary—movement of national self-liberation. Its national anthem was “hope,” and some call its creation the spark of the messianic redemption. Most of its political institutions and much of its political thinking bore the imprint of its progressive founders. As the first democracy in its region, it ought to have become the beacon of liberal democracy in a new part of the world. Instead, Arab autocrats and despots organized their internal and regional politics in op-

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position to Israel as the symbol of democracy and of those aspects of modernization that threatened their rule. Adapting the techniques and terminology of European anti-Semitism, these tyrants blamed the Jews for the misery they themselves were causing their countries. The obsession with Israel turned Arab society increasingly fanatical, compounding its problems and preventing any hope of improvement. “Whatever policies Israel undertakes now,” Nathan Glazer wrote in 1975, “it is inconceivable that Arab hostility will in the foreseeable future be diminished to the point at which there can be any substantial reduction in the need for arms.”47 As the Arab war against Israel escalated in violence and hardened ideologically, it left the Jews exposed not only to Arab hatred but also to the ire of liberals who wanted to believe in conflict resolution. Neoconservatism was the logical consequence of defending Israel and the Jews from Arab belligerence and from the hypocrisy of liberal reproach. Irving Kristol’s felicitous image of the liberal “mugged by reality” describes neoconservatism as an adjustment of philosophic optimism to the awareness of evil, but consider the relative mildness of Kristol’s term, “mugged,” which evokes no more than a man forfeiting his wallet or a woman her purse, if sometimes at gunpoint. What a gentle instruction in “reality” the American receives compared with the assaults leveled against the Jews of Europe during World War II and the suicide bombers who take pride in killing the Jews of Israel! The Jew experienced the contradiction of liberalism more violently and consistently than citizens of other democracies, and to the degree that Commentary undertook the defense of the Jews as Jews, it bore the brunt of that assault. This result also helps to answer the good question Nathan Glazer posed in the Partisan Review article to which I have already referred: “why a magazine that was in such large measure created by Jewish editors and writers had so little to say about Jews, Jewishness, or Judaism.” Glazer notes that the Jewish component was admitted only when a universal and non-Jewish source of authority or point of reference gave it an appropriate cachet.”48 The Jewish intellectuals of whom Glazer writes (as well as the scholarship devoted to them) assumed that they were transcending their parochial affiliation in addressing universal concerns. The record of Commentary suggests just the opposite, that in failing to identify with the Jewish people, the intellectuals hid behind a safer set of issues and insulated

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themselves from the most strenuous battles. To assume responsibility for the Jews, Judaism, and Israel required ceaseless attentiveness to everything that was happening in the world, especially in its most dangerous regions. Contrarily, there was no surer way to stay safely parochial than to avoid responsibility for the Jewish people and for the problem that their security posed. This brings us to a second and related consequence of the way Commentary interpreted its mandate as a Jewish magazine. By taking intellectual responsibility for the Jewish people and the Jewish polity, it reinvented the intellectual calling. Elsewhere I have characterized this development as a shift of posture from adolescent to parent.49 Historical analyses of the rise of intellectuals in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe emphasize the socioeconomic and political conditions that produced a new amalgam of jester and priest. The presence of an educated youth that cannot realize its ambition through preexisting or emerging professional opportunities breeds a brand of writers, thinkers, and teachers who make a virtue of this alienation. Karl Mannheim writes of a “socially unattached intelligentsia” that can think independently because of its social detachment, and Irving Howe has a similar model in mind in his 1954 argument for intellectuals as “agents of discontent.” According to Howe, critical independence requires the readiness to stand alone. He writes that when intellectuals become absorbed into the accredited institutions of society, they “not only lose their traditional rebelliousness but to one extent of another they cease to function as intellectuals.”50 The Jew entering Gentile society seemed to fit this description. Raised in a culture that rewarded learning and intelligence, he was unfairly discriminated against at the point of wanting to realize his ambition. Many young Jews of immigrant families growing up in America during the Depression were not allowed to compete with their fellow Americans for choice academic and white-collar jobs, but there were several defects in the theory of intellectual iconoclasm, given that so many of those who claimed to be autonomous were tied to an ideology and institutional framework that monitored the limits of their independence. Ironically, among the New York Intellectuals, it was the same champion of “independence,” Irving Howe, who alone never broke with the socialist faith into which he entered as a teenager. What’s more, when the ideal of dissent filtered down from

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every socialist to every sophomore, it turned the radicals and liberals into intellectual conformists. Once intellectuals were free to compete for power and influence, there was no further moral justification for self-alienation. Indeed, within Jewish society, the man of learning was traditionally expected to actualize his intellectual gifts by assuming greater responsibility for his people. He was welcomed into the best families and accorded elevated social status in the expectation that his thinking would benefit the entire community. So, too, the American Intellectual, as exemplified by the authors of the Federalist papers and by other American thinkers of similar breadth of mind, likewise assumed that a man of intellect was an ideal candidate for public life. The constitutional cultures of Judaism and America were, by definition, cultures of argument, which called for, let alone allowed for, independent judgment in the application of its customs and laws. Cultures of opportunity, as opposed to cultures of oppression, invite the intellectual to share in their guidance and maintenance. If America was free, why shouldn’t intellectuals imagine themselves as a breed of rabbis, judges, leaders, and statesmen instead of along the lines of Dostoevsky’s dispossessed or as ivory tower aristocrats? I began by saying that Commentary started out as an unlikely merger between two constituencies—an intelligentsia intent on maintaining its “independence” and an institutional sponsor charged with protecting Jewish interests. Having in mind the modern rift that had developed between intellectual and society, both parties assumed that the former’s insistence on autonomy would strain the latter’s concern for national well-being. Instead, in voluntarily assuming responsibility for both its Jewish and American constituencies, Commentary created a socially attached intelligentsia, that proved that intellectual independence could be enhanced, not endangered, by a sense of belonging to an open group. Conservative intellectuals did not seek freedom or independence from constituted authority: They assumed that in Jewish civilization and American democracy, constituted authority acted on their behalf. A parental, as opposed to filial, posture in the self-definition of the intellectual led to a much higher level of cohesion in the magazine’s point of view, and a higher degree of clarity in the presentation of that point of view. Morris Dickstein told me in 1981 that he had

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stopped reading Commentary because it had become so predictable. I recall thinking then, and I have become ever more convinced, that he stopped reading Commentary because he wanted nothing but his predictable views on politics and culture. In fact, the evolution of Commentary was one of the least predictable phenomena in Jewish intellectual history, and as the magazine had to respond without a socialist or liberal road map to every major occurrence affecting its constituencies, one could never know in advance where its arguments would lead. Intellectual consistency and coherence require much greater efforts of mind than detached speculation. The intellectual who assumes responsibility for his polity has an ultimate stake in the ideas that govern its existence. Unfortunately, Commentary had no power to stave off many of the dangers it warned against. It could not stop the Arab war against Israel, Israel’s disastrous transfer of powers to the Palestine Liberation Organization, or the Islamist terror that was emboldened by it. But the magazine helped opinion makers in the American government and the public that elects them better understand the conflict and what was at stake in it. “In stark contrast to almost every editorialist and columnist and political observer who thought and wrote about the Oslo peace process, the magazine’s editors not only failed to applaud or endorse it, but took a deeply skeptical view . . . of Oslo’s origins, its course, and its likely consequences.”51 Neal Kozodoy edited the collected record of Commentary’s views on the Mideast peace process in the hope that it “may serve as a warning in the face of similar temptations to come.”52 Commentary had come full circle from fence-sitting neutrality in the struggle for a Jewish state to consistent and powerful engagement in its defense. In charting the way its Jewish mandate drove the neoconservatism of Commentary, I have emphasized its political dynamism at the expense of its creativity in other areas. Some of the most audacious articles of the last eight years, since Neal Kozodoy became editor, have tried to create a new language for Judaism and for Jewish experience. Hillel Halkin has pioneered an effort to discover whether members of an Asian tribe that calls itself the Bnei Menashe are truly descendants of one of the lost tribes of Israel. There have been vigorous affirmations by scholars like Jon Levenson and Jack Wertheimer (affiliated

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with different branches of Judaism) of the integrity of Judaism in the face of well-intentioned interfaith and ecumenical and integrationist initiatives. The point here is hardly to dismiss Christianity or Islam; Commentary presents these religions in their own terms while upholding the advantage of religion and a religious way of life. Nor do the writers of Commentary underestimate the need for a strong, common, civic culture in America. But religion is valuable in the specific ways it organizes its worldview, faith, and cultic practice, and Judaism’s covenantal relation between God and a particular people offers its own beauty and truth—and its own path to universal salvation. In bucking the assumption that Judaism must keep acculturating to liberalism or socialism or Christianity or Americanism, the editors of Commentary generated a new enthusiasm for what Judaism has to offer its adherents. The magazine helps define how Judaism begs to differ. As for beauty—a category all too seldom invoked in discussions of Judaism—a series of articles by David Gelernter unveils a sensuous “Judaism beyond words.”53 Gelernter invites us to reexperience Judaism through its thematic imagery rather than through the moral ideas for which it is justly famous. One such theme-image is the energy field between maleness and femaleness that reaches its climax on the evening of the Sabbath, which is welcomed as the “bride,” and celebrated as the reenactment and confirmation of the wedding ceremony. In this segment of his exposition, Gelernter uses Jewish sources, customs, and practices the way an artist uses brush, paint, and canvas to convey the experience of living as a Jew in a passionate marriage that mirrors the passionate encounter with the divine. Gelernter (in true conservative fashion) downplays the novelty of his achievement, calling it not a solo but a voice in a choir—the choir of modern Jewish philosophy, which is so often undervalued and neglected by observant and secular Jews alike. Observant Jews naturally rank halakhic and homiletic literature higher. Secular Jews tend to be interested in philosophy, not Jewish philosophy. But Jews have an urgent obligation, today more than ever, to speak to the world about fundamental questions not merely as generic human brings but as Jews.44

This urgent obligation is one the magazine has been fulfilling in partnership with Jewish scholars, writers, and intellectuals. Commentary

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probably gained greater influence through its articles on general rather than specifically Jewish subjects, but not the least of its contributions has been to help put Judaism back into contention as a competitive and not merely continuous civilization. I would like to end on a personal note. Commentary used to run an ad showing a dazed, bedraggled prisoner emerging from a cave under the cutline, “In the Name of Sanity, Send Me Commentary.” Though I never felt like that person emerging from darkness to light, I certainly felt the urgency of his request, because Commentary seemed to me exactly that—an infusion of sanity in an increasingly deranged and irresponsible academic community. Just because America allows the free expression of opinion does not guarantee that an editor will create a magazine whose opinions and intellectual standards will satisfy you. Just because Judaism encourages those born into it and those who choose it to try to live up to its imperatives does not mean that a Jewish publication will present Judaism and defend the Jews effectively enough to satisfy you. How very lucky I have been to encounter this magazine at the kitchen table in my parents’ home and to continue benefiting from its wisdom for all these many years since. Commentary took advantage of a historic moment to forge a new Jewish-American public forum in which everything could be said and debated with mutual trust and trust in the power of ideas. It reached for truth and justice with epistemological humility but also with faith that these standards could be achieved: The magazine’s commitment to clarity through accessible prose manifests its faith in the democratic citizenry and the democratic process. Commentary has been for all my adult life the touchstone of sanity because it has been the chief source of hope—hope that America will stay true to its high promise and that if it does, Israel will be allowed to realize its own promise. The fate of these two polities is more closely entwined than most people realize. So, in the name of sanity, keep sending me Commentary.

4 Commentary and the City Getting It Right, Getting It Wrong Fred Siegel

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he 1990s should have been banner years for Commentary and its critique of urban liberalism. For a quarter-century, Commentary and its young nephew The Public Interest had 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, Commentary responded to the foibles of urban liberalism from within a liberal perspective, but gradually, as its disenchantment with the fruits of liberal policy grew, it moved into a full-blown critique. This was a period when the magazine gave rise to an extraordinary intellectual ferment. Political and policy debates about urban issues have been defined ever since by what Commentary wrote in those years. Commentary’s impact, if not unparalleled, was exceeded only by the impact the Muckrakers had on the Progressive era. Commentary stepped into the breach created by the intellectual collapse of academia. The politically correct campus of the last twenty-five years was anticipated in the 1960s and 1970s by reactions to arguments that strayed from the 74

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liberal line on race and urban issues. The 1965 publication of the Moynihan Report on the breakdown of the black family, which suggested that white racism might not be the only source of black poverty, was greeted with a torrent of abuse. Open discussion, already stifled, was further closed off seven years later in response to Edward Banfield’s critique of urban liberalism, entitled “The Unheavenly City.”1 Banfield’s critic, William Ryan, of “blaming the victim” fame, recruited, in his words an “army” of “ideological shock troops” to shut down discussion with accusations of racism. Ryan largely succeeded. “The commitment to the substance of supporting marginal groups,” explained James Q. Wilson (June 1972), “overwhelmed the form of university life organized around debate.”2 With academia shambling into a high-blown marginality, Commentary achieved unprecedented importance. What began with questioning particular policies, such as urban renewal and school busing, evolved, as the evidence of urban collapse mounted, into not just a critique of liberalism but an understanding of race and cities grounded in the experience of what had made America into a successful society. The issue, as Commentary saw it, was not whether the country and its cities had a special obligation to help African-Americans but, rather, how they should to help. Then and now, the question was how far we should move from traditional American values to discharge that obligation. By the early 1990s, Commentary’s critique of urban liberalism had been vindicated in practice, if not in academic theory. Liberal policies and politicians had been defeated across the country in cities large and small. In New York and Los Angeles, Republican moderates were victorious over the candidates of liberal multiculturalism. In Detroit and Cleveland, black moderates won the mayoralty, and in Chicago, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, and Jersey City, reform mayors were beginning to provide examples of successful innovation. All of these new mayors talked about restraining taxes, enhancing police protection, and shaking up the bureaucracy. Some even spoke of privatizing city services and instituting education vouchers to break the stranglehold of the education establishment. The Commentary critique of the last twenty-five years was bearing fruit, yet the magazine, apparently in the grip of an overriding pessi-

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mism about the future of the cities, was silent about the new wave of mayors. There were articles on urban issues, but with the exception of some optimism about the effect of new immigrants on neighborhoods, they were on riots in Los Angles and New York, black antiSemitism, educational failures, and homelessness. Burned by the disappointment of New York mayor Ed Koch’s last six years in office, from 1983–1989, and by the spectacle of David Dinkins’s election on the basis of a platform that said, in effect, “allow me to heal the city’s racial wounds or else there will be trouble,” Commentary’s stance seemed to have been defined by Charles Murray’s bleak 1988 article, “The Coming of Custodial Democracy.” Barring a dramatic shift in policy, Murray argued that the underclass was going to be a permanent fixture of city life, so that, short of simply eliminating welfare, the best we could do would be to continue serving as the guardians of the dysfunctional. Murray, anticipating the failure of long-time Commentary contributor Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1988 welfare reform bill, argued that as social engineering continued to fail, liberals would be pushed farther in the direction of quotas and group rights, “but without the moral passion” of twenty years ago, “and without any faith” that their goals are achievable by government. In short, although he saw that “liberalism [was] becoming unmoored,” he saw no opening for reform. Instead, turning the arguments for multiculturalism against liberals, he suggested, with resignation, that what was coming was a recognition that the inner-city underclass was quite different from the rest of us (a point on which Moynihan was to agree); that they were, in fact, so different that attempts to bring them closer to the mainstream were futile; and that therefore, the only humane course was to provide generously for their separate existence, as we currently do for Indians who live on reservations. In the early 1990s, as the percentage of welfare recipients in New York who were working actually went down despite the intentions of Moynihan’s 1988 legislation, the senator expanded on Murray’s pessimism in a series of speeches and statements. His winter 1992–1993 American Scholar article, “Defining Deviancy Down,” accepted as a given the cynical use that had been made of urban pathology: “Family breakdown is extraordinary by historical standards, yet there is little

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evidence that these facts are regarded as a calamity in municipal government”—in part because breakdown supports a vase network of social workers for whom breakdown is a job opportunity. Speaking to developers and businessmen of the Association for a Better New York in April of 1993, an angry Moynihan invited the audience to ask itself, “what, in the last fifty years in New York City is now better than it was.” In 1943, he noted, there were 44 homicides by gunfire, 73,000 people on welfare, and the illegitimacy rate was three percent. In 1992, those numbers were 1499, 1.1 million, and 45 percent, and although the New York of the late twentieth century had been unable to build Westway or any other major project, the George Washington Bridge had been built in the corrupt old days of mayor Jimmy Walker—in 49 months and well ahead of schedule. The violence that accompanied family breakdown, he noted, had numbed New Yorkers, who had withdrawn into a protective shell, a “narcoleptic state of acceptance,” similar to that of “combat infantrymen.” The theft of car radios had effectively been decriminalized, and people put up “no radio” signs that the senator described as “flags of urban surrender.” An angry mayor Dinkins, who had been in the audience and heard the speech as an attack on his administration, responded by saying that in Moynihan’s “good old days, I wore the uniform of a US Marine and I had to sit in the back of the bus.” A little earlier, in his 1992 annual State of the Fisc report, which charted the balance of payments between New York and the federal government, the senator argued that even Democrats in Washington soaked the city, but when Dinkins came up for reelection in a rematch with Rudy Giuliani, a thoroughly resigned Moynihan provided a brief, almost Aesopian endorsement for Dinkins’s reelection. The endorsement argued, implausibly, that together, Dinkins and Clinton, whom he cordially despised, would reverse the New Deal pattern of having the federal government redistribute New York’s money to the South and West. Giuliani’s election did little to raise Moynihan’s hopes. At the start of the new administration, when the city’s viability seemed genuinely in doubt, Moynihan told a hearing on juvenile violence, conducted by New York’s former Public Advocate Andrew Stein, that, “the out of wedlock ratio in NYC today is 43%, and there are districts where

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it is 94%. If you know that number today, you know what the situation of teenagers in high school will be in 16 years time. This tells you that the next two decades are spoken for. . . . There is nothing you’ll do of any consequence, except start the process of change. Don’t expect it to take less than 30 years.” Caught up in his social scientific version of Calvinism, Moynihan’s comments took on an increasingly bitter tone. In the summer of 1994, at senate hearings on the failure of the 1988 welfare reform, the senator expressed his pessimism in apparently off-the-cuff remarks.3 He talked about the fourfold increase in teenage pregnancy from 1960 to 1991 as “an unbelievable national tragedy for every segment of society.” He then suggested that a biologist who looked at the recent surge in teenage pregnancy might wind up “talking about ‘speciation,’” implying that the multigenerational offspring of inner-city female-headed households were becoming a people almost entirely apart from the rest of society. In other words, urban pathology was intractable, and the costs and casualties it imposed on the cities were simply going to have to be accepted as a normal part of doing business. Commentary and Moynihan had parted ways over the Reagan presidency, but they continued to share the assumption that New York’s best days were long behind it. The city, notes the soon-to-be-editor of Commentary, Neil Kozodoy, “was (mistakenly) thought to be beyond redemption.” Although the outgoing editor, Norman Podhoretz, looking back on those days, wrote in 1999 that “neither I nor anyone else ever dreamed that the new mayor—or any other person occupying that office—would be able to turn the city around, let alone that he would do so almost overnight. How wrong we were!” Looking back over the magazine’s nearly sixty-year history, Commentary’s coverage of urban issues had been, for nearly fifty of those years, consistently ahead of the curve. A nuanced prescience combined with a distaste for cant became its trademark. This was as true for the period from 1945 to 1968, when Commentary had been liberal, as for the 1970s and early 1980s, when Commentary had become a conservative magazine. Consistent with both moral necessity and the liberalism of the 1940s and 1950s, Commentary writers such as academics Charles Abrams and James Rorty analyzed the difficulties faced by the movements for

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black equality in both the South and the big cities. On other issues, however, there were liberal insights. Take, for example, a key political issue of the 1940s and 1950s: the conflict between “bosses” and “reformers.” In 1945, journalist Irwin Ross wrote an article entitled “Big City Machines and Liberal Voters,” in which he anticipated the iconoclastic tone of Commentary in the 1960s. Contrary to the conventional assumptions of the day, Ross noted that despite the assumed antipathy between reformers and regulars, Ross notes that “on virtually every issue of public policy—labor law, housing, welfare economics, civil rights—they (the machines) have been liberalism’s powerful allies. . . . The machines have become year by year, as uninhibited in support of the Fair Deal, as tireless in their assaults on privilege, as bold in their designs for federal intervention in the economy, as the most militant brain-truster in Washington.” The tension, he argued in a journal that was devoting a good deal of favorable attention to progressive attacks on segregation, was largely a matter of the liberal’s self-conception. “Many liberals,” he wrote, “are sentimental Mugwumps at heart; they make a fetish of independence because that somehow connotes moral superiority in politics.” In 1960, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in his first article for Commentary, also took up the theme of Catholic “Bosses” and Jewish and Protestant “Reformers,” with similar insights. “Liberals” he wrote, “accustomed as they are to success in every other sphere of life, simply do not understand how and why people like the regulars should have come to dominate in party offices and legislative posts, and therefore they have resorted to ‘bossism’ as an explanation. . . . The feeling, aggravated by the liberal habit of impugning the motives of anyone they disagree with, has led many of the regulars” to an intense anger. That anger would soon produce first the Catholic-dominated New York Conservative party and then the heavily Jewish neoconservative movement, of which Commentary was the key component. Moynihan’s article was one of a number in the early 1960s that foresaw the weakening of the liberal consensus ruling New York. The most striking pieces were by Nathan Glazer, a frequent contributor. The first, “Is ‘Integration’ Possible in the New York City Schools?” would be one of many articles by the sociologist warning that attempts to apply black/white Southern assumptions about “UpSouth” in the ethnic stew of New York were doomed to increase black frus-

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tration without reducing the isolation of heavily black and Puerto Rican schools. The article was occasioned by the third year of attempted “strikes” by minority parents, who felt that their neighborhood schools were inferior by dint of their racial composition. New York, Glazer notes, had tried to respond to the parents, and sixty new school buildings were opened between 1957 and 1959. As much—if not more—money was spent on the minority schools as on the predominantly white schools, the former of which received a rich diet of additional services. In addition, Glazer noted that “there was no significant evidence to indicate that ethnic separation” was a factor in drawing school boundaries. Glazer pointed out that in Manhattan, 75 percent of the kids were black or Puerto Rican, which made greater integration physically difficult. In such a setting, Glazer concluded, “clearcut victories” were unlikely. Even incremental gains, likely to come with rising incomes and more housing integration, were unlikely, he saw, to calm rising black anger and exasperation. In a 1964 article “Negroes and Jews: The New Challenge to Pluralism,” Glazer saw that given the tiny number of black school officials, the understandable demand for a more favorable distribution of highend jobs meant that the cherished principle of merit would be challenged. The pre–Great Society HARYOU antipoverty program in Harlem had already gone after the “competitive culture from which the bulk of the teachers come.” What Jews saw as merit, HARYOU described as the “arrogance” of claims to “intellectual superiority.” At issue was the tension that had long existed between an official doctrine of individual merit and the reality of group power. Blacks saw that many public-sector jobs had long been informally distributed on a group basis and asked why they should not get their share. Here, as in so many issues, New York anticipated the debate over affirmative action/racial quotas. Glazer saw that the demands of black leaders like the Reverend Milton Galamison for total integration were impossible, and hence corrupting. They were impossible because they assumed that New York was like the South, a single white community, when in fact it was a series of ethnic communities. The upshot, wrote Glazer, is that “The negro now demands entrance into a . . . society that does not exist except in ideology.”

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To make matters worse, activists like Galamison, noted Midge Decter in “The Negro and the New York City Schools” (September 1964), had begun to make a series of contradictory arguments: They insisted both on total integration and that black children could not be taught by white teachers because of an unbridgeable cultural gap. Decter’s article anticipated the same/difference game that would be played out to no good end in the ensuing decades Glazer also turned his eye on city hall, and in a seminal article he asked what would become the ongoing question for the next thirtyfive years: “Is New York City Ungovernable?” (September 1961). Glazer notes that over the last twenty years, the number of students in the city schools had declined by 7 percent, whereas the number of staff had grown by 22 percent, a pattern that repeated across the city agencies. Despite the sharp growth of city employment, however, the quality of city services had declined. The answer given to all problems seemed to be to spend more money in the same traditional way it had always been spent. The newly powerful reform Democratic clubs blamed these problems on a near moribund Tammany Hall. Glazer would have none of this. The problem, he thought, drawing on Wallace Sayre and Herbert Kaufman’s 1960 landmark study, “Governing New York City,” was that “rules and regulations—ironically set up in the first place to create a merit system to protect the city employee from unfair treatment and political manipulation—have now taken on a life of their own and become the major obstacle in improving city services.” In a union-driven social democratic city, nonaccountability was built into a system in which “anything which affects, even in the slightest, the interests and prerogatives of the employees runs into fantastic resistance, for the first aim of the rules and regulations is to defend the city employee against outsiders.” Here was the dilemma, which recurs time and again, that divided the city’s liberalism against itself. On the one hand, liberals rightly supported more integration and better schools for minority students; on the other, they were politically obeisant to the interest of the recently organized public sector unions, whose demands were beginning to clash with those of the minority parents—and Glazer was writing just before the unionization of the city’s large public sector work force.

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Exactly the opposite would occur even as Glazer was writing, however. In the 1930s, Fiorello LaGuardia cheered on the city’s privatesector strikers, pledging to make New York a “100 per cent union town.” However, La Guardia, champion of labor though he was, had strong reservations about public employee unions: “I do not want,” he warned, “any of the pinochle club atmosphere to take hold.” In 1958, however, New York passed “the little Wagner Act,” becoming the first major city to extend collective bargaining to its work force. A vast new political force supportive of bureaucracy had been created, and it was on a collision course with the rising tide of black politics. The 1961 election marked the end of New York’s venerable political machine, Tammany Hall. Having been on the decline since the LaGuardia years, Tammany and its leader, Carmine De Sapio, was taken down by the alliance of then-Mayor Wagner and a rising band of left-liberal reformers: ideological activists who anticipated both the Great Society and the McGovern Democrats nationally. Wagner himself would be overtaken in the 1965 election by John Lindsay, whose administration promised to remake New York. The Lindsay years, shadowed by first the 1964 Harlem riots and then the earthquake of the 1965 Watts “rebellion” in Los Angles, produced both a set of destructive policies that have yet to be fully undone and a style of political theater that is still with us in the form of 2004 presidential candidate Al Sharpton In February 1965, editor Norman Podhoretz, who had brought James Baldwin in to the pages of Commentary, published an extraordinary essay by the critic George Dennison entitled “The Demagogy of LeRoi Jones.” Jones, a would-be black Nechaev, whose play “The Toilet and the Slave” was being presented at the St. Marks Theater, represented a new and ominous thaumaturgical turn in what had been a civil rights struggle to integrate blacks into the American mainstream. “My ideas,” explained Jones, “revolve around the rotting and destruction of America.” The play was a therapy of sorts for the heavily black and radical audience, which “produced a huge yawp” when the Negro revolutionary beat up the “dick-less” and implicitly Jewish white liberal intellectual and when the revolutionary enacted a brief rape of his former wife (now married to the liberal intellectual), and

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“when the revolutionary finally shoots the intellectual the audience responded with cries of ‘give it to him.’ ” “The same gleeful participation” erupted “when the revolutionaries boasted of the destruction of both the universities and the cities.” In anticipation of the rhetoric of what was to come, Dennison boiled the formula down to Jones telling whites, “you stink, I’m great, don’t you dare say that I stink.” In subsequent essays by Jervis Anderson and James Q. Wilson, Commentary chronicled the dangers of what Tocqueville called “the literary spirit in politics.” This mood favored what was new, dramatic, and aesthetically pleasing over what was useful and possible. In October of 1967, Jervis Anderson, writing about the 1967 Newark Riot, notes how that event (incited in part by the Jones’s ranting) seemed to come out of closing chapters of Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man. A year later, in December 1968, Anderson, who was repelled by the applause accompanying Eldridge Cleaver’s claim that “rape was an insurrectionary act” because it trampled “on the white man’s law,” looked at the issue of what would come to be called multiculturalism. He took aim at the claim that made by Richard Gilman in the New Republic that blackness was so absolutely different that it was beyond white judgment. Anderson replied, “We judge foreign literature by the standards we know. Why now do we need separate standards by which to judge writing by black Americans?” In the same December 1968 issue, Leonard Chazen reviewed Paul Jacob’s book on the Watts uprising, Prelude to a Riot, which laid out the practical implications of having separate standards. Jacobs argued that the institutions such as the Department of Health, the civil service, and the schools that had served earlier white arrivals in the city as they began their ascent up the social ladder were dehumanizing instruments of repression when it came to how they regarded blacks. Jacobs, anticipating the arguments of the postmodernists, insists that objectivity itself is the enemy. Neutral rules he says, are inherent in “a middle class bias that makes bureaucratic authority especially burdensome on poor.” He wanted white objectivity to be replaced by black authenticity. This absence of shared standards required, in turn, both representation solely on the basis of race and a radical decentral-

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ization of all urban institutions, including the police. Appeals to neutral authority were challenged or replaced by what amounted to “tests of political loyalty.” The attack on the “rational/universalistic/professional criteria” of the “politics of common interests” was aided and abetted by mayoralty of John Lindsay. He so shattered urban liberalism that it has never recovered. Looking back, we can mark the start of liberalism’s collapse with the 1968 Ocean-Hill Brownsville school Kulturkampf over Black Nationalist control of inner-city schools. David Cohen (“The Price of Community Control,” July 1969) saw the conflict as a liberal civil war, driven by irrational aims, in which white liberals had all but voluntarily disarmed themselves. Liberalism had long touted education as the surest and least contentious path to upward mobility: Education, as opposed to credentialing, demanded “heavy doses of disciplined activities.” But middle-class “liberals couldn’t impart discipline to inner city kids when they themselves were choosing permissive settings for their own children.” The Black Nationalist assaults were in one sense wide of the mark: “The social-welfare bureaucracies, schools, welfare, (and) anti-poverty programs were” Jacobs acknowledged, odd targets. They had been “among the most liberal institutions, they have a common interest with blacks in expansion of social-welfare legislation . . . but they were close at hand . . . located in the ghettos . . . even sympathetic to the situation which produced the movement for black control.” The heavily Jewish teachers’ union, led by Al Shanker, had, for instance, been strongly supportive both of the civil rights movement and of the force behind introducing an integrated curriculum into the schools, but community control put the teachers’ union into bitter conflict with community control at a time when the Six-Day War had brought a heightened sense of ethnic consciousness to the Jewish teachers. The upshot was that the entire city took sides in a bitter series of strikes, the wounds from which can still be felt today However, notes Cohen, a victorious black power movement was unlikely to reap the prize of better schools. He showed, using the Coleman Report, that there was no evidentiary basis for racially based community control as a means to improving the schools, nor was there

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any indication, anecdotes aside, that bigoted teachers were at fault for the failure of black students. The appeal of community control, he argued, was to be found elsewhere, in the immediate rewards that could come from capturing institutions in the name of black power. Integration offered the prospect of a difficult struggle to rise in unfamiliar institutions as well as uncertain rewards. “Community control,” however, promised black professionals immediate and “concrete” gains that were long overdue. Further, it promised to provide those gains on the terms defined by Black Nationalism. If black children saw their black elders empowered, so the argument went, they too would benefit mightily. Given an authentically black setting that advanced the life-enhancing African values of spontaneity and oral expression, rather than the stifling Eurocentric values of disciplined writing and desiccated logic, black children would saved from emotional strangulation. In the wake of the black takeover of the Ocean-Hill schools and expulsion of many of the middle-class Jewish teachers, test scores, noted Diane Ravitch (“Community Control Revisisted,” February 1972) and attendance dropped in every one of the district’s schools. When the decline came, despite the extraordinary resources poured in by the Ford Foundation that allowed for an unprecedented ratio of roughly one professional for every nine students, the primary rationale for community control was changed. Reading scores were deemed “fraudulent” on the grounds that they “reflected limited kind of static learning” which was less important than the affective “humanistic changes wrought by the experiment in creating schools more sensitive to the needs of the child.” The long-term tragedy of Ocean-Hill Brownsville was that it destroyed the most successful big-city school system in America, making it far harder for young black children to have the same advantages that earlier immigrants to New York had received. The city was afflicted with similar calamities in higher education and welfare. The once glorious city colleges were afflicted with an open admissions policy that dramatically drove down both standards and the value of a City College degree. At a time when the city’s

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black male unemployment rate was four percent, the Lindsay administration actively recruited people onto the welfare roles rather than see them take what were disdained as menial jobs. The concept of “dead-end jobs” first appeared in a Commentary article by Paul Goodman (and, like Norman Mailer’s 1956 article on “The White Negro” in Dissent, which Irving Howe regretted)—this came back to bite Commentary and the city it loved. Cyril Tyson, Lindsay’s Human Resources Commissioner, said he would not try to place blacks as taxi drivers because “This dead end job has no future and involves too little pay for too much work.” “Unfortunately,” explained Roger Starr in his elegant essay on Lindsay, “the exploitation of the negro in America has been so thorough that a strain of it even runs through the movement to liberate him.” Starr would later illustrate his point with an anecdote (“Welfare and Society,” November 1982): At a Board of Estimate hearing, a woman on welfare shouted at Lindsay that a new public housing project should be approved only if it couldn’t discriminate against mothers with illegitimate kids. “I’ve got 6 kids,” she shouted, “and each one of them has a different daddy. It’s my job to have kids, and your job, Mr. Mayor, to take care of them.”

The upshot of Lindsay’s policies of rights without responsibilities was to push hundreds of thousands of people out of the mainstream and into the intergenerational dead-end of life on welfare. Lindsay, enamored of his own nobility, disdained both the New York middle class and the middle-class character of his country. “Lindsay,” wrote Roger Starr (“John V. Lindsay: A Political Portrait,” February 1970) “appears uneasy still with those who are neither so rich that they can afford uplifting leisure nor so poor that they do not seek money for station, but merely for survival.” The mayor’s answer to his failures, noted Murray Friedman (“Is White Racism the Problem,” May 1969) was to attribute all of the city’s problems to white racism. The premise of the Kerner Commission, written by Lindsay, was the assumption that blacks could never rise up the social scale in the private economy. In the 1960s, however—invisible to the mayor—blacks in New York, noted James Ring Adams (“Why New York City Went Broke,” May 1976) moved into the upper-income brackets at a faster rate than whites. Lindsay, in-

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creasingly reviled at home, sure that he had been failed by a population inadequate to his greatness, traveled to the college campuses, where he told students that the Vietnam War was proof that America was a “sick” society that had to totally remade. The problem was not just New York, however, with its special history of social democracy. The antipoverty efforts of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs were generating more in the way of anger than upward mobility. Commentary had run a series of articles by Bayard Rustin, organizer of the famed 1963 civil rights march on Washington. Rustin, who saw the rise of Black Nationalism and white left-wing radicalism as a threat to the coalition politics essential for winning a social democratic program in Washington, argued that the cities required a massive infusion of financial support from the federal government, but fellow left liberals David Danzig and John Feild argued in “The Betrayal of the American City” (June 1968) that Washington was a part of the problem. Since the 1930s, they explained, the federal government had increasingly preempted the taxing power that had once belonged to the cities. Their argument anticipated the reports Senator Moynihan has issued for nearly twenty-five years describing the negative terms of trade between New York and Washington. Worse yet, the Great Society policies for the minority poor did not simply fail but, rather, as Moynihan warned in his article “The Professors and the Poor” (August 1968), the doctors of social policy were producing iatrogenic political illnesses. Moynihan describes an activist coming into his Harvard office arguing for more support for community action programs. Moynihan noted that many such programs had been begun in Boston—262 in all. “Exactly,” came the retort, “but don’t you notice they only fund programs that don’t succeed.” Power, the activist assumed, “continues to reside in a concealed but ruthless and disciplined freemasonry of the white elite.” While clinging to the hope that American social science could do better, Moynihan worried that the federal poverty program that emphasized political organizing rather than work would have a terrible effect. The program raised “the level of perceived and validated discontent,” he noted, “without improving the condition of the poor in anything like a comparable degree.” It would take nearly thirty more

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years of urban decline until state and local initiatives pushed a laggard federal government to place work back at the center of social policy with the 1996 welfare reform bill, opposed by Moynihan but supported by both President Clinton and the Republican Congress. As with welfare and work, the nationalization and federalization of crime policy had deleterious effects. James Q. Wilson chronicled part of the shift to federal dominance in a 1966 profile of Adam Clayton Powell (January): When Powell, one of Al Sharpton’s heroes, fought with Mayor Wagner and renowned black social scientist Kenneth Clark for control of the pre–Great Society poverty programs in Harlem, Powell won. “Powell’s position as Chair of the House Committee on Education and Labor, through which all aid-to-education and antipoverty bills must pass, was too strong for Mayor Wagner or others to fight.” The 1960s explosion in crime, a reflection both of black adjustment to the city after migrating from rural areas and of family breakdown, became, according to surveys, the leading national issue in the summer of 1965. The survey showed that blacks as well as whites shared a growing fear of crime. As a result, not surprisingly, police chiefs became increasingly important in the political life of cities, but while city dwellers saw the civility and disorder as the most pressing issues, what James Q. Wilson (January 1971) describes as “the liberal audience” for mayors did not: “The importance of members of the Liberal audience (Foundations, federal funders, clergy and public opinion makers) has grown as the power and cohesiveness of the political party at the local level has declined. . . . TV has acquired a power to bless or curse formerly reserved for archbishops.” This liberal audience, largely centered in Washington, was sure that a concern for crime was simply a code word for racism, and for the next two decades liberals steeped in the urban version of the adversary culture became enormously skillful at arguing the issue away. In one particularly egregious example, Melvin Dubofsky reviewed two books by the hip sociologist Richard Sennett that argued that, “it was the development of strong nuclear families that produced the urban crisis.” Danzig and Feild predicted full-scale guerilla warfare in the cities, and they were not entirely alarmist. Theodore Draper (December 1971) quoted a Black Panther leader on the situation in New Haven:

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“Basically what we’re going to do is create conditions in which white folks are going to have to kill the pigs or defend themselves against black folks. We’re going to turn Yale into a police state.” On the ground, the response was further flight from the cities. The Danzig and Feild article (June 1968) reprinted an ad from the New York Times: “HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT OF LIVING IN VERMONT?” Vermont has no really big cities with snarled transportation, strife, crime, bureaucratic waste, poor housing, air pollution, and all the seemingly hopeless problems of large metropolitan areas today.

