Le Monde continues (July 23rd) its ambitious thirty-part series on cultural reviews. Numbers eight and nine having been dedicated to two sturdy growths of twentieth century French intellectualism, the Christian “personalist” Emmanuel Mounier’s Esprit and the existentialist and Marxist (or at any rate philocommunist) Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes, number ten crosses the Atlantic to focus on the New York review Commentary, chiefly associated with the name Norman Podhoretz and now directed by his son John.
The review was founded in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee, with the purpose of aiding the integration of newly arrived European Jews, many of whom were poor, not particularly religious and, in some cases, intellectually formed by Marxism. Commentary was at first not explicitly political, but it soon took on an anti-communist tone - anti-communist but not at this stage right-wing. Under Podhoretz, who took over in 1960, the magazine became identified for a number of years with the radical left (New Left). After the Six Day War of 1967 however, Commentary began to veer to the right. “The fight for Israel, the fight for America have become two sides of the same war,” Podhoretz wrote. He was against the Vietnam War, but also opposed the anti-war movement, accusing it of anti-Americanism. The final break came with a 1975 article by him titled “Making the world safe for communism”.
The review at this time sold 60,000 copies an issue and was read in the White House. “If Commentary hadn’t existed,” Podhoretz boasts, “it would have been impossible for a candidate with opinions like Reagan’s to have been elected.” In 2004 George W Bush gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Despite its narrower and more polemical present (endless attacks on the Democratic Party and on Obama), Commentary has a rich archive, having published among others George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Norman Mailer, Thomas Mann, Philip Roth, John Updike and Paul Auster.
Commentary’s online presence is at www.commentarymagazine.com