Although cities were be written off as beyond repair, the urbanity once associated with the metropolis was being diffused across the country. In “Urban Civilization and Its Discontents” (July 1970), Irving Kristol described the growth of a BOBO (bourgeois bohemian) culture avant la lettre: “Many of the traditional functions of the great metropolis,” he noted, “are being radically decentralized . . . even bohemia, that most urban of cultural phenomena, has been transplanted to and around the university campus.” This meant, he saw, that “though our major cities keep floundering . . . the nation as a whole will not be profoundly effected.” So it was that, for instance, Detroit would collapse even as Southeast Michigan prospered. In 1974, Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses appeared to widespread applause; Commentary was the rare exception. Caro’s book explained too much. Not only did it justly criticize the arrogant Moses for destroying neighborhoods, Caro turned Moses into a megamonster responsible for everything from the breakdown of the black family to the decentralization of urban life that had been going on for at least three-quarters of a century. The review by B. Bruce-Biggs of Caro’s book (December 1974) found numerous mistakes and noted that Moses, far from being omnipotent as Caro suggested, had suffered numerous defeats. He had been repeatedly bested by the Port Authority, which seized control of New York’s airports and whose incompetence dogs the city to this very day. Had the book appeared just a little later, it would, no doubt, have blamed Moses for the mid-1970s fiscal crisis as well. Caro let Lindsay off the hook; Commentary did not. During the 1957–1958 and 1960–1961 recessions, New York suffered fewer job

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losses than the rest of the United States, but the 1969 recession, which came at the end of John Lindsay’s first term, was marked by sharp tax increases, racial strife, and a rapid rise in the city government payroll and welfare rolls: Gotham lost jobs at three times the national average. After eight years of Lindsay, noted James Ring Adams (May 1976), in the severe national recession from 1973 to 1975, the city’s job loss was six times the national average. The rapid decline in city tax revenues, combined with the costs of a city-employed workforce that had swollen to 340,000 people, pushed the city into massive short-term borrowing. For thirty years, wrote Roger Starr (December 1978), mayors in their annual budget messages talked about the shortage of money to do all the things they wanted to do, but there was no mention of the effect of taxes on the economy: “the city’s ability to produce wealth was taken for granted.” When Abe Beame succeeded Lindsay in 1974, the city was spending more than 70 percent of its budget simply to pay off the shortterm debt. Beame, who had been comptroller during the Lindsay years, had cooperated with the mayor in conjuring up imaginary revenue streams, deferring essential maintenance spending on the city’s infrastructure, and generating arbitrary revenue estimates to borrow against eroded assets. Once in office, Beame played the victim when Washington did not quickly come to his rescue. The diminutive mayor suggested that New York was being punished for being too compassionate. Beame, however, was willing to cut cops on the cynical grounds that Washington had a choice between either federal money or federal troops. He “back loaded” the budget cuts, says Adams (August 1979), putting most cuts off when he hoped that a Democrat in the White House would ride to the rescue, but the banks got nervous, and when they began calling in their loans, the whole house of cards collapsed. New York was pushed to the brink of bankruptcy. The city had nearly choked to death trying to swallow the cost of running a government in which the self-interest of the massive public sector was always garnished with the rhetoric of compassion. The 1970 census found that in constant dollars, the percentage of low-income families remained unchanged at between 59 and 69 percent, so that as of 1970,

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New York had the same percentage of poor people as the rest of the country; in the 1970s, however, Gotham’s nonwhite families suffered severely as poverty rates soared. In other words, Lindsay’s policies produced the very poverty they were designed to alleviate. Commentary’s intense focus on urban issues came to an unofficial end in September 1977 with Midge Decter’s powerful cri de coeur, occasioned by the looting that followed a New York power blackout in the summer of 1977. A similar blackout had occurred in 1965, to little effect—at that time, Gotham’s social fabric was still tightly woven. In 1977, however, nearly 4000 people had to be taken into custody, and more than 400 policeman were injured after massive looting and widespread arson took place during the twenty-four hours of the blackout carnival. The response in the New Yorker and the New York Times was straight out of the postmodern handbook. Conflating cause and effect, they claimed that the rhetoric that described the looters as “animals” was the reason for the rioting in the first place: “For well over a decade now,” Decter responded, “there has been almost no form of urban unpleasantness, from purse snatching to robbery, which has not been instantly imputed by those who have elected to speak in the name of liberalism to the inescapability of black poverty and the indifference of white society.” This was, she said, part of a race game in which liberal explanations for the city social breakdown were based on any given position and its opposite. For instance, she noted, whites were condemned at one and the same time for not treating blacks equally and also then for not giving minorities special consideration. Blacks were said to be degraded both as “objects of charity on welfare” and for “not making our charity more abundant.” Writing on “Racial Perversity in Chicago” (December 1988), Joseph Epstein summed things up when he described the essence of the race game as the trick of “simultaneously playing both the martyr and the bully.” If after the billions that had been spent on the Great Society a New York Times headline could read “Urban Poor Worse off than Ever,” was not it time, Decter asked, to reconsider how we had gotten into such a situation? She then answered her own question: The endless and infantilizing game of double standards, what she described as

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“liberal racism” (a phrase later echoed in George W. Bush’s talk of the “bigotry of low expectations”) was, she argued, what had led to the looting. After 1977, Commentary would never give urban issues the same sustained and influential attention they had received since the early 1960s. There were numerous articles on crime, welfare reform, and black anti-Semitism, but relatively little in the way of the major articles on cities that had once filled its pages. With liberalism having attained a seemingly permanent place in the saddle, the magazine saw little reason to be hopeful about New York in particular, or the cities more generally. The mayoralty of Ed Koch, however, appeared for a time to be grounds for optimism: If Lindsay’s politics heralded the top and bottom versus the middle alignment of post–New Deal liberalism, Koch’s initially unabashed advocacy for business and for the outerborough middle class anticipated Reaganism. Koch, wrote Dorothy Rabinowitz (April 1973) understood that that the public was concerned not only with your position on crime but also with how you “feel about crime.” Once an arch-liberal, the wisecracking Koch won the mayoralty in 1977 in part because he seemed the candidate most likely to face down the municipal unions. Declaring that New York was open for business again, Koch argued for lower taxes and a smaller public sector. Koch mocked the liberal left elites, describing them as “a very inbred group of people who go around telling everybody what to do and how to suffer.” He spoke to the hypocrisy of “liberal racism.” Noting that he’s accused of being “insensitive” on race, he asked what sensitive means and answered that it means professing one’s belief in equality while understanding “privately” that one “can not expect minorities to meet the same standards as others.” The upshot, he warned, “is to do with kind words what was once done with racial segregation . . . to isolate minorities from full participation in American society.” By contrast, he presented himself as “an ordinary guy” who wants “the things that the average person wants.” Commentary never published a full-fledged essay on Koch, but it did review the three books the prolific mayor published while he was in office. Reading Koch’s first book, Mayor, Norman Podhoretz

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(April 1984) found that it was hard not like a guy who had been attacked by the racialists at the Amsterdam News as a “cancer” while Sidney Schamberg of the Times equated him with a “foreign dictator” and the Village Voice thought he had the potential to grow into a “Hitler.” Koch, Podhoretz observed, “has hired a record number of blacks to high positions in his government but he was hated for rejecting reverse discrimination and quotas in principle and what’s worse he speaks to everyone in the same blunt sarcastic tone.” Podhoretz had identified the key to understanding Koch: the mayor with a borscht belt style was hated far more for what he said rather than what he did. This was not of enormous consequence in the early years of Koch’s three terms in office: His rhetoric made it easy to overlook the fact that almost all of his efforts to reform city government, from reducing the welfare rolls to reforming civil service and modernizing labor contracts, were overwhelmingly thwarted. The mayor put on a good show, and when the boom of the 1980s refilled the city’s coffers it was hard to notice that Koch, in his last six years in office, was giving the city the worst of both worlds. Although Koch wrote that it’s not that the poor “aren’t deserving,” it is that “our help doesn’t do them much good and our energies might be better spent elsewhere,” he was making peace with the people he once called “poverty pimps.” He used the “new patronage” of billions of dollars in social service contracts to buy off black, labor, and Latino criticism. In his last six years in office, he reflated the municipal payroll by hiring 50,000 employees even as his rhetoric continued to inflame black leaders. In the closing years of the Koch mayoralty, Wall Street waned, while crack, crime and corruption all waxed, but Commentary never weighed in on what had gone wrong with Koch. Instead, his last years brought a return to the resigned pessimism of Midge Decter’s article on the 1977 blackout. This was the tone of Charles Murray’s concussive article on “The Coming of Custodial Democracy” (September 1988), in which he explained, “we do not know how—to change the behavior of significant proportions of the urban underclass. All we can do is provide for them” (emphasis added). Murray saw that, “as social engineering continue[d] to fail” liberals [would] be pushed further in

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the direction of quotas and group rights, “but without the moral passion” of twenty years ago. Murray had anticipated the Dinkins mayoralty. Dinkins’s election was made possible by a revival of left-wing politics during the scandals of Reagan’s second term and the 1988 Jesse Jackson for President campaign, in which the preacher ran a close second to Dukakis in New York and mobilized the city’s minority and liberal voters. The campaign itself, in which Dinkins defeated the incumbent Koch in the Democratic primary and then narrowly bested prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani in the general election, was driven by questions surrounding Dinkins’s past failure to pay taxes and by a series of violent racial incidents. “The media,” explained Scott McConnell (February 1990), “treated the election as a civil rights story in which a black candidate won by overcoming lingering (if diminishing) pockets of white racism.” Dinkins, who was often described as “the black Abe Beame,” was part of the Harlem political machine and had never held any substantial office. His greatest accomplishment was his own appealing persona as a courtly gentleman who lived an integrated life and who distinguished himself from other black leaders by his willingness to criticize Louis Farrakahn. The campaign, which took place as New York was galloping into a recession, had no time for economic issues, or any other nonracial issues for that matter. Scant attention was paid to Dinkins’s sense of himself as “the tribune of the underclass.” He was critical of that “prevalent myth” that many of the homeless were mentally ill and socially dysfunctional. He insisted that they were just “like other people in every respect except that they have no homes.” The city’s problems, he asserted, were the fruit of an “inequality and discrimination [which] not only exist but [are] institutionalized.” This was a condition, he said, best combated through more affirmative action and an activist government. The racial melodrama of the 1989 mayoral campaign was summed up by journalist Ken Auletta. Responding to Giulinani’s call for a color-blind city government, Auletta insisted in the Daily News that if we “reject Dinkins, we license haters like Sonny Carson. . . . Reject Dinkins and the racial polarization attributed to Mayor Koch will

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appear as a minor irritant.” Jews were the swing vote, and, warned Auletta, “should Dinkins lose it is likely many blacks will whisper ‘The Jews killed Dinkins.’ ” Auletta had unwittingly turned the “healing” theme on its head and revealed its underside. Dinkins, who was often dismissed as a mere bumbler, a man without vision, had a grandiose sense of himself as the leader of national liberal and urban revival. His mayoralty, which was marked by an ongoing series of violent racial incidents, was a disaster of almost Lindsayesqe proportions, and thanks in part to Dinkins’s massive tax increases in the midst of a recession, New York, which was 3 percent of the national population, lost 25 percent of the country’s jobs during the recession. Although Commentary wrote articles on the revival of Black Nationalism, the Leonard Jeffries Affair at City College of New York, the Crown Height’s pogrom, and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, it paid almost no attention to either the Dinkins administration or the seeds of urban reform that were being sowed in other cities. Meanwhile, a drug-runners’ riot in Washington Heights (in which Dinkins initially tired to appease the mob by making a dead drug dealer into a victim of police brutality), an anti-Semitic rampage in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, and record murder rates mocked the rule of law and produced a near-evacuation mentality. In the words of David Danzig, writing in June 1968 about an earlier period of massive flight, “Even those who have no intention of leaving the city are inwardly abandoning it; few people expect it to solve its problems.” Commentary’s oversight was unfortunate because it was the Dinkins debacle and the discrediting of urban liberalism that made it possible for Giuliani to succeed. In the 1960s, Commentary dissected the liberal civil war over Ocean-Hill Brownsville, but the liberal civil wars of the early 1990s went by undiscussed. Dinkins sincerely believed in almost every version of liberalism. He favored 1930s-style labor liberalism and 1960s-style community control, as well as the 1970s and 1980s versions of rights-based liberalism, not to mention the corporate liberalism of bringing big business and big labor together with big government. What he could not do was choose between them. When community control and rights-based liberalism clashed over placing dysfunctional homeless families in shaky black, working-class neigh-

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borhoods the mayor’s policies stammered. When labor and social services clashed over the budget, he lurched wildly one way and then another. Michael Tomasky, a thoughtful liberal, was appalled, watching his city’s descent. “Progressive New York,” he wrote (in The Nation [June 23, 1991], referring to Dinkins supporters), “speaks only in the coded language of identity politics and entreaties to oppressed subgroups. It’s a language that sounds noble when talking of black or Latino ‘empowerment,’ cloaking itself in the rhetoric of civil rights, and comity . . . but in the end it is the same old interest group palm-greasing, just like the Irish pols used to play it, dressed up in a multicultural tuxedo. . . . Above all, there has to be a single standard for civil behavior” (emhasis added). The Dinkins failures generated considerable intellectual activity in New York, where the Manhattan Institute and the Public Advocate Andrew Stein were talking about the importance of markets and the need to “reinvent government.” Nationally, the ferment was energized by the reform mayors, who had taken over in Milwaukee, Chicago, Indianapolis, and Philadelphia, as well as by the emergence of the New Democrats, who were showing Bill Clinton how to break with traditional liberalism on some issues. These reform mayors stopped rattling the tin cup in Washington and began tackling the problems of why city government did not work. Giuliani’s opportunity for greatness emerged out of this ferment. The wise man of New York politics, Edward Costikyan, noted that a whole generation had been brought up believing that leadership is in bad taste and out of place. Lindsay, Beame, and Dinkins had presented themselves as victim mayors leading a city victimized by grand historical forces, but Giuliani broke with both appeasement and determinism: There was no need, he showed, to bow before threats of violence. Comparing Dinkins to Churchill during the Battle of Britain, Giuliani said that although “there was not much Churchill could do to stop the bombs from falling, . . . he didn’t just say that things were worse in Czechoslovakia.” LaGuardia once told a balky alderman, “in this administration, I’m the majority.” That was the Giuliani approach. Like Machiavelli’s Prince, he set out to wrest the city’s future from the whims of fortune.

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Without ever quoting the Prince, he adopted its approach by criticizing what Machiavelli called “the bad uses of compassion.” Regarding a “contemporary ruler,” Machievalli said he “never preaches anything except peace and good faith, and he is an enemy of both one and the other.” Giuliani broke with the “pious cruelty” of urban liberalism and adopted what Machiavelli called the sovereignty of words over deeds. However, Commentary was slow to acknowledge his effect. A December 1995 article by Irwin Stelzer recognized that something very important was happening with crime but devoted most of its attention to explaining why national and international trends meant that Giuliani probably could not succeed. Stelzer ended by comparing Giuliani unfavorably with Thatcher and Reagan; the prize of reversing urban decay, he said, “may well be reserved for a gambler with more nerve than Giuliani.” In “Urban Civilization and Its Discontents,” Irving Kristol argued that “the challenge to our urban democracy is to evolve a set of values and a conception of democracy that can function as the equivalent of “republican morality.” Giuliani did not come up to that standard, but his emphasis on accountability for government as well as individuals, and his insistence in principle (if not always in practice) of a single standard of judgment, were crucial to his success in reducing crime the most in minority neighborhoods. Liberals, argued Larry Mead (March 1988), following in Kristol’s tracks, wanted more government programs but without government authority. “The public will remain uncomfortable,” he explained, “until a civic version of welfare is realized.” Giuliani went a long way toward this “civic” version when he insisted that welfare was a matter of both rights and responsibilities. Although liberalism could be studiously nonjudgmental about even the most heinous behavior, Giuliani was, his own personal life excepted, relentlessly judgmental. The core of Giuliani’s success goes back to what had been largely overlooked in the successful campaign to shut down the debate provoked by Banfield’s The Unheavenly City. Writing in Commentary, Ted Marmor (July 1972) warned that Banfield had painted with too broad a brush. He had ignored the submerged lower middle class trapped in violent neighborhoods dominated by a culture of poverty. (These

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were the same neighborhoods that objected to Dinkins’s overwhelming them with the homeless.) Giuliani’s most important accomplishment was to use the police and welfare reform to free the aspiring black and Latino lower middle classes from their ghetto imprisonment. “It is in the cities,” wrote David Danzig in June 1968, “that American liberalism, if it is not to succumb in our generation will ultimately have to be saved.” However, it was not. Thirty years after this article was published, the left-liberal Harold Meyerson wrote in The American Prospect that, “if you want to view the political decay of American liberalism, look at its spawning ground—the great cities. In the late 1990s, there simply are no remaining strongholds of municipal liberalism.” Commentary was slow to notice what was changing: It had argued itself out of seeing any hope for the cities. As prescience gave way to pessimism, Commentary was shielded by the brilliance of its own analysis from seeing that on the practical level, where mayors have to meet their responsibilities, a new and decidedly nonliberal framework for urban governance had emerged. Commentary had largely won: a new generation of mayors was trying to reattach the cities to the mainstream of American life.

5 What They Talked About When They Talked About Literature Commentary in Its First Three Decades Thomas L. Jeffers

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hen, 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 a Jewish state in Israel, and cultural creativity (or its absence) on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s therefore no exaggeration to say that under its three editors—Cohen through 1959, Norman Podhoretz through 1995, and Neal Kozodoy since—Commentary has attempted something like a total cultural critique. I say “total” not totalizing, because the magazine has skeptically opposed the several systems—from a Fascist, 99

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Communist, Freudian, or whatever religiously orthodox perspective— that have claimed to know, with certainty, all the right questions and answers. (To invoke the distinction Isaiah Berlin made famous, Commentary has been more fox than hedgehog.) I say “attempted” because finally, however large the den of smart writers, no total critique is possible. The foxes may talk very fast and be quick on their feet, with sharp eyes and a terrific sense of smell, but they can investigate only so many burrows, fields, and forests in a given year—or decade. Still, what a stunningly thorough guide the magazine has been to the last half-century’s American, and not just Jewish-American, works and days. As my Raymond Carver–ish title indicates, my subject is what, during the first three decades of its run, the writers at Commentary did to critique, and in no small part to create, the literary scene. An unwieldy subject, but by breaking out four of the more important issues that “they talked about when they talked about literature,” I hope to gain in energy what will inevitably be lost in mass. First, contributors in the late 1940s and early 1950s felt obliged to define and resist anti- and philo-Semitic stereotypes of “the Jew” that had existed in Anglophonic literature since Chaucer’s day. Commentary’s critics could not identify with either stereotype. But that raised a second issue, named in the title of Harold Rosenberg’s superb essay of 1949, “Does the Jew Exist?” Exist, that is to say, positively, in his own terms, and not just negatively, in reaction to persecution. The answer from Rosenberg and other writers was variously yes, and this ethnic affirmation raised questions about the positive existence of other minority groups in America, especially blacks; about the relations between the minority groups themselves; and about the multiminority country, America, in which the dominant tradition was white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant but to which all other racial and religious groups, as long as they were not themselves violently intolerant, were supposed to have the right to belong. The successful struggle of the Jews to belong to America is my third focus, for the “who are we?” introspection overlaid the groundswell of creativity marked by fiction writers such as Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, and Joseph Heller, not to mention the extraordinary Yiddishinto-English achievements of Isaac Bashevis Singer.2 This efflores-

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cence was accompanied nearly every month by intelligent reviews of current fiction, verse, and drama and occasionally by overviews of, say, “the state of the novel,” a tired-sounding topic that the magazine’s intellectuals, as I will show, nearly always managed to revitalize. Fourth, and last, I’ll try to characterize the literary critical effort of that archetypal early Commentary writer, Robert Warshow, who set such a high standard for his successors.3

I The American Jewish Committee’s charge to fight against bigotry, heightened as it was by the terrifying eruption of anti-Semitism in Nazi-dominated Europe, derived from the European Enlightenment’s campaign for religious tolerance, on which American culture—remember George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Jewish congregation at Newport—was in many ways founded. The young Lionel Trilling had in 1931 written a piece for the Menorah Journal entitled “The Changing Myth of the Jew” that covers the subject very thoroughly, especially in obscure English novels of the nineteenth century, but that for some reason was not published until 1978, in Commentary, three years after his death.4 The essay is worth mentioning if only to indicate that when Irving Howe and Leslie Fiedler addressed the subject in 1949, and Steven Marcus again in 1962, they were exhibiting the uneasiness, going back to the early 1930s and well before, that second-generation Jews in America quite naturally felt toward the Anglo-American literary tradition that they encountered in high school and college. The tradition their first-generation parents, and of course their European forebears, had cherished was either Yiddish, Hebrew, or in a few cases broadly European. There was plenty of anti-Semitism in the European tradition, needless to say: Fiedler remembers being visually struck by it at the Ducal Palace at Urbino, the very center of Renaissance virtu´, where Ucello’s “The Desecration of the Host” shows in its first panel “a grossly caricatured Jew stabbing a consecrated wafer, which spurts blood under his knife; and whose final panel depicts that perfidious enemy of Christ apprehended and executed to the satisfaction of a crowd of gentile spectators—some of

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them clearly cortegiani.” Looking at which, the American “offspring of plebeian Eastern European Jews” had to wonder whether there was not something odd about revering and wanting to make his own a Western civilization that identified him with Judas, with antiChristian desecration, and finally with the gibbeted criminal. If he tried to blend in, it seemed “a kind of apostasy, a falsification of my very identity.” Anyway, Hitler had shown that Jews could not blend in altogether: they could always, when necessary, be labeled and disposed of. Fiedler called “What Can We Do About Fagin?” “a tentative, exploratory piece”—he would not reprint it until 1989, folded into “The Roots of Anti-Semitism”—but even in 1949 it was luminously insightful.5 The anti-Semitism of the great modernists—Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and D. H. Lawrence, in that order of virulence—had deep roots. These roots lay ultimately in the first-century church’s antipathy toward a Jewish population that had refused to recognize as the Messiah the Jesus whom some priests and a mob had wanted crucified, and in English literary tradition in works such as Chaucer’s “The Prioress’s Tale,” which resembles but is not equivalent to the story of little Saint Hugh of Lincoln found in the ballad “The Jew’s Daughter” (i.e., the Antichrist’s daughter, who is guilty of murdering a Christian child to serve as the paschal lamb).6 The central work of anti-Semitism, however—and it must be called a masterpiece—is Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. A key element in “The Prioress’s Tale” is the mutilating knife, not unconnected with usury, and it is repeated in Shylock’s insistence that he have his usurer’s bond, his pound of flesh, off the Christian Antonio, who cannot pay his debt in specie. Fiedler shows that Shylock’s knife recalls, iconographically, the knife repeatedly placed in Abraham’s hand in paintings the Christian world insisted on titling the sacrifice (rather than the binding) of Isaac—the blade that would kill him were it not for the ram provided as substitute, merging in the “undermind” of Europe with the blade of circumcision. What to Jewish culture is a sign of the covenant—in Hebrew the term for circumcision is brith, the bond memorialized in the rite as the celebrant intones, “In blood, in blood shalt thou remember”7 —is to the Gentile a threat of castration. The pound of flesh “nearest the heart” (as Shylock’s bond stipulates) is to Fiedler

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a manifest displacement, and in the later version of his essay he suggestively expatiates on its significance: Judaism did indeed threaten to unman the gentile world, insofar as Jewish morality, transmitted via Christianity, sought to limit and control the “free” sexuality presumably enjoyed by males in pre-Christian Europe. To the degree, then, that masculine Europe has remained pagan in its deep psyche, it imagines that morality holding a knife to its genitals. The resentment engendered by such fantasies is, of course, really directed against the Church and its teachings; but believing Christians have felt it impossible to confess this. Instead, they project it backward onto the Jewish patriarch Abraham.8

That is, Judaism and Christianity are as one in upholding the law regulating sexuality; it’s the uncivilized, discontented pagan who rebels against it—hiding his rebellion behind a screen of pro-Christian, anti-Semite honor. To proceed to Marcus: the affreux Abraham appears again in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, where Fagin, startled to find little Oliver watching him open his box of stolen jewels, threatens him with a knife. Taking Freud rather too much at his word, Marcus moves into the deep end by identifying Fagin not merely with the archetypal murderer-castrator but—and here he has to conflate the later scene of a Satanic Fagin peering in at Oliver’s window when the latter is apparently safe at the Maylies’ in the country, with Dickens’s memory of his father, too unconcerned, looking through the window as his young son pasted labels at the blacking warehouse—with the father in every boy’s unconscious, ready to castrate and possibly kill the son who, in “primal scene” accidental impudence, had witnessed his parents having intercourse.9 Fiedler and Marcus are nothing if not ingenious, and even those of us who, tender of the reputation of our unconscious, object to the latter’s Freudspeak as poetic imagination mistaking itself for scientific reason, will have to admit that the Gentile’s fear of “the Jew,” figured as Shylock, Fagin, or whomever, is precisely an imaginative construct requiring less sociological than psychological explanation. Howe’s “The Stranger and the Victim: The Two Jewish Stereotypes in American Fiction” assumes, without much going into, a psychological foundation for the stereotypes, and devotes itself mainly to a survey of their recurrence from Abraham Cahan’s fine The Rise of David Levinsky

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(1917) to Jerome Weidman’s I Can Get It For You Wholesale (1937) and Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run (1941). The “stranger” stereotype limns the Jew as the Judas-like alien; the “victim” stereotype regards him, a` la George Eliot’s Zionist hero Daniel Deronda, as an embodiment of virtue who, too good for this world, is done in by it—or would be if, as is often sentimentally the case, he were not strong like Deronda. Howe lists the several story-lines Jewish writers spun round these stereotypes: the “rags to riches” tale that plays on the quaintnesses of Lower East Side life, the “father as patriarch” tale that idealizes and pities the man who contains but cannot pass on the wisdom of European Jewry, the emancipatory “nothing to lose but your chains” tale that typified the 1930s and 1940s, wherein the Jew is, per socialist realism, the enhanced labor leader, offset by the “artist as businessman” tale, as in Weidman and Schulberg, of the Jew as ruthless, sharp “operator,” and so on. Setting aside The Rise of David Levinsky and Henry Roth’s “great [family] romance” novel, Call It Sleep (1934), as high art—“Two lone books of truth and imagination in a sea of mediocrity!”—Howe looks forward to the day when writers, Jew and Gentile alike, will be able to present Jewish characters not as stereotypes but as human beings. In The Last Tycoon (1941), F. Scott Fitzgerald had in Monroe Stahr created a human being, “one of the few genuinely tragic heroes in American literature”; in The Sun Also Rises (1926), Ernest Hemingway had in Robert Cohn done the same thing, showing us “a Jew who is both a Jew and a human being. And once a Jew has been granted truly human status, he has been granted everything.”10 If these Gentiles could grant all that, there was reason to hope that the rising generation of Jewish writers, knowing Jewish culture from the inside and having gone to school with modernists such as Fitzgerald and Hemingway, could grant it too.

II In 1949 Howe was ready to put his money on the young Bellow and Delmore Schwartz, who, if they could not yet present Jewish characters that were fully human, were balked by forces preventing “modern man” generally from achieving fully human status: “When a Jew

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cries out, ‘I am a man,’ and society replies, ‘No, you are the Jew,’ his dilemma is but an extreme version of every other man’s.” Welcome to the Age of Alienation.11 According to the early-Marx analysis still favored by intellectuals who, back in the 1930s, had broken with Stalinism, the Popular Front, and even the most sentimental cells of the Communist Party in America, every modern person was, with the exception of the artist, “alienated” from his work, his neighbors, and his “authentic” self—the self that wanted the full life of thinking, feeling, and creating that capitalism supposedly made impossible. Well, if everybody was in the same alienated boat, everybody could but try to think, feel, and create with some measure of authenticity, however slight—and authenticity, taken in the ordinary, not Trillingesque sense of “being genuine,”12 would entail recognition of one’s “blood”; that is, of one’s ethnicity, religious training, sex, parentage, and even extended family history. Which is where Rosenberg’s question that I referred to earlier, “Does the Jew Exist?”, comes into play. Howe spoke of letting Jews just be human beings, but on other occasions he was the first to acknowledge that it’s not so simple. The project of becoming a human being starts in a thoroughly embedded context. Take Oedipus, as Rosenberg suggests (everybody in those loosely Freudian days was “taking Oedipus”): he looks completely different as king of Thebes and as infant exposed on Mount Cithaeron, and yet by “blood” he’s “the same individual.” So with the modern Jew, circumstanced in splendor or in misery: he is by blood connected with the Jews of the Hebrew Bible, Rosenberg using “blood” as a metonym for the Jew’s “acts of turning toward the Promised Land in his crises.” Who is the Jew? He is the Zionist, a spiritual fact “not deducible from his surroundings,” but still in racial continuity with the Israel of old. Rosenberg’s immediate purpose is to refute Jean-Paul Sartre’s thesis in Anti-Semite and Jew (Re´flexions sur la Question Juive) that the Jew is defined by his anti-Semitic tormentors—“inauthentic” when he tries to efface himself through assimilation, “authentic” when he confronts the hideous music, in suffering or in defiance.13 Sartre argues that if people were reasonable and stopped hating one another, then France—and his first concern is with France, not with Europe or the larger world—would realize the libertarian, egalitarian, fraternal goals of the revolution of 1789: a nation consisting of abstract, ideal

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citizens, including individuals who were once known as Jews, workers, bourgeois, and so forth. To Sartre, the Jews have no history of their own apart from persecution, just as French workers have no history before 1789. Rosenberg easily refutes this claim with two counterstatements. First, he points out that Sartre’s class-based understanding of history is exclusive, whereas Judaism is inclusive. One can become a Jew by declaring oneself a son of Abraham (i.e., a worshipper of that patriarch’s God): The Jews differ from other peoples, both ancient and modern, in that every Jew, regardless of class or even of blood origin, is included equally in the entire common account. . . . The survival of the Jews may well be attributable to this “democratic” participation in the Jewish past which appears in the earliest Biblical situations and which was immeasurably strengthened by the prophets. . . . Jewish history is the history of a people, not of a cult, since the participation is not metaphysical but in an actual past.

Second, he expands the definition of history beyond the activities of armies and embassies, painters and architects, to encompass literature and a mode of philosophical thinking. In these areas Jews have developed their own special product, namely the “Jewish intellectual,” who springs from the tradition of talmid hacham, the life-long student. For two thousand years the main energies of Jewish communities in various parts of the world have gone into the mass production of intellectuals. . . . I estimate this enterprise of the Jews to be as civilized and “historical” as the catching of herring to which the Dutch devoted themselves in their great period, or the production of cotton by the British.

Like the Dutch and English with their herring and cotton, when the Jews faced a domestic over-supply of intellectuals, they exported their product to other countries. Exports always stimulate competition and resentment, and in this case the resulting anti-Semitism—attempts to keep Jews out of schools, professions, and politics—can be understood, Rosenberg maintains, as a form of protectionism. Thus comes into existence the history of suffering on which Sartre focuses, though it emanates specifically from intellectualism; to wit, the habits of mind that a people devoted to texts would develop.14 Rosenberg is representative of the generation that among many other important intellectuals includes Trilling, Fiedler, Warshow, and

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Greenberg, insofar as he’s of two minds about the socio-religious context within which Jewish intellectualism flourished. Now he celebrates those “blood” ties: “the Jew possesses a unique identity which springs from his origin and his story,” though of course it’s an origin and story that, whatever his blood-type, anyone can, in an act of faith, annex for himself. Now, however, anxious that the story of the Jews seems to be so bound up with suffering, not to mention with rituals and taboos that appear more cultish than rational or morally essential, Rosenberg longs for assimilation with the wider European and American culture. He is like Stephen Dedalus at the end of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, wishing to fly above the nets of “nationality, language, religion.” Too, he is like the ambivalent Fiedler, who at once loathes and adores The Merchant of Venice. The Jew in any event must not let himself be defined by passive suffering; he must also do things, as Henri Bergson did philosophy, Marcel Proust did literature, or Albert Einstein did physics. Rosenberg ends with statements looking both ways: It is possible for him to be any kind of man—rationalist, irrationalist, heroic, cowardly, Zionist or good European—and still be a Jew. The Jew exists but there are no Jewish traits. The Jew who chooses to flee his Jewishness does not thereby turn into something other than a man, any more than an Italian who decides to become an American. Whatever it is, the desire to assimilate is not “inauthentic”; one may choose to suppress the past in oneself or to surpass it. On the other hand, the Jewish identity has a remarkable richness for those who rediscover it within themselves.15

Go figure. And go see Rosenberg’s nearly contemporaneous review of an anthology of Jewish writing edited by Nahum N. Glatzer, in which the critic respects the centuries of Jewish devotion to “the Law” and to fathers in general, while yet insisting that any current appropriation of past Jewish literature is going to depend on the present writer’s keen, sensitive, “intellectual daring” in picking up whatever “is actually still alive”: “an obscure phrase, an isolated insight, an unintentional stroke of fancy,” not the supernaturalist teleology or the paternalistic moralizing of the medieval Diaspora.16 Another, absolutely essential article on this fraught subject is Greenberg’s “Self-Hatred and Jewish Chauvinism,” written at that critical pass when Jews were psychologically absorbing the fact of

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“Hitler’s destruction of six million of us”: if that was not a judgment of God, Greenberg argues, it was a judgment of history upon Jews’ failure to defend themselves. “Self-Hatred” was written, too, after the victory for and the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, which Greenberg parallels, in its chauvinistic effects, with the German victory over France in 1870. And so, judiciously, on. Greenberg understands the chauvinist, separatist reaction to suffering, but he also believes that humanity as a whole is finally more important than any particular part of it. Hence his effectually joining Rosenberg and (as we will note) Warshow in defending the primacy of the individual: What we might ask of our new Jewish self-consciousness is that it liberate rather than organize us. . . . Both the assimilationist and the nationalist leave too little room for their native personalities. While there is no such thing as a human being in general, there is also no such thing as a complete Jew or a complete Englishman. . . . I am both Jew and American naturally, simply because I cannot help being them, having been born and brought up what I am. But I do not want to make any more issue of being a Jew—unless I am forced to by such things as anti-Semitism—than an enlightened Englishman makes of being English. And I want to overcome my self-hatred in order to be more myself, not in order to be a “good Jew.”17

If Henry James was right to declare that being an American is “a complex fate,” one would be doubly right to apply the phrase to being a Jew, though I’m not sure that the complexity is greater in America than elsewhere. Indeed, per Rosenberg’s comparison between a Jew and an Italian, it seems to me that being at once “any kind of man” and also a Jew has been easier in America than in Europe. Ethnically, philosophically, and religiously, people in this country have been free to be what they will—adaptations of what their forebears brought with them. All they have to agree on are those sacred-secular documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, with the legislative scrips that have been drawn from them. (The scrips they do not like they can, through the system, try to change.) Their Jewishness aside, what seems to me of more publicly passionate importance to Rosenberg and the other Commentary writers of this early period is the very American need to declare, one by one, their critical independence. That is, to repeat the deed of Ralph Waldo

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Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and other nineteenthcentury canonical American writers who wanted to see the New World with their own, not European, eyes—to become, culturally, what the revolution of 1776 had already made them politically. The animating spirit of Rosenberg’s puissant essays in opposition to the totalizing systems of Communism and Freudian psychoanalysis18 grows out of the 1948 piece that gave a phrase and a sensibility to his generation: “The Herd of Independent Minds: Has the Avant-Garde Its Own Mass Culture?” Rosenberg’s case, in a nutshell, is that in their doughty combat against the vulgarities of mass-culture, intellectuals have themselves “herded” together in mass-thinking ways. They may call themselves liberals, but in their boring predictability they cannot be structurally distinguished from, say, the Soviet Writers Congress—or a plenary session of the American Psychoanalytic Association. The example of a true artist like Franz Kafka is crucial: His fiction represents individual experience, with each character bewildered but resolutely struggling on his own for “self-knowledge”: “Along this rocky road to the actual it is only possible to go Indian file, one at a time. It means breaking up the crowd—not ‘reflecting’ its experience.” In this determination, as we’ll see, Rosenberg is reaffirming Warshow’s claim about the critic’s duty to account for “the immediate experience” of a work of art, which, if it has any claim to greatness, is in the first place presenting the immediate experience of its creator, or his imagined characters—this despite Rosenberg’s accusing Warshow himself of falling into herd-think about “The Legacy of the 30’s” (my italics). The title was Warshow’s in a 1947 piece, and Rosenberg testily objects that his 1930s experience was not Warshow’s, Trilling’s, Edmund Wilson’s, or anybody else’s. Again, for intellectuals the going has to be “Indian file, one at a time.” “Maybe there is no individual in the old sense of the term. This cannot be gone into here. But whatever there is, one will not arrive at it by reflecting oneself in a ‘we.’ ”19 Asking whether there still are individuals in the old sense is like asking whether there are Jews, and the answers are inescapably, frustratingly convoluted. Rosenberg, however, defers that psycho-social discussion for another time. On the ground, the tension is between “I” and “we,” and the political, and even legal, pressures of the day

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are driving each “I” toward identification with an increasingly racial or ethnic “we.” James Baldwin, whose early essays and stories frequently appeared in Commentary, understood those pressures better than most. For example, there was the pressure of religion. Everyone now knows that Baldwin grew up as a preacher’s son, and in “The Death of the Prophet” his fictive stand-in Johnnie says farewell to his dying father and to “his father’s God, now so crushingly shapeless and omnipotent, Who had come out of Eden and Jerusalem and Africa to sweeten the cotton-field and make endurable the lash, and Who now hovered, like the promise of mercy, above the brutal Northern streets”—the rhetoric not getting any subtler at the story’s close, where the crescent moon “hung fanged and evil, . . . impossible, eternal, burning, like God hanging over the world.”20 In the essay “The Harlem Ghetto,” though, Baldwin acknowledges that the God of evangelical black Christianity does offer one hope. It’s not immediately of love, though Baldwin would feelingly turn to that Christian theme in The Fire Next Time. Rather, it’s the theme of “a complete and exquisite fantasy revenge: white people own the earth and commit all manner of abomination and injustice on it; the bad will be punished and the good rewarded, for God is not sleeping, the judgment is not far off.” In this, like Phillis Wheatley a century and a half before, Baldwin finds a distant relationship with Jews, for just as they were enslaved in Egypt and were delivered, so blacks have been enslaved in America, were emancipated by Lincoln, and may yet, whenever their own particular Moses emerges, enter into a Promised Land. The possibility of alliance between blacks and Jews is undercut, unfortunately, by the fact that blacks hate “the Jew as a Jew”—partly from an American reflex, imitating the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant hatred of any minority, and therefore projecting the blacks’ hatred of themselves, and partly from a feeling “that the Jew should ‘know better’ ” because he’s suffered too. Both houses are plagued. On the one hand, “The Jew has been taught—and, too often, accepts—the legend of Negro inferiority; and the Negro, on the other hand, has found nothing in his experience with Jews to counteract the legend of Semitic greed. Here the American white Gentile has two legends serving him at once: he has divided these minorities and he rules.”

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The Jew and the Negro “do not dare trust each other—the Jew because he feels he must climb higher on the American social ladder and has, so far as he is concerned, nothing to gain from identification with any minority even more unloved than he; while the Negro is in the even less tenable position of not really daring to trust anyone.” However, if he cannot trust anyone, he can still hate. The logic of scapegoating that in Georgia brings white folk down on the black man operates in Harlem to bring him down on the Jew, not because of his Jewishness but because of his white skin. His Jewishness is in many instances identifiable by surname, diet, clothing, and so forth, but to Harlem his principal characteristic derives from his jobs as tradesman, rent collector, and pawnbroker. He is the oppressor, and he is therefore the white man whom it’s convenient to separate out and perform acts of hate on.21 In Baldwin’s first published story, “Previous Condition,” the hero Peter, an actor usually confined to stock black roles, does not consider himself a Moses in the making, come to free all black people. As he tells a “Jewboy” named Jules Weissman, with whom he’s living in New York: I’m not Booker T. Washington. I’ve got no vision of emancipating anybody. I want to emancipate myself. If this goes on much longer, they’ll send me to Bellevue, I’ll blow my top, I’ll break somebody’s head. . . . Oh, I know, you’re Jewish, you get kicked around, too, but you can walk into a bar and nobody knows you’re Jewish and if you go looking for a job you’ll get a better job than mine! . . . I don’t want to hate anybody— but now maybe, I can’t love anybody either—are we friends? Can we be really friends?

Apparently not, since the Jew can usually pass as white, while the black usually cannot. The impossibility of Jew-black friendship is merely a corollary to the impossibility of white-black friendship, which the story centrally dramatizes in a fight between Peter and Ida, the liberal do-gooder married to a homosexual ballet dancer and going out with Peter, advising and promoting him, as a way of assuaging white guilt. Discouraged about his dead-end career and about the pervasiveness of scapegoating everywhere (Ida has told him that, even post-Holocaust, people in Europe still “hate the Jews—nothing’s going to change, baby, people are too empty-headed, too empty-hearted”),

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Peter sardonically declares that “I’m gonna go back to my people where I belong and find me a nice, black nigger wench and raise me a flock of babies.” Playing “an old maternal trick,” she raps him across the knuckles with her fork and tells him to grow up. Which is all he’s needed to erupt with “Don’t do that, you bitch, don’t ever do that!” and to break with her. Awareness of color prejudice and resentment of white maternalism or paternalism defeats Peter’s attempts at becoming friends with whites, and his attempt at the end of the story to return to Harlem, back to his “previous condition” among “my people,” and cozy up to the aforesaid “wench,” who’s drunk but not bad looking, is not very promising either. She notices that he does not cozy easily: “Nigger, you must think you’s somebody,” she says. And he does. Only, as a would-be somebody, “I didn’t seem to have a place.”22 When he went to France, Baldwin found that another culture was quite ready to provide “a place” for him, less as a black, though the French police’s treatment of North Africans demonstrated that the republic had its own color prejudices, than as a person who was indigent and possibly criminal. His misadventures are the subject of “Equal in Paris,” an account a` la George Orwell in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) of his getting arrested for possessing a bedsheet an acquaintance had stolen from a flea-bag hotel. Waiting for his own hearing, Baldwin sees the court meting out heavy sentences to scores of petty criminals: the judges had to put them away “where they could not be seen,” simply because they did not wish to know that their society could be counted on to produce, probably in greater and greater numbers, a whole body of people for whom crime was the only possible career. Any society inevitably produces its criminals, but a society at once rigid and unstable can do nothing whatever to alleviate the poverty of its lowest members, cannot present to the hypothetical young man at the crucial moment that so-well-advertised right path.

This sounds to me similar to America’s problem with underclass young people, and young black males (now as then) most of all. Their families are so dysfunctional, their under-performance in school so striking, that crime becomes their chief career choice, and prison their ultimate address. However, there is a difference between America

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and France that is evident in what Baldwin says next: “the fact . . . that the French are the earth’s least sentimental people and must also be numbered among the most proud aggravates the plight of their lowest, youngest, and unluckiest members, for it means that the idea of rehabilitation is scarcely real to them.”23 Americans in the 1950s were, and today remain, an exceptionally “sentimental people” who believe—sometimes in the face of contrary evidence—not only in “the idea of rehabilitation” but also in the efficacy of measures to prevent immiserization and crime, and so to make rehabilitation unnecessary. If, despite the continuingly deplorable record for young black males, the condition of blacks in America is measurably better today than it was when Baldwin wrote for Commentary, it is thanks in large part to the sentiment-meets-praxis Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s that grew out of the Movement that the magazine did so much to forward in the 1950s. Publishing Baldwin was only part of the role that Commentary played. There were numerous articles, written mostly by sociologists and political theorists, on race relations, on ways in which black and Jewish groups might work with one another in the fight against bigotry, and on prospects for their understanding and learning from each other’s cultural traditions.24 With respect to literary culture, however, I will mention only the seminal studies by Fiedler and Howe on black-white relationships in the fiction of William Faulkner, and by Marcus on the post-Harlem Renaissance flowering of black fiction in the work of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Baldwin himself.25 These Jewish critics were too sensitive to suggest facile equivalences between the plight of minority blacks in the 1950s and the plight of minority Jews a few decades before. Baldwin had accurately pin-pointed the significance of color and, of course, of nearly 300 years of slavery in exacerbating the challenges blacks faced in America, compared with those of the Jews. Still, the Jewish critics could deeply empathize with Peter’s wish in “Previous Condition” to “emancipate” himself, to break from the herd of ethnicity, race, liberal intellectuals, religious orthodoxy, whatever, if that’s what it takes to be friends with the people one likes, to live where one likes, to create what one likes, to respond to art as one likes (Peter weeps at the beauty of Handel’s Messiah and Beethoven’s

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piano concertos, performed in Yankee Stadium no less, while “his people,” it seems, hear only Ella Fitzgerald’s “Cow-Cow Boogie” and other music like it). The impatience for self-emancipation that Howe sensed in the blacks of Faulkner’s late novels is analogous to Peter’s (Baldwin’s) impatience, and looking back from this side of the Civil Rights Movement, one appreciates the “on the eve” feeling that must, in the early and mid-1950s, have been ubiquitous.26 As Peter takes the subway uptown to Harlem, he gazes at the white-bread ads above the windows: “nightgowns, chewing gum, movies, sex; sex without organs, drier than sand and more secret than death.”27 That’s a series that could come, almost automatically, out of many 1950s fictions or essays in cultural criticism, which in their herdlike independence were convinced that something was deathly wrong with middle-class American ways of getting, spending, making babies, “enjoying” weekends, eating, imagining—everything. If minorities were not pictured in the ads—were not part of the projected American dream—then lucky for them. No one during those years spoke for the adversarial herd more energetically than Norman Mailer, who after Podhoretz’s “My Negro Problem—And Ours” came out in 1963 took up the question of “the real nature of a minority group.” That is, what was a Jew or a black when he was not trying to assimilate himself into the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant middle class? Those people in the middle were zeros, too contented (as against happy) to feel anything strongly or to take any part of themselves to the moral edge (you know: shout at, rape, torture, or stab someone you passionately love or hate, and to do so “heroically” enough to create a tragedy, have a story, and not be dully forgotten). The middle class may be officially “sane,” Mailer concedes, but what a “collective nausea” their sanity represents. Blacks and Jews should not let themselves be sucked into that suburban sameness and emptiness. Instead they should express the things-are-happening insanity implanted, so to say, in the outsider’s psyche: “The liberal premise—that Negroes and Jews are like everybody else once they are given the same rights—can only obscure the complexity, the intensity, and the psychotic brilliance of a minority’s inner life.” Does the Jew or the black “exist”? Absolutely, and everyone will behold that existence in all its “psychotic brilliance” when those minorities stop trying to resemble the

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Christian majority.28 Mailer called this “existential politics”—promoting one’s own, one’s group’s existence in contradistinction from others’. Later, people in America would call this “identity politics,” which would have the upside of affirming this or that sort of person’s legally protected right to pursue happiness as he or she wanted to, but which would also have the downside of eroding some things that as Americans we are, legally again, supposed to share in common, such as your right not to like or approve of me, even as you tolerate what I say or do, and vice versa, or our right to say and print our feelings about one another, without having our speech censored.

III Now to literature—though one can hardly ever refer, in the pages of Commentary, to literature qua literature. When critics talk about it, they’re always coupling it with something non-literary. Mailer himself did so brilliantly, in 1966 publishing a talk he’d given before a nodoubt gaga audience at a Modern Language Association convention. He traces the “class war” between the “Genteel Tradition,” then upheld by the New Yorker, and the naturalism of Theodore Dreiser and Co., upheld by he says not whom, though it would have to be the majority of trade publishers that bring out fiction. It’s a war between the novelist of manners, European, Austenian, with characters active in a reasonably stable society, versus the novelist of gritty reality, American, leave-home-and-you-can’t-go-back Thomas Wolfian, where the society’s chutes and ladders are constantly, rapidly being switched around. From the masterly novelists of manners such as Henry James and Edith Wharton, the talents of the twentieth century had dwindled to, at best, Truman Capote and Terry Southern. From the titanic Dreiser and Wolfe, there descended (again at best) Bellow and James Jones. No novelist, early or late, had been able to do what in the nineteenth century Stendhal or Thackeray, for instance, had done for their audiences; namely, depict both manners and grittiness—both society as, in its mores and in its positions of economic and political power, it really is, and how a young arriviste might, by crook or hook, climb into it. Unable to portray the whole, “the billion-footed beast” as the later Tom Wolfe has neatly called it,29 our mid-century novel-

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ists settled for portraying parts: this region, that ethnic group, the second sex, the country club. And no novelist portraying his part to any great effect. Hence the electronic media were taking over, now buzzing, now tranquilizing us with the formless form and the all but tasteless taste of the small-town tit-eating cannibal mind at its worst . . . Half of America went insane with head colds and medicaments . . . and the other part of America went ape, and the motorcycles began to roar like lions across the land . . . One thought of America and one thought of aspirin, kitchen-commercials, and blood. Hot damn, Vietnam. And the important art in America became the art of the absurd.30

We can appreciate why Howe even in the 1960s declared that Mailer was the test for the New York intellectuals, one they often failed. Personally charming, imaginatively fertile, rhetorically hepped, he could persuade people that the novelists’ problem was an America too out-of-whack and out-of-control for even an amalgam of James and Dreiser to capture it between book-covers—indeed that the American mainstream, its bubbling tributaries and its wetlands, all were sick—which, as his novel Why We Are in Vietnam quixotically hoped to explain, was, well, why we were in Vietnam. Forget about the Soviets, the mainland Chinese, or the North Vietnamese: We had become the dangerous totalitarian state.31 The 1960s made us familiar with that sort of exercise in irresponsibility: Words simply lost their meanings. Mailer nevertheless was homing in on a plausible diagnosis for the sterility of mid-century American novelists, himself included. Our fiction, from Fenimore Cooper on, had perhaps never had a Stendhal or Balzac, a Dickens or Thackeray, large enough to compass the whole society, manners and strategies included; this was because our society was less unified, and certainly less static, than the French or the English. Still, our fiction had flourished in its treatment of whatever part of the whole was especially restless, discovering new (“novel”) realities, or making a push for power. Hence, as John W. Aldridge sharply put it in “The State of the Novel,” we’d had in the nineteenth century the New England novel of Hawthorne and Melville, the frontier novel first of Cooper then of Twain, and the international novel of James and Wharton, followed in the early twentieth century by youth-from-the-

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provinces novels by Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and others, which were about the Midwesterner or Southerner who goes to New York or to Europe. In the 1930s there was the Depression novel, or Faulkner’s Southern novel, and beginning in the 1950s there were the black, Jewish, homosexual, and women’s novels—with Asian-American and Latino novels yet to come. One advantage the pre-1960s novelists enjoyed was that of demystifying a conventional set of ideals—as in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Twain demystified antebellum assumptions about the not-quite-human nature of blacks or, more recently, as in The Adventures of Augie March Bellow had demystified the assumptions of Gentiles—and even of Jews themselves—about Jewish family life. Now, however, American society does all the demystifying for us. That is, people’s own thoughts and actions, or more exactly the ways in which the media report on them, are “stripping away layers of idealistic assumption, hypocrisy, illusions of purpose, meaning, integrity, principle, and responsibility, and exposing the emptiness or the corruption or the insanity beneath.” This is what Mailer had claimed: Because American society is irremediably sick, with Bellow’s New York being as desolate as Kafka’s Prague, all the novelist can do is diagnose its symptoms—and maybe, for a sort of relief, turn to those corners where individuals are trying to discover affection for one another, or at least sexual pleasure for themselves (and mainly the latter). Aldridge decries the 1970s’ dependence on experts for technical solutions to personal problems in general, and to sexual problems in particular. The last frontier of novelistic “news” was the exploration of female sexuality—Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, Francine du Plessix Gray’s Lovers and Tyrants—which finally centered less on “the apocalyptic orgasm” than on feminism’s broader questions “of whether or not [a woman] needs [orgasm] and wants it, whether she needs a man to help her attain it, whether she needs marriage, household, and motherhood” and so on, all questions she’s supposed to answer in terms not of her individual self—forget about that will-o’-the-wisp—but of “public moral imperatives, tissues of self-righteous shoulds and oughts by which women as a corporate minority group have made programmatic the nature and expectations of liberated female existence.” Paradoxically, this corporate approach to personal problems does not promote what everyone would soon be

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calling “community” (following whatever “herd” prefix is desired): It has promoted a narcissism so prevalent that Christopher Lasch would dub the entire culture after it. Aldridge understood—and he was waiting for a major novelist to express it—that the dilemma of the female narcissist, as of the male, is this: “in trying to find herself she can find nothing to which she is willing to give herself and in the giving achieve the meaning of her freedom.” That’s a moral ideal—giving oneself in service to others—worth rediscovering and preserving from the postmodern deconstructionists who were just then gearing up to finish the Nietzschean job of “stripping away” all our “illusions of purpose,” because the person thus stripped of illusions looks as though he (and I have to mean “he” in this case) has only those twin siblings to contemplate: phallus and omphalos.32 Philip Roth, to forward a final diagnostician, saw the dilemma clearly back in 1961. Like Mailer and Aldridge later, Roth throws up his hands at the impossibility of American novelists keeping pace with the American scene: “It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.” The reference is immediately to Richard Nixon, whose character moved Roth to “a type of professional envy,” but next and more pertinently it’s to a lurid crime in Chicago so bizarre in commission and in the media coverage it receives as to rob the novelist of his typewriter. Roth’s essay takes us back to what seems like “the moment” when intellectuals were waking up to a new fact: The media were not only reporting on our society, but they were also shaping the ways in which people behaved. Has your daughter murdered someone? Fabulous: Now you can be on television! It’s a world that the middlebrow Herman Wouks and Sloan Wilsons, full of liberal “concern,” can treat as merely a series of “controversial” problems, which, even if unsolved, are at least alleviated by love. These “amor-vincit-omnia boys” lift our hearts along with their own sales. “It is like ‘Dover Beach’ ending happily for Matthew Arnold, and for us, because the poet is standing at the window with a woman who understands him.” Finding Mailer’s advertisements for himself a poor substitute for storytelling, J. D. Sal-

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inger’s advertisements for Zen a poor substitute for “life as it is lived in this world,” and Malamud’s advertisements for magic (the surreal and allegorical) “in a timeless depression, a placeless Lower East Side,” a poor substitute for the ground the rest of us have our feet on,33 Roth wonders whether the novel has anything useful to offer. The apparent answer is yes, its “bouncy” prose, which its Jewish practitioners—Roth himself not hindmost—are notably adept at creating. Inasmuch as the bounciness results from incorporating “the rhythms, the excitements, the nuances and emphases of urban speech, or immigrant speech,” it’s to be welcomed as “a language of new and rich emotional subtleties, with a kind of back-handed grace and irony all its own.” Regrettably, the bounciness also reflects the writers’ selfabsorbed pleasure in the play of words as words, not as windows onto human beings and onto a world that we can recognize as real, and that we would like, through the novel, to become even better acquainted with. Defeated by the incredibilities of the society “out there,” novelists have, like other people, turned “in here” to their hobbies and fantasies, which in their case usually means a preoccupation with the stylistic tricks of word-ordering, “a form of literary onanism.”34 Roth himself, as Portnoy’s Complaint would in 1969 unforgettably disclose, knew a thing or two about the ordinary sort of onanism, but both at that time and then through the following three-plus decades he has faithfully endeavored to avoid the literary sort. He has wanted his fictions to show us those familiar but elusive people living in the family and in the evanescent world around us. From the get-go, that kind of exhibition has not been to everyone’s taste. The stories collected in Goodbye, Columbus (1959) offended a number of rabbis and pious Jews, who wrote letters to the New Yorker, the Anti-Defamation League, and Roth himself protesting his depiction of, say, an adulterous late-middle-aged Jew in “Epstein” or a manipulator-of-sympathies Jewish army inductee in “Defender of the Faith.” Four years later, in Commentary, Roth took his critics up in “Writing About Jews,” a statement worth mentioning for its attempt to bring closure to the question the magazine had raised in the late 1940s: If we can say that Jews do indeed “exist,” what is the responsibility of the Jewish writer, espe-

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cially, when he or she writes about them? Roth’s answer is, in short, that the writer must represent them as human beings, no more and no less. The pious had, of course, couched their objections in terms of moral responsibility, but moral responsibility misunderstood. Jewish writers, they said, should portray virtuous Jews and keep quiet about the rest, or else the goyim would seize on the portrayed adulterer or guilt-manipulator as—from a Jew’s own mouth—an excuse for hating Jews altogether. It’s a public-relations concept of storytelling, and an adolescent estimation of reader behavior, that Roth has no trouble laughing out of court: Anna Karenina commits adultery with Vronsky, with consequences more disastrous than those that Epstein brings about. Who thinks to ask, “Is it a Russian trait?” It is a decidedly human possibility. Even though the most famous injunction against it is reported as being issued, for God’s own reasons, to the Jews, adultery has been one of the ways by which people of all faiths have sought pleasure, or freedom, or vengeance, or power, or love, or humiliation.

More, Roth was charged with having squealed. “I had informed on the Jews. I had told the Gentiles what apparently it would otherwise have been possible to keep secret from them: that the perils of human nature afflict the members of our minority.” Worse, this bad-mouth truth-telling played into the hands of the anti-Semites: “There was a suggestion . . . and a grave one, that I had acted like a fool. ‘You have earned the gratitude,’ [one rabbi] wrote, ‘of all who sustain their antiSemitism on such conceptions of Jews as ultimately led to the murder of six million in our time.’ ” First, Roth answers that it is not 1933 anymore: “How pathetic. And what an insult to the dead. Imagine: sitting in New York in the 1960s and piously summoning up ‘the six million’ to justify one’s own timidity” about acknowledging the place of Jews in American society. They are not hiding in attics, they are not on the periphery of professions and institutions, they are in the open and, increasingly, in positions where they have leverage and recognition. As for the six million, Roth said, “The solution is not to convince people to like Jews so as not to want to kill them; it is to let them know that they cannot kill them even if they despise them. And how to let them know?” Not

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by repeatedly murmuring “It can happen here,” but by saying “to any restriction of liberties . . . ‘No, I refuse.’ ” Second: the Holocaust did not result merely from Germans’ “anti-Semitic misconceptions”; it resulted also from “the intolerability of Jewry, on the one hand, and its usefulness, on the other, to the Nazi ideology and dream.” By which I think Roth means that the behavior of some Jews was intolerable, just as the behavior of some members of any group would be, and that the Nazis isolated that “intolerability” in order to scapegoat Jews in general. Perhaps he is also suggesting that some Jews’ keeping to themselves as a chosen people made them an easy target for “Aryan” racialists who preferred to regard themselves as history’s chosen people. In any case, the best corrective to anybody’s hubristic assertion of radical difference from the rest of humanity is literature that does for us what Ellison’s Invisible Man had done for Roth: It made him “less stupid . . . about Negro lives, including those lives that a bigot would point to as affirming his own half-baked, inviolable ideas.”35 In a word, Ellison, Roth, or any other responsible novelist gives us characters who, seemly and unseemly, are evidently human beings and who therefore, although of course not exactly like us anymore than they are exactly like one another, all have (my illustration here) what in Middlemarch George Eliot called “equivalent center[s] of self,” sufficiently analogous to our selves to stay our hand should we ever be tempted to persecute them.

IV I will end with a few words about the writer who, in the first decade at least, was surely the archetypal Commentary writer: Robert Warshow. He wrote eight pieces for the magazine between 1946 and 1955, when he died of a heart-attack at age thirty-seven. I shall quote generously from a few of these pieces to convey the flavor of Warshow’s prose—his medium for arguing about the irreplaceability, in art and in political or moral reflection, of “the immediate experience.” That was the title of the posthumous collection of his essays published in 1962, which became a classic among people who cared particularly about the criticism of film and popular culture, in which he was a pioneer, and who cared broadly about the formation of an honest,

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individual sensibility. We do not—unless we are thoroughly selfestranged—see a movie, look at a picture, or read a book as representative members of a group, which nowadays might be that of feminists, Afro-centrists, homosexuals, Islamic fundamentalists, social democrats, neoconservatives, peace activists, what have you. We respond as individuals, differing in all kinds of ways from other people with whom we might be categorized—hence the significance of Warshow’s tame-sounding declaration that “at the center of all truly successful criticism there is always a man reading a book, a man looking at a picture, a man watching a movie.”36 Warshow is insisting with Harold Rosenberg—I’d call it the all-but-announced aesthetic credo of Commentary then and afterward—that group or, more invidiously, “herd” thinking is fundamentally fraudulent. During the Sacco and Vanzetti case in 1927, Warshow notes, American intellectuals simply wanted justice. In the 1930s, however, they had to forward demands for justice within Stalin’s framework. They called it “mature” thinking, but what it produced was “an age of organized mass disingenuousness, when every act and every idea had behind it some ‘larger consideration’ which destroyed its honesty and meaning.” For instance, when Communist critics hailed the “popular” radicalism of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, no lover of justice could say nay. There seemed to be no firm anti-Stalinist (i.e., anti-Marxist) criteria by which to criticize such a novel. Steinbeck’s failure, as Warshow makes clear in the previouslymentioned “The Legacy of the 30’s,” lay in having created stock, flat, stereotyped characters (the wicked banker, the noble farmer, etc.) rather than fresh, round, individuated characters (the banker who is ambivalent about his occupation, or the farmer who works hard but cheats on his wife). The Grapes of Wrath is closer to agitprop and melodrama, with its moral simplicities, than to the great tradition of the novel, with its moral realism. “Moral realism” is Trilling’s phrase, and one of Warshow’s tasks in “The Legacy” is to place the formidable critic’s one novel, The Middle of the Journey, as less-than-great not because it neglects morals (on the contrary, it’s rich in moral ideas) but because it slights reality. Trilling’s characters accept or reject Stalinism as though it were merely a philosophical decision, whereas in reality people’s feelings matter immensely. The denial of personal feel-

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ings, central to your or my “experience” in any decade, is one of the sad legacies of the decade before World War II, and—in the decade after it—Warshow identified another symptom of such denial in the plays of Arthur Miller. Nothing, I should say at once, is more delicious than the disparagement-by-indirection that comes from Warshow’s pen. About the movie version of Death of a Salesman, he writes, “Where most films made from Broadway plays are automatically better than their originals merely by reduction of the amount of undistinguished dialogue, this one manages to include almost as much as the play.” So much everyday chatter, so little everyday materiality—not only an absence of any indication of what product Willy sells (as with the infamous lacuna in James’s The Ambassadors, where we’re never told what “business” Chad Newsome is supposed to come home to look after: as one critic wondered, did it manufacture anything having to do with the bathroom?) but also an absence of any indication of the concrete milieu in which the Lomans live, which the movie could easily have filled in but did not: [I]f the subway or the streets or the real Brooklyn were permitted to exist, then it would be clear that Willy Loman had, if not a good life, at least a style of life, and the point of the film, as of the play, is that he had no life at all, he didn’t “put a bolt to a nut or tell you the law or give you medicine,” above all he did not work with his hands, which for Mr. Miller seems to represent the true meaning of failure—again, a characteristic American abstraction.

Another abstraction, sociologically pertinent perhaps but dead on the stage or on the screen, is Willy’s status as an “organization man” always having to please other people in order to succeed, or at least to avoid failure, that “insidious disease, like cancer: you may find out at any moment that you have had it all along. And our defenses become correspondingly vague, moving toward fantasy and propitiation; so long as our smiles are returned, we know that we are not yet cast away.” As a general proposition, it is an idea that any bunch of organization people might entertain every day of their adult lives, but the artist must never begin with general propositions: He must, in practice if not in thought, begin with discrete individuals in a concrete situation, saying this or doing that particular thing. The only particular

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thing Miller has Willy do (other than crash his car) is commit adultery, suggesting that this is why his family collapses, when the point of the play is supposed to be the emptiness of salesmanship and so on. Hence, the best reaction is after all the ridiculed “philistine one, which has at least the virtue of judging the play in terms of actuality. . . . ‘That New England territory never was any good.’ ”37 The adultery theme recurs in The Crucible, where it’s not treated seriously as a human problem but is offered as “a mere theatrical device, like the dropping of a letter.” The Puritans are treated with the same irreality as the modern salesman, as if the Salem witch trials were somehow the opening act in the American melodrama about the eventual triumph of liberalism. Look, Warshow lucidly says, those trials were not “political”: “The Salem ‘witches’ suffered something that may be worse than persecution: they were hanged because of a metaphysical error. And they chose to die—for all could have saved themselves by ‘confession’—not for a cause, not for ‘civil rights,’ not even to defeat the error that hanged them, but for their own credit on earth and in heaven: they would not say they were witches when they were not.” Each of Miller’s plays belongs to that culture of ideology which may eventually be all the culture we shall have. It is serious and in the most obvious ways honest, but if we take it as seriously as it asks to be taken, that is only one more evidence of our ability to refuse to recognize our own boredom . . . As the mass audience escapes into easy sentiment, so the educated audience escapes into ideas, a tendency which does not necessarily reflect a real interest in ideas: Death of a Salesman offers us not the fact but the atmosphere of thought.

There’s only the atmosphere of thought because the liberal ideas Miller and his audience depend on do not exist anymore, at least not as operative concepts directing behavior. The liberal ideas have devolved into a mere attitude, mutual recognition of which entitles people to belong to the same group; namely, the audience cheering “bravo!” when the curtain falls on Miller’s plays. Those bravos mean “we agree with Arthur Miller; he has set forth brilliantly and courageously what has been weighing on all our minds; at last someone has had the courage to answer Senator McCarthy” (etc.), thus dispelling “for a couple of hours that undefined but very real sense of frustration

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which oppresses these ‘liberals’—who believe in their innermost being that salvation comes from saying something, and who yet find themselves somehow without anything very relevant to say.” Miller’s sayings seem relevant because, just as Willy reminds audiences of the organization men that they have become, so the Salem witches remind them of the liberals that they think they are—and of the Communists they might, as fellow travelers, be accused of being: If you say to a Communist that he is a Communist, he is likely to feel himself in the position of a man who has been accused on no evidence of a crime that he has actually committed. He knows that he happens to be a Communist. But he knows also that his opinions and behavior are only the opinions and behavior of a “liberal,” a “dissenter.” You are therefore accusing him of being a Communist because he is a liberal, because he is for peace and civil rights and everything good. By some fantastic accident, your accusation happens to be true, but it is essentially false.

False, presumably, because he has not done anything to overthrow the bourgeois state. With accusations of Communist sympathizing, and indeed treasonous spying, thickly flying in those days, Warshow was not surprised that liberals should cluster together in “their close community of right-mindedness in the orthodoxy of ‘dissent,’ ” but that did not solve the specific political problems, having to do with the guilt or innocence of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, for instance, or with Stalin’s persecution of Russian Jews, outside the theater—and it certainly did not solve the artistic problems inside.38 The playwright who did solve some of those artistic problems was Clifford Odets, author of Waiting for Lefty and, his masterpiece, Awake and Sing. The general political ideas of either play may be as fallacious as Miller’s historiography of the Puritans, but the plays live because the characters are three-dimensional, their material world palpable and detailed, and their speech “a special type of dramatic poetry.” That is, they are the psychologically, morally complex human beings who happen to be Jews that the critics I began with, lamenting the centuries of stereotypes, were calling for. It was the dramatic poetry of Jewish immigrant speech, of course, that Bellow, Malamud, Roth, and others were to catch in the years during and after Warshow’s grievously brief career—a speech that Odets’s characters use less as

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a means to communicate with one another than, each “confront[ing] his own unhappiness, . . . as an instrument of self-expression and a weapon of defense.”39 Well, each individual, like each family, is unhappy in his own way, and only the great artist can represent those differences to us. The unhappiness was not, for Warshow, an experience reserved for Jews. It was the lot of individuals from all groups, and if a Jewish or a black or a German artist delineated the unhappiness of individuals “in this time, in that place” (the title phrase of Trilling’s most successful fiction), then it was the critic’s job—consistently, responsibly performed by Commentary critics for half a century—to recognize and describe the achievement. That I’ve had space here for nothing more than a light sketch of that critical task during the early decades of the magazine’s history—the task of describing and combating Jewish stereotypes, affirming a sense of Jewish and other minority identities while yet insisting on individuality, assessing the condition of the novel in America or, with Warshow in mind, the work of the culture critic per se—is cause for a measure of my own present unhappiness. The reader, however, will doubtless think it’s time to stop. There’s an abundance of fine critical essays and stories in those decades that I have not mentioned, and in the writing of Podhoretz, Cynthia Ozick, Ruth Wisse, John Gross, Robert Alter, Joseph Epstein, and others, the brilliance and wisdom of the magazine’s literary criticism has, since the mid-1970s, not diminished.40

6 Commentary and the Common Culture Terry Teachout

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early two decades after I started writing for Commentary, 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 read Commentary, 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 wish merely to know what they thought, however, though that was obviously what mattered most. I also wanted to know what they were like, so I consulted their various memoirs, and the one that made the strongest impression on me was Norman Podhoretz’s Making It.1 I suspect that a great many people of my generation who now write for Commentary read Making It when they were young, and that it made much the same impression on them that it did on me, being at once challenging and a bit unnerving, like gazing at a mountain you intended to climb someday. For my part, I saw Making It as an instruction 127

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manual, a how-to guide for budding young public intellectuals, and I read it with the closest possible attention. I was particularly struck by a scene in which Clement Greenberg, then one of the magazine’s editors, told Podhoretz that Commentary was “a middlebrow magazine.” This remark puzzled Podhoretz as much as it did me: “I was bewildered by this application of the term to so intellectually stylish, so (to me) obviously highbrow a phenomenon,”2 he wrote. But in later years, he figured out what Greenberg had meant: Unlike the indubitably highbrow Partisan Review, which was addressed exclusively to the family [of New York intellectuals] and to anyone else who had read enough to be able to eavesdrop on conversations in the allusive language the family habitually used, Commentary was edited by [Eliot] Cohen with his eye on a more diverse and more far-flung audience. Or, to put the point in a slightly different context, whereas Partisan Review might be said to have been a magazine for “producers” of ideas, Commentary was a magazine for “consumers.”3

Perhaps not surprisingly, I didn’t understand that distinction, and nobody bothered to set me straight when I started writing for Commentary in 1985. Today, though, it is central to the way I write for Commentary. Among other things, I now see that even though he never intended it as such, Greenberg was actually paying the magazine a compliment when he called it “middlebrow.” In the very best sense of that much-misused word, that’s exactly what Commentary was—and is. I grew up in the Age of the Middlebrow, that earnest, self-improving fellow who watched prime-time television documentaries and read the Book of the Month. I was born in a small Midwestern town in 1956, the year Dwight Eisenhower was reelected by a landslide, and as far back as I can remember, I was eager to learn what was going on beyond the city limits of my hometown, out in the great world of art and culture. Even though I lived hundreds of miles from the nearest museum, and I didn’t see my first live performance of a ballet until I went off to college, I already knew a little something about people like Jackson Pollock and Jerome Robbins, thanks entirely to such house organs of middlebrow aspiration as Life magazine and The Ed Sullivan Show, and what little I knew made me want to know more. Intellectuals of the Partisan Review stripe were for the most part

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deeply suspicious of middlebrows, having beheld the effects of Popular Front Stalinism on American art; they feared, not unreasonably, that any broaching of the dam separating high art from popular culture would lead inexorably to the watering down of the former by the latter. Such views, however, were only possible in a city where high art was on tap twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. In my town, it came on television or in the mailbox, and I was glad to get it in whatever form it was available, be it from Ed Sullivan or Henry Luce. Commentary wasn’t, and isn’t, Life magazine. It was a magazine written and read by intellectuals of the highest possible caliber, but one edited in such a way as to be equally accessible to ordinary educated people—the “common readers” with whose judgments Samuel Johnson “rejoiced to concur.” That’s one of Dr. Johnson’s best-remembered lines, but it’s worth repeating, especially in the present context: “I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtility and the dogmatism of learning, must finally be decided all claim to poetical honours.”4 From the beginning, Commentary has taken those words to heart: it has never been a house organ for the New York intellectuals, but a magazine that takes the common sense of common readers seriously. As I say, I didn’t understand any of this back in the days when I was a “consumer” rather than a “producer” of ideas. Nor do the editors of Commentary go out of their way to set you straight when you start writing for them. Sooner or later, though, you figure it out for yourself, especially once you take a close look at how your pieces are edited. Part of the answer is in the details—in the fact that whenever I mention, say, Clement Greenberg’s name in one of my pieces, Neal Kozodoy, Norman Podhoretz’s successor as editor of Commentary, makes me identify him as “the art critic Clement Greenberg.” Similarly revealing is the painstaking, almost fanatical care with which Kozodoy and his colleagues make sure that every article they publish in Commentary unfolds in a clear, orderly way. You don’t write for them in code or shorthand. You don’t assume that your readers have extensive prior knowledge of your subject matter. Instead, you explain yourself, and do so without condescending. You do your best to inform and persuade.

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These disciplines can be frustrating to the untried contributor, especially when he’s inclined, as I was, to write in an overly fancy way. How well I remember Podhoretz telling me that the first piece I ever wrote for Commentary, a review of a volume of essays by James Baldwin, was “too knowing.” That puzzled me no end. How could anyone be too knowing? I wanted the whole world to know how much I knew! But out came the blue pencil, and my piece was cut by about a third of its original length—an exercise that was repeated time and again over the next few years until I got the message: Commentary doesn’t exist for you to show off in its soberly designed pages. Instead, you’re expected to make your points straightforwardly, going to endless trouble to ensure that those points will make sense to whoever happens to pick up that month’s issue, be he a card-carrying intellectual or a small-town boy in search of enlightenment. That is middlebrow culture at its very best, a quintessentially democratic, singularly idealistic enterprise that offers free and unimpeded access to what Matthew Arnold so famously called “the best that has been thought and said in the world.” As I searched for models to imitate in my quest to crack the Commentary code, I stumbled on the essays of Robert Warshow, and through reading them came at last to understand how the magazine worked. Warshow isn’t sufficiently remembered today (I found out about him, as about so much else, from reading Making It), but he should be, for he was an essayist of considerable importance, whose work was typical of the Commentary formula at its most exalted. Whether he was writing about Russian movies or Lionel Trilling or comic books, he wrote as an intellectual—but one who believed that he had a responsibility to be intelligible. His style was at once serious and informal and utterly transparent, honest in the way that an essay by George Orwell is honest. Anyone could understand what he was saying, but that didn’t make it any less worth knowing. I once wrote an article about Warshow in which I made admiring mention of what I believe to be his finest essay. In “The ‘Idealism’ of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,” published in Commentary in 1953, Warshow turned his unsparing gaze on the letters exchanged in prison by the martyrs of the postwar left as they awaited execution for having passed atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. For him, the Rosenbergs

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were the ultimate embodiment of the Popular Front, a robot couple incapable of harboring any unpolitical opinions whatsoever, even about baseball. He quoted Julius on the Brooklyn Dodgers: “It’s that indomitable spirit that has endeared them to so many. But it is chiefly in their outstanding contribution to the eradication of racial prejudice that they have covered themselves with glory.” In such crude fatuities, Warshow heard the death knell of American liberalism: Whether he cheers the Yankees or the Dodgers, whether he damns Franklin Roosevelt as a warmonger or adores him as the champion of human rights, the Communist is always celebrating the same thing: the great empty Idea which has taken on the outlines of his personality. Communists are still “idealists”—perhaps all the more so because their “idealism” is by now almost entirely without content—and the surprising degree of sympathy and even respect that they can command among liberals is partly to be explained by the liberal belief that “idealism” in itself is a virtue.5

When I first read those words, I said to myself, “That’s how I want to write.” You may wonder what this all has to do with the monthly essays I write about music for Commentary. In fact, it has everything to do with them. Like Samuel Lipman, my predecessor as Commentary’s regular music critic, I’m a trained musician with professional performing experience. I’m also an intellectual, deeply immersed in the world of ideas. If I cared to, I could write for people like me, and no one else. The jargon of music, after all, sounds pretty impressive when you throw it around, assuming that you want to impress other people. I don’t. I want to write for readers who love music and know something about it, but who are not themselves musicians, and perhaps not even intellectuals. I want to tell them what people like me are thinking and doing—and I want them to understand. This perspective informs every word I write for Commentary. I see myself as a specialist filing a monthly report for generalists. I’ve been doing so for the better part of a decade, and in that time I’ve made a great discovery, which is that not only do generalists read my pieces, but so do specialists. That’s Commentary in a nutshell. I spoke earlier of “the Commentary formula,” though I didn’t intend it to be taken pejoratively. In any case, I prefer to speak of “the Commentary approach.” Those of us who write for Commentary do so as

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specialists addressing a mixed audience of specialists and generalists, and we endeavor to write in such a way as to be intelligible and interesting to both halves of our audience. The success of that approach is the reason why Commentary has been so influential in the past halfcentury, not least in the area of what has come to be called “the culture war.” One of the things I noticed soon after moving to New York in 1985 was that many ordinary educated people simply weren’t aware that American culture had become a bloody battleground. They didn’t know what was going on in the academy or the museums, and if they did know, they didn’t take it seriously—unless they were fortunate enough to be regular readers of Commentary, in which case they knew better. For years, Commentary readers had been hearing each month from specialists in the academy and the world of high art who reported from the battlefronts of the culture war—writing not for each other, but for the common reader. Cleaning out a dusty cupboard the other day, I ran across a party favor distributed at Norman Podhoretz’s retirement dinner in 1995, a paperbound anthology entitled What Commentary Has Wrought: An Anthology Comprised of the First Pages of Articles and Stories of Particular Note Published Over the Past Twenty-Five Years, Together with a Short History of the Magazine. I’m glad I kept it, for it is a tribute not only to what Commentary has wrought, but to how Commentary wrought it. The table of contents tells the tale: Joseph Epstein on “Who Killed Poetry?” Murray Friedman on “A New Direction for American Jews.” Carol Iannone on “Feminism vs. Literature.” Hillel Halkin on “Whose Palestine? An Open Letter to Edward Said.” Abigail Thernstrom on “Bilingual Miseducation.” Robert Alter on “How Important are the Dead Sea Scrolls?” Bernard Lewis on “The Return of Islam” (all the way back in 1976, thank you very much). Month after month, issue after issue, Commentary has been making sense out of culture and politics for close to six decades now, not just for the benefit of “the family” of New York intellectuals but for anyone who takes the time to open an issue and read it attentively from cover to cover. This is, I think, a great and noble achievement, and one in which I am immensely proud to play a small part. For I believe deeply in the common reader, and in the possibility of a truly democratic culture in which the best that has been thought and said in the world is made

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accessible and intelligible to all men in all conditions. So far as I know, Commentary doesn’t have a mission statement—though perhaps Neal Kozodoy keeps one locked in his bottom desk drawer—but if it did, that would be it. We who are privileged to write for Commentary rejoice to concur with the common reader when he’s right and seek to nudge him in the right direction when he’s wrong. I know no more honorable pursuit.

7 Norman Podhoretz and the Cold War Richard Gid Powers

Powers: To what extent was anti-Americanism an important part of the cold war? Podhoretz: Well, it was one of the crucial parts. Anti-Americanism was, I still think, even more important than pro-communism in determining the position of people who opposed us or who took a procommunist or neutralist position.1

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n 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 fear of communism” speech at Notre Dame—Podhoretz led the campaign to revive anticommunism as the basis of a coher134

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ent American foreignpolicy. He gave fresh support to the old idea that communism was the true and central issue of a cold war against a Soviet Union that was as dangerous as ever and that had to be opposed if America were to survive as a free nation. I argued that Podhoretz significantly influenced the public debate that led to the election of an avowedly anticommunist president, Ronald Reagan—the first and only truly anticommunist president in our history.2 In this chapter I want to probe more deeply than before the reasons—intellectual but, more interestingly, I think, emotional—why Podhoretz adopted the positions he did during the Cold War, and I will argue that the basis for his anticommunism was his reaction to a phenomenon that, if anything, has become even more significant and dangerous today. Because at an early stage in his political evolution Podhoretz became convinced that an underlying issue in the Cold War was anti-Americanism, which he argues was almost as important as the nature and ambitions of the Soviet Union. Finally, that will lead to some speculations on my part about how the international crisis of today—Afghanistan, Iraq, and terror—has given rise to a form of anti-Americanism eerily similar in its psychology to the enduring insanity of anti-Semitism. “The Cold War is over,” Mikhail Gorbachev is supposed to have said soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, “and it doesn’t matter who won or lost.” Jack Kemp, former congressman, cabinet secretary, and quarterback, used to bring down the house at banquets by retorting that “there’s only one kind of man who doesn’t care whether he won or lost—and that’s a loser.” There isn’t much debate about who lost the Cold War. There is no more Soviet Union, no more Warsaw Pact, and the rag-tag entourage of Soviet semisatellites around the world are now left to their own devices, their survival depending on coming to terms with the global free market system. As for who won it, that should be pretty obvious too, but it is not. Winners usually do some celebrating in the end zone, but the only victory parades were in Doonesbury, with crooked investment bankers doing the hokey-pokey around their office paper shredders, yowling for a general amnesty on tax fraud to mark the downfall of communism.

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It was as though any celebration of the victory over communism might have been misunderstood as an endorsement of anticommunism and all its sins (Many Were the Crimes, as one history of American anticommunism had it3)—or even of McCarthyism, which is regarded in some quarters as much the same thing. In that sense, as I argued in Not Without Honor, the Cold War really is not over, not until historians agree on what it was all about—or whether it was about anything at all. At the moment, there are disturbing indications that the latter position—that the Cold War was not about anything in particular—is gaining ground, perhaps as a way of draining the moral content from current American foreign policy. Norman Podhoretz, however, never had any doubt, from beginning to end, that the Cold War was about something important, and his insistence on the moral nature of the struggle led him to certain insights that are just as essential today when the Cold War is over—that is, if it is truly over—as they were when he had them. I think it is a fact that Norman Podhoretz did play a historically significant role in the final days of the Cold War. That role was, in my opinion, so significant in reality that it does not need to be exaggerated for the sake of historical argument. There were also the Soviet and Eastern European dissidents who put their lives on the line in moral protest against Soviet communism, there was Pope John Paul II, there was the free labor movement, and there were the socialist parties that came to the support of Solidarity. But at a critical time in the history of American political thought, Norman Podhoretz put back into circulation an idea (anticommunism) that had all but passed out of current usage. That idea became the driving force behind Reagan’s challenge to the Soviet Union, a challenge credited by the dissidents themselves with sustaining their morale and destroying that of their rulers. And if we do not believe that ideas have consequences—even if we cannot agree exactly what they are—then why am I writing this and why are you reading it when we could be pursuing happiness in so many more immediately satisfying ways? Podhoretz’s role in the revival of anticommunism during the late 1970s began in semisolitude. Not only the idea of anticommunism but

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also the word itself had been practically banished from respectable American political discourse. Anticommunists like Podhoretz saw themselves as a saving remnant keeping alive the truth about the immorality of communism. He recalls the loneliness of the anticommunist during those years: “to be pro-American in the sixties was like being anti-Soviet in the thirties, but just as radicalism then had been tied to support of the Soviet Union as the center of socialist hope, so radicalism now increasingly defined itself in opposition to the United States as the major obstacle to the birth of a better world. Here too, then, in dissenting from the anti-Americanism of the new radicals, I thought I was adapting the example of my elders who in the thirties had refused to accept the equation of radicalism with support of the Soviet Union.”4 Podhoretz argued that the excision of the words “communist” and “anticommunist” from the American political lexicon after Vietnam had rendered the world, both domestic and international, incomprehensible. He thought anticommunism had been exiled because its most indefensible manifestations had, over time, come to be seen as characteristic of the entire movement, as though malpractice were all there was to medicine. In Breaking Ranks (1979), he wrote, “Thanks to the legacy of McCarthyism, the word ‘Communist’ was no longer generally used even to describe self-proclaimed members of the Communist party. If they were black, like Angela Davis, they would be referred to in the press as ‘militants,’ and if they were white, like Dashiell Hammett, they would simply be called ‘radicals.’ And if the use of the word ‘Communist’ to describe a Communist was interdicted as a species of McCarthyism, it was almost unthinkable to employ such subsidiary concepts as ‘fellow traveler’ or ‘Stalinist’ or ‘Stalinoid’ to describe people who were not members of the Communist party but whose outlook had been largely shaped or influenced by its ideas and values.”5 Debates over American foreign policy had become aimless and incoherent since Vietnam, Podhoretz said, because “a key term has quietly disappeared from the discussion of the Soviet-American conflict. It is the term ‘communism.’ ”6 Even though the communist movement remained the principal destabilizing force in the world, President Carter hardly ever mentioned the word, not even in the 1980

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State of the Union (“Carter Doctrine”) message that announced that the United States would resist any effort by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region—and the “outside force” Carter had in mind was the Soviet Union. Podhoretz insisted on going back to basics. Underlying all the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, he reminded his readers, was the clash between communism and freedom. Wherever communism had gained power, it had been “a curse.” It was a system built on terror, resting on genocide; a system that suppressed, even in the most liberal communist regimes, the most elementary human rights. “In short, the reason Soviet imperialism is a threat to us is not merely that the Soviet Union is a superpower bent on aggrandizing itself, but that it is a Communist state armed, as Sakharov says, to the teeth, and dedicated to the destruction of the free institutions which are our heritage and the political culture which is our glory.”7 In waging the Cold War, Podhoretz concluded in The Present Danger that, “we are fighting for freedom and against Communism, for democracy and against totalitarianism.” Only by reaffirming that the moral basis of American containment of the Soviet Union was opposition to communism could America and the West summon their full energies to a struggle that would demand enduring commitment, a commitment that could only be sustained if it rested on a moral foundation. There were reviews of my Not Without Honor that claimed I credited Podhoretz with bringing down the Soviet Union, single-handed. I never said that. I never even said that anticommunism by itself brought down the Soviet Union. You just cannot prove these things. What I did say was that Podhoretz was the American who revived anticommunism in this country. (When I reminded Podhoretz of this, he quipped, “And, he said modestly, I agree.”) In Podhoretz’s opinion, however, the revival of American anticommunism did have a great deal to do the end of the Cold War. He argues that that it was a combination of Reagan’s anticommunism and that of the anticommunist intellectuals that gave heart to Soviet bloc dissidents, and this he was told by former dissidents themselves, “with tears in their eyes when they describe how much Commentary

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meant to them in their darkest days. But then there was also Gorbachev. I’ve also argued that Gorbachev was one of the stupidest men who ever lived because he thought he could save communism while opening it up. . . . So Reagan was lucky in Gorbachev.” Then, Podhoretz argues, there were the Star Wars program and American technological advances, as the former dissidents have said, plus the failure of their economic system. “All of this put greater punch into the ideological resistance coming from Reagan and the anticommunist intellectuals. If not for Reagan’s revival of a strong stand against them, or if someone else, Carter, or even the elder George Bush, had been president, the Soviet Union might have lasted another ten years or more. You can safely say that the Soviet Union would have collapsed eventually, but it wouldn’t have collapsed at all if it hadn’t been resisted.” Podhoretz’s most famous public pronouncement on the Cold War was the aforementioned Present Danger. This was written as campaign literature to create support for the Reagan candidacy, and so the book was an extreme formulation—unnuanced, as campaign literature generally is—of the case against de´tente. Taken out of its origins in a political campaign and separated from its immediate historical context, some of Podhoretz’s statements there about the overwhelming strength of the Soviet Union and the threat it posed to American security are easy to caricature as scare-mongering, but to do so depends on hindsight about the collapse of the Soviet Union, a collapse almost no one foresaw in 1980—the sole exception, as far as anyone knows, being Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and even Moynihan, who took well-merited pride in having predicted in January 1975 that the Soviet Union was breaking up because of economic paralysis and ethnic disunity, warned at the same time that the USSR might still “have considerable time left before ethnicity breaks it up.” Four years later, he wrote in Newsweek that “the Soviet empire is coming under tremendous strain,” but, he added ominously, “It could blow up.”8 In 1984, Moynihan told graduates of New York University that America “should be less obsessed with the Soviets,” because the Soviet idea is spent—history is moving away from it with astounding speed. . . . It is as if the whole Marxist-Leninist ethos is hurtling into a black hole in the universe. . . . The historical outcome is certain if we can

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keep the nuclear peace and attend to our own arrangements in a manner that they continue to improve. . . . Our grand strategy should be to wait out the Soviet Union—its time is spent. . . . When the time comes, it will be clear that in the end freedom did prevail.

Once again, however, Moynihan warned that although the Soviet Union was dying, its death throes could be dangerous: “So long as the [Soviet] economy was growing, the system could put up with the ‘waste’ of armaments,” he argued, “but that time is past.” Its leaders might make a lunge for territory in the oil-producing regions to “reverse the decline at home and preserve national unity.”9 Moynihan later lamented that the vast arms buildup of the Reagan years may have been needless, that the Soviet Union might have collapsed without it, but at the time he too was worried that the Soviet Union, unless deterred, like an expiring supernova might consume all of us. Back to Podhoretz in The Present Danger. The book emerged out of a contemporary intellectual context that provided strong external support for what, read in isolation years later, might seem bald assertions. The book was really a popular distillation of four years of debate over the relative military strength of the United States and the Soviet Union, both conventional and nuclear. By 1980, that debate had moved the center of gravity of American strategic thought away from the de´tente policies of the Nixon–Ford–Carter administrations to a point where Jimmy Carter himself, in a remarkable repudiation of his Notre Dame speech, declared that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had completely changed his thinking about the Russians. He then called for an increase in defense spending that would rank with any of those of the Reagan administrations.10 Podhoretz borrowed the title for his book from a group that had been leading the campaign against the Carter foreign policy’s version of de´tente since 1976, the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD). The CPD was itself preceded by a remarkable series of hearings on comparative Soviet–American military strength conducted by Senator Henry Jackson. It was also foreshadowed by the antide´tente campaigns of the veteran strategic planner and arms expert Paul Nitze. During the Ford administration, Nitze had participated in the famous “Team B” study of the CIA’s most important “product,” the National

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Intelligence Estimate.11 Nitze then founded the Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy, which not only issued public statements on the growing arms imbalance between the Soviet Union and the United States but also supported the professional training and career development of hard-line arms experts like Peter Wilson, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle. In 1976, Nitze assembled the group whose research would be the foundation of Podhoretz’s popular summary four years later. In association with Eugene Rostow, James Schlesinger, Henry Jackson, and David Packard, Nitze set up an informal group in March of that year. It was directed by Charles Tyroler II, who had long been lobbying within the Democratic Party for stronger defenses. Eugene V. Rostow, Charls E. Walker, Nitze, Richard V. Allen, Lane Kirkland, Henry H. Fowler, and Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt joined the effort, with the encouragement of Gerald Ford’s Defense Secretary, James R. Schlesinger. The key meeting was held at Washington’s Metropolitan Club on March 12, 1976, attended by Walker, Nitze, Fowler, Zumwalt, Allen, Kirkland, Schlesinger, Max Kampelman, David Packard, Charles Burton Marshall, Edmund A. Gullion, and Tyroler. In November, this group, now calling itself the CPD, introduced itself to the public.12 The Executive Committee of the CPD was chaired by Rostow, and its Policy Studies Committee by Nitze. Its cochairs were former Secretary of the Treasury Fowler, Secretary Treasurer of the AFLCIO Kirkland, and Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Packard. Former Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Walker was treasurer, and Kampelman was general counsel. The executive committee included Allen (former Deputy Assistant to the President for International Economic Affairs), Gullion (Dean of the Fletcher School), Rita Hauser (chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the American Jewish Committee), Richard Pipes, John P. Roche (former aide to Lyndon B. Johnson), Dean Rusk, Richard Whalen, and Zumwalt. The group decided against having a public membership arm, limiting itself to the 100 members of the Board of Directors. This included conservative cultural figures Saul Bellow, Nathan Glazer, Oscar Handlin, Seymour Martin Lipset, Samuel McCracken, and James T. Farrell; labor union officials included Kirkland and Jay Lovestone of the AFL-CIO, Sol Chaikin and Evelyn DuBrow of the ILGWU, William DuChessi of

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the Amalgamated, J. C. Turner of the International Union of Operating Engineers, Martin Ward of the Plumbers Union, and Rochelle Horowitz of the Teachers Union. There were former military officers, ambassadors, lawyers (William F. Casey), businessmen, and foreign policy and national defense academics (notably Jeane Kirkpatrick). There was the ancient anticommunist Bertram Wolfe.13 And, of course, there was Norman Podhoretz, with his wife Midge Decter. The CPD found that it did not need a large budget because there were plenty of high-quality volunteer workers available, so its staff, over its first eight years, numbered only four full-time and two part-time employees. The first public meeting of the Committee on the Present Danger, coming two days after the 1976 election, attracted over a hundred media representatives for a presentation of its manifesto, “Common Sense and the Common Danger,” read in turn by Fowler, Kirkland, and Packard. Its preamble, echoing the classic call to arms of the French Revolution, began: “Our country is in a period of danger, and the danger is increasing. Unless decisive steps are taken to alert the nation, and to change the course of its policy, our economic and military capacity will become inadequate to assure peace with security.” Time was short, and “a conscious act of political will is needed to restore the strength and coherence of our foreign policy.” Only then could the country “seek reliable conditions of peace with the Soviet Union, rather than an illusory peace.”14 The CPD manifesto argued that “the principal threat to our nation, to world peace, and to the cause of human freedom is the Soviet drive for dominance based upon an unparalleled military buildup. The Soviet Union has not altered its long-held goal of a world dominated from a single center—Moscow.” It was exploiting every sign of American weakness, and “the scope and sophistication of the Soviet campaign have been increased in recent years.” America was reaching a point where its military weakness would make it vulnerable to coercion, where it would be forced to concede interest after interest in the face of superior Soviet power: “If we continue to drift, we shall become second best to the Soviet Union in overall military strength; our alliances will weaken; our promising

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rapprochement with China could be reversed. Then we could find ourselves isolated in a hostile world. . . . Our national survival itself would be in peril, and we should face, one after another, bitter choices between war and acquiescence under pressure.” The CPD charged that, “time, weariness, and the tragic experience of Vietnam have weakened the bipartisan consensus which sustained our foreign policy between 1940 and the mid-60s. We must build a fresh consensus.”15 The CPD’s oral presentation of “Common Sense and the Common Danger” lasted more than ninety minutes. There were some questions from the media, but the result was disappointing in terms of news coverage. It took two months for the New York Times to notice the organization, so out of step was it with the establishment’s hopeful embrace of de´tente. Editorials gradually began to give respectful mention to the group’s policy papers, however, while Moscow attacked it as “A Flock of Hawks.”16 Over the next four years, in a flood of papers based on expert analysis of the progress of the arms competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, the CPD succeeded in shifting public sentiment until its support for rearmament could no longer be ignored. The committee’s public papers—twenty in all, published from 1976 through 1984—were short, powerfully written, and reflected Nitze’s unrivaled knowledge of the details of the strategic balance. They all drove home the same point: that the Soviet Union was still pursuing its original goal of a worldwide political and economic system dominated by Moscow, was supporting foreign insurgences with anti-American regimes, and was building up its own forces to promote such a goal. The United States, in contrast, was letting its own forces deteriorate so badly that it would shortly face a situation in which it would have no alternative but to allow the Soviet Union a free hand in world affairs.17 During the SALT hearings, the CPD members appeared on seventeen different occasions before Senate committees. Nitze’s papers were updated eleven times, once almost every month. The CPD participated in 479 public forums and distributed 200,000 reports, and managed to convince the Foreign Relations Committee (with Kissinger coming aboard, unexpectedly) that ratification of the SALT

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treaty should depend on administration pledges to increase defense spending and had be linked to improvement in Soviet behavior around the world. By the time Podhoretz penned his Present Danger, he was not simply making assertions about Soviet strength and intentions, as has sometimes been charged. He was summarizing arguments—arguments supported by the research of a sizeable body of weapons experts—that were already well established in the public forum. It is ahistorical to treat Podhoretz’s book as though it appeared in an evidentiary vacuum.18 Then there was The Present Danger’s immediate historical context. This was the series of American strategic and foreign policy disasters that culminated in the humiliation at Desert One, a context that colored the arguments and the reception of The Present Danger. Desert One revealed to the military that its interservice rivalries had produced a dysfunctional system incapable of internal reform. The situation was so bad that in desperation, General David Jones, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Went before the House Armed Services Committee in a closed session on 3 February 1982, about five months before he was to retire, and said, essentially, ‘The system is broken. I have tried to reform it from the inside, but I cannot. Congress is going to have to mandate necessary reforms.’ ” That led to the Goldwater-Nichols Act that transformed the American military into the formidable weapon it is today.19 It is ahistorical to project the power of the current American military establishment back to 1980 in an effort to discredit the military analysis of the Committee on the Present Danger. It is also ahistorical to project the weakness of the Soviet military after it had been debilitated by its failure in Afghanistan as though that were a measure of the power of the force that launched the invasion in 1980. Was Napoleon’s army in retreat from Moscow the same army that had invaded Russia? Like the intellectual foundations of Podhoretz’s Cold War arguments, the emotional roots of his anticommunism also run deep. It is almost, but not quite, true, Podhoretz said recently, that his political beliefs were anticommunist from the start. Actually, swept away by the heroism of the Red Army at Stalingrad, he says he was, for a brief period

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at age thirteen, a teenage fellow traveler.20 Naturally, however, at that age politics was hardly his chief concern in life. To the extent that he had political opinions then, they were shaped by his favorite political periodical, the anti-Stalinist Partisan Review, and by the anticommunism of his father, who was waging his own domestic Cold War against their communist relatives.21 I made a distinction in Not Without Honor between a person’s being “anticommunist” and being “an anticommunist”: being “anticommunist” simply means a rejection of communism as being irrelevant, useless, or wrong; being “an anticommunist” means taking the additional, and crucial, step, of making opposition to communism the center, or at least a central element, of one’s political activism. It is, I think, an essential distinction. When did Podhoretz take that step of becoming an anticommunist? Here I take advantage of the biographer’s privilege of differing with the subject in his interpretation of his own past. Podhoretz himself dates his emergence as an anticommunist to his college days at Columbia, where he studied literature under Lionel Trilling and other anticommunists,22 but it is only when Podhoretz describes his intense reaction against the anti-Americanism he encountered while studying at Cambridge University in England that one detects the first signs of that well-known, let us say, vehemence that came to be his signature in political argument. He spent three years at Cambridge and traveled throughout Europe in 1950–1953, then spent another year in the Army in Germany. In England and Europe alike, he recalls, he encountered “exactly the same kind of anti-Americanism we see today. . . . The conservatives were afraid that we were going to drown the world in Coca Cola—we were barbarians, a cultural menace—and the left saw us as the war-mongering party that was going to drag the world into a nuclear war.” The anti-Americanism then was based, he feels, on the same emotions as it is today “but, if anything, today it has metastasized.” So it was anti-Americanism, which he first encountered in Europe, that stoked the fires of his anticommunism: “Always, and to this day. I never could stomach anti-Americanism. Because I love this country, I really do, what it has meant to me, having been born here of immigrant parents, and I still feel that way.”

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During the 1950s, until he started moving to the left, Podhoretz was a hard-line anticommunist. He was in full agreement with Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism that Soviet Russia was no different from Nazi Germany. It was a totalitarian system, and it was his duty to fight it. He was also a strong supporter of the Truman Doctrine and of the Kennan policy of containment. Podhoretz agreed with Nathan Glazer and the other Commentary writers that McCarthyism and communism were equal dangers. He also agreed with Irving Kristol’s notorious argument that McCarthyism was fed by the liberal denial that there was an internal communist threat. “I was intensely involved in the debates over Hiss and I thought then and still think that Witness is a great book. . . . So in those years, before joining the staff of Commentary, I was much in tune with the magazine’s position, which was hard-line anticommunist in the Cold War and of course anti-McCarthy at home.” Podhoretz’s move to the left at the end of the 1950s was also driven by feelings of patriotism. That shift started with Khrushchev’s deStalinization speech, which Podhoretz thought meant that there were changes occurring in the Soviet Union—that there might be a chance of a thaw, of negotiations, of doing something about the Cold War and the threat of nuclear war, little by little. Podhoretz began meeting with Nathan Glazer and with “what was grandly called the peace movement,” consisting of approximately six people, three of them Quakers: Norman Thomas, A. J. Muste, Bayard Rustin, David Riesman, and Erich Fromm. Podhoretz began moving gradually to the position that the Cold War was not necessarily permanent, that the conditions that had originally caused it had changed because of what was going on in the Soviet Union, that the United States should be more open to finding a way out of this impasse. This position had a domestic corollary “because, for better or worse, . . . I have an inner compulsion to achieve coherence in my thinking. So as I was rethinking a lot of the assumptions I had made in connection with the Cold War, I also began rethinking my ideas about America.” That led, Podhoretz recalls ruefully, to a temporary “infection of utopianism.” He never became anti-American, he says, but he did become critical of the view that “the status quo in this country was the best we could hope for and that it was too dangerous to mess

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around with it because of the danger of nuclear war.” He began to argue, on the contrary, that because of the growing prosperity of the country and the easing tensions of the Cold War, the United States now had an opportunity to realize its full potential. So when he became the editor of Commentary in 1960, he began to publish writers like Paul Goodman, Norman O. Brown, “and a lot of other people who were less famous and are now forgotten, mercifully.” In short, he felt that it was now possible “to achieve perfection” in the United States, a position he now recalls with some amazement. “I was highly critical of the status quo—of the institutions that prevailed at that time in America—I was at the same time saying this country had the potential for becoming heaven on earth. And so, although I was never a sucker [he laughs] for the Soviet Union the way some people were, but generally, I would say roughly for eight or ten years, 1958–9 to 1966–7, because these things with me happen gradually, I was sympathetic to the anti-anticommunist position.” As it had been his pro-Americanism that had shifted him to the left, it was his reaction against the vehement anti-Americanism of the Vietnam-era left that made him “break ranks” and begin his journey to the right. “The major issue for me was the anti-Americanism that infected the movement that I had helped to launch and propagate. As I said before, that movement wasn’t anti-American to begin with, not even the SDS, which in its early days was talking in utopian terms about the possibilities of American society. But after ’65—I think ’65, when we started bombing North Vietnam, was the turning point— and in private more than in public, you know, at dinner parties, I began to hear these vile attacks on America. Lyndon Johnson was Hitler, America was Nazi Germany, Harlem was Auschwitz. . . . And I just couldn’t stand it, I couldn’t stomach it. I thought it was utterly ridiculous intellectually but it also offended me morally. It seemed to me, I mean, if you are going to say that Harlem is Auschwitz then what is Auschwitz?” This anti-Americanism that began sweeping through the left drove Podhoretz to reevaluate his political convictions, and he concluded that there was something “very wrong in the root of the position I had been occupying for roughly a decade.” That led him to question the utopian element in his own thinking and to return to “my old

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idea about the enormous apocalyptic importance of the war against totalitarianism.” He concluded that he had been deceived about the changes in the Soviet Union. It was the same evil totalitarian menace it had been before. In fact, it was an even greater menace because the Vietnam War was undermining the country’s will to resist the Soviet Union and to maintain the military forces necessary to counter their military buildup. “I also began to see that America, far from being corrupt or evil, as you measure these things in the world, the real world, may not have been an ideal society but was as close to ideal as one could hope to achieve in the here and now. Incidentally, this was when the civil rights movement, which I had passionately supported, was going bad in its own way, because it too had become infected with anti-Americanism.” In a sense, then, Podhoretz had returned to his original position, propelled by his reaction against the Left’s anti-Americanism, but in terms adapted to the current situation. He saw himself as breaking ranks with the left but not, initially at least, moving to the right. For a few years, he kept insisting that he was the true liberal or social democrat and that the word liberal had been kidnapped by radicals who the real antiliberals. After a while, though, he just gave up: “It seemed to me . . . that you just confused people if you insisted you were a liberal because the word now meant something else to almost everyone. At some point I yielded to the description of me as a neoconservative, and even eventually embraced it. . . . The takeover of the Democratic Party by the McGovernites helped to push me rightward, right of center, and various other developments furthered that process.” His shift to the right opened Podhoretz to charges that his support for an assertive anticommunist American foreign policy was tailored to fit the interests of Israel. “It’s a plausible theory,” he responds, “but it just happens not to be true.” For one thing, the chronology was wrong. “It was not for nothing that someone like me who was becoming more aggressively and staunchly pro-American should have become more and more willing to defend Israel against the same kind of attacks that were being made on the United States. But the driving force for me was in the first instance the anti-Americanism, not the anti-Semitism; the anti-Semitism came later chronologically. The left

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turned on Israel after 1967, only after the Six Day War. . . . Before 1967, which was when I began to get bothered by the anti-Americanism of the left, most people over there were still pro-Israel. . . . So it is not true that the tail was wagging the dog in my case. And it is certainly not true of any of the other Jewish neo-conservatives.” Of course, as a Jew and as editor of Commentary, Podhoretz was sensitive to the issue of anti-Semitism, particularly when he was attacked in terms that verged on the anti-Semitic, as in the above instance. This sensitivity enabled him to notice the similarity between anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism, and in his opinion they were uncannily similar. For example, there was an almost identical use of a double standard against Israel and America. Thus, Podhoretz would argue that in distinguishing between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, it was “anti-Semitism when Israel was denied the same rights that are accorded to all other nations: if another nation protects itself from foreign attacks, it is self-defense. If Israel defends itself, it is accused of aggression.” Podhoretz makes much the same distinction between legitimate criticism of American policy and anti-Americanism. Osama bin Laden “hates us not for anything we’ve done but for what we are. I think that is also true of anti-Semitism: Jews are not hated by anti-Semites for anything they do but for who they are. Of course the anti-Semites justify themselves by saying Jews do this, that, and the other thing, but those things turn out to be the things that all people do. If you are critical of America for a particular policy, and the criticism is limited, centered, on that policy, you are not being anti-American. If you say we should not go to war with Saddam Hussein because you think he can be contained, well, there’s no anti-Americanism in that. Yet when we see people who take that position hurling vile insults at America, we’re entitled to believe that they aren’t just against going to war, they’re against America”; thus the deep-rooted similarity between anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. In both there is the same psychological syndrome, in which the groups’ “virtues are totally overlooked, their vices wildly exaggerated, and some virtues turned into vices.” So, Podhoretz would argue, in a certain sense the Cold War goes on: “Is la guerre fini? Well, it’s a slightly different guerre.” To the ex-

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tent that communism was the issue, it is over, but to the extent that America was the issue in the Cold War, it goes on. That suggests that a reassessment of the Cold War might be in order, one that examines the otherwise inexplicable durability of the Soviet Union’s appeal as being rooted in its usefulness as a global champion and symbol of anti-Americanism. This chapter begins with a statement by Podhoretz on the centrality of anti-Americanism in the history of the Cold War. It ends with another provocative insight by this reliably provocative thinker, from My Love Affair With America: “The lesson was that anti-Semitism, even the relatively harmless genteel variety that enforced quotas against Jewish students or kept their parents from joining fashionable clubs or getting jobs in prestigious Wall Street law firms, could end in mass murder.”23 In light of 9/11, could there be any doubt that antiAmericanism, genteel or otherwise, could have similarly lethal consequences?

8 Joining the Ranks Commentary and American Conservatism George H. Nash

I

P

robably no American journal of opinion has been more praised and pilloried in the last thirty years than Commentary has, 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 which Commentary has 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 Confronting this unending avalanche of scholarship, apologia, and polemic, one is reminded of an anecdote told about Albert Einstein. Called on to speak at an after-dinner ceremony, he arose and declared simply, “There is nothing new to say.” Yet, on reflection, at least one part of the story merits further investigation. Most of the now-extensive literature on neoconservatism has tended to concentrate on its early years, when Norman Podhoretz and his allies staged an in151

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tellectual insurrection against the American Left. Relatively less attention has been paid to the rest of the story: the years in which the deradicalized journal joined forces with the American Right. It is Commentary’s process not of “breaking ranks,” but of joining ranks— the ranks of American conservatism—that will be the focus of the pages that follow.

II In its nearly sixty years of existence, Commentary has gone through three distinct ideological phases. The first (1945–1959), under its founding editor Elliot Cohen, may be labeled Cold War liberalism. The second (1960–late 1960s), under his successor Norman Podhoretz, might be called left/liberalism or New Leftism. The third, which Podhoretz initiated in 1970, was a repudiation of the second phase and a comprehensive assault on the Left in all its guises. To this third period (still ongoing), critics and scholars have affixed the label “neoconservatism.” We need not tarry long over the origins of this third chapter in Commentary’s political evolution. In three powerful memoirs and other writings, Podhoretz has explained in detail the reasons for his break with his erstwhile comrades. To say that in 1970 Commentary’s editor launched a comprehensive critique of “the Sixties” might be acceptable shorthand. To be somewhat more specific, Podhoretz and likeminded friends were appalled by the furious anti-Americanism, neoisolationism, and anti-anticommunism permeating the New Left in the later years of the Vietnam War and by the concurrent “cultural revolution of the 60’s.”2 They were equally alarmed by what they saw as the craven capitulation of the liberal elite to the swelling left-wing tide and by the emergence of a corrosively antibourgeois “adversary culture” sustained by this very elite. Many elements fueled the nascent neoconservatives’ apprehensions: destructive student radicalism on the campuses, the traumatic 1967 New York City teachers’ strike (which pitted blacks against Jews), the eruption of anti-Semitism in parts of the black community as black protest swept beyond the traditional civil rights agenda to demands for “black power” and even revolution, the rising cry for

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racial quotas in colleges and universities, and the shocking appearance of anti-Semitism and hostility to Israel on the American Left in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War. For all these reasons and more, Podhoretz concluded that the time had come for Commentary, and for Jews in general, to defend “the liberal democratic order in America” against the ideas of those, “especially on the radical Left,” who were working to destroy it.3 Commentary’s public volte-face began with the magazine’s June 1970 issue.4 For the next several years, every issue bristled with articles challenging the icons and shibboleths of the Left. That this was no passing intellectual squabble was apparent by 1972, when the magazine’s editor and his new allies vehemently opposed the leftist presidential candidacy of George McGovern. In a portent of things to come, that year Podhoretz voted to reelect President Richard Nixon. It was the first time he—and many other disaffected liberals—had ever cast a ballot for a Republican.5 The spectacle of exradicals and chastened liberals loudly rebelling against the transmogrification of American liberalism—a revolt against the Left from within—quickly aroused the interest of the nation’s media.6 Among those who were particularly intrigued were the editors of America’s principal conservative magazine, National Review, headquartered (like Commentary) in New York City. In March 1971, National Review took approving note of Commentary’s right turn in an editorial invitingly entitled “Come On In, the Water’s Fine.”7 A year later, one of National Review’s senior editors, James Burnham—an exMarxist himself, and thus in some ways a “premature neoconservative”—analyzed the intellectual journey that the Commentary circle was taking. To Burnham, the new ideological grouping had two characteristics: “a break with liberal doctrine” coupled with a retention of “the emotional gestalt of liberalism.” In his judgment, it was an “uneasy dualism” indicative of a “transitional state” that was “bound to develop further into a more integral outlook.”8 Meanwhile, National Review’s editor-in-chief, William F. Buckley Jr., had been getting acquainted with Norman Podhoretz. In 1972, the two began to correspond.9 In one letter, Buckley acclaimed the “superb job” that Podhoretz was doing at Commentary.10 Early in 1973, Podhoretz invited Buckley—evidently for the first time—to contrib-

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ute to a Commentary symposium.11 It was a subtle sign of the changing ideological landscape. Such gestures were all the more significant in the light of Commentary’s past unfriendliness to National Review. Back in 1956, scarcely six months after Buckley’s magazine was founded, Commentary had published a scathing attack on it, written by Dwight MacDonald. His article was called, “Scrambled Eggheads on the Right,” a title supplied by a young assistant editor named Norman Podhoretz.12 In 1965, Commentary had struck again, this time with an article by Richard H. Rovere entitled, “The Conservative Mindlessness.” According to Rovere, the “rightist intellectuals” clustered around Buckley had produced “almost nothing but insults to the intelligence.”13 Whatever their past ideological differences, by 1972 Podhoretz and Buckley had discovered common ground—so greatly had the political terrain shifted since the early 1960s. In part, perhaps, their developing friendship illustrated the old adage that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. More profoundly, it reflected the growing congruence between the Cold War liberalism that Podhoretz was now trying to revive and the Cold War conservatism championed by National Review. When it came to resisting Soviet imperialism abroad and de´tentist illusions (or worse) at home, the readers of Commentary could increasingly appreciate National Review (and vice versa). For Podhoretz, another factor permitted these first modest steps toward dialogue, and eventual alliance, with the respectable Right. In the wake of the harrowing Arab–Israeli war of 1967, the editor of Commentary had vowed with renewed determination to defend the state of Israel “relentlessly” against its enemies and to “stand up for Jewish interests in America” whenever they were threatened.14 Where, he asked publicly in 1971, were these threats to be found? In “the ideological precincts of the Radical Left,” he answered, where hostility to Israel had merged with a “larger hostility among intellectuals to America, to middle-class values, to industrialism, to technology, and even to democracy.” The “most active enemies of the Jews,” he insisted, were now on the far Left, not on the “ideological Right.”15 It was an assertion profoundly counter to Jewish historical experience abroad—and profoundly consequential for the unfolding direction of Commentary.

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If the conservative editors of National Review were encouraged by Commentary’s tilt toward “right-wing liberalism,”16 the Jewish magazine’s erstwhile friends on the Left were infuriated. To them Podhoretz and company had become “apostates and lunatics”17 —in a word, traitors. Socialists like Irving Howe and Michael Harrington were particularly incensed—and perhaps particularly worried by the new movement’s potential. In 1974, Howe and Lewis A. Coser edited an entire volume of essays critical of the pernicious phenomenon. They entitled their book The New Conservatives.18 To compound the insult (in their circle the word “conservative” was no honorific), Harrington and others disseminated a taunting epithet that caught the fancy of the media. Podhoretz and his ilk, they charged, had become “neoconservatives.”19 Not surprisingly, the Commentary circle did not take kindly to this tendentious label. In an elementary sense, of course, by veering away from the radical Left, Podhoretz and company had necessarily moved toward the Right. But not, they vigorously argued, into the Right. Time and again, Podhoretz and other Commentary stalwarts insisted that they were really (once again) true liberals, striving to rescue an honorable political tradition from those we were trying (as Podhoretz’s wife, Midge Decter, said) to “abscond with its good name.”20 They were liberals—unabashed, anticommunist, Cold War liberals—endeavoring to revive the Vital Center after its collapse during the intellectuals’ civil war over Vietnam. In substantial measure, Podhoretz was attempting to revert to Commentary’s first phase, its pre-1960 phase: the days when it had affirmed “hard” anticommunism, moderate reformism, and the essential goodness of American civilization. Here we come to a crucial point about the opening stage (roughly 1970–1979) in Commentary’s turn to the Right: it was a turn only, not a conversion. Podhoretz himself (and various contributors to Commentary) might reach out cautiously to Buckley’s National Review, and even occasionally socialize with conservative intellectuals, but they did not embrace National Review–style conservatism, or its political vehicle, the Republican Party. Why not? For one thing, as self-defined liberals and Democrats, they were not yet ready to give up on their party of heritage. In December 1972, just after the McGovern election debacle, Podhoretz

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and many other intellectuals associated with Commentary organized the Coalition for a Democratic Majority to recapture the Democratic Party from the McGovernites.21 In 1975 and 1976, many of these same right-wing liberals rallied to the presidential candidacy of Senator Henry Jackson (D-Washington). These efforts ultimately failed, of course, but it took several years for neoconservative activists to recognize they could not go home again. Another impediment to realignment lay in the neoconservatives’ perception of the landscape beyond the precincts of liberalism. It was one thing to consort with a dashing conservative like Buckley, a verbalist and controversialist like themselves. It was quite another thing to contemplate joining the Republican Party of Richard Nixon. To the gathering clan of neoconservatives—heavily Northeastern, disproportionately Jewish, and at home in the intellectual hothouse of New York—the Republican Party represented the alien and boring world of business, country clubs, and small-town America. As for Nixon himself, although many neoconservatives had preferred him to McGovern (faute de mieux), the Republican President’s Cold War policy of de´tente seemed a feeble foundation for the revival of American power and self-confidence that they craved.22 Still another brake on Commentary’s rightward drift arose in the mid-1970s in the person of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In 1975, the revisionist liberal professor and former government official published in Commentary a passionate summons to the United States to stand up and defend its liberal democratic principles at the United Nations against the anti-American, anti-democratic, and illiberal attacks cascading from its ideological foes in the Third World.23 Within weeks Moynihan found himself appointed American ambassador to the United Nations, where for the next eight months he waged a spirited counterattack and reaffirmation of American values. So popular did he become that in 1976, in part at Podhoretz’s urging, Moynihan sought the Democratic senatorial nomination in New York.24 After first defeating two leftists in the party’s primary, Moynihan ousted the conservative Republican incumbent—William F. Buckley Jr.’s brother— in the fall election. For Podhoretz, writing as a “centrist liberal” three years later, Moynihan’s victory represented a triumph of a man of “the old liberal tradition” over “the kind of conservative who might more properly have been called a radical of the Right.”25

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For the next three years Senator Moynihan was Commentary’s hero and the bearer of its political aspirations.26 As long as Moynihan was a potential contender for the presidency, the right-wing liberals now known as neoconservatives could dream of redeeming the Democratic Party and resuscitating the Cold War liberalism for which they stood. As long as such a project seemed viable, their trek to the Right would be hesitant and incomplete. Beneath these political circumstances and calculations, however, deeper inhibitions were at work. Although increasingly aware of the failure of Great Society liberalism (a lesson taught by that other neoconservative journal par excellence, The Public Interest),27 the Commentary circle during the 1970s continued to believe in the welfare state—in contrast, they believed, to the conservatives at National Review, who appeared unreconciled even then to the New Deal.28 Moreover, many of Commentary’s writers had grown up poor during the Great Depression and did not share what they perceived as conservative antipathy to the labor movement.29 To Commentary-style neoconservatives in the making, the leadership of America’s labor unions was resolutely anticommunist, which was more than they could say about some business leaders.30 (Here again, neoconservatives seemed to conflate conservative intellectuals with Republicans.) Militant, evangelistic anticommunism, of course, was to be the great bonding agent between Buckleyite conservatism and the new variant stirring around Commentary. Here, too, however, there was a difference—at least in some neoconservative minds—that may have imparted some sense of distance from the Right. In the 1950s, Norman Podhoretz has written, he vigorously disputed the “antisecularist” contention (held by conservatives like Buckley and Whittaker Chambers) that the salient difference between the Communist and Western worlds was that “they were godless and we were not”: I did not, that is, accept the idea that the cold war was a war between atheism and religious faith. What in my view separated us from them was that we were free and they were not, that our political system was democratic and that theirs was totalitarian.31

It is difficult to know how much such a difference of perspective was still operative twenty years later, but it does bring back to mind James Burnham’s observation in 1972 that the neoconservatives had broken

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with liberalism’s “doctrine” but not with its “gestalt.” And two powerful elements in the liberal gestalt of the 1970s (and later) were a suspicion of religiously based discourse and a conviction that conservative intellectuals were at best eccentrics, not to be taken seriously by open (i.e., liberal) minds. Beyond the “policy gap” between Commentary and mainstream conservatism, then, there lay a “culture gap” that had not yet been bridged. Although little has been written about this subject, one has a sense that to much of the Commentary circle of the mid- and late 1970s, the existing conservative intellectual community was an unimpressive lot.32 In this largely unspoken attitude, Commentary may have been influenced by the much-quoted words of its literary patron saint (and Podhoretz’s mentor), Lionel Trilling. Back in 1950 (in The Liberal Imagination), Trilling had famously declared that “no conservative or reactionary ideas” were in “general circulation” in the United States and that liberalism was the country’s “sole intellectual tradition.”33 Trilling was wrong, as Podhoretz later acknowledged,34 but the eminent literary critic’s pronouncement long reverberated through the corridors of academia, reinforcing a subtle superiority complex that distorted liberal judgment of conservatism until quite recently. Yet if—for all these reasons—Commentary had not yet come all the way into the water, National Review–style conservatives could applaud its progress, and did.35 As former Leftists, Podhoretz and his colleagues had an advantage: they knew their enemy intimately and knew how to breach its armor.36 Even more important, as writers and academics who had made their reputation while on the Left, the neoconservatives could not be contemptuously ignored. In the hierarchy of the American intelligentsia, their credentials and status were unassailable. This meant that—to the consternation of their enemies— they could reach an audience largely impervious to the arguments of marginalized conservatives. As the 1970s unfolded, then, the self-styled “centrists” around Commentary did not “convert”—not yet.37 But the political tide was now running against them. Increasingly appalled by Soviet expansionism abroad and by the fecklessness and flaccidity of the American response, the born-again Cold Warriors at Commentary became ever more estranged from the administration of President Jimmy Carter.

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One historian of neoconservatism has labeled the years 1976–1980 the time of “Searching for Truman.”38 One might just as aptly label it “Waiting for Moynihan.” But in 1979 Senator Moynihan—a politician now—signaled that he had no intention of challenging Carter’s renomination, thereby depriving Podhoretz and others of their wouldbe paladin.39 The vaunted middle ground of Cold War liberalism had become a will-o’-the wisp. Thus, in 1980, Norman Podhoretz and a host of right-wing liberals of the Commentary/Henry Jackson/Daniel Moynihan stripe rallied to the candidacy of the man whose celebration of American virtues and whose anticommunist fervor most closely resembled their own: Ronald Reagan. Initially, in a private meeting in 1979, Podhoretz had not been impressed by Reagan’s intellect.40 Nevertheless, after nearly a decade of contention with former soulmates on the left-of-center, the editor of Commentary had learned a lesson: “that one ought to join the side one was now on instead of engaging in a futile attempt to change the side one used to be on.”41 In 1980, Podhoretz voted unhesitatingly for Reagan for president and even published a pro-Reagan foreign policy manifesto entitled The Present Danger.42 When Reagan won the election in a landslide, a jubilant Podhoretz declared in Commentary that the Republican Party had a “truly historic opportunity” to “reverse the decline of American power.”43 It was a new era, and not just for Republicans. During the 1970s, Commentary had mounted a relentless critique of the American Left from the right (but not from within the Right), thereby helping to create an intellectual climate receptive to Reaganism. In the political crucible of 1980, the magazine’s liberal inhibitions disappeared. In 1980, Commentary and its editor crossed the Rubicon.

III With the inauguration of President Reagan in 1981, a new chapter in Commentary’s turn to the right commenced—a chapter that, in its essential features, continues to unfold. The minutiae of the story line need not detain us. What is more interesting—and revealing—is the evolving interplay between the now unabashedly neoconservative magazine and the larger political and intellectual constellation that it joined.

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In the early 1980s, for the first time since the mid-1960s, Commentary had a sympathetic audience in Washington. Not only were its monthly issues avidly read inside the Beltway but many of its former contributors and allies (including Podhoretz’s son-in-law) attained positions of influence in the Reagan administration, particularly in the foreign policy and military establishments.44 The prime example of this nexus was Jeane Kirkpatrick, whose 1979 article in Commentary on “Dictatorships and Double Standards” had profoundly impressed Ronald Reagan and had led to his selection of her to be his administration’s ambassador to the United Nations.45 If, as some like to say, the function of intellectuals is to “speak truth to power,” Commentary in the early 1980s was superbly situated for the task. Politically, then, the Reagan years were Commentary’s moment in the sun. However, with newfound influence came a subtle change of circumstances. Although Commentary was never a house organ of the Reagan administration or the Republican Party, the neoconservatives for whom it spoke were not free-floating intellectuals, either. They were now part of a wider conservative coalition embracing five distinctive elements: libertarians—defenders of free market economics and personal liberty against socialism and the metastasizing, regulatory, welfare state; traditionalists—defenders of traditional social mores and morals (the “permanent things”) against the corrosive acids of modernity, especially secular liberalism; Cold Warriors—specialists in the military and geopolitical struggle against Communism and the Soviet “evil empire”; the Religious Right—evangelical Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Orthodox Jews engaged in grassroots resistance to a deepening cultural revolution waged by a secular, liberal elite against Judeo-Christian morality and institutions; and the neoconservatives themselves. Although the neoconservatives shared, to varying degrees, the concerns of the other constituents of the conservative grand alliance, the fact that they now belonged to an alliance was to pose eventual problems for Commentary. As the neoconservatives quickly settled into the Reaganite landscape, signs of their adaptation to the new zeitgeist multiplied. Gone now was any lingering public resistance to the label that had been pinned on them.46 More interesting still, gone now—or at least going—was the abstract and reflexive commitment to the welfare state

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that had kept many fledgling neoconservatives from accepting National Review–style economics.47 Why? In part, no doubt, like much of America, the Commentary circle had been “mugged by reality”—the reality of stagflation during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. In part, too, the writers for Commentary were influenced by the trenchant critique of Great Society liberalism emanating from The Public Interest, edited by neoconservatism’s “godfather,” Irving Kristol. Nor was the Commentary circle unaware of the spectacular appearance in the late 1970s of a new body of thought called supply-side economics, of which Kristol was the leading impresario.48 More than ever, conventional welfare state liberalism seemed problematic. Not surprisingly, then, in the 1980s Commentary became an ardent exponent of capitalism.49 Fittingly enough, it was Podhoretz’s wife, Midge Decter, who edited one of the classic pro-capitalist tracts of the decade, George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty.50 Commentary also publicized the pathbreaking work of the neoconservative scholar Michael Novak, whose The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1983) became the locus classicus of a new moral and theological case for the American economic system.51 By extolling capitalism not just pragmatically but philosophically (“democratic capitalism”), Commentary contributed substantially to the intellectual counterrevolution against the Left. In so doing, the magazine altered not only the national climate of opinion but also its own mooring on the ideological spectrum. In the realm of foreign policy, Commentary’s trajectory during the 1980s was somewhat different. Already militantly anticommunist and supportive of aggressive resistance to the Soviet empire, the magazine changed little in this area after the 1980 election: Its hard-line Cold War posture was already congruent with Ronald Reagan’s. Ideological compatibility was one thing, however, programmatic implementation another. Here, to its surprise and distress, the magazine found itself frequently to the right of the Reagan administration. At times Podhoretz and other Commentary writers sternly criticized the Reagan team for failing to prosecute the Cold War energetically enough and for succumbing to de´tentist illusions about the Soviet Union.52 On one occasion, the criticism elicited a telephone call to Podhoretz from Reagan himself.53

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Yet if the Commentary neoconservatives were now fulfilling James Burnham’s prophecy that they would develop “a more integral outlook,” a troubling question was beginning to take form by the mid1980s—not on the Left, from which Commentary had long since broken ranks, but on the intellectual Right: Was the neoconservatives’ world view truly conservative? Aside from being zealous anticommunists, did they belong on the Right at all? To an increasingly angry group of traditionalists, who took the label “paleoconservatives,” the answer was emphatically no. The “neocons” (they argued) were “impostors” and “interlopers,” who despite their recent rightward journey remained essentially secular, Wilsonian, and welfare-statist in their philosophy.54 In other words, not conservative at all. Where, for example, traditional conservatives had opposed Communism in the name of Western civilization, the neoconservatives of the 1980s did so (said their right-wing critics) in the name of a grandiose, neo-Wilsonian ideology of “global democratic capitalism.” As if (said disgusted “paleos”) “capitalism” and “global democracy” were the essence of the conservative cause. The conflict between the two factions first surfaced in 1981, when President Reagan selected the Brooklyn-born neoconservative William Bennett (over the Texas traditionalist Professor M. E. Bradford) to chair the National Endowment for the Humanities after a lobbying battle that left many wounds. Bradford, a prolific scholar and disciple of the anticapitalist Southern Agrarian writers of the 1930s, was a popular figure in the conservative intellectual community, but on three counts he was politically vulnerable: he had opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he had supported George Wallace for President in 1968 and 1972, and in his scholarly writings he had excoriated Abraham Lincoln. Seizing on this record, his neoconservative antagonists derailed his nomination, to the undying outrage of some of his supporters.55 Partly, perhaps, out of deference to the ecumenical tone of the Reagan administration, the clash between the “neocons” and their rivals stayed mostly out of view for several years, but the feud publicly erupted again in 1986, when Bradford and his allies subjected the neoconservatives to a scathing critique at the annual meeting of the conservative Philadelphia Society and in the Intercollegiate Review.56

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The fat was now in the fire. In 1989 and 1990, the lingering animosities flared into a firestorm that threatened to sunder the conservative alliance. The outbreak of the “conservative wars” (as the New Republic labeled them) unleashed a torrent of analysis, mostly by aggrieved paleoconservatives and liberal journalists eager to document the “conservative crackup.”57 At one level, the problem was cast in personal and political terms: Some paleoconservatives accused the “neocons” of capturing the leading conservative grant-making foundations and deliberately defunding more genuinely conservative challenges to the status quo.58 According to the preeminent traditionalist author Russell Kirk, the neoconservatives had “behaved as if they were the cadre of political machines . . . eager for place and preferment and power, skillful at intrigue.”59 Another traditionalist scholar, Stephen Tonsor, was more blunt: It has always struck me as odd, even perverse, that former Marxists have been permitted, yes invited, to play such a leading role in the Conservative movement in the twentieth century. It is splendid when the town whore gets religion and joins the church. Now and then she makes a good choir director, but when she begins to tell the minister what he ought to say in his Sunday sermons, matters have been carried too far.60

Most observers agreed that the differences between the neoconservatives and other conservatives went deeper than the rough-and-tumble of coalition politics. Some stressed sociological factors: The neoconservatives at Commentary and elsewhere tended to be city folk, often New Yorkers, Jewish, and formerly Marxist, in contrast to the paleoconservatives, who were based in the South and Midwest.61 Moreover, most neoconservative scholars (it was claimed) seemed to be social scientists, susceptible to meliorist temptations; traditionalist conservatives, in contrast, tended to find their home in the humanities.62 A recurrent refrain on the “paleo” Right was that the neoconservatives had simply not escaped the prison of their philosophical premises: in their worldview they were liberals and modernists still. Far from supporting “diversity in the world,” said Russell Kirk, the neoconservatives “aspire to bring about a world of uniformity and dull standardization, Americanized, industrialized, democratized, logicalized, boring.”63 It was noteworthy that what to neoconservatives were good

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words (“Americanize” and “democratize”) were to Kirk and his followers the distasteful vocabulary of liberalism.64 There, as much as anywhere, lay the rub. To Stephen Tonsor, the neoconservatives were still trapped in “the halfway house” of secularized modernity. True conservatism, he averred, had its roots in Roman and Anglo-Catholicism; its culture was not alienated modernity but “Christian humanism.” The neoconservative phenomenon was “a transmogrification of ‘the New York intellectuals’ . . . who, in turn, reflected the instantiation of modernity among secularized Jewish intellectuals.” He boldly called on the neoconservatives (so many of whom were Jewish) to renounce their “cultural modernism” and return (if they “wish us to take their conservatism seriously”) to “the religious roots, beliefs, and values of our common heritage.”65 Initially the neoconservatives said little in print about these fusillades. One exception was a 1988 article in Commentary that argued that, when all was said and done, neoconservatism was closer to the American mainstream than was its rival. The “fundamental difference” between the two bodies of thought, the Commentary writer asserted, was that neoconservatives belonged to “the tradition of liberaldemocratic modernity,” whereas the paleoconservatives were “heirs to the Christian and aristocratic Middle Ages.” The neoconservatives espoused the principles of “individual liberty, self-government, and equality of opportunity”; their antagonists affirmed religious (especially Christian) belief, prescription, and hierarchy. From this perspective, the writer argued, it was neoconservatism, not paleoconservatism, that was “both genuinely American and genuinely conservative.”66 Once more Commentary was positioning itself in the center, between the far Right and far Left. If the sectarian strife had proceeded at this level of abstraction, it might eventually have subsided into a sullen truce. But amid the sound and fury of paleoconservative indignation, worried neoconservatives thought they discerned something more: the resentful rumblings of neoisolationist nativism and, in a few cases, anti-Semitism. For Norman Podhoretz in particular, who had long felt a special responsibility to defend “Jewish interests,” the apparent recrudescence of long-suppressed anti-Semitism on the Left and the Right was profoundly disturbing. Never one to shy from journalistic conten-

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tion, between 1986 and the early 1990s he publicly accused several paleoconservatives of anti-Semitic utterances.67 The editor of Commentary was most perturbed by the pugnacious, paleoconservative journalist Patrick Buchanan, whose public remarks on Israel and related subjects Podhoretz judged to be indisputably anti-Semitic.68 Podhoretz’s dismay intensified when Buchanan turned politician in 1991 and vowed to “take back” the conservative movement from the “neocon” cabal.69 Fiercely and defiantly “nationalist” (rather than “internationalist”), skeptical of “global democracy” and entanglements overseas (including the Middle East), and fearful of the effect of Third World immigration on America’s Europe-oriented culture, Buchananite paleoconservatism increasingly resembled nothing so much as the American Right before the onset of the Cold War. When Buchanan himself campaigned for the presidency in 1992 under the pre– World War II “isolationist” banner of “America First,” his symbolism seemed deliberate and complete. To Jewish neoconservatives who vividly recalled Charles Lindbergh’s aspersions about “the Jews” at an America First antiwar rally in 1941, Buchanan’s revival of pre-1945, “Old Right” conservatism was not pleasant to contemplate. The political aspirations of Patrick Buchanan triggered another round of conservative discord, in which Podhoretz and Commentary conspicuously participated.70 Podhoretz, to put it mildly, was not amused when National Review, for “tactical” reasons, briefly supported Buchanan’s presidential campaign against President George Bush in 1992.71 So heated did the atmosphere become on the Right, especially over the sensitive issue of anti-Semitism, that William F. Buckley Jr.—the paterfamilias of the conservative intellectual movement—was moved to publish an entire book on the subject in 1991.72 To the immense pleasure and relief of Podhoretz, Buckley came down largely on the side of the neoconservatives.73 Beyond the passions and particularities of the moment, what was going on? In retrospect, it is clear that from the mid-1980s to the mid1990s, American conservative intellectuals became embroiled in a great transitional struggle for self-definition. When President Reagan retired in 1989, they lost the unifying hero who had embodied each component of the five-part conservative coalition. When the Cold War ended soon after, they lost much of the ideological cement and imper-

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ative to cooperate that had held them together and suppressed deviationist tendencies. In 1990, William F. Buckley Jr. retired as editor of National Review—another sign that the American Right was entering a new phase. With the leadership of the conservative movement seemingly up for grabs, and with a strange, new, post–Cold War world now looming, the possibility seemed real that the conservative community might revert to its pre–Cold War, pre-Buckleyite roots. For the embattled editor of Commentary and his fellow neoconservatives, the stakes in this transition were especially high. For nearly a decade, Podhoretz had made his political home on the Right. For nearly two decades he had contended that there was far more antiSemitism on the American Left than on the Right. To his Jewish readers and others, Podhoretz had cited William F. Buckley Jr.’s long and honorable record of keeping National Review free of any antiSemitic taint.74 In effect, Podhoretz had been asserting that it was now safe for a Jew to be a conservative. What if he were wrong? When the polemical dust finally settled in the mid-1990s, it became clear that Podhoretz’s apprehensions had not materialized. The political and intellectual landscape on the Right was far more congenial to the neoconservatives than to their paleoconservative adversaries. Although Buchanan and his brethren continued to compete in the public square (in 2002 he launched a new magazine)75, both politically and intellectually the “Old Right” remained on the margin of the conservative movement. The conservative establishment had not been overthrown. Why not? Why—to put the question differently—did mainstream conservatism seem increasingly indistinguishable from its neoconservative variant? To some paleoconservatives, the answer was unflattering: Conservative media and institutions had been systematically coopted and corrupted, by money from neoconservative-dominated foundations, by misplaced friendship, and by the fear of being labeled anti-Semitic.76 Whatever the truth of such allegations in individual cases, deeper intellectual currents were at work. Back in 1972, long before Commentary joined the conservative ranks, the “premature neoconservative” James Burnham declared in National Review that much conservative “doctrine” had become “more and more obviously obsolescent.”77 So, for better or worse, it turned out to be. In the late

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1970s and 1980s, conservative intellectuals increasingly accepted—in practice if not quite in principle—the continued existence of the welfare state.78 What was Ronald Reagan’s “safety net” but an acknowledgment by conservatives that some form of governmental aid to the needy would always be with us? What, indeed, was supply-side economics (in part a neoconservative invention) but an effort not to dismantle the State (an impossibility) but to shrink its importance by enlarging the private sector through economic growth? On another front—race relations—the conservative movement also shifted toward the center, making peace with the civil rights legislation of the 1960s (and the memory of Martin Luther King Jr.) but drawing the line against quotas and reverse discrimination. Here, as in economic policy, the older conservative community’s dominant perspective increasingly converged with that of the neoconservatives.79 The Commentary-style neoconservatives were changing, too, however, although more, perhaps, in their gestalt than in their doctrine. In their enthusiastic embrace of “democratic capitalism” during the 1980s and their growing recognition of the “social pathologies” of the welfare state, Podhoretz and his associates had come a long way from the liberal and radical biases of their youth.80 And when the Cold War preoccupations of the 1970s and 1980s yielded to the “culture wars” of the 1990s, Podhoretz increasingly explored the moral and religious dimensions of contemporary issues—and in terms that nearly every conservative could applaud.81 Here again, perceived barriers between “secular” neoconservatives and “religious” traditional conservatives were fading away. In no respect was this rapprochement more remarkable than in the willingness of Commentary in the 1990s to defend another crucial part of the conservative coalition: the religious Right. Although the faithbased conservatives included Orthodox Jews and rabbis, the bulk of the movement consisted of Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants, led first by Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority organization and then by Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition. It is no exaggeration to say that the political awakening of theologically conservative Christians in the 1980s stirred enormous anxiety among American Jews. Conditioned by centuries of European experience to fear the political Right and the populist manifestations of

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Christian militancy, apprehensive Jews now perceived both elements to be arising simultaneously in America. As the energized Christians pushed their agenda (notably about abortion) into the public arena, Jews who had been taught to equate the “Jewish interest” with liberalism and secularism were greatly vexed. How could such a phenomenon possibly be good for the Jews? And why, some of them must have asked themselves, was Commentary—a Jewish magazine—cohabiting a political dwelling with people like that? Yet (and the evidence was undeniable) Pat Robertson and other Christian conservative leaders were vocally and strenuously supportive of Israel—as much as, if not more than, any other non-Jewish segment of the American population. Should Jews reject such potentially useful allies in the defense of the Jewish state? For the Commentary circle of Jewish neoconservatives, the issue became acute in mid-1994, when the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith published a 193-page report condemning the religious Right for an “assault on tolerance and pluralism in America.”82 According to the ADL’s national director, the religious Right indulged in “a rhetoric of fear, suspicion and even hatred that stains the democratic process.”83 Such an attack was not in itself surprising: the ADL had long been critical of spokesmen for American conservatism.84 What was newsworthy was the response to the ADL by Jewish neoconservatives. In short order, Podhoretz’s wife collected the signatures of seventy-five Jewish leaders, including many contributors to Commentary, on a full-page advertisement in the New York Times under the headline “Should Jews fear the ‘Christian Right’?” The Jewish signatories accused the ADL of perpetrating an act of “defamation” and “bigotry” against conservative Christians. They asked, how was “the political activity of Christian conservatives” tantamount to “an assault on pluralism”? “The separation of church and state is not the same thing as the elimination of religious values and concepts from political discourse.” More pointedly still, the Jewish neoconservatives remarked, “Judaism is not, as the ADL seems to suggest, coextensive with liberalism.” “Above all,” they concluded, on the issue of “the survival of Israel,” Jews “have no more stalwart friends than evangelical Christians.”85 Clearly the neoconservative defense of the Christian Right contained an element of pragmatic calculation: Pat Robertson and his

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followers were friends of Israel, and hence good for the Jews. Norman Podhoretz himself, in a 1995 article in Commentary, made this very point in the course of absolving Robertson of the charge (by leftist critics) of anti-Semitism.86 But Podhoretz was willing to go even farther: “Who’s afraid of the religious Right? Not I,” he announced in National Review in 2000. Not only was he not afraid of the religious Right, he actually believed that it possessed “certain positive virtues.” It had reminded America of her “religious foundations”—the “capital” on which her “democratic system still draws”—and it had “acted as an often lonely source of resistance to the complete triumph of relativism in our culture and libertinism in our behavior.”87 Here, in plain view, was yet another bridge that now linked Commentary-style neoconservatives to their compatriots on the Right. Neoconservative hostility to the antinomian countercultural upheaval of the 1960s blended nicely with conservative revulsion against the “liberationist” trends of the 1990s. How far Podhoretz and his allies around Commentary had traveled from the “halfway house” of modernity—and from the predominantly secular and liberal Jewish community. Liberal Jews might still worry about the threat of a “Christian America.” Neoconservative Jews were more alarmed about living in an anti-Christian America—a harsh, atheistic, morally disorienting world that was a menace to everyone, including Jews.88 Yet if Commentary-style neoconservatives increasingly shared the religious Right’s moral concerns, this did not mean that they had succumbed to cultural despair. This became apparent in late 1996 and 1997, when a new storm blew in from a totally unexpected direction: the religious magazine First Things, edited by Podhoretz’s neoconservative friend, Richard John Neuhaus. In a symposium entitled “The End of Democracy? The Judicial Usurpation of Politics,” Neuhaus and his colleagues charged that the American judiciary had become so brazenly imperialistic and so utterly divorced from Biblical morality in its rulings that it constituted a threat to the very foundations of the American political order. Millions of Americans, Neuhaus asserted, were becoming profoundly alienated from their government. Citing Nazi Germany as an analogy, he wondered aloud whether the time might be near when “conscientious citizens” could “no longer give moral assent to the existing regime.” The symposium also seemed to hint that active resistance to unjust laws—including civil disobedi-

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ence and “morally justified revolution”—might someday be necessary.89 The First Things symposium was deliberately provocative, and no one was more provoked than Norman Podhoretz and some of his fellow neoconservatives. Although Podhoretz had long been critical of the imperial judiciary, he was outraged at what he deemed an irresponsible, seditious, anti-American outburst that was uncomfortably reminiscent of the radical Left’s attack on the American “regime” in the 1960s: “I did not become a conservative in order to be a radical,” he told Neuhaus, “let alone to support the preaching of revolution against this country.”90 To Podhoretz and such allies as the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, the symposium’s questioning of the legitimacy of the American regime was beyond the pale of responsible conservative discourse.91 Two neoconservative scholars severed their association with First Things in protest.92 In the next several months, the conservative intellectual community, including the Commentary circle, plunged into a new and highly publicized civil war—or so it seemed for a time.93 So incendiary was the subject matter, and so distinguished were the polemicists, that the media strained to put labels on the feuding factions. It was said to be a war between “neocons” and “theocons,” Straussian political philosophers and Catholic Thomists, even Jews and Christians.94 One commentator, an Orthodox rabbi, denied that the split was between Jews and Christians at all. It represented, rather, a division between the orthodox believers of either faith on one hand, and bourgeois conservatives on the other. Most of the neocons are defending bourgeois stability and respectability; Father Neuhaus, on the other hand, realizes that much of the American right is not clear about the basic civilizational crisis. That’s because he is an orthodox Catholic, while most of the neocons are not orthodox Jews.95

The rabbi may have had a point about Podhoretz and some of the neoconservatives associated with Commentary: Perturbed though Podhoretz was by the ravages wrought by the 1960s counterculture and its heirs, he did not believe that the “traditionalists” were losing the culture war. It seemed instead than an “armistice” was in the making.96 Rejecting what he called “the anti-Americanism of the Right,” he emphatically did not see his native land as mired in irredeemable

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decay.97 To the contrary, it was in a mood of profound gratitude that he published in 2000 a memoir revealingly entitled My Love Affair with America.98 Although Podhoretz initially feared that the First Things symposium had created the “most consequential” fissure of all on the contemporary Right,99 the explosive controversy soon subsided, as both sides pulled back from the rhetorical brink.100 Despite all the verbal pyrotechnics and journalistic drumrolling, the intellectual Right did not inwardly secede from the American regime in 1997. For Podhoretz, this turn of events came as a great relief. In 1995, he had retired as Commentary’s editor; as he later remarked, he was now “too old to seek for yet another political home.”101

IV In March 1996, a few months after his retirement, Podhoretz published in Commentary a lengthy “eulogy” for neoconservatism. The movement, he announced, was “dead,” a victim “not of failure but of success.”102 The retired editor enumerated some of the ways that the neoconservative movement had altered the “character” and “ethos” of American conservatism as well as the larger course of American history. “More passionately and more effectively than any other group,” he asserted, the neoconservatives had exposed the “lies” of 1960s radicalism. “[M]ore passionately and more effectively than any other group,” the neoconservatives had undertaken the task “of rebuilding intellectual and moral confidence in the values and institutions on which American society rests”—values that he unashamedly lauded as those of “the bourgeois democratic order.”103 “The bourgeois democratic order”: In this one phrase Podhoretz spoke volumes about the kind of conservatism that he and Commentary had come to espouse. In 1945, Commentary had been born into a marginal, impoverished, immigrant-based subculture and an intellectual milieu that touted “alienation” and “critical nonconformity” as the true marks of the intellectual vis-a`-vis his own culture. Two generations later, Commentary stood in the mainstream of American culture, and even of American conservatism, as a celebrant of the funda-

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mental goodness of the American regime, and Norman Podhoretz, an immigrant milkman’s son, was its advocate. It was a stunning achievement. In his list of neoconservative successes, however, there was one that Podhoretz omitted, though in the long run it may prove to be the most important of all. It concerns Commentary’s effect on the Jewish community. In his recent autobiography, A Jew in America, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg (who officiated at Norman Podhoretz’s wedding to Midge Decter) recounts how he did not join his neoconservative friends in their turn to the Right after the trauma of the Six-Day War. Hertzberg shared the incipient neoconservatives’ outrage at “the betrayal of Israel” by many liberals “in its moment of need,” but I could not agree with them that political and social liberalism was to be abandoned. I did not see the conservatives in America flocking to the banner of racial equality or abjuring their own long-standing habits of excluding Jews wherever and whenever they could. . . . I refused to believe that Jews could find dependable allies in that part of American society that had almost always excluded them and held them in social contempt.104

Hertzberg was referring, of course, to American conservatism as he perceived it in the 1960s. But his refusal to believe that Jews could find “dependable allies” on the Right bespoke an adamantine resistance to conservatism that has by no means disappeared among American Jews—an ideological headwind against which Commentary has had to contend since 1970. Commentary under Podhoretz did not, of course, convert the majority of American Jews to its brand of conservatism, but it did accomplish something almost as momentous: It made conservatism a respected and unignorable presence in the Jewish community. Like William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, it was heard. At least as important, Commentary opened a door to a new generation of conservative Jewish writers, not just by publishing some of their work in its pages but by the compelling example of its own history. For if Commentary-style neoconservatism lost its distinctiveness in the 1990s, the decade also witnessed another phenomenon: the emergence of a host of postneoconservative Jewish journalists and scholars into the front ranks of American conservatism.105 A few of them—like John Podhoretz and William Kristol—were literally the

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offspring of neoconservative parents, but all of them, in a sense, were Commentary’s children—not because they were true neoconservatives (leftists who turned Right) but precisely because they did not need to be: Commentary had helped to clear the ground before them. Thanks to the labors of Podhoretz and his generation, it was now respectable—and, indeed, hardly worthy of comment—to be both a Jew and a conservative. With that achievement, Podhoretz had earned the right to retire. Neoconservatism may be dead, but its legacy thrives. Thanks in no small measure to Commentary, it may be said of today’s mainstream Right: “We are all neoconservatives now.”

9 Commentary’s Children Neoconservatism in the Twenty-First Century John Ehrman

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ommentary is synonymous with neoconservatism. Although neoconservatism was born in 1965, in the pages of Irving Kristol’s journal the Public Interest, it was not until editor Norman Podhoretz used Commentary in 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. Two of its best-known contributors, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick, served as U.S. ambassadors to the United Nations, where they became known for their strong denunciations of the Soviet Union and Third World radicalism. Moynihan went on to serve four terms as senator from New York, and several other Commentary contributors received high-level appointments in the Reagan administration. Because of its role in developing ideas and people 174

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for conservative politics, as well as its continuing criticisms of liberalism, Commentary by the early 1990s had gained a new identity as a leading intellectual journal for the American Right.1 Commentary’s influence in early-twenty-first century America remains substantial. The political climate in the United States is more conservative than when neoconservatism emerged, and many more periodicals, institutions, and politicians espouse conservative ideas than was the case in the early 1970s. However, even if Commentary is one voice among many, the War on Terrorism and the invasion of Iraq have prompted the popular media to pay a great deal of attention to neoconservatism. Much of what has been said or written is erroneous or exaggerated, but it also points to a way of measuring Commentary’s influence. Looking at the people, institutions, and views that characterize neoconservatism today shows how they have been shaped by Commentary and how the magazine continues to affect American politics.

Three Generations Neoconservatism began as a defensive reaction to the New Left’s attacks on post-1945 liberalism. The original neoconservatives—most notably Kristol and Podhoretz—were prominent figures in New York’s predominantly Jewish intellectual community. Many in the group had escaped the poverty of their youths by going to college, and as young intellectuals, they had been active in the anti-Stalinist Left of the 1930s and 1940s. After World War II, they became part of the Cold War liberal consensus, strongly anticommunist and believing in the virtues of liberal democracy, regulated capitalism, and—reflecting their personal experiences—rigorous standards for higher education. In Podhoretz’s view, however, during the 1960s the New Left developed an implacable hatred toward these attributes of “bourgeois civilization . . . as well as the values traditionally associated with it (ambition, discipline, work).” In response, in June 1970 he began using Commentary to attack “almost every important aspect of the radicalism of the sixties; its political ideas, its cultural attitudes, its institutional structures, and its literary and intellectual heroes.” This view soon became known as neoconservatism, and Commentary remained

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its major intellectual platform, eventually leading the neoconservatives out of the Democratic Party—which it saw as in thrall to the party’s McGovern wing and dangerously weak on foreign policy issues—and into Ronald Reagan’s Republican coalition.2 In many respects, neoconservatism is little changed. Well into its fourth decade, it remains a small movement with only a few defining characteristics. Most neoconservatives are Jewish and are often closely related by blood or long friendships. Indeed, as its adherents are the best-known Jewish conservatives, neoconservatism might fairly be described as the conservatism of the Jews—those few Jews who become prominent on the Right almost invariably identify with it. Recalling their early struggles against fascist and communist totalitarianism, the neoconservatives continue to view external opponents of the United States as threats not simply to American interests but to civilization itself. They also remain intellectuals, not politicians, and are most comfortable as thinkers and writers who, unlike candidates for office, can express their views without reservation. Those who have served in government—with the exception of Moynihan—have done so as appointees and have developed impressive bureaucratic skills that they have used effectively in high-level positions. In one important way, however, neoconservatism has changed. The left-wing experiences that marked the youths of many older neoconservatives do not characterize the current generation—some came from the relatively conservative Jackson wing of the 1970s Democratic Party, but most of the new generation have been conservatives their entire adult lives. Understanding these characteristics makes it possible to categorize the major neoconservatives. From the founding generation, and still active in intellectual affairs, are Norman Podhoretz and his wife, writer Midge Decter; Irving Kristol is in his eighties and largely inactive, although his wife, historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, still writes. A middle group consists of those who were born after World War II, grew up as Democrats but became Republicans, held appointments under presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush, and now have ascended to high levels in the George W. Bush administration. These include Elliott Abrams, who served in three assistant secretary of state positions in the Reagan years and now is in charge of Middle East policy at the National Security Council; Paul Wolfowitz, who was an

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assistant secretary of state and ambassador to Indonesia in the Reagan– Bush years and now is deputy secretary of defense; and Richard Perle, who was an assistant secretary of defense in the eighties and until the spring of 2003 was chairman of the Defense Policy Board. Also in this generation, but currently working in the intellectual world, are William Kristol, Irving’s son and the founder of the Weekly Standard; John Podhoretz, Norman’s son and cofounder of the Standard; David Gelernter, a Yale University computer scientist and polymath who writes on the arts and Judaism; and Michael Ledeen and Joshua Muravchik, both of the American Enterprise Institute, who write on foreign and national security affairs. A third, younger group, has emerged in the past few years as well. This includes Max Boot, an editorialist at the Wall Street Journal who also writes popular history to support neoconservative foreign policy views; David Brooks, who writes insightful and clever social commentary; and Robert Kagan, who writes on national security issues. A smaller group of conservative, and even liberal-leaning, writers hold views that often coincide with the neoconservatives’ on specific issues. Their writings often inform neoconservative thinking or, when they agree with the neoconservatives, help support and spread their views. The best known such writer probably is columnist and television pundit Charles Krauthammer, a conservative whose foreign policy views are identical to the neoconservatives’. Robert Kaplan of the New Republic also holds neoconservative-style views on foreign affairs; so, too, does socially liberal journalist and former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan. The neoconservatives also have based much of their understanding of events since 9/11 and terrorism on the writings of Bernard Lewis, the prominent historian of Islam and the Middle East, and Victor Davis Hanson, the classicist and military historian. The neoconservatives have gained access to an impressive number of platforms for spreading their message. When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, Commentary and the Public Interest were their only journals, and the Wall Street Journal provided Irving Kristol with space for occasional op-ed pieces. Kristol founded the National Interest in 1985 as an outlet for foreign policy discussion, but its audience, although influential, has remained small. The founding of the Weekly Standard in 1995, however, provided neoconservatives with a platform

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aimed at a popular audience. Financed by media baron Rupert Murdoch, the Standard also welcomes the neoconservatives’ allies in the larger conservative movement—many of its contributors come from conservative organizations and also write for Commentary and National Review, the conservative movement’s most venerable journal. Its frequency makes the Standard topical; its articles and features are short, unpredictable, and animated by a dry sense of humor, making it the “fun” conservative magazine.3 Beyond their own publications, moreover, the neoconservatives have access to a wide range of media. They write frequently for National Review and, thanks in large part to Max Boot, appear far more often in the Wall Street Journal. Even the New York Times and New Republic have opened their pages to the neoconservatives. The Times has appointed David Brooks to be an op-ed columnist, starting in September 2003, and the financially troubled New Republic’s friendliness no doubt has been increased by the acquisition of majority ownership in January 2002 by two businessmen who have long supported conservative organizations. On television, William Kristol, who often appeared on Sunday morning talk shows during the Clinton years, now regularly provides commentary on Murdoch-owned Fox News. In the cyberworld, the Weekly Standard maintains a lively Web site, which also provides a full archive of the magazine’s back issues. In an age in which the proliferation of magazines, cable television talk shows, and Internet publications makes it increasingly difficult for a specific point of view to be heard above the din of competing voices, this variety and organization of media platforms provides neoconservatives with a strong position for making their views known.4 The neoconservatives have entrenched themselves in the world of Washington think tanks. This, too, is a shift from the 1970s and Reagan years, when the neoconservatives were based in New York and its intellectual community. Now, the American Enterprise Institute is home to several prominent neoconservatives, including Ledeen and Muravchik, and serves as a place for neoconservatives to perch whenever Republicans are out of power, much as Democrats use the Brookings Institution. The Ethics and Public Policy Center, which Elliott Abrams headed in the late 1990s, is another neoconservative base, as is the Hudson Institute. The neoconservatives also

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have proven adept at securing funding for new or transient think tanks, as the need arises. William Kristol, for example, started the Project for the Republican Future after the 1992 election, which provided him with an influential platform in the early Clinton years. Indeed, the neoconservatives have been so effective at working within conservative institutions and financial networks that many on the traditional Right—the so-called “paleoconservatives,” who are the intellectual descendants of the midwestern isolationists and who are deeply suspicious of the neoconservatives’ liberal Jewish backgrounds—complain bitterly that they have been defunded and their views pushed out of the conservative movement.5

Beliefs I: The Home Front Disgust with the legacy of the New Left and the 1960s counterculture still drives much of neoconservatism’s thinking. The neoconservatives believe that these forces continue to dominate the American intellectual landscape and present potent threats to the liberal democratic order. David Gelernter stated this position bluntly in 1997: “during the 1960s and early ’70s, the intelligentsia’s hatred for middle-class society was something fierce . . . today’s elite loathes the nation it rules.” The neoconservatives often identify the legacy of the 1960s behind current social problems or unfavorable developments. Midge Decter has argued that the rise in the suicide rate for teenage boys is the result of cultural changes from the 1960s, and another Commentary regular, Arch Puddington, sees 1960s-style “black radicals and the their liberal white sympathizers” as seeking to reverse New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s progress against street crime. Most recently, Podhoretz has written that the “anti-American Left” is using its control of the universities and elite cultural institutions to lead opposition to the War on Terrorism.6 Their belief that the intellectual elite hates America has led the neoconservatives to celebrate middle-class values, which they view as the foundation of liberal democracy. They view the family as the basic unit of such a society and believe, as Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote in 1999, that the “two-parent family is generally . . . most conducive to the welfare of children as well as society.” Therefore, the neocon-

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servatives are hostile to any policies or movements that they believe would erode traditional moral values, challenge traditional gender roles, question the autonomy of the family, or reduce parents’ control over their children. Indeed, says Himmelfarb in her criticism of liberalized divorce, cohabitation, and unwed parenthood, “a great many middle-class families have become, to one degree or another, dysfunctional, as the newly liberated family ceases to be a stable, reliable force either for its members or for society.” The Weekly Standard argues that the middle class also dislikes those who denigrate its values, and promotes the virtues of modern middle-class, suburban family life. “Patio Man,” as David Brooks terms the new suburbanites, lives and works in the new suburban “Sprinkler Cities,” to which he has fled to escape elite “journalists and media consultants” who live in the older suburbs and “consider themselves superior to you if you sell home-security systems or . . . are a mechanical engineer.” In Brooks’s view, the middle-class technology worker is a revolutionary who “spends his long workdays striving to create some technological innovation, management solution, or organizing system breakthroughs that will alter the world.” At the same time, however, Patio Man is socially conservative—“he won’t waste his time fighting a culture war,” but instead settles in the Sprinkler Cities to pursue a “utopian conservatism,” that will be relaxed, secure, and “morally upstanding” for his children.7 With one exception, neoconservative ideas on economic and social issues follow conservative orthodoxy. A review of a few issues of Commentary or the Weekly Standard, for example, will find consistent opposition to affirmative action, support for school vouchers and other freemarket approaches to social policy, and vigorous denunciations of liberal alternatives. Where the neoconservatives stand apart, especially those associated with the Weekly Standard, is in their desire to use the federal government to build a sense of common identity and shared goals for Americans, or “national greatness,” as David Brooks terms it. Government, in this view, must have confidence in itself, or the confidence of the people or democracy itself will be at risk. “The first task of government is to convey a spirit of confidence and vigor that can spill across the life of the nation,” wrote Brooks in March 1997. “A government that fails to offer any vision merely feeds public

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cynicism and disenchantment.” Brooks blames both liberals—“one of the worst effects of the vast post-Great Society government is that it has caused Americans to lose respect for our government” and conservatives—who “instead of arguing that government should be limited but energetic . . . have often argued that government is itself evil” for failing to live up to this responsibility. Citing such achievements as building the Library of Congress, the interstate highway system, and exploring space, Brooks advocates undertaking large-scale programs that combine utility and symbolism to make Americans proud as well as give them a sense of connection to past and future generations. Brooks is not alone in this view. William Kristol has cited Ronald Reagan as the model of a conservative who believed in America’s greatness, and writing in the Wall Street Journal with Brooks, he urged conservatives to use the appeal to national greatness to move America toward its “grand destiny.”8 Despite Kristol and Brooks’s efforts, national greatness did not catch on with the broader conservative movement. In part this was because the frankness of its critique of 1990s-style conservatism’s limited ambitions and distrust of government made it hard for many on the Right to agree with it. Another reason was that in the 1990s it seemed, in part, to be just one more conservative attack on President Clinton. “The way to defeat the unctuous and trivializing politics of Bill Clinton is by making it seem petty and contemptible in light of the greatness of the American experiment,” said Brooks and Kristol. True as this may have been, it did not stand out from the hundreds of similar conservative anti-Clinton statements. It would have taken more than appeals to embark on unspecified great projects to move conservatives to reconsider America’s—and their own—purposes in neoconservative terms.9

Beliefs II: Democracy versus Terrorism Continuity also marks neoconservative views on foreign policy and national security issues. Reflecting the experiences of their younger days, the neoconservatives remained staunchly anticommunist throughout the Cold War and warned of the danger posed by the Soviet Union until the day it collapsed. Their views on foreign policy were

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not simply a reflexive anticommunism, however: They long have understood that the defense of liberal democracy in a hostile world requires that the United States have a moral, even an idealist, foundation for its policies, rather than simply act on the basis of cold calculations of national interest. Daniel Patrick Moynihan stated this best in two well-known articles in Commentary. In discussing Woodrow Wilson’s legacy in May 1974, he pointed out that the United States remains a nation of immigrants and therefore “there will be no struggle for personal liberty . . . anywhere in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, in Latin America which will not affect American politics.” As a consequence, the United States will have no choice other than to “deliberately and consistently to bring its influence to bear on behalf of . . . personal and national liberty.” The following March, in discussing American isolation at the United Nations, he wrote that “speaking for political and civil liberty, and doing so in detail and in concrete particulars,” is something the United States should never hesitate to do, that Washington should stop apologizing for being an “imperfect democracy” and remind the world that “we are of the liberty party.” Moynihan put these ideas into practice as soon as he was appointed ambassador to the United Nations in 1975, and other neoconservatives have done so as well—Jeane Kirkpatrick spoke out for democracy while she was Reagan’s UN ambassador, as did Elliott Abrams when he was in charge of Reagan’s human rights and Latin American policies. Neoconservatives also helped establish the National Endowment for Democracy, which works to promote representative government in newly democratizing countries.10 The neoconservatives lost some of their focus on foreign policy ideals after the collapse of the USSR. They supported such policies as building a national missile defense, maintaining a strong military, and standing up to states like Iraq and North Korea that posed direct threats to American interests. They also warned continuously of the threats posed by terrorism and, of course, supported Israel and took a dim view of Middle East peace efforts. These were standard conservative positions, however, and supporting them required little updated thinking about basic ideological or strategic issues. Indeed, Podhoretz lamented in March 1996 that it was becoming “impossible to define a neoconservative position” in foreign affairs. He also feared

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that neoconservatives were drifting away from their ideals. “I can think of only a tiny handful who still advocate the expansive Wilsonian interventionism that grew out of the anticommunist passions of the neoconservatives at the height of the cold war,” he wrote.11 Bill Clinton rescued the neoconservatives. Several neoconservatives, including Joshua Muravchik, supported Clinton in 1992, but they received no appointments in the new administration. Clinton’s first year in office, meanwhile, was marked by fumbling on several issues, including indecision about intervention in the Bosnian civil war and a humiliating retreat from Somalia. Having been spurned, and then viewing Clinton as an incompetent, the neoconservatives attacked him without mercy. Reviewing Clinton’s early performance in Foreign Affairs, Paul Wolfowitz wrote that he had “failed to articulate an understanding of the national interest”; had no idea of how or when to use force; was not paying attention to the dangers posed by Iran, Iraq, and North Korea; and was allowing American military strength and credibility to decline dangerously. “The administration runs the risk that it will not be able to commit forces later in truly vital situations, and that such a commitment would be presumed halfhearted in any case,” said Wolfowitz. Wolfowitz also scorned Clinton’s preference for multilateral approaches—the United States should be ready “to act, if necessary, with only those partners that share its purposes.” For the remainder of his administration, the neoconservatives charged that Clinton ignored growing threats and dangers, allowed the military to decline dangerously, and refused to defend American interests. The administration’s “preference is to issue strong language followed by no action,” sneered Elliott Abrams in 1999.”12 Stimulated by their dislike of Clinton, in the later part of the 1990s the neoconservatives moved beyond criticism and developed alternative policy positions. Here, as in domestic affairs, it was William Kristol who set them apart from other conservatives, providing a version of national greatness for external relations. Writing in Foreign Affairs in the summer of 1996—as the Republican candidate for president, Bob Dole, was heading for certain defeat—Kristol and his coauthor, Robert Kagan, suggested that conservatives should stand for maintaining a “benevolent global hegemony.” This, they explained, meant combining “military supremacy and moral confidence” not only to pro-

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tect American interests but also to deter would-be competitors from challenging the United States. “The more Washington is able to make clear that it is futile to compete with American power,” they argued, the less willing states like China or Iran would be even to consider it.13 Kristol and Kagan did not want a policy aimed solely at the protection of economic or military interests, however: “American foreign policy should be informed with a clear moral purpose,” they stated, “actively promoting American principles of governance abroad— democracy, free markets, respect for liberty.” This, they made clear, also extended to creating policies “ultimately intended to bring about a change of regime” in states such as China, Cuba, and Iran. The American people, Kristol and Kagan claimed, would support this approach if conservative “statesmen make the case loudly, cogently, and persistently.” Undoubtedly to attract conservative support, Kristol and Kagan called this a neo-Reaganite approach, claiming that the former president’s success abroad had been a result of his devotion to these basic principles. In truth, however, their argument was classically neoconservative; Wolfowitz had proposed in 1992 that maintaining global military supremacy should be policy, and the argument about democracy largely restated Moynihan’s ideas, which predated the neoconservatives’ attraction to Reagan by several years.14 The neoconservatives have continued to develop these ideas since then, most clearly in the pages of the National Interest: “To preserve and extend an international order that is in accord with both our material interests and our principles” should remain America’s most important goal, wrote Kristol and Kagan in the spring of 2000. Separately, Kagan pointed out in 1997 that it was especially important to encourage democracy in the Islamic world, where the “battle against the radicals in Iran, in Sudan, and in Afghanistan” had to be waged. Elliott Abrams advocated interventions abroad in support of humanitarian efforts—Americans, he argued, should work with “like-minded friends and allies . . . to eliminate or at least reduce abuses of the rights of man.” The United States also had to provide clear, firm leadership to its allies, said Wolfowitz, which meant “demonstrating that your friends will be protected and taken care of, that your enemies will be punished, and that those who refuse to support you will live to regret having done so.” These ideas, like the domestic version of

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national greatness, did not catch on within the broader conservative or Republican communities, which continued to support limited foreign policy goals. Writing in Foreign Affairs in early 2000, Condoleeza Rice, who then served as foreign policy advisor to presidential candidate George W. Bush, surveyed foreign issues and shied away from neoconservative conclusions. China’s rulers, Rice wrote, needed to be handled with “nuance and balance,” not overthrown, intervention in humanitarian crises should be “exceedingly rare,” and she paid little attention to Iran or Iraq. Rice’s views subsequently guided the Bush administration through its early days. Even though Abrams, Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle received senior appointments, Bush’s first months were marked by aloofness from world affairs.15 Matters changed dramatically after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The neoconservatives had ready explanations and responses for the attacks, drawing both on their Cold War experiences and their writings from the late 1990s. “The enemy is militant Islam,” wrote Middle East specialist Daniel Pipes, and its goal, like that of the Nazis and Soviets before it, is nothing less than the destruction of the United States and Western civilization. Thus, the struggle to defeat it, in Podhoretz’s term, would be World War IV (the Cold War had been the third world war). The neoconservatives adopted Bernard Lewis’s explanation of the rise of Islamic extremism, attributing it to the political, social, and economic stagnation of the Middle East, which led them to an obvious remedy. Replacing the “miserable despotisms” of the Middle East with democratic governments, wrote Podhoretz in February 2002, is the way to “give adherents of Islam a chance to set their feet on the path to greater freedom and greater prosperity,” and thus turn them away from extremism and political violence. “We do not want stability in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and even Saudi Arabia; we want things to change,” wrote Ledeen. Thus, the neoconservative intellectuals enthusiastically embraced the War on Terrorism and President Bush’s willingness to seek—unilaterally, if need be—regime changes in countries deemed threatening to the United States.16 It was in this context that the neoconservatives began to urge the destruction of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime. Iraq had not been a great concern of the neoconservatives before September 11.

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When they mentioned Iraq in their writings it was as a secondary problem, well below the threats posed by China, North Korea, and Iran. As late as January 2002, Pipes wrote that the Iraqi regime had no ideological appeal beyond its borders and that its threat was “limited to the military dimension, to one odious dictator and his circle, and to raw intimidation,” and thus posed a much smaller threat than Islamic extremism. However, if the Middle East was to be democratized, the neoconservatives soon realized, Iraq was the best place to start—an outlaw state run by a bloodthirsty tyrant seeking weapons of mass destruction, who had no allies to save him. Beginning in early 2002, the neoconservatives started demanding that the United States oust Saddam and build a democratic regime in Iraq. “If successful, this would have a dramatic impact on the surrounding states,” wrote Muravchik. In the face of European opposition, Robert Kagan supported unilateral action—recalling Gary Cooper in High Noon, he argued that the United States should “defend the townspeople, whether the townspeople want them to or not.” After the fall of Baghdad, an exultant Kristol called the war the “first great battle for the future of the Middle East.”17

A Time of Controversy The war in Iraq and its aftermath have brought the neoconservatives an unexpected amount of attention. Beginning in the fall of 2002, as the debate about war intensified, and through the conflict itself, the popular press ran numerous articles on the neoconservatives. Publications as varied as the Economist, New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, and the New York Review of Books profiled the leading figures and their ideas and tried to measure and explain their influence. “The neoconservatives are powerful because they are cohesive, determined, ideologically driven, and clever,” wrote political journalist Elizabeth Drew in the New York Review, and the Economist speculated that “a new foreign-policy establishment may be emerging.” The articles often focused on Perle and Wolfowitz, identified as the neoconservative leaders of the prowar faction in the administration. Wolfowitz, said Newsweek, is “the most powerful neoconservative in Washington.” Taken together, the articles leave the impression that

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the neoconservatives gained control of American foreign policy after September 11—during the confused weeks after the attacks, they had explanations and plans ready when no one else did—and used it to achieve their long-sought goal of bringing down Saddam. It will be many years before researchers are able to untangle the decisionmaking on Iraq, but already this explanation for the war is too simplistic. The journalists label as neoconservatives a variety of supporters of the war—some of whom have never been so identified before— and assume that deposing Saddam had long been the neoconservatives’ most important goal. It is hard, however, to imagine Bush, Rice, Vice President Cheney, or Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld being bowled over easily by their subordinates.18 Iraq also has reopened long-simmering feuds among conservatives. The neoconservatives generally get along well with other conservatives, who appreciate their intellectual abilities. They also have good relations with the Christian Right, which shares their support for Israel, but the alliance does not extend to the paleoconservatives, who reject the neoconservatives’ Wilsonian views on foreign policy and instead believe that they are trying to use American power to serve Israeli interests: “Not seldom has it seemed as if some eminent neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States,” once remarked Russell Kirk, who was for many years the paleoconservatives’ leading intellectual figure. Now Patrick Buchanan has taken up these arguments, using his new magazine, American Conservative, to denounce the neoconservatives and their support for war with Iraq in terms that are blatantly anti-Semitic. “A cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interests,” he wrote shortly before the outbreak of the war. Asking who would benefit, Buchanan answered with words that equated neoconservatism with Nazism: “one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud.”19 The paleoconservatives’ charges started a vicious battle on the Right to define conservatism in a time of war. Writing in National Review in early April 2003, David Frum took on their opposition to war with Iraq. The paleoconservatives, he argued, had declined during the 1980s and 1990s into a small band of anti-immigrant, antiSemitic, neo-Confederate racists and isolationists who blamed the

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neoconservatives for their problems. Naming Buchanan and other prominent paleoconservatives, Frum described how they had become increasingly marginalized within the conservative movement and isolated from mainstream American life, until they grew to hate their country. After September 11, said Frum, the paleoconservatives concluded that the United States, through its support for Israel, had brought the attacks on itself. Rather than fight terrorism and its state supporters, Frum argued, the paleoconservatives “collapsed into a mood of despairing surrender unparalleled since the Vichy republic went out of business.” Their opposition to war in Iraq, Frum concluded, took their thinking to its logical conclusion: “They began by hating the neoconservatives. They came to hate their party and this president. They have finished by hating their country.”20 By mid-June, the fight had gone two rounds. The stakes were high: historically, such debates in National Review have been important in defining conservatism, and the losers, who include the John Birch Society and Ayn Rand’s objectivists, have been dismissed from the movement. In May, National Review published a forum in which conservative intellectuals commented on Frum’s article, and neither side gave any ground. Joseph Sobran, dismissed from the magazine in the early 1990s for his anti-Semitic writings, declared, “there is more true patriotism in the simplest Iraqi soldier, fighting for his country, than in Frum and his ilk, no matter what their passports may say at the moment.” Frum reiterated his claims, likening the paleoconservatives to those who had, during World War II and the Cold War, “spread defeatism, discouragement, and disillusionment” to do “real damage” to the cause of freedom. Next, in June 2003, National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru wrote that the paleoconservative charges that the neoconservatives had hijacked foreign policy and the conservative movement were “lurid . . . conspiracy theories.” Looking closely at the recent conservative debates, Ponnuru pointed out the many differences—even among the neoconservatives—and noted that the great majority of conservatives “supported military action against Iraq because its totalitarian regime was a threat to America, and because the spread of freedom there might promote American interests in a strategically important part of the world.”21 As the fight over who is a conservative goes on, the neoconservatives may gain new allies from an unexpected quarter. Since Septem-

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ber 11, several prominent leftist intellectuals have begun to look critically at the Left’s reflexive anti-Americanism and tentatively lend their support to the idea that a vigorous response to terror may justify spreading American ways of liberty and democracy. Writing in Dissent, Michael Walzer began the debate in early 2002 by criticizing the Left’s “rag-tag Marxism” that turns “world politics into a cheap melodrama, with all the villains dressed to look the part and one villain larger than life.” Christopher Hitchens, a longtime columnist for the Nation, left the magazine in September 2002 because he believed it was “becoming the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden.” Hitchens has since vigorously supported the war in Iraq and written for the Weekly Standard. Paul Berman, however, has provided the most thorough reconsideration to date. Like the neoconservatives, in his book Terror and Liberalism, Berman attributes the roots of Islamic extremism to the same anti-Western, antimodern nihilism that lay behind communism and fascism. For Berman, the War on Terrorism is a war of ideas, and for strategic guidance he looks to the “classic literature of anti-totalitarianism from circa 1950,” that was produced by “a concerted mobilizing of liberal thinkers and writers.” These intellectuals, Berman may soon realize, included Irving Kristol and others who became the founders of neoconservatism.22

Keeping Up the Fight Much of the recent writing on the neoconservatives asserts they have risked all on Iraq. Success in building democracy in Baghdad will, the argument goes, give them dominance of American foreign policy for years to come; should Iraq turn into a new Vietnam, however, their power will crumble just as the liberal foreign policy establishment’s did in the jungles of Southeast Asia. The weakness of this view is that it looks at Iraq in a vacuum. Issues as pressing, or far more pressing, than Iraq lurk in Iran and North Korea, and Islamic terrorism remains a constant threat. No one knows, furthermore, what dangers may suddenly appear. In such a world, the urgent situation of one week can be forgotten during the emergency of the next. In such an environment, Commentary’s consistency will be its greatest asset. Its arguments will continue to build on the same themes it

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has used until now, adding the threats of terrorism and Middle East despotism to its memories of the struggles against fascism and communism. Furthermore, as the center of the neoconservative world, Commentary will continue to carry out an important institutional role, sending its adherents into the worlds of intellectual debate and politics to put their ideas into action. Rightly or wrongly, the magazine will provide neoconservatives with explanations and responses for events, and their strong position within the conservative movement will give them opportunities to put these ideas into action.23

Notes

Chapter 1 1. Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 709. 2. Ibid. 3. No single monograph has ever focused on the journal. Even Naomi W. Cohen’s history of the AJC, Not Free to Desist: A History of the American Jewish Committee 1906–1966 (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1972), only mentions Commentary on a handful of pages, and these references are scattered and vague. Although Alan Wald’s The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1987) does examine the magazine, it does so as part of the wider intellectual movement of the time. The same can be said for Alexander Bloom’s Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) and Neil Jumonville’s Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Therefore, Commentary is yet again not examined in enough detail, and hence the scope and effect of the magazine are not fully considered. 4. The single major study of the American Jewish Committee is Cohen, Not Free to Desist. 5. Oscar Handlin, “The American Jewish Committee: A Half-Century View,” Commentary 23 (January 1957): 3. 6. Ibid., 8. 7. Ibid., 5, 8. 8. Menahem Kaufman, An Ambiguous Partnership: Non-Zionists and Zionists in America 1939–1948 (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1991), 150–1. 9. Handlin, “The American Jewish Committee,” 5, 7, 9. 10. Cohen, Not Free to Desist, 262–3. 11. I shall use the term “Jewish intellectuals” as shorthand to refer to what has become known as the “New York Intellectual family”: Elliot Cohen, Sidney Hook, Philip Rahv, Lionel Trilling, Meyer Schapiro, William Phillips, Hannah

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Arendt, Diana Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Richard Hofstadter, Saul Bellow, Delmore Schwartz, Bernard Malamud, Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, Lionel Abel, Paul Goodman, Isaac Rosenfeld, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Leslie Fiedler, Robert Warshow, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, Nathan Glazer, S.M. Lipset, David Bazelon, Norman Podhoretz, Steven Marcus, Robert Brustein, Midge Decter, Jason Epstein, Robert Silvers, Susan Sontag, Theodore Solotaroff, Norman Mailer, and Philip Roth. This list is drawn from Daniel Bell, “The ‘Intelligentsia’ in American Society,” in his Sociological Journeys: Essays 1960–1980 (London: Heinemann, 1980), 128–9. 12. See Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Noonday Press, 1987); Peter I. Rose (ed.), The Ghetto and Beyond: Essays on Jewish Life in America (New York: Random House, 1969). 13. See Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 14. Many articles expressing this theme appeared. Clement Greenberg wrote that the “position of the Jew becomes like every other plight today, a version of the alienation of man under capitalism; all plights merge, and that of the Jew has become less particular because it all turns more and more into an intensified expression of a general one” (“Under Forty: A Symposium on American Literature and the Younger Generation of American Jews,” Contemporary Jewish Record 7 [1944], 32–4). Delmore Schwartz wrote, “the fact of being a Jew became available to me as a central symbol of alienation” (ibid., 12–4). 15. Terry Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 43. 16. Ibid., 50. 17. See Stephen A. Longstaff, “The New York Intellectuals: A Study of Particularism and Universalism in American High Culture” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, 1978), 117–22. 18. Ibid, 4, 124–32. 19. See Stephen A. Longstaff, “The New York Family,” Queen’s Quarterly 83 (1976): 556–73. 20. See Hugh Wilford, The New York Intellectuals: From Vanguard to Institution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 32–6, 60. 21. See Longstaff, “The New York Intellectuals,” 200. 22. See Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals, 232–4. 23. For the experience and effect of the war on Jewish intellectuals, Longstaff is especially good. See his “The New York Intellectuals,” 169–212, 228–81. 24. Daniel Aaron, “Some Reflections on Communism and the Jewish Writer,” in The Ghetto and Beyond, ed. Rose, 259. There are two possible reasons for greater identification through Army service. First, citizenship meant the right to bear arms and fight for one’s country. To do so, as the recently emancipated black communities argued following the Civil War, implied citizenship. Second, the Army, like the Communist Party, was a great leveler: It projected an image that did not discriminate on the basis of ethnicity but, on the contrary, allowed for progression through individual merit. 25. Irving Howe, Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (London: Secker & Warburg, 1982), 253.

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26. Ibid., 258. 27. Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 215. 28. Migde Decter, “An Activist Critic on the Upper West Side” in Creators and Disturbers: Reminisces by Jewish Intellectuals of New York, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and Ernest Goldstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 358. 29. Irving Howe, “The New York Intellectuals: A Chronicle and a Critique,” Commentary 46 (1968): 43. 30. Norman Podhoretz, Making It (New York: Random House, 1967), 92. 31. “Under Forty,” 3–36. 32. Longstaff, “The New York Intellectuals,” 296. 33. Ibid., 296–7, 299. Longstaff wrote that “someone close to the CJR told me” that it was Oko “who first thought of diminishing the Jewish parochialism that marked the early CJR. The point is that Oko started the trend that was carried on by Commentary. The reason that he gets little credit for this is that Elliot Cohen was inclined to take all the credit for himself. . . . Oko was clearly aware of the intellectuals around PR, [which is why] Philip Rahv was hired by Oko as an editor.” To which Longstaff added, “Cohen’s ‘Grand Design’ was unfolding even before his reentry into New York intellectual life at the close of the war.” See ibid., 299. 34. American Jewish Committee, “Commentary: A Statement of Aims.” This statement appeared in every issue of Commentary. 35. Podhoretz, Making It, 207. 36. Elliot E. Cohen, “The Intellectuals and the Jewish Community: The Hope for Our Heritage in America,” Commentary 8 (1949): 20, 24. 37. Nathan Glazer, interview by Rosalind Mayer, 27 October 1980, William E. Wiener Oral History Library of the AJC, New York Public Library Jewish Division (hereafter WEWOHL), 12. 38. John Slawson, interview by Murray Polner, 5 September 1969, WEWOHL, 20. 39. Terry A. Cooney, “New York Intellectuals and the Question of Jewish Identity,” American Jewish History 80 (1991): 345; Elliot Cohen, quoted in Podhoretz, Making It, 99–100. 40. Podhoretz, Making It, 129. 41. Ibid., 133. 42. Ibid., 129. 43. Ibid., 299. 44. Slawson, interview by Polner, 5 September 1969, 32. 45. Ibid., 20. One of Longstaff’s interviewees recalled that Cohen even dominated the Publications Committee: “for his lay committee Elliot deliberately chose men who didn’t have much conviction or character because he wanted to boss them” with the result that they were “bulldozed by him a great deal.” See Longstaff, “The New York Intellectuals,” 318. 46. Memorandum from John Slawson to David Sher, 20 February 1947, AJC Records, RG 347, GEN-12, Box 145 John Slawson 1924–62, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York, 11. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 12. Interestingly there was some disagreement over this issue. Da-

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vid Sher, another member of the Publications Committee, had offered Cohen “complete administrative autonomy,” but Slawson overruled him and established the present working conditions. 49. Slawson, interview by Murray Polner, 5 September 1969, 22; Elliot Cohen, private letter to John Slawson, 16 Februray 1952, AJC Records, RG 347 GEN-12, Box 29, Folder 45–59, 1. This relationship between Slawson and Cohen was not always a harmonious one. On the “strictly” professional level, their relationship was “understanding and correct.” However, this belied an underlying tension caused by mutual suspicion. In a private letter to Slawson, Cohen observed: “After all, an attitude of mutual confidence and friendliness between one’s chief and colleague and oneself, while nice to have, is not indispensable to good, efficient, and effective work.” Their working relationship was such that he felt under compulsion to give Slawson an assurance that Commentary was not inimical to the AJC’s interests and that the editorial staff “really respect and like the AJC.” Elliot Cohen, private letter to John Slawson, 16 February 1952, AJC Records, RG 347, GEN-12, Box 29 Folder Elliot Cohen 45–59, p. 1. 50. Podhoretz, Making It, 221. 51. Ibid., 221–2. 52. Ibid., 299, emphasis added. Podhoretz’s use of the term, “The Boss” refers to a composite of Martin and Clement Greenberg, who took over the running of Commentary when Cohen, because of mental illness, was unable to do so. 53. Ibid., 300. 54. Slawson interviewed by Murray Polner, 5 September 1969, 24. 55. Alan Stroock, quoted in the 43rd Annual Report of the AJC, 1949 (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1950), 66; Irving M. Engel, quoted in the 44th Annual Report of the AJC, 1950 (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1951), 73. 56. Engel, quoted in 45th Annual Report of the AJC, 1951 (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1952), 121. 57. Confidential memorandum to Domestic Affairs Committee on Alleged Association of Jews and Communism, 11 August 1950, AJC Records RG 347 GEN 10, Box 246, Political Philosophies, Communism, June–August 1950, YIVO, 3. 58. Lucy Dawidowicz, “Antisemitism and the Rosenberg Case: The Latest Communist Propaganda Trap,” Commentary 14 (July 1952): 41–5. 59. One memorandum reported the printing and distribution of an article by Milton Himmelfarb at the expense of the AJC’s Community Services Department, to be distributed by the AJC’s Community Activities Department. Seymour Rubin, memorandum to Simon Segal, 11 June 1953, AJC Records RG 347 GEN-12, Box 179, US Govt.: State Department, pp. 51–8. 60. “Confidential memorandum to Domestic Affairs Committee on Alleged Association of Jews and Communism,” 11 August 1950, AJC Records RG 347 GEN 10, Box 246, Political Philosophies, Communism, June-August 1950, YIVO, 3. 61. 42nd Annual Report of the AJC, 1948 (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1949), 27. 62. Memorandum from S.A. Fineberg to John Slawson, 2 June 1952, AJC Records RG 347 GEN 10, Box 246, Political Philosophies, Communism, 1951–53, 4. 63. Irving Engel, in 44th Annual Report of the AJC, 73.

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64. Slawson, interview by Murray Polner, 5 September 1969, 25. Emphasis added. 65. Cohen, letter to Slawson, 16 February 1952, 2. 66. 42nd Annual Report of the AJC, 28; Confidential memorandum to Domestic Affairs Committee on Alleged Association of Jews and Communism, 11 August 1950, AJC Records RG 347 GEN 10, Box 246, Political Philosophies, Communism, June–August 1950, YIVO, 3. 67. Slawson, interview by Murray Polner, 5 September 1969, 24. 68. Norman Podhoretz, interview by the author, 5 August 1996. He added that he felt that Cohen’s “relation to the Committee was much closer than mine ever was and he inevitably, I think, tailored certain decisions to what he saw as political necessities.” 69. Although he was never a party member, Cohen did head the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, a Communist-front organization. 70. Irving Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative: Looking Back, Looking Ahead (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 17. 71. Ibid. Kristol is worth quoting in full here: “The relations of the editors of Encounter to the congress [for cultural freedom] were in all respects comparable to those of the editors of Commentary to the Committee. In both cases, we had been hired because our views (including, of course, our political views) and talents were congenial to the sponsoring organization.” Given what we know now of the CIA’s sponsorship of both the CCF and Encounter magazine, this places the AJC in a new light. If the AJC not only granted editorial independence to its editors because they espoused positions agreeable to it but they also did so if Kristol’s views were attractive to both the CIA and the AJC, then the two organizations must have shared similar outlooks. This subtle relationship might belie the overt pressure that could be placed on Cohen. Although he was not forced to listen to the AJC or do anything that he did not wish to do, this did not mean that such pressure did not exist. Podhoretz hinted at such a state of affairs when he recalled that the editor “might choose to be influenced by pressure from the AJC.” Interview by the author, 5 August 1996. That Cohen toed the AJC line, however, without any seemingly explicit pressure seems further to indicate that the editorial relationship, in its more subtle form, functioned extremely well, negating the need for any overt influence. 72. Bloom, Prodigal Sons, 163. 73. Kristol, interview with Bloom, 17 June 1976. Quoted in Bloom, Prodigal Sons, 163. 74. Norman Podhoretz, “Preface,” The Commentary Reader: Two Decades of Articles and Stories, ed. Norman Podhoretz (New York: Atheneum, 1966), ix. 75. Diana Trilling, The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1993), 92. 76. Longstaff, “The New York Intellectuals,” 319. 77. Irving Kristol, interview by Mimi Harmon, 13 February 1980, WEWOHL, 11. 78. Theodore Solotaroff, “The New York Publishing World,” in Creators and Disturbers, 412–3.

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79. Podhoretz, interview by the author, 5 August 1996. 80. Isaac Rosenfeld, “Adam and Eve on Delancey Street,” Commentary 8 (October 1949): 385–7. 81. Ibid., 385, 386, 387. For a fuller treatment of this episode, see Longstaff, “The New York Intellectuals,” 319–25, and Stephen Zipperstein, “Commentary and American Jewish Culture in the 1940s and 1950s,” Jewish Social Studies 3:2 (Winter 1997): 18–28. 82. Glazer, interview by Rosalind Meyer, 27 October 1980, 15; Kristol, interview by Mimi Harmon, 13 February 1980, 12; Podhoretz, interview by the author, 5 August 1996. 83. Kristol, interview by Mimi Harmon, 13 February 1980, 12. 84. Elliot Cohen, editorial note, Commentary 8 (November 1949): 501. 85. Jacob Blaustein, letter to Commentary 8 (December 1949): 594. 86. Dwight Macdonald, letter to the Editors of Commentary, 13 December 1949, Dwight Macdonald Papers, Sterling Library, Yale University. 87. Mary McCarthy, letter to Elliot Cohen, 14 December 1949, Dwight Macdonald Papers. 88. Irving Howe, letter to Elliot Cohen, 18 December 1949, Dwight Macdonald Papers; Philip Rahv, letter to the Editors of Commentary, 19 December 1949, Dwight Macdonald Papers. 89. Longstaff, “The New York Intellectuals,” 324. 90. Dwight Macdonald, letter to Mary McCarthy, 18 December 1949, Dwight Macdonald Papers; Howe, letter to Cohen, Dwight Macdonald Papers. 91. Elliot Cohen, letter to Dwight Macdonald, 16 February 1950, Dwight Macdonald Papers. 92. Dwight Macdonald, letter to the Editors of Commentary, 13 December 1949, Dwight Macdonald Papers. 93. Longstaff, “The New York Intellectuals,” 325. 94. Irving Kristol, “‘Civil Liberties,’ 1952—A Study in Confusion: Do We Defend Our Rights by Protecting Communists?” Commentary 13 (1952): 228–36. 95. Ibid., 229. 96. Kristol, interview by the author, 27 August 1996. 97. Kristol, interview by Mimi Harmon, 13 February 1980, 4. 98. Glazer, interview by Rosalind Mayer, 27 October 1980, WEWOHL, AJC, 15–6. 99. Podhoretz, Making It, 129. 100. Wald, The New York Intellectuals, 27, 30, 31. 101. Robert Alter, “Epitaph for a Jewish Magazine,” Commentary 39 (1965): 52. Many contributors to Commentary were drawn from the Menorah group, most notably Lionel Trilling. Wald ascribes singular importance to Cohen in influencing and shaping such writers as Trilling and Herbert Solow. See Wald, The New York Intellectuals, 32–33. For a more detailed appreciation of Cohen’s influence at the Menorah Journal and its position as both a training ground for and precursor of Commentary, see Elinor Grumet, “Elliot Cohen: The Vocation of a Jewish Literary Mentor,” in Studies in the American Jewish Experience, ed. Jacob R. Marcus and Abraham J. Peck (Cincinnati, OH: American Jewish Archives, 1981), 8–25, and Lauren B. Strauss, “Staying Afloat in the Melting Pot: Constructing an Amer-

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ican Jewish Identity in the Menorah Journal of the 1920s,” American Jewish History 84:4 (December 1996): 315–31. 102. Lionel Trilling, letter to Elliot Cohen, 2 December 1929, MS Coll. Lionel Trilling, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 103. Midge Decter, “An Activist Critic on the Upper West Side,” 357. 104. Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, 86–87. 105. Max Lerner, quoted in Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, 87. 106. Unnamed Jewish student quoted in Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, 87. 107. Ibid. 108. Bell, “The ‘Intelligentsia,’” 133. 109. Elliot Cohen, “The Menorah Summer School,” Menorah Journal 9 (1923): 339–45. 110. Jumonville, Critical Crossings, 64; see also 61–3. 111. Podhoretz, Making It, 135. 112. Elliot E. Cohen, “An Act of Affirmation” (editorial statement), Commentary 1 (1945): 1–2. 113. Ibid., 3. 114. Percival Goodman, “The Architect from New York,” in Creators and Disturbers, 322. 115. Cohen, “An Act of Affirmation,” 2. 116. Commentary 18 (1954): 384. 117. Elliot E. Cohen, “Foreword” in Commentary on the American Scene: Portraits of Jewish Life in America, ed. Elliot E. Cohen (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), xx. 118. Ibid., xxiii. 119. Milton Klonsky, “The Trojans of Brighton Beach” in Commentary on the American Scene, 189. 120. Lionel Abel, “New York City: A Remembrance,” Dissent 8 (1961): 251. 121. Israel Knox, “Is America Exile or Home?: We Must Begin to Build for Permanence,” Commentary 2 (1946): 406, 408. Emphasis added. 122. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 123. See John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Le´viStrauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974), 205–6. 124. Ibid. 125. National Jewish Post, 9 February 1951, AJC Records, RG 347 GEN-12, Box 29 Elliot Cohen, 45–59. 126. Ibid. 127. Grumet, “Elliot Cohen,” 14. 128. Irving Howe, A World More Attractive (New York: Horizon, 1963), 265. 129. Norman Podhoretz, “The Issue,” Commentary 29 (1960): 182–3; Making It, 294–5. See also Jumonville, Critical Crossings, 64–78. 130. Edward S. Shapiro, A Time for Healing: American Jewry Since World War II (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 92. Shapiro points out the fusion of Jewishness and Americanness at this particular banquet. It was reported in the New York Times that “traditional stuffed freshwater fish” was served

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as the starter because “the term gefilte fish was unfamiliar to the president, although it certainly was known to his hosts.” See A Time for Healing, 92 and New York Times 21 October 1954, 14. 131. Leon A. Jink, “The Holocaust: Its Use and Abuse within the American Public,” Yad Vashem Studies 14 (1981): 306. 132. Cohen, editorial note, Commentary 18 (September 1954): 185. 133. See Jink, “The Holocaust,” 303–18. 134. Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (London: Methuen, 1987), 63. Jink advanced suggestions for this response. In the aftermath of the Rosenberg trial and executions, American Jews felt anxious and uneasy about the possibility of renewed anti-Semitism, especially in the context of rising anticommunism, which had equated Jews and Communists. Many Jews acquiesced to the silence because to speak not only opposed the administration discourse but revealed their own insecurities and vulnerabilities. Combined with this silence were the upwardly mobile aspirations of the Jewish community, which sought to enter mainstream American society as full and equal American citizens. According to Jink, this movement was compounded by deeper psychological reasons: the sense of shame felt by those who have been victims of crime, the sense of guilt and culpability by those who felt they did not do enough to help, and the possibility of a recurrent experience. See Jink, “The Holocaust,” 307–8. The lack of reference to these events was symptomatic of the Cold War from 1947 until the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1960 and 1961, respectively, which refocused Jewish intellectual attention. A typical response was that of Will Herberg, a regular contributor to Commentary. Although he wrote two books on the subject of Jews in America, American Judaism and Modern Man: An Interpretation of Jewish Religion (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Young, 1951) and Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (New York: Anchor, 1955), both ignored the events of 1933–1945 completely. The former text may have opened with the line that “horrors which only yesterday we all believed had been banished once and for all from human society . . . have come back in the most virulent form,” but no further mention is made. I am indebted to Stephen J. Whitfield for pointing this out in his Voices of Jacob, Hands of Esau: Jews in American Life and Thought (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1984), 30–41; see also Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999). Yet the Jewish community did not feel that this omission was necessarily a bad thing: Jacob Reimer, writing in Judaism in 1955, felt that: “In America, the fact of the six million dead has somehow never really been absorbed. . . . The awesome reports were published here and yet the mind never really comprehended the words; the immensity of the disaster never really permeated the consciousness of the community. And perhaps it is good that this was so.” Jacob Reimer, “No Ease in Zion,” Judaism 4 (1955): 241. The Commentary community can be located within this context: Their feelings surrounding the event remained relatively unarticulated. See Bloom, Prodigal Sons, 137–40. It would be a mistake, however, to state that Commentary did not refer to those events at all. Many articles appeared, but none during the festive months of that year. What is more, the term “Holocaust” as the single, overarching neologism for the extermination of European Jewry was not yet in place within Jewish American discourse. This did not occur until the

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late 1960s, at least, with the advent of the Six-Day War. The narrativized memory of a coherent, structured event (with its effect on identity) that the current usage of the term “Holocaust” signifies, therefore, was not a core construct of Jewish American discourse at that time. 135. Irving Howe, letter to Elliot Cohen, 18 December 1949, Dwight Macdonald Papers. 136. “A Word to Our Readers” (Editorial), Dissent 1 (1954): 3. 137. Irving Howe, “Does It Hurt When You Laugh?” Dissent 1 (1954): 6, 7. 138. Podhoretz, “Preface” in The Commentary Reader, ix. 139. Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1991), 113–4. 140. Podhoretz, “Preface,” viii. Chapter 3 Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Michael Kimmage for his help in researching this chapter and for talking through some of its conclusions. 1. The Tel Aviv University Institute for the Study of Jewish Press and Communications publishes the journal Qesher, devoted to the documentation of the Jewish press in all languages and forms. This figure was provided in oral communication with the editorial office. 2. William Barrett, The Truants: Adventures among the Intellectuals (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1983,) 23. 3. Mission statement, Commentary. 4. See, e.g., comments of Alfred Kazin and Louis Kronenberger in “Under Forty: American Literature and the Younger Generation of American Jews,” Contemporary Jewish Record (February 1944): 3–36. 5. See Norman Podhoretz’s analysis of the symposium in his introduction to the later symposium on “Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals,” Commentary 31 (April 1961). 6. What Commentary Has Wrought: An Anthology Comprised of the First Pages of Articles and Stories of Particular Note Published Over the Past Twenty-Five Years, Together with A Short History of the Magazine. Published in honor of Norman Podhoretz on the occasion of his retirement, May 2, 1995: 2. 7. Zachariah Shuster, “Must the Jews Quit Europe?” Commentary 1 (December 1945): 9–16. 8. Israel Knox, “Is America Exile or Home?” Commentary 2 (November 1946): 401–8. 9. Hannah Arendt, “The Jewish State: Fifty Years After,” Commentary 1 (May 1946): 1–9. 10. Mosche Smelansky, “A Palestinian Warns Against Small States,” Commentary 2 (November 1946), 421. See also Smelansky’s articles in the issues of March, July, and December of the same year. 11. Franz Rosenzweig, “On Being a Jewish Person,” Commentary 1 (November 1945): 71–78; Simon Dubnow, “A New Conception of Jewish History,” Commentary 1 (March 1946): 72–9. 12. In a brief unpublished summary of the magazine’s overall stance from

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November 1945 to June 1947, Kimmage writes, “It would be accurate to describe Commentary in [these] years . . . as a Zionist magazine.” 13. Meyer Levin, “The Temper of the Yishuv: The Battle of the Children,” Commentary 1 (January 1946): 25. 14. Shlomo Katz, “No Hope Except Exodus: Does History Spell the Doom of Western Jewry?” Commentary 2 (April 1946): 14. 15. Irving Kristol, “Adam and I: A Story,” Commentary 2 (November 1946): 448–51. 16. Nathan Glazer, “Jewish Intellectuals,” Partisan Review (50th Anniversary Issue, 1984:4 and 1985:1): 677. 17. Sidney Hook, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 5. 18. Philip Rahv, “Jews of the Ice Age,” Commentary 2 (December 1946): 591–3; Nathan Glazer, “The Parlour Terrorists: Koestler’s Fellow-Travelers and their Politics,” Commentary 3 (January 1947): 55–8. 19. Leslie Fiedler, “What Can We Do About Fagin?” Commentary 7 (May 1949): 411–8. 20. Lionel Trilling, “On the Death of a Friend,” Commentary 29 (February 1960): 93. 21. Norman Podhoretz, “The Issue,” Commentary 29 (February 1960): 182. 22. Norman Podhoretz and Neal Kozodoy, “A Short History of Commentary,” in What Commentary has Wrought, 2. 23. Mordecai Richler, “Their Canada and Mine,” Commentary 32 (August 1961): 135–43. 24. Theodore Solotaroff, “Harvey Golden and the American Audience,” Commentary 31 (January 1961): 1–13. 25. Norman Podhoretz, “My Negro Problem—And Ours,” Commentary 35 (February 1963): 93–101. 26. Ibid., 101. 27. Robert Brustein, “Letter to the Editor,” Commentary 35 (May 1963): 438. 28. Robert Gorham Davis, “Passion at Oberammergau,” Commentary 29 (March 1960): 198–204. 29. See, for example, an amazing series of posthumous letters written from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941 (Commentary 31 [June 1961]: 486–92), and Alexander Donat’s memoir of the Ghetto’s last days (Commentary 35 [May 1963]: 378–89). 30. Guenther Lewy, “Pius XII, the Jews, and the German Catholic Church” (Commentary 37 [February 1964]: 23–35). “The Pope knew that the German Catholics were not prepared to suffer martyrdom for their Church; still less were they willing to incur the wrath of their Nazi rulers for the sake of the Jews, whom their own bishops for years had castigated as a harmful influence in German life.” The quotation here is from Leon Poliakov. 31. A point-by-point analysis and historical refutation of many of Arendt’s claims is presented by Jacob Robinson, And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight: The Eichmann Trial, the Jewish Catastrophe, and Hannah Arendt’s Narrative (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1965). 32. Norman Podhoretz, “Hannah Arendt on Eichmann,” Commentary 35 (May 1963): 201. 33. Albert Memmi, “Am I a Traitor?” Commentary 34 (October 1962): 288.

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34. George Steiner, “A Kind of Survivor,” Commentary 39 (February 1965): 34. 35. Isaac Bashevis Singer, “A New Use for Yiddish,” Commentary 33 (March 1962): 267–9. 36. A collection of Himmelfarb’s Commentary essays can be found in Milton Himmelfarb, The Jews of Modernity. (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1973). 37. Milton Himmelfarb, “Festivals and Judges,” Commentary 35 (January 1963): 66–70. 38. Milton Himmelfarb, “Negroes, Jews, and Muzhiks,” Commentary 40 (October 1966): 83–6. 39. Milton Himmelfarb, “Jewish Class Conflict,” Commentary 49 (January 1970): 37–8. 40. Milton Himmelfarb, “Rome and Jerusalem,” Commentary 38 (September 1964): 69–73. 41. Milton Himmelfarb, “How We Are,” Commentary 39 (January 1965): 71. 42. Milton Himmelfarb, “This Aquarian Age,” Commentary 49 (April 1970): 38–41. 43. Milton Himmelfarb, “The Vanishing Jews,” Commentary 36 (September 1963): 250. 44. See The Jews of Modernity, section 2, 65–116. 45. Emil Fackenheim, “Apologia for a Confirmation Text,” Commentary 31 (May 1961): 406. 46. Herbert Weiner, “A Mission to Israel,” Commentary 36 (August 1963): 118. 47. Nathan Glazer, “The Exposed American Jew,” Commentary 59 (June 1975): 27. 48. Nathan Glazer, “Jewish Intellectuals,” Partisan Review (50th Anniversary Issue, 1984:4 and 1985:1): 679. 49. Ruth R. Wisse, “The Maturing of Commentary and of the Jewish Intellectual,” Jewish Social Studies 3:2 (Winter 1997): 38. 50. Emphasis is original author’s; Irving Howe, “This Age of Conformity,” Partisan Review (January–February 1954): 7–33. 51. Neal Kozodoy, “Preface,” in The Mideast Peace Process: An Autopsy, ed. Neal Kozodoy (New York: Encounter Books, 2002), ix. 52. Ibid., x. 53. David Gelernter, “Judaism Beyond Words,” Commentary 113 (May 2002): 31–40; Part 2, Commentary 114 (September 2002): 39–45; Part 3, Commentary 114 (November 2002): 31–7; Part 4, Commentary 115 (March 2003): 53–61; Part 5, Commentary 116 (July–August 2003): 43–7. 54. David Gelernter, “Response to Letters from Readers,” Commentary (September 2002): 10. Chapter 4 1. Edward Banfield, The Unheavenly City: The Nature and Future of Our Urban Crisis (Boston: Little Brown, 1970). 2. Citations that reference Commentary articles are identified by month and year. 3. A summary of Moynihan’s remarks were reported in the Newsday of August 2, 1994.

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Chapter 5 Acknowledgments: I wish to thank Murray Friedman and Neal Kozodoy for encouraging me to take on this project, and Jessica Demovsky for assisting me in preliminary research. 1. Norman Podhoretz, “Preface,” The Commentary Reader (New York: Atheneum, 1966), vii. 2. Their stories were often published in Commentary, though the magazine’s typical contents made it clear that, after World War II, the form in which American (and not just Jewish-American) literary genius would best express itself was the essay. Among the stories from the first three decades that I do not mention elsewhere, I’d urge readers to try the following: Isaak Babel’s “The Awakening,” Commentary (February 1947), 132–5, “First Love,” Commentary (September 1947), 234–7, and “In the Cellar,” Commentary (January 1948), 41–5; Leslie A. Fiedler’s “Let Nothing You Dismay,” Commentary (March, 1948), 229–33; Bellow’s “Looking for Mr. Green,” Commentary (March 1951), 251–61; Edgar Rosenberg’s “The Happy One,” Commentary (June 1949), 566–73, and “Next of Kin,” Commentary (January 1952), 52–61; and Cynthia Ozick’s “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” Commentary (November 1969), 33–52. 3. Needless to say, there are topics important to Commentary during the early decades that, for coherence’ sake, I here leave to the side. Such topics and critics include: the struggle among Jewish writers over the question of which tradition should have primacy, the Hebrew or the Yiddish, or whether both must give way to American English (key authors include Singer, Bellow, Howe, Ozick, and later Ruth Wisse); the importance of the major European Jewish modernist, Franz Kafka (Heinz Politzer, Hermann L. Goldschmidt, Clement Greenberg, F. R. Leavis); literary approaches to biblical literature (David Daiches, Robert Alter); the revaluation of American literature per se (Philip Rahv, Alfred Kazin, Fiedler, Richard Chase, Leavis, Howe); the achievements of Jewish Anglophone poets, notably Isaac Rosenberg (see essays by Marius Bewley, Daiches, Wisse) and Allen Ginsberg (see Harold Rosenberg, Robert Richman, Podhoretz, Joseph Epstein); and the self-portraits of the New York intellectuals as a group, the central effort being Howe’s “The New York Intellectuals,” Commentary (October 1968), 29–51. The magazine’s contents can now be searched and accessed on-line at commentarymagazine.com/archive 4. Lionel Trilling, “The Changing Myth of the Jew,” Commentary (August 1978), 24–34. 5. Leslie A. Fiedler, “What Can We Do About Fagin?” Commentary (May 1949), 7. The amplified version is in Fiedler on the Roof: Essays on Literature and Jewish Identity (Boston: Godine, 1991), 3–29. 6. As a recent editor puts it: “In the ballad Hugh is tortured and crucified, his heart then eaten by his tormentors; three times they try to dispose of the body—in the earth, in a privy, and in a well—and three times the body reappears. These details indicate just how virulent and hysterical anti-Semitism in England could be and how the miraculous element could be commensurately magnified” (Beverly Boyd, A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Volume 2, The Canterbury Tales, Part 20, “The Prioress’s Tale” [Norman: Univer-

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sity of Oklahoma Press, 1987], 18). In the more usual version, the Jews are said to use the child’s blood in the baking of matzo for Passover. Of course, it’s at least conceivable that Chaucer is no more to be identified with the sweet, unintellectual, anti-Semitic Prioress than he is with the Miller or Reeve. As E. Talbot Donaldson taught, she was an ignorant product of her age in her condemnation of the Jews as enemies of Christianity, “quite forgetting [as Chaucer surely did not] both Christ’s charity and the significance of the fact that He was Himself a Jew” (Chaucer’s Poetry [New York: Ronald, 1958], 933). 7. Thus Fiedler on the Roof, 21. In fact the celebrant says, in echo of Ezekiel 16:6: “In blood thou shalt live.” 8. Ibid. 9. Steven Marcus, “Who Is Fagin?” Commentary (July 1962), 48–59. 10. Irving Howe, “The Stranger and the Victim: The Two Jewish Stereotypes in American Fiction,” Commentary (August 1949), 149, 152. Cf. Milton Hindus, “F. Scott Fitzgerald and Literary Anti-Semitism,” Commentary (June 1947), 508– 16, which distinguishes “fashionable anti-Semitism of the 1920’s, of the sort we find in T. S. Eliot at the same period,” from the “contagious” mad variety found later in Pound or the mystic variety found earlier in Dostoevsky. All such writers are culpable insofar as they had given the virulent anti-Semites materials to work with. But there are distinctions and qualifications to be noted. “Fitzgerald was an artist rather than a philosopher,” Hindus says, “and he was therefore at his best when creating images, not when thinking about them.” When, romanticizing the Midwest, Fitzgerald saw Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby, he saw a man who was foreign, part gangster, part bogey (those molars for cufflinks), symptomatic of East Coast decay. Monroe Stahr may not be altogether “a good man,” but he is what Fitzgerald valued more: “a self-made, romantic millionaire, a dreamer. The more one thinks about him, the more he seems to resemble Jay Gatsby. With one important difference—he is a Jew. . . . For Fitzgerald to admit that a Jew might be a romantic was equivalent to his ceasing to be an anti-Semite. This perhaps reinforces the suggestion that his anti-Semitism was a superficial, merely ‘fashionable’ thing from the beginning” (515). 11. A New Yorker editor once asked Podhoretz if Partisan Review had special typewriters “with entire words like ‘alienation’ stamped on each key,” the way word-processors at (say) New Literary History now have phrase keys for “gendered parameters” and “subject position.” 12. The term “genuine” was freighted with significance by Trilling, who distinguished it from the apparently synonymous “sincerity.” The latter belonged to the Romantic period, and designated being true to the picture one had of oneself—an abiding, morally bound, socially connected citizen of a nation. Authenticity by contrast designated being true to the impulse of the moment, which was all that remained once allegiance to a moral code or to a nation had, for postNietzschean modernists, ceased to command belief. Prior to either sincerity or authenticity were those cultures that believed in something larger than the modern impulse of the moment, or the Romantic self, nature, or nation—namely, religion (Judaism, Christianity) or reason (science, Enlightenment). See Trilling’s “Authenticity and the Modern Unconscious,” Commentary (September 1971), 39– 51, reprinted as the final chapter in his Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Har-

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vard University Press, 1972), and Howe’s “Reading Lionel Trilling,” Commentary (August 1973), 68–71. 13. Excerpted in Commentary’s April, May, and June issues, 1948. 14. Harold Rosenberg, “Does the Jew Exist? Sartre’s Morality Play About Anti-Semitism,” Commentary (January 1949), 12–4. Apropos of these habits of mind, see Paul Goodman, “The Judaism of a Man of Letters,” Commentary (September 1948), 241–3, in which the habits are directed by four theological ideas, all stemming from the biblical stories teaching that “‘the Lord’ . . . is only another name for the nature of things.” That is, God is the author of natural law, physically and morally applied. The four ideas are, first, “the Creation justifies itself, I do not need to justify it.” It often makes no more moral sense to us than it did to Job, but that’s the way things are. Our only hope may lie in talking it through: “I should say that ours is the only Western theology that absolutely justifies, and indeed obliges, psychoanalysis.” Second, God is not a body, a creature to be worshipped: “it is better to have an abstract and impersonal standard, not a father.” Third, the Messiah—not just a “good society”—will come by miracle. Our job is to work, to wait, and to expect that miracle. “‘You are not obliged to finish the work,’ said Rabbi Tarfon, ‘but neither are you free to leave it off.’” Finally, the fourth idea is that nothing else really matters: “all the rest is dubious and unessential, e.g. even most of Maimonides’ thirteen articles.” Other issues, say the doctrine of immortality, can be massaged as playfully as one likes, but they will remain undecidable and by the way: “One could say of the Jewish creed [these four theological ideas]—and there is no higher philosophical praise—what [T. H.] Green once said of the philosophy of Kant: ‘There are difficulties and seeming contradictions; but where nature is clear, Kant is evident; and where Kant is dark, you will find that the nature of things is dark.’” 15. Rosenberg, “Does the Jew Exist?” 18. 16. Harold Rosenberg, “In Time and Eternity,” Commentary (March 1947), 293. 17. Clement Greenberg, “Self-Hatred and Jewish Chauvinism,” Commentary (November 1950), 432. 18. See Harold Rosenberg, “The Communist: His Mentality and His Morals,” Commentary (July 1949), 1–9, and “The Psychoanalysts and the Writer: Mother’s Milk and Inspiration,” Commentary (September 1950), 272–5. 19. Harold Rosenberg, “The Herd of Independent Minds: Has the AvantGarde Its Own Mass Culture?” Commentary (September 1948), 246, 251. 20. James Baldwin, “The Death of the Prophet,” Commentary (March 1950), 261. This is the only piece Baldwin did for Commentary that for some reason is not reprinted in the two-volume Library of America edition of his works. 21. James Baldwin, “The Harlem Ghetto: Winter 1948” Commentary (February 1948), 168, 170. 22. James Baldwin, “Previous Condition,” Commentary (October 1948), 339–42. 23. James Baldwin, “Equal in Paris,” Commentary (March 1955), 258. 24. The next step in such a discussion would be not only Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963), which Podhoretz encouraged him to write, but also the latter’s own “My Negro Problem—And Ours” in Commentary (February 1963), 93–102, and often reprinted, as in Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments, ed. Paul Berman (New York: Delacourte Press, 1994), with an important postscript.

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25. Leslie A. Fiedler, “William Faulkner, An American Dickens,” Commentary (October 1950), 384–7, and “Race—The Dream and the Nightmare,” Commentary (October 1963), 297–304; Irving Howe, “William Faulkner and the Negroes,” Commentary (October 1951), 359–68; Steven Marcus, “The American Negro in Search of Identity,” Commentary (July 1953), 456–63—to which one should add the early Baldwin’s anti-protest-novel, implicitly anti-Richard Wright statement, “The Image of the Negro,” Commentary (April 1948), 378–80. 26. And that sadly dissipated in the course of the 1960s, when Howe’s 1963 essay, “Black Boys and Native Sons” (reprinted with additions in Howe’s Selected Writings 1950–1990 [San Diego: Harcourt, 1990], 119–39), was politely savaged by Ellison—a contretemps that Ozick (Art and Ardor [New York: Knopf, 1983], 96–101) believes to have been the model for Malamud’s The Tenants (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), a novel expressing despair about relations between black and Jewish intellectuals. 27. Baldwin, “Previous Condition,” 341. 28. Norman Mailer, “Responses and Reactions VI,” Commentary (October 1963), 320–1. Apparently Jews should stick to Judaism and let Christianity make its own mistakes, while blacks should stick to something not very removed from animism—or evolve beyond it in their own exhilarated way. Since this is the sort of thing the thought-police will not allow young writers to say even in a first draft, it’s instructive to quote Mailer being his free-floating 1960s self: “The Jews have staggered along for centuries wondering to their primitive horror whether they have betrayed God once in the desert or again twice with Christ: so they are obsessed in their unconscious nightmare with whether they belong to a God of righteousness or a Devil of treachery—their flight from this confrontation has rushed to produce a large part of that mechanistic jargon which now rules American life in philosophy, psychoanalysis, social action, productive process, and the arts themselves. The Negro, secretly fixed upon magic—that elixir of nature which seems to mediate between God and Devil—has never made his peace with Christianity, or mankind. The Negro in the most protected recesses of his soul still does not know if he is a part of mankind, or a special embodiment of nature suspended between society and the gods. As the Negro enters civilization, Faust may be his archetype, even as the Jew has fled Iago as the despised image of himself.” One privilege the novelist claimed for himself was the freedom to melodramatize whole groups of people: the Jew, the Negro. The spirit of Commentary, as I maintain throughout this essay, has more often been that of Rosenberg and Warshow, who defied this pseudo-sociological lumping together in favor of individuated experience, creation, and judgment. 29. Tom Wolfe, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” Harper’s (November 1989), 45–56. 30. Norman Mailer, “Modes and Mutations,” Commentary (March 1966), 37– 40. “Hot damn, Vietnam” is, in mock LBJ-ese, a rhyming phrase. Inverted, it was to be the last sentence of Why We Are in Vietnam (New York: Putnam’s, 1967): “Vietnam, hot damn.” 31. If this was too facile for Howe, it was dangerous and irresponsible to Podhoretz, whose Why We Were in Vietnam (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982)

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is a vigorous, toughly thought-out, and therefore shunned book among (to be redundant) liberal academic historians. 32. John W. Aldridge, “The State of the Novel,” Commentary (October 1977), 47, 50, 51, 47. 33. Malamud published numerous stories in Commentary between 1950 and 1985, all reprinted in the Complete Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997). The best of the Commentary lot are in my opinion “The Bill” (Commentary 1957), 355–8; “The Loan” (Commentary 1952), 56–9; “Angel Levine” (Commentary 1955), 534–40; and “Idiots First” (Commentary 1961), 491–6—especially the first two, which do not at all rely on the magical, supernatural machinery the author frequently cranked up. “The Bill” takes place in a palpably actual Lower East Side, a very poor German-American janitor named Schlegel running up grocery charges he does not understand at a deli run by a retired Jewish couple, the Panessas. Mr. Panessa is no businessman, just an idealist who feels that “if you were really a human being you gave credit to somebody else and he gave credit to you.” Schlegel panics as he realizes he cannot pay the bill, he stops going into the deli, the Panessas go very hungry. Finally, just when it occurs to Schlegel that he might pawn something to raise a bit of money, he finds that Mr. Panessa has died of inanition. At the very least, the story scotches the stereotype about the Jewish moneylender, even as it confirms the truism about how debtors turn on, and victimize, their creditors. It’s an exquisitely brief and understated tale, as is “The Loan,” which is very rich in interpretation-resistant symbols: the baker weeping into his bread dough and somehow improving it, his wife’s insisting that they need money for life insurance and should therefore not forgive a loan to an old friend, and, seemingly in consequence of this tough appeal, the smell of burning loaves of bread: “in the trays were blackened bricks—charred corpses.” This last, if nothing else, alludes to the Holocaust, and reminds us that whatever the individual Jew may have suffered in America, the collective suffering of European Jewry was infinitely worse. 34. Philip Roth, “Writing American Fiction,” Commentary (March 1961), 224, 226–8, 231. 35. Philip Roth, “Writing About Jews,” Commentary (December 1963), 447, 450–2. 36. Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience, enlarged edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), xl. The Commentary pieces cited are “The Legacy of the 30’s” (December 1947), 548–55, “The Movie Camera and the American” (March 1952), 275–81, “The Liberal Conscience in ‘The Crucible’” (March 1953), 265–71, and “Poet of the Jewish Middle Class” (May 1946), 17–22. 37. Warshow, Immediate Experience, 144, 146, 149, 151. The lack of material reality or poetic dialogue did not much trouble another Commentary critic: Kazin, reviewing the Broadway production in 1949, regarded the play as an expressionistic dream, which overcame the liberal cliche´s Miller felt obliged to offer up. “Is Willy Loman’s life only the parable of a familiar lower-middle-class failure, the story of the naive little dreamer run down by the juggernaut of American power? This, presumably, is the ‘meaning’ of the play—but only in the sense that the meaning of a man bleeding to death in the street is that he has been run down by an automobile. It is not this meaning that I carried away from Death of a

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Salesman. On the contrary, what makes it memorable is a concentration of tragic insight and pity directed entirely on the theme of individual destiny. The audience is not so much moved by the situation as it is stunned by the unexpected, the unhoped-for, dignity of emotion brought to bear on it.” Rather than celebrate Warshow’s hard inner-core at the expense of Kazin’s decidedly softer one, I’d say what the latter critic virtually admits: that Elia Kazan’s production, and Lee Cobb and Mildred Dunnock’s acting, managed on stage (Warshow is writing about the film) to do what Miller’s text alone cannot; namely, call forth tragic emotion. See Kazin’s “Broadway and American Integrity,” Commentary (April 1949), 335–40. 38. Warshow, Immediate Experience, 150–1, 168–9, 171–2. 39. Ibid., 28, 35. 40. Self-restraint being called for, I’ll mention only the following literary-critical essays from the last thirty-five years: Podhoretz’s “Lolita, My Mother-in-Law, the Marquis de Sade and Larry Flynt,” Commentary (April 1997), 23–35, “The Adventures of Philip Roth,” Commentary (October 1998), 25–36, “What Happened to Ralph Ellison,” Commentary (July-August, 1999) 46–58, “Looking Back at Catch-22,” Commentary (February 2000), 32–7, and the early 1980s essays on Solzhenitsyn and Milan Kundera collected in The Bloody Crossroads: Where Literature and Politics Meet (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986); Epstein’s “Who Killed Poetry?” Commentary (August 1988), 13–20; Robert Alter’s “The Decline and Fall of Literary Criticism,” Commentary (March 1984), 50–6, and “The Jewish Voice,” Commentary (October 1995), 39–45; Wisse’s “American Jewish Writing, Act II,” Commentary (June 1976), 40–5, “Reading About Jews,” Commentary (March 1980), 41–9, “Saul Bellow’s Winter of Discontent,” Commentary (April 1982), 71–3, and “Sex, Love, and Death: Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth,” Commentary (December 1995), 61–4; Ozick’s “Bech: A Book, by John Updike,” Commentary (November 1970), 106–13, “Observations: Forster as Homosexual,” Commentary (December 1971), 81–5, “Mrs. Virginia Woolf,” Commentary (August 1973), 33–44, “Justice (Again) to Edith Wharton,” Commentary (October 1976), 48–57, and “Mark Twain and the Jews,” Commentary (May 1995), 56–62; and Gross’s “Matthew Arnold and Us,” Commentary (July 1994), 38–42, and “Was T. S. Eliot a Scoundrel?” Commentary (November 1996), 26–31. Plus the following short stories: Johanna Kaplan’s “Sickness,” Commentary (December 1968), 53–61; Yehoshua Bar Yosef’s “The Stranger,” Commentary (November 1984), 51–9; Kelly Cherry’s “Alzheimer’s,” Commentary (June 1987), 50–5; Felix Roziner’s “Purple Smoke,” Commentary (March 1989), 48–59; and Rebecca Goldstein’s “Rabbinical Eyes,” Commentary (June 1991), 39–51. Chapter 6 1. Norman Podhoretz, Making It (New York: Random House, 1967). 2. Ibid., 129–30. 3. Ibid. 4. Samuel Johnson, “Life of Gray,” Lives of the Poets. 5. Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 46, 47.

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Chapter 7 1. All statements by Podhoretz, unless otherwise noted, come from the taped interview with Norman Podhoretz, conducted February 19, 2003, by the author. 2. Richard Gid Powers, Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 3. Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998). 4. Norman Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 219. 5. Ibid., 253. 6. Norman Podhoretz, The Present Danger: Do We Have the Will to Reverse the decline of American Power? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980), 91. 7. Ibid., 92, 94. 8. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Will Russia Blow Up?” Newsweek, November 19, 1979, 144, quoted in Richard Gid Powers, “Introduction” in Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 5. 9. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Commencement Address at New York University,” May 24, 1984, quoted in Moynihan, Secrecy, 5 10. Powers, Not Without Honor, 387. 11. In the spring of 1976, President Ford had ordered CIA Director George Bush to organize an outside committee of defense experts to assess the reliability of the CIA’s estimates of Soviet strength and goals, estimates that most conservatives—and the majority of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board— considered far too “soft” on the Soviets. Team B began its work in June 1976. Richard Pipes chaired the group, which included Paul Nitze, Foy Kohler, and William Van Cleave. Nitze had discovered that “the danger posed by Soviet capabilities was greater than was being reported in the NIEs, but also that there was little evidence to indicate that the Soviets subscribed to our concept of mutual assured destruction (MAD).” When President-elect Carter began to outline his de´tente policies, he was confronted by two independent estimates of Soviet intentions—Team B’s, and a second estimate by the CIA—both of which contradicted Carter’s views that the Soviets were as committed as he to a search for a relaxation of tensions through de´tente and arms reduction. See Paul H. Nitze, From Hiroshima to Glasnost: At the Center of Decision, A Memoir (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1989), 20, 56–7. 12. Charles Tyroler II (ed.), Alerting America: The Papers of the Committee on the Present Danger (Washington, DC: Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1984), xv. 13. Powers, Not Without Honor, 370–1, 373. 14. Tyroler, Alerting America, xvi. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 374. 17. Ibid., 376. 18. The CPD’s second policy paper, “What is the Soviet Union Up To?” was released in on April 4, 1977. It tried to restate and rejustify the fundamental principles that had supported containment policies since the end of World War II: “The Soviet Union is radically different from our society,” it stated, and its

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differences, which had their roots in Russian history and which were heightened by communist ideology, resulted in a drive toward expansion and domination of other countries, near and far away. “No empire in history has expanded so persistently as the Russian. . . . Weakness invites aggression, strength deters it. Thus American strength holds the key to our quest for peace and to our survival as a free society in a world friendly to our hopes and ideals.” Insisting on a parallel to the 1930s and, more specifically, to the appeasement of Hitler at Munich, the CPD concluded with the stark statement that, “The Soviet military buildup of all its armed forces over the past quarter century is, in part, reminiscent of Nazi German’s rearmament in the 1930s.” Quoted in Powers, Not Without Honor, 374. 19. James R. Locher III, “Has It Worked? The Goldwater-Nichols Reorganization Act,” Naval War College Reader Services, available at 20. Norman Podhoretz, My Love Affair with America (San Francisco: Encounter Paperback, 2000), 93. 21. Ibid., 82. 22. Ibid., 105. 23. Ibid., 148.

Chapter 8 1. Book-length treatments of neoconservatism include (in order of appearance) Peter Steinfels, The Neoconservatives (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979); Gary Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind: Culture and the War of Ideology (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993); John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1994 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); and Mark Gerson, The Neoconservative Vision: From the Cold War to the Culture Wars (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1996). Neoconservatives are a major subject of David Hoeveler, Watch on the Right: Conservative Intellectuals in the Reagan Era (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). A lively compendium is Christopher De Muth and William Kristol, eds., The Neoconservative Imagination: Essays in Honor of Irving Kristol (Washington, DC: AEI, 1995). Several neoconservatives have written highly illuminating memoirs. These include Irving Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (New York: Free Press, 1995), and Midge Decter, An Old Wife’s Tale: My Seven Decades in Love and War (New York: ReganBooks, 2001). Of crucial importance for the history of Commentary are four volumes by Norman Podhoretz: Making It (New York: Random House, 1967), Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), Ex-Friends (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000), and My Love Affair with America: The Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative (New York: Free Press, 2000). For accounts of the “New York intellectuals” that contain significant discussion of Commentary’s history, see Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals & Their World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); and Neil Jumon-

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ville, Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 2. Podhoretz’s Breaking Ranks, Ex-Friends, and My Love Affair with America treat his disillusionment with, and revolt from, the Left at length. See also Norman Podhoretz, “The ‘Commentary’ Case,” Quadrant 31 (August 1987): 29–32, and his essay “Neoconservatism: A Eulogy,” Commentary 101 (March 1996): 19– 27. For Podhoretz’s use of the phrase “the cultural revolution of the 60’s” quoted in the text, see his article “What the Voters Sensed,” Commentary 55 (January 1973): 6. 3. Norman Podhoretz, “A Certain Anxiety,” Commentary 52 (August 1971): 4, 6, 8, 10. 4. As a further sign of the magazine’s new direction, Podhoretz introduced into the June 1970 issue an editorial column of his own entitled “Issues.” Commentary 49 (June 1970): 26, 28. He continued the column through December 1972. 5. Podhoretz, My Love Affair with America, 180. 6. See, for example, Louis Harap, “ ‘Commentary’ Moves to the Right,” Jewish Currents 25 (December 1971): 4–9, 27–30; Merle Miller, “Why Norman and Jason Aren’t Talking,” New York Times Magazine, March 26, 1972, 34–5, 104– 111. 7. “Come on In, the Water’s Fine,” National Review 23 (March 9, 1971): 249–50. 8. James Burnham, “Selective, Yes. Humanism, Maybe,” National Review 24 (May 23, 1972): 516. 9. Podhoretz’s correspondence with Buckley may be found in the William F. Buckley, Jr. Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. The earliest item in the Podhoretz file is a letter from him to Buckley dated March 2, 1972. 10. Buckley to Podhoretz, March 28, 1972, Buckley Papers. 11. Podhoretz to Buckley, February 1, 1973, and Buckley to Podhoretz, April 26, 1973, Buckley Papers. Because of illness Buckley was unable to contribute to the symposium. 12. Dwight MacDonald, “Scrambled Eggheads on the Right,” Commentary 21 (April 1956): 367–73; recorded oral history interview of William F. Buckley, Jr., September 27, 1996, by Timothy S. Goeglein, copy in the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 13. Richard H. Rovere, “The Conservative Mindlessness,” Commentary 39 (March 1965): 38–42. 14. Podhoretz, Ex-Friends, 167–8. 15. Podhoretz, “A Certain Anxiety,” 6, 10. 16. This is a phrase that I used in 1976 to describe the new political orientation then arising at Commentary and at the publication The Public Interest. George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 324–7. 17. Podhoretz, “The ‘Commentary’ Case,” 31. 18. Lewis A. Coser and Irving Howe, eds., The New Conservatives: A Critique from the Left (New York: Quadrangle, 1974).

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19. Podhoretz, “Neoconservatism: A Eulogy,” 20. Michael Harrington was not the first person to use the word “neoconservatism” (which can be traced back to the 1950s), but he and some of his colleagues on the Left were evidently the first, or among the first, to apply it specifically to the phenomenon represented by Commentary. 20. Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks, 354–6. Midge Decter, contribution to “What Is a Liberal—Who is a Conservative?” Commentary 62 (September 1976): 50–1. 21. New York Times, December 7, 1972, 14; Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks, 339, 344; Ehrman, Rise of Neoconservatism, 60–1. 22. Podhoretz, My Love Affair with America, 180–1; Ex-Friends, 224–5; Elliott Abrams, contribution to “Liberalism and the Jews,” Commentary 69 (January 1980): 17. 23. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The United States in Opposition,” Commentary 59 (March 1975): 31–44. 24. Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks, 351–4. 25. Ibid., 16, 356–57; Ehrman, Rise of Neoconservatism, 90–2. 26. Ehrman, Rise of Neoconservatism, 92–6, 131–5. 27. Established in 1965 by Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell, The Public Interest put forth a steady stream of critical analysis of Great Society liberalism, both in theory and practice. The Public Interest’s focus, however, was on public policy, not on the wider political and cultural turbulence associated with the Sixties Left. Commentary—although receptive to The Public Interest’s outlook—was not a policy journal aimed at social scientists. Its paramount concerns included foreign policy and what later became known as the “culture wars.” 28. Podhoretz, “Neoconservatism: A Eulogy,” 21. It was precisely because Senator James Buckley of New York appeared to Podhoretz to be an enemy of the New Deal and the “liberal welfare state” that Podhoretz deemed Buckley “a radical of the Right.” Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks, 356, 358. 29. Podhoretz, “Neoconservatism: A Eulogy,” 21. 30. Ibid. It is noteworthy that when Podhoretz “broke ranks” with the Democratic party of the McGovernites, he allied himself for a time with the Social Democrats, a small Socialist group linked to the anticommunist leadership of the AFL-CIO. Podhoretz, My Love Affair with America, 180. Podhoretz’s wife also briefly became affiliated with the Social Democrats; see Midge Decter, “Socialism’s Nine Lives,” Commentary 113 (June 2002): 30. 31. Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks, 27. 32. In 2002 Midge Decter asserted that in the 1970s American “ideological conservatives, who by decade’s end would be preparing to take power, were with only a few exceptions still sulking in their cultural tents.” Decter, “Socialism’s Nine Lives,” 30. One suspects that many other “neoconservatives” at that time shared Decter’s view of the “ideological conservatives.” 33. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Viking Press, 1950), ix. 34. Podhoretz, My Love Affair with America, 189–90. 35. Jeffrey Hart, “New Directions: Catholics and Jews,” National Review 30 (April 28, 1978): 517–20. 36. Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks, 307; “Neoconservatism: A Eulogy,” 22.

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37. As late as 1979, Podhoretz was using the words “centrist” and “centrist liberal” to describe his political position; Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks, 16. 38. Ehrman, Rise of Neoconservatism, chapter 4: “Searching for Truman: 1976– 1980,” 97–136. 39. Ibid., 131–5. 40. Norman Podhoretz, “The Riddle of Reagan,” Weekly Standard 4 (November 9, 1998): 22–4. 41. Podhoretz, Ex-Friends, 100. 42. Ibid.; Norman Podhoretz, The Present Danger (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980); Michael Kramer, “The Book Reagan Wants You to Read,” New York 13 (December 1, 1980): 23–4, 26. 43. Norman Podhoretz, “The New American Majority,” Commentary 71 (January 1981): 19–28. 44. Among the Commentary contributors and other supporters who took important positions in the Reagan administration were Elliott Abrams (Podhoretz’s sonin-law), William Bennett, Linda Chavez, William Kristol, Richard Perle, and Richard Pipes. 45. Jeane Kirkpatrick, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” Commentary 68 (November 1979): 34–45; Podhoretz, “The ‘Commentary’ Case,” 30. 46. Podhoretz, Ex-Friends, 98; Norman Podhoretz, “The Neo-Conservative Anguish Over Reagan’s Foreign Policy,” New York Times Magazine, May 2, 1982, 30. 47. It was in the early 1980s that neoconservatives lost what Irving Kristol called their “social democratic wing.” Although most of the original “neoconservatives” moved to the right on economic issues, a few remained on the left-ofcenter. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan also left the Commentary orbit. Years later Norman Podhoretz observed that in making an intellectual case for capitalism the neoconservatives had been positively “heretical” toward the socialist tradition of the “New York intellectuals” out of whose milieu so many neoconservatives had come. Podhoretz, Ex-Friends, 229. 48. Irving Kristol, “Ideology and Supply-Side Economics,” Commentary 71 (April 1981): 48–54. 49. As Podhoretz later put it, “It was the neoconservatives who decided that the time had come to drag capitalism out of the closet.” Podhoretz, “Neoconservatism: A Eulogy,” 23. See also Podhoretz, Ex-Friends, 229, and “The New Defenders of Capitalism,” Harvard Business Review 59 (March–April 1981): 96–106. 50. George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1981). 51. Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982). Commentary’s reviewer hailed Novak’s book as a “stunning achievement.” Samuel McCracken, “A Theology of Capitalism,” Commentary 74 (July 1982): 74, 76–7. 52. See, for example, Podhoretz, “Neo-Conservative Anguish,” 30–3, 88–9, 92, 96, 97; “Appeasement by Any Other Name,” Commentary 76 (July 1983): 25– 38; “The Reagan Road to Detente,” Foreign Affairs 63, no. 3 (1985): 447–64. 53. Podhoretz, “Riddle of Reagan,” 25. 54. The words “impostor” and “interlopers” were used by the paleoconservative professors Clyde Wilson and M. E. Bradford, respectively, in Intercollegiate Review 21 (Spring 1986): 7, 15.

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55. On the Bradford–Bennett controversy, see: George F. Will, “A Shrill Assault on Mr. Lincoln,” Washington Post, November 29, 1981, C7; John B. Judis, “The Conservative Wars,” New Republic 195 (August 11 and 18, 1986): 15–6; Paul Gottfried, The Conservative Movement, revised edition (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993), 74–5; Gerson, Neoconservative Vision, 312–13. Among paleoconservatives Bradford’s defeat produced great bitterness that persists to this day. See, for example, Samuel Francis, “Inhospitable Neos,” National Review 41 (April 7, 1989): 43; Joseph Scotchie, Revolt from the Heartland: The Struggle for an Authentic Conservatism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 56–8; and Samuel Francis, “The Paleo Persuasion,” December 16, 2002, posted at The American Conservative’s Web site. Available at . 56. “The State of Conservatism: A Symposium,” Intercollegiate Review 21 (Spring 1986): 3–28; Jeffrey Hart, “Gang Warfare in Chicago,” National Review 38 (June 6, 1986): 32–3; Judis, “Conservative Wars,” 16. 57. See, for example, Hart, “Gang Warfare in Chicago,” 32–3; Judis, “Conservative Wars,” 15–8; Paul Gottfried, “Notes on Neoconservatism,” The World and I 1 (September 1986): 573–82; Edward Shapiro, “Conservatism and Its Discontents,” ibid., 565–72; Brigitte Berger and Peter L. Berger, “Our Conservatism and Theirs,” Commentary 82 (October 1986): 62–7; Ernest van den Haag, “The War between Paleos and Neos,” National Review 41 (February 24, 1989): 21–3; “Paleolithics,” ibid., April 7, 1989, 43–4, 46; David Frum, “Cultural Clash on the Right,” Wall Street Journal, June 2, 1989, A16; Robert Moynihan, “Thunder on the Right,” 30 Days (September 1989): 66–72; John B. Judis, “The War at Home,” In These Times 14 (March 14–20, 1990): 12–13, 22; Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., “A New Right,” Rothbard-Rockwell Report 1 (April 1990): 8–12; John P. Judis, “The Conservative Crackup,” American Prospect 1 (Fall 1990): 30–42; Jacob Weisberg, “Hunter Gatherers,” New Republic 205 (September 2, 1991): 14–6. The neo–paleo feud is also discussed in detail in the books by Dorrien and Gerson (cited earlier) and in Gottfried, Conservative Movement, 142–66. See also Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (New York: Guilford Press, 1995), 279–89. For an excellent analysis of the intellectual tensions between neoconservatives and paleoconservatives, see Edward S. Shapiro, “Jews and the Conservative Rift,” American Jewish History 87 (June and September 1999): 195–215. An astute account of paleoconservatism is Edward Ashbee, “Politics of Paleoconservatism,” Society 37 (March–April 2000): 75–84. 58. Paul Gottfried, “Scrambling for Funds,” Rothbard-Rockwell Report 2 (March 1991): 9–15; Gottfried, Conservative Movement, 118–41. 59. Russell Kirk, The Politics of Prudence (Bryn Mawr, PA: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1993), 187. Kirk’s charge is contained in a chapter entitled “The Neoconservatives: An Endangered Species” (172–90). This essay was originally a lecture delivered at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC in 1988. 60. Stephen J. Tonsor, “Why I Too Am Not a Neoconservative,” National Review 38 (June 20, 1986): 55. 61. Van den Haag, “War between Paleos and Neos,” 21. 62. Shapiro, “Conservatism and Its Discontents,” 569; Shapiro, “Jews and the Conservative Rift,” 204. 63. Kirk, Politics of Prudence, 187.

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64. Kirk accused many of the neoconservatives of being “cultural and economic imperialists”; ibid. 65. Tonsor, “Why I Too Am Not a Neoconservative,” 54–6. Said Tonsor: “Unbelief is incompatible with Conservatism” (ibid., 55). 66. Dan Himmelfarb, “Conservative Splits,” Commentary (May 1988): 54–8. 67. Norman Podhoretz, “The Hate That Dares Not Speak Its Name,” Commentary 82 (November 1986): 21–32; Norman Podhoretz, “What Is AntiSemitism? An Open Letter to William F. Buckley, Jr.,” Commentary 93 (February 1992): 15–20; Norman Podhoretz, “Buchanan and the Conservative Crackup,” Commentary 93 (May 1992): 30–4. See also Podhoretz, My Love Affair with America, 202–4. Additional details about these controversies may be found in most of the sources cited in note 57. 68. Podhoretz, “What Is Anti-Semitism?” 16–7; “Buchanan and the Conservative Crackup,” 30–4. See also Joshua Muravchik, “Patrick J. Buchanan and the Jews,” Commentary 91 (January 1991): 29–37. 69. Patrick J. Buchanan, “Conservatives heading for a crack-up,” Boston Herald, May 1, 1991, 31. 70. Podhoretz, “Buchanan and the Conservative Crackup,” 30–4; letters to the editor in Commentary 94 (September 1992): 2, 4–6, 8–10, 12; Norman Podhoretz, “Buchanan and Anti-Semitism.” Wall Street Journal, October 25, 1999, A52; Patrick J. Buchanan, letter to the editor, Wall Street Journal, November 5, 1999, A19; Norman Podhoretz, letter to the editor, Wall Street Journal, November 8, 1999, A51. 71. Podhoretz, “Buchanan and the Conservative Crackup,” 32; John O’Sullivan letter to the editor, Commentary 94 (September 1992): 2, 4; Podhoretz rejoinder to O’Sullivan, ibid., 10. 72. William F. Buckley, Jr., In Search of Anti-Semitism (New York: Continuum, 1992). 73. Podhoretz, “What is Anti-Semitism?” 15–20. 74. Ibid., 15, 20. 75. It is called The American Conservative. 76. Podhoretz, “The Hate That Dares Not Speak Its Name,” 32; Moynihan, “Thunder on the Right,” 71; Gottfried, “Scrambling for Funds,” 9–15; Gottfried, Conservative Movement, 118–41; Gottfried, “Conservative Crack-up Continued,” Society 31 (January/February 1994): 23–9. 77. Burnham, “Selective, Yes. Humanism, Maybe,” 516. 78. In mid-1979 Irving Kristol remarked that “the gap is closing” between Reaganite conservatives and the neoconservatives. In his judgment, conservatives were “gradually becoming, I would say, somewhat neoconservative.” In his opinion Reagan and “the Republican Party as a whole” were moving toward an acceptance of “the welfare state principle” coupled with criticism of the welfare state’s “size and shape”; in other words, the neoconservative position. Irving Kristol, remarks at National Public Radio’s “National Town Meeting: The Neoconservatives,” Washington, DC, July 19, 1979 (transcript in the author’s possession). Kristol’s comments proved prophetic of the practice (if not, perhaps, the theory) of applied Reaganite conservatism in the 1980s. 79. In 1996 Norman Podhoretz suggested that many traditional conservatives

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moved toward acceptance of the principles of the (early) civil rights movement “under the tutelage of the neoconservatives.” Podhoretz, “Neoconservatism: A Eulogy,” 24. 80. Ibid., 23–4. 81. Thus, Podhoretz’s book My Love Affair with America contains considerable discussion of the “culture wars” of the 1990s. It also seems emblematic of his evolving interests that his latest book focuses on religion. See Podhoretz, The Prophets: Who They Were, What They Are (New York: Free Press, 2002). It is also noteworthy that during the 1990s, Podhoretz’s wife, Midge Decter, was affiliated for five years with the Institute on Religion and Public Life, publisher of the religiously oriented journal First Things. Decter, An Old Wife’s Tale, 176–81. 82. David Cantor, The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance & Pluralism in America (New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1994); New York Times, July 23, 1994, 26. 83. New York Times, July 23, 1994, 26. 84. See, for example, Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein, Danger on the Right (New York: Random House, 1964). 85. New York Times, July 23, 1994, 26; ibid., August 2, 1994, A21 (for the advertisement). See also Midge Decter, “The ADL vs. the ‘Religious Right,’” Commentary 98 (September 1994): 45–7, and letters to the editor, Commentary 99 (January 1995): 10–4. 86. Norman Podhoretz, “In the Matter of Pat Robertson,” Commentary 100 (August 1995): 27–32. Podhoretz remarked here that, “in my view Robertson’s support for Israel trumps the anti-Semitic pedigree of his ideas about the secret history of the dream of a new world order” (32). 87. Norman Podhoretz, “The Christian Right and Its Demonizers,” National Review 52 (April 3, 2000): 30–2. 88. Midge Decter, “A Jew in Anti-Christian America,” First Things, no. 56 (October 1995): 25–31. See also Irving Kristol, “The Future of American Jewry,” Commentary 92 (August 1991): 21–6. According to Kristol, “The real danger is not from a revived Christianity, which American Jews (if they are sensible) can cope with, but from an upsurge of anti-biblical barbarism that will challenge Christianity, Judaism, and Western civilization altogether” (26). 89. Richard John Neuhaus, “Introduction” to “The End of Democracy? The Judicial Usurpation of Politics,” First Things, no. 67 (November 1996): 18–20. The ensuing symposium contained essays by five contributors. Although the “Introduction” was signed by “The Editors,” Neuhaus himself (the editor-in-chief) evidently wrote it. Podhoretz, My Love Affair with America, 204. 90. Podhoretz, My Love Affair with America, 204–5, 208–9; contribution to “On the Future of Conservatism,” Commentary 103 (February 1997): 35–7. 91. Ibid.; Gertrude Himmelfarb, letter to the editor, First Things, no. 69 (January 1997): 2. 92. The two were Gertrude Himmelfarb and Peter Berger. A third contributor, Walter Berns, also resigned. First Things, no. 69 (January 1997): 2, 3; and Jacob Heilbrunn, “Neocon v. Theocon,” New Republic 215 (December 30, 1996): 22. 93. The First Things symposium generated a huge outpouring of commentary,

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much of which has been collected in two volumes: Mitchell S. Muncy, ed., The End of Democracy? (Dallas, TX: Spence, 1997); Mitchell S. Muncy, ed., The End of Democracy? II: A Crisis of Legitimacy (Dallas, TX: Spence, 1999). 94. Heilbrunn, “Neocon v. Theocon,” 20–4; David Glenn, “The Schism,” Lingua Franca 7 (February 1997): 24–6; Michael Rust and David Wagner, “GOP Philosopher-Kings Battle for Soul of the Party,” Insight (February 3, 1997): 12–5; Chronicle of Higher Education, February 7, 1997, A14–5. 95. Rabbi Mayer Schiller, quoted in Insight (February 3, 1997): 15. 96. Podhoretz, My Love Affair with America, 215–20. 97. Ibid., 220. 98. Ibid., 232–5. 99. Podhoretz, contribution to “On the Future of Conservatism,” 36. 100. Podhoretz, My Love Affair with America, 209. 101. Ibid. 102. Podhoretz, “Neoconservatism: A Eulogy,” 19, 25. 103. Ibid., 26, 25, 23. 104. Arthur Hertzberg, A Jew in America: My Life and a People’s Struggle for Identity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002), 284–5. 105. Murray Friedman, “Rights of Passage,” Moment (October 1997): 51–2. Chapter 9 1. A large literature on the history of Commentary and neoconservatism now exists. For a brief history of the magazine, see John Ehrman, “Commentary,” in Ronald Lora and William Longton, eds., The Conservative Press in Twentieth-Century America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999). For the development of neoconservatism, see Norman Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks (New York: Harper & Row, 1979; reprint, New York: Harper Colophon, 1980); Neil Jumonville, Critical Crossings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Gary Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993); John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Irving Kristol, Neoconservatism (New York: Free Press, 1995); and Ehrman, “Commentary, the Public Interest, and the Problem of Jewish Conservatism,” American Jewish History 87 (June–September 1999): 159–81. Two recent summaries of neoconservatism’s basic tenets are Irving Kristol, “The Neoconservative Persuasion,” Weekly Standard, August 25, 2003, 23ff and Joshua Muravchik, “The Neoconservative Cabal,” Commentary (September 2003): 26ff. 2. Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks, 294–5, 305–6. 3. “Murdoch Finances New Forum for Right,” New York Times, April 30, 1995, 20; “Debut for a Conservative Weekly,” New York Times, September 11, 1995, D9. 4. “New Republic’s Longtime Owner Sells Control to 2 Big Financiers,” New York Times, January 28, 2002, C1. 5. Gottfried, The Conservative Movement, revised edition, (New York: Twayne, 1993), 92. 6. David Gelernter, “How the Intellectuals Took Over (And What to Do About It),” Commentary (March 1997): 37; Midge Decter, “What Are Little Boys

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Made Of?” Commentary (December 1998): 30–1; Arch Puddington, “The War on the War on Crime,” Commentary (May 1999): 32; Norman Podhoretz, “The Return of the ‘Jackal Bins,’” Commentary (April 2002): 32. 7. Gertrude Himmelfarb, One Nation, Two Cultures (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999): 45, 57, 52; David Brooks, “Patio Man and the Sprawl People,” Weekly Standard, August 12–19, 2002, 25, 26, 29. 8. David Brooks, “A Return to National Greatness,” Weekly Standard, March 3, 1997, 21, 19; David Brooks, “Bully for America,” Weekly Standard, June 23, 1997, 21, 23; William Kristol, “Reagan’s Greatness,” Weekly Standard, November 10, 1997, 30–4; David Brooks and William Kristol, “What Ails Conservatism,” Wall Street Journal, September 15, 1997, A22. See also William Bennett and John DiIulio, “What Good is Government?” Commentary (November 1997): 25ff. 9. Brooks and Kristol, “What Ails Conservatism.” 10. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Was Woodrow Wilson Right?” Commentary (May 1974): 30; Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The United States in Opposition,” Commentary (March 1975): 42–4 (italics in the original). 11. Norman Podhoretz, “Neoconservatism: A Eulogy,” Commentary (March 1996): 24. 12. Paul Wolfowitz, “Clinton’s First Year,” Foreign Affairs (January/February 1994): 30, 31, 32, 35, 37, 42; Frederick Kagan and David Fautua, “Could We Fight a War if We Had To?” Commentary (May 1997): 29; Elliott Abrams, “Hapless Abroad,” National Review, April 5, 1999, 20. 13. William Kristol and Robert Kagan, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, (July/August 1996): 20, 23, 26. 14. Kristol and Kagan, “Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” 27–9. “Keeping the U.S. First: Pentagon Would Preclude a Rival Superpower,” Washington Post, March 11, 1992, 1. 15. Robert Kagan and William Kristol, “The Present Danger,” National Interest (Spring 2000): 61; Robert Kagan, “Democracies and Double Standards,” Commentary (August 1997): 26; Elliott Abrams, “To Fight the Good Fight,” National Interest (Spring 2000): 76; Paul Wolfowitz, “Remembering the Future,” National Interest (Spring 2000): 41; Paul Wolfowitz, “Rising Up,” New Republic (December 7, 1998): 12; Condoleeza Rice, “Promoting the National Interest,” Foreign Affairs (January/February 2000): 53, 57. See also Robert Kagan, “The Ungreat Washed,” New Republic (July 7–14, 2003): 27ff. 16. Daniel Pipes, “Who is the Enemy?” Commentary (January 2002): 22; Norman Podhoretz, “How to Win World War IV,” Commentary (February 2002): 28; Michael Ledeen, The War Against the Terror Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), 172. For the explanation of how Middle Eastern troubles have given rise to extremism, see Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), and Lewis, The Crisis of Islam (New York: Modern Library, 2003). 17. Pipes, “Who is the Enemy?” 23; Joshua Muravchik, “The Bush Manifesto,” Commentary (December 2002): 30; Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 95; William Kristol, “The End of the Beginning,” Weekly Standard, May 12, 2003, 9. 18. Elizabeth Drew, “The Neocons in Power,” New York Review of Books, June

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12, 2003, 22; “The Shadow Men,” Economist (April 26, 2003): 21; “Welcome to the Real World,” Newsweek (June 23, 2003): 34. For other treatments of the neoconservatives in the popular press, see “Who’s Pulling the Foreign Policy Strings?” Washington Post, May 14, 2002, A19; Bill Keller, “The Sunshine Warrior,” New York Times Magazine, September 22, 2002, pp. 48ff; “Back in Political Forefront,” Washington Post, May 27, 2003, 1; and Sam Tanenhaus, “Bush’s Brain Trust,” Vanity Fair (July 2003): 114ff; Maureen Dowd, “Neocon Coup at the Department d’Etat,” New York Times, August 6, 2003, A21. Tanenhaus’s article draws heavily on a revealing interview with Wolfowitz, the transcript of which may be found online. Available at: . For a neoconservative’s reply to the charges, see Murachik, “Cabal.” 19. Russell Kirk, The Politics of Prudence (Bryn Mawr, PA: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1993), 180; Patrick Buchanan, “Whose War?” American Conservative, March 24, 2002, available at: . For an example of neoconservative support for the Christian Right—Podhoretz defending the Reverend Pat Robertson from charges of anti-Semitism—see Norman Podhoretz, “In the Matter of Pat Robertson,” Commentary (August 1995): 27ff. For additional paleoconservative comments about neoconservatism, see Samuel Francis, “Beautiful Losers,” (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), chaps. 5, 6, 13; and Gottfried, The Conservative Movement, chaps. 4, 6. 20. David Frum, “Unpatriotic Conservatives,” National Review (April 7, 2003): 33, 40. 21. “Frum Forum,” National Review (May 19, 2003): 22, 24; Ramesh Ponnuru, “Getting to the Bottom of This ‘Neo’ Nonsense,” National Review (June 16, 2003): 29, 30. For the role of National Review in the fates of the Randians and John Birch Society, see George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, updated edition (Wilimington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1996), 142–5, 275–6. 22. Michael Walzer, “Can There Be a Decent Left,” Dissent (Spring 2002): 22; Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), 185; “Christopher Hitchens Quits the Nation,” Washington Post, September 26, 2002, C3. See also Michael Kazin, “A Patriotic Left,” Dissent (Fall 2002): 41ff. 23. For the Iraq–Vietnam analogy, see “The Shadow Men.” For a response to this argument, see Paul Wolfowitz, “Roots of Hope in a Realm of Fear,” Washington Post, July 28, 2002, A21; and for the neoconservative view of Vietnam and America’s ability to spread democracy through military action, see Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace (New York: Basic Books, 2002), chaps. 12–5.

About the Contributors

Nathan Abrams lectures in American history at the University of Aberdeen. He is co-editor of Containing America: Cultural Production and Consumption in Fifties America. He is currently researching Commentary magazine. John Ehrman is the author of The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1994. Murray Friedman is Director of the Myer and Rosaline Feinstein Center for American Jewish History at Temple University. Nathan Glazer is Professor Emeritus of Education and Social Structure at Harvard University. Thomas L. Jeffers is an associate professor in the department of English at Marquette University. George H. Nash is the author of many books, including a multivolume biography of Herbert Hoover. He writes and lectures frequently about American conservatism. His contributions have appeared in National Review, Modern Age, Policy Review, The American Spectator, and many other periodicals. Richard Gid Powers is a professor of history at the College of Staten Island and the CUNY Graduate Center, and author of Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism. 219

220

About the Contributors

Fred Siegel is a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute and a professor of history and humanities at The Cooper Union in Manhattan. In addition to his weekly column in the New York Post, he is a frequent contributor to publications such as The New Republic, Atlantic Monthly, Tikkun, and Commonwealth. Terry Teachout, the music critic of Commentary and the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal, writes “Second City,” a column for the Washington Post about the arts in New York City. His writings about books, dance, film, music, and the visual arts also appear regularly in National Review and the New York Times. His most recent book is The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken. Ruth R. Wisse is the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University.

Index

Abel, Lionel: and Jewish Americanism, 32 Abrams, Charles: on race, 78 Abrams, Elliott: and neoconservative successes, 176, 178; as exponent of neoconservative foreign policy, 182, 184 Adams, James Ring: on race, 86–7 affirmative action: rejected by neoconservatives, 167, 179 African Americans: relationship of, with Jews, 84, 85, 95, 110–15 Aldridge, John W.: on American literature, 116–17, 118 Aleichem, Sholem, 58 Alter, Robert: and Menorah Journal, 29; and Jewish literature, 66–7 American Council for Judaism: as antiZionist, 12 American Enterprise Institute: as home to neoconservatives, 178 American Jewish Committee (AJC): and creation of intellectual community, 9–10; history of, 10–12; as non-Zionist, 11, 45; anticommunism of, 22–3; relationship with Commentary, 18–29, 55. American Jewish Congress, 11 Anderson, Jervis: on multiculturalism, 83 Anti-Defamation League, 11; condemns religious Right, 168 anti-Semitism: AJC fight against, 11; impact on Jewish intellectuals, 12–14; in higher education, 29–30; social sciences as aid to understanding, 43; discussed in Commentary, 42, 43–4 62–3; in literature, 58–9, 100, 101–3; of Right, 164–5; of Left, 154; of African Americans, 152; compared to anti-Americanism, 148–50

221

anticommunism, 4; importance of Commentary in supporting, 5–6; as major issue in Commentary, 45–7; of Podhoretz, 134–9, 140, 142, 144–50; as bond between Commentary and conservatives, 157–8 Arendt, Hannah, 18; on Zionism, 48, 56; Podhoretz criticizes Eichmann coverage of, 63 Auletta, Ken: on race, 94 Avukah: as socialist, 39; opposes Jewish state, 40 Baldwin, James: on relationship of African Americans and Jews, 110–12, 113–14 Banfield, Edward, 97; critique of liberal reform, 75 Beame, Abe: and economic decline of New York, 89–90 Bell, Daniel: on Cohen, 30; Glazer consults, 38–9; and Judaism at Commentary, 49 Bellow, Saul, 3; and redefinition of Jewishness, 34; and Judaism, 49 Bennett, William, 162 Berman, Paul: and leftist foreign policy, 189 Bernstein, Richard: and rejection of political correctness, 6–7 Bialik, Chaim Nahman, 58 Blaustein, Jacob: and post-war AJC, 12; and Rosenfeld controversy, 26, 27 Bloom, Alexander: on Commentary, 4 Boot, Max: and neoconservative successes, 177, 178 Borkenau, Franz: and anticommunism in Commentary, 46

222

Index

Bradford, M. E.: and paleo/neoconservative conflicts, 162–3 Brookings Institution, 178 Brooks, David, 7; and neoconservative successes, 177, 178; on role of federal government, 180–1 Bruce-Biggs, B.: on Robert Moses, 89 Brustein, Robert, 62 Buchanan, Patrick: as anti-Semitic, 165; and paleo/neoconservative conflicts, 187, 188 Buckley, William F. Jr.: and Commentary’s shift to right, 153–4; and anti-Semitism on Right, 165, 166 Burnham, James: on neoconservatism, 153, 157–8, 162, 166 Caro, Robert: on Robert Moses, 89–90 Carter, Jimmy: Cold War policy of, 137–8, 140 Chazen, Leonard: on racial politics of school reform, 83–4 Christian Right: Commentary defends, 167–9 civil liberties, 37 Clark, Kenneth, 88 Cleaver, Eldridge: on race, 83 Cohen, David: on racial politics of school reform, 84–5 Cohen, Elliot E., 152; on Commentary and Partisan Review, 2; editorial philosophy of, 2, 19, 23, 24–5; and Jewish intellectuals, 18; and Rosenfeld controversy, 26–7; background of, 28–31; as advocate of Jewish Americanism, 30–2, 54; achievements, 37; becomes Commentary editor, 41–2 Cold War: and anti-Americanism, 137. See also anticommunism Commentary: stresses Americanism of Jews, 1–3, 9–10, 30–2; “From the American Scene,” 2–3, 35; editorial freedom of, 10, 19–20, 21, 23, 25–7; relationship of AJC to, 18–29, 55; as anticommunist, 22, 45–7, 64; as Jewish magazine, 42–3; The Study of Man, 43; The Cedars of Lebanon, 45; The Month in History, 45–6; broad influence of, 52–3; and Zionism, 55–9; Podhoretz editorial philosophy, 59–61; shift to neoconservatism, 67–9, 78–9, 153–9; under Kozodoy, 71–3; writing style of, 127–30, 131–3; political influence of, 160

Committee on the Present Danger: background, 140–1; membership, 141–2; on communist threat, 142–4 Communism: and Soviet Jews, 64. See also anticommunism Contemporary Jewish Record (CJR), 38; on Jewish identity, 17–18; superseded by Commentary, 19; death of Oko, 40; Glazer works for, 40–1; arrival of Cohen, 41–2 Cooney, Terry, 14 Corbett, Percy, 42 Coser, Lewis A.: and Dissent, 36–7; criticizes Commentary’s shift to right, 155 Costikyan, Edward: on New York politics, 96 Danzig, David: on urban reform, 87, 88, 89; on liberalism, 98 Dawidowicz, Lucy: and relationship of AJC to Commentary, 22 Decter, Midge, 161, 176; on Jewish identity, 17; on intellectual community, 29; on poverty and race, 91–2; on Left’s hatred for America, 179 Dennison, George: on black radical literature, 82–3 Dickerstein, Morris, 71 Dinkins, David: as mayor of New York, 77, 94–6 Dinnerstein, Leonard: on anti-Semitism, 29 Draper, Theodore, 88 Drew, Elizabeth: on neoconservative foreign policy, 186 Dubnow, Shimon: on Zionism, 56 Dubofsky, Melvin, 88 education: racial politics and school reform, 79–81, 83–5 Ehrman, John, 7; on value of Commentary, 8 Eichmann, Adolf: Arendt on trial of, 63 Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man: and power of literature, 121 Engel, Irving: and post-war AJC, 12; and relationship of AJC to Commentary, 22, 23 Epstein, Jason, 50–1 Epstein, Joseph: on race, 91 Ethics and Public Policy Center, 178 Fackenheim, Emil: on Reform Judaism, 66 Fallwell Jerry: and Christian Right, 167 Feild, John: on urban reform, 87, 88, 89

Index Fiedler, Leslie: and redefinition of Jewishness, 34; on Jews in literature, 58–9, 101, 102–3 Fineberg, Solomon: on anticommunism, 22–3 Fischer, Louis: and anticommunism in Commentary, 46 Foucault, Michel, 37 Fox News: as neoconservative, 178 Friedenberg, Edgar, 4 Friedman, Murray: on racism, 86 Frum, David: and paleo/neoconservative conflicts, 187–8 Gaster, Theodor, 42 Gelernter, David: on Judaism, 72; on Left’s hatred for America, 179 Gilman, Richard: on race, 83 Ginsberg, Allen, 65 Giuliani, Rudolph, 77, 94; as mayor of New York, 96–8 Glamaison, Milton: and school integration, 80–1 Glazer, Nathan, 2; rejects political correctness, 6; on Israel, 58, 68; on Jewish intellectuals, 68; on school integration, 79– 80; on city government, 81 Golden, Harvey, Only in America: critiqued, 60–1 Goodman, Paul: and radicalism of Commentary, 59 Great Society programs: 87–8. See also welfare Greenberg, Clement, 2; as editor of CJR, 40; as art critic, 43; and Judaism, 49–50; on Jewish identity, 107–8 Halkin, Hillel, 71 Handlin, Oscar: on AJC, 11 Hanson, Victor Davis: and neoconservative successes, 177 Harrington, Michael: criticizes Commentary’s shift to right, 155 Hayden, Tom, 5 Heller, Joseph, 3 Hertzberg, Sidney: and The Month in History column, 45 higher education: and New Left, 6 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 176; and Judaism at Commentary, 49; and First Things controversy, 169–70; on Left’s hatred for America, 179

223

Himmelfarb, Milton, 28; and Judaism at Commentary, 49; as writer on Jewish subjects, 64–6 Hitchens, Christopher: and leftist foreign policy, 189 Hook, Sidney: and Zionism, 58 Horkheimer, Max: Glazer works for, 39–40 Howe, Irving: on Jewish identity, 17, 105; and Rosenfeld controversy, 27; leaves Commentary to establish Dissent, 35, 36–7; and Judaism, 49; on role of intelligentsia, 69–70; on stereotypes of Jews in literature, 101, 103–4; on Mailer, 116; criticizes Commentary’s shift to right, 155 Hudson Institute, 178 intelligentsia: relation of to community, 69–71 Iran, 189; hostage crisis, 144 Iraq: neconservative position on, 185–6, 187–8 Israel, 58, 68, 71, 153; Podhoretz’s support for, 148–9, 154; Christian Right support for, 168–9. See also Palestine question; Zionism Jackson, Henry, 156; and Cold War, 140, 141 Jacobs, Paul: on racial politics of school reform, 83–4 Jarrell, Randall, 42 Jeffers, Thomas Bell, 3 Jewish Americans: and America as home, 10–11, 12, 32–3; assimilation of, 12–13; and identity, 16–17, 33–5, 108. See also Jewish identity Jewish Frontier, 53 Jewish identity: stereotypes in literature, 100, 101–4; self-definition of, 100, 104– 115; and individualism, 108–10. See also Jewish Americans Jones, LeRoi: Dennison’s critique of, 82–3 Judaism: lack of, among Commentary staff, 49–50; rejection of, by intellectuals, 54–5; Conservative, 64–6; Reform, 66; recent coverage of, in Commentary, 71–3 Jumonville, Neil: on Cohen, 30 Kagan, Robert: and neoconservative successes, 177; on Left’s hatred for America, 179; advocates global hegemony, 183–5; and Iraq, 186 Kallen, Horace: and Menorah Journal, 29

224

Index

Kaplan, Robert: and neoconservative successes, 177 Katz, Shlomo: on Zionism, 48, 57 Kazin, Alfred: on Jewish identity, 17; and Judaism, 49 Kazin, Michael: and importance of studying Commentary, 7–8 Kemp, Jack, 135 Kimmage, Michael: on Zionism, 56 Kirk, Russell: and paleo/neoconservative conflicts, 163, 187 Kirkpatrick, Jeane, 52, 160; as exponent of neoconservative foreign policy, 174, 182 Knox, Isreal: on Zionism, 56 Koch, Ed: as mayor of New York, 92–4 Kozodoy, Neal, 2; and Mideast peace process, 71; as Commentary editor, 71–3; on urban reform, 78 Krauthammer, Charles: and neoconservative successes, 177 Kristol, Irving, 2, 174, 176; on importance of Commentary, 1; and editorial freedom, 24, 25, 26, 27–8; “‘Civil Liberties,’ 1952—A Study in Confusion: Do We Defend Our Rights by Protecting Communists?” 27–8; joins Commentary, 44; and McCarthy, 47; lack of familiarity with Judaism at Commentary, 49; and Zionism, 57; on BOBO culture, 89; and supply-side economics, 161 Kristol, William, 7; and neoconservative successes, 177, 178, 179, 181; advocates global hegemony, 183–5 Kronenberger, Louis, 42 LaGuardia, Fiorello, 90; supports unions, 82 Lasch, Christopher, 4 Lasky, Melvin: and anticommunism in Commentary, 46 Ledeen, Michael: and neoconservative successes, 177; and foreign policy, 185 Left: points of agreement with neoconservatives, 189. See also New Left Lerner, Max: and anti-Semitism in higher education, 30 Levenson, Jon, 71 Levin, Meyer, 42; on Zionism, 56 Lewis, Bernard: and neoconservative successes, 177, 178; and foreign policy, 185

liberalism, 98; urban reform and, 74–6, 82, 84; Commentary shift from, 78–9, 155–9; of Podhoretz, 146–8 Lindsay, John: and failure of liberalism, 82, 84; welfare policies of, 86–7; and economic decline of New York, 89–90 literature, American: as reviewed in Commentary, 115–19 Longstaff, Stephen: on Jewish identity, 17–18 Lowenthal, Leo, 39 Macdonald, Dwight: and Rosenfeld controversy, 26–7; and critique of conservatives, 154 Mailer, Norman, 3; and radicalism of Commentary, 59; on relationship of African Americans and Jews, 114–15; on American literature, 115–16, 117 Malamud, Bernard, 3; and redefinition of Jewishness, 34 Mannheim, Karl: on intelligentsia, 69 Marcus, Steven: on stereotypes of Jews in literature, 101, 103 Marmor, Ted: on welfare, 98 Marxism: and Jewish intellectuals, 12, 13, 14–15, 39 McCarthy, Mary, 42; and Rosenfeld controversy, 26–7 McCarthyism, 136, 137 McConnell, Scott: and Dinkins mayoral campaign, 94 McGovern, George, 4; opposed by Commentary, 153, 155–6 Mead, Larry: on welfare, 97 Memmi, Albert: on North African Jews, 63 Menorah Journal, The, 14, 24, 53 Meyer, Peter: and anticommunism in Commentary, 46 Meyerson, Harold: on liberalism, 98 Miller, Arthur: Warshow on, 123–5 modernism: and social science, 43; as alternative to ethnic traditions, 49–50 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 52; on failure of urban reform, 76–8, 87–8; on machine politics, 79; predicts fall of USSR, 139– 40; supported by Commentary as centrist liberal, 156–7, 159; as exponent of neoconservative foreign policy, 174, 182, 184 Moynihan Report, 75 Munz, Ernest: on Zionism, 48

Index Muravchik, Joshua: and neoconservative successes, 177, 178; and Clinton, 183; and Iraq, 186 Murray, Charles: on failure of urban reform, 76; on welfare, 93–4 Nash, George, 7 National Review: and Commentary’s shift to right, 153 neoconservatism: Commentary’s gradual shift to, 67–9, 155–9; economics, 161; foreign policy, 161; conflicts with traditional conservatives, 162–71; and religious right, 167–70; Podhoretz declares victory of, 171–3; defining characteristics of, 175–6; current exponents of, 176–6; new media outlets for, 177–8; think tanks, 178–9; and terrorism, 181–6; paleoconservative attacks on, 187–8 Neuhaus, Richard John: and First Things controversy, 169–71 New Leader, The, 38–9 New Left: rejected neoconservatives, 4–5, 152, 155, 179 New Republic, The, 54 New York City: urban reform in, 75–8. welfare in, 86–7, 95; economic decline of, 89–91, 95; under Lindsey, 82, 84, 86–4; 89–90; under Beame, 89–90; under Koch, 92–4; under Dinkins, 94–5; under Giuliani, 96–8. New York Federation of Jewish Philanthropists, 24, 30 Nitze, Paul: and Cold War, 140 North Korea, 189 Novak, Michael: and neoconservative economics, 161 Odets, Clifford: Warshow on, 125–6 Oko, Adolph S.: and CJR, 18, 40 Orwell, Geroge, 42 Ozick, Cynthia: impact of Commentary on career of, 3 Palestine question: in Commentary, 55–9. See also Israel; Zionism Partisan Review, 54; as model for Commentary, 1–2, 8, 19; creation of intellectual community around, 15–16; and CJR, 40; shares writers with Commentary, 41, 42; and Judaism, 50

225

Pauli, Hertha, 42 Pells, Richard: on importance of Commentary, 1 Perle, Richard: and neoconservative successes, 177 Pipes, Daniel: on anti-Semitism, 3–4; and foreign policy, 185, 186 Podhoretz, John: and neoconservative successes, 177 Podhoretz, Norman, 2, 176; editorial philosophy of, 3, 59–61; and terrorism, 7; on Cohen, 10–20, 21, 25; on Jewish identity, 17; and Menorah Journal, 29; on Jewish Americanism, 30–1, 35; on Eichmann trial, 63; on urban reform, 78; on Koch, 92–3; Making It, 127–8; as anticommunist, 134–9, 140, 142, 144–6, 148–50; liberal phase of, 4, 146–8; Breaking Ranks, 140; The Present Danger, 138, 140; impact of anti-Americanism on, 137, 145, 147– 50, 179; defends Christian Right, 169; and First Things controversy, 169–71; declares neconservative victory, 171–2; and foreign policy, 182–3 Ponnuru, Ramesh: and paleo/neoconservative conflicts, 188 Proskauer, Joseph M.: and post-war AJC, 12 Puddington, Arch: on Left’s hatred for America, 179 Rabinowitz, Dorothy: on Koch, 92 race: and urban reform, 75, 79–81, 83–5; tensions between African Americans and Jews, 80, 84, 95, 110–15; and crime, 88, 91; Koch on, 92; and Dinkins mayoral campaign, 94–5. See also African Americans Rahv, Philip: and CJR, 18, 40; and Rosenfeld controversy, 27; and Zionism, 58 Ravitch, Diane: on racial politics of school reform, 84–5 Reagan, Ronald, 6; Cold War policy of, 136, 138–9; supported by Podhoretz, 139, 159, 161 Rice, Condoleeza: and foreign policy, 185 Richler, Mordecai: on New York intelligentsia, 60 Robertson, Pat: and Christian Right, 167; supports Israel, 168–9 Robinson, Jacob: on Eichmann trial, 63

226

Index

Rorty, James, 42; on race, 78 Rosenberg (Julius and Ethel) case, 22 Rosenberg, Harold, 42; on stereotypes of Jews in literature, 100; on Jewish selfidentification, 105–7 Rosenfeld, Isaac: “Adam and Eve on Delancy Street” controversy, 25–7; and CJR, 40; and familiarity with Judaism, 49 Rosenzweig, Franz: on Zionism, 56 Roth, Philip, 3; on American literature, 118–19; fiction of, 119–21 Rovere, Richard: and critique of conservatives, 154 Rustin, Bayard: on urban reform, 87 Ryan, William: on racism, 75 Sachar, Howard: on construction of Jewish American discourse, 9–10 Sartre, Jean-Paul: on anti-Semitism, 105–6 Schamberg, Sidney: on Koch, 93 Schlesinger, Arthur Jr.: and rejection of political correctness, 6 Schwartz, Harry: and anticommunism in Commentary, 46 Seigel, Seymour, 49 Selzer, Irwin: on Giuiliani, 97 Sennett, Richard, 88 Shanker, Al: and school reform, 84 Shefner, Evelyn: and CJR, 40 Siegel, Fred: on welfare state, 5 Simon, Ernst: lack of familiarity with Judaism at Commentary, 49 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 3; on Communism, 64 Slawson, John: and reorganization of AJC, 12; and Commentary, 19, 20–21 Smelansky, Moshe: on Zionism, 56 Sobran, Joseph: and paleo/neoconservative conflicts, 188 Solotaroff, Theodore, 25 Soviet Union: and Commentary’s anticommunism, 4 Steinbeck, John: Warshow on, 122–3 Steiner, George, 64 Stroock, Alan: and relationship of AJC to Commentary, 22 Sullivan, Andrew: and neoconservative successes, 177 Taubes, Jacob: lack of familiarity with Judaism at Commentary, 49

Teachout, Terry, 3 Tercentenary celebration of Jews in America, 35–6 terrorism, 7, 181–6 Tomasky, Michael: on Dinkins administration, 96 Tonsor, Stephen: and paleo/neoconservative conflicts, 163, 164 Trilling, Diana: on Cohen, 24–5 Trilling, Lionel, 30; and redefinition of Jewishness, 34; and Cohen, 41; on stereotypes of Jews in literature, 101; on conservatism, 158 unions: as block to urban reform, 81–2 United States: as Jewish home, 10–11, 12, 32–3 universalism: and Jewish intellectuals, 19 urban reform: failure of, 75–8; of political machines, 79; and school integration 79–81 Vietnam: Podhoretz opposes, 5 Wald, Alan: and Menorah Journal, 29 Walzer, Michael: and leftist foreign policy, 189 Warshow, Robert, 2, 44, 101, 109; Commentary writings by, 121–6; writing style of, 130–1 Weekley Standard: as neoconsevative outlet, 178 Weiner, Herbert: on Reform Judaism, 66 welfare: in New York City, 86–7; federal programs, 87–8 welfare state: Commentary on, 4, 5, 157, 160–1, 167 Weltsch, Robert: on Zionism, 48 Wertheimer, Jack: on Judaism, 71 Wilson, James Q.: on New Left and higher education, 6; critique of liberal reform, 75; on black radical literature, 83; on federal crime policy, 88 Wolfowitz, Paul: and neoconservative successes, 176–7; and foreign policy, 184 Zionism: AJC as non-Zionist, 11, 12, 40; Avukah, 38; Commentary position on, 45, 47–8, 55–9. See also Israel