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''Commentary'' is a monthly American magazine on politics, Judaism, social and cultural issues. It was founded by the American Jewish Committee in 1945. Besides its strong coverage of cultural issues, it provided a strong voice for the anti-Stalinist left. By 1960 its editor was Norman Podhoretz, originally a mainstream liberal Democrat. He and his magazine moved to the right in the 1970s and 1980s.〔Nathan Abrams, ''Norman Podhoretz and Commentary magazine: the rise and fall of the neocons'' (2009) "Introduction"〕 Benjamin Balint describes it as the "Contentious Magazine That Transformed the Jewish Left Into the Neoconservative Right".〔Benjamin Balint, ''Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine That Transformed the Jewish Left Into the Neoconservative Right'' (2010). New York: PublicAffairs. ISBN 1-586-48749-3.〕 Historian Richard Pells says that "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."〔Quoted from Murray Friedman (ed.): ''(Commentary in American Life )'', Philadelphia 2005, Temple UP.〕 ==History== ''Commentary'' was the successor to the ''Contemporary Jewish Record.'' When the ''Records editor died in 1944, its publisher, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) consulted with New York intellectuals including Daniel Bell and literary critic Lionel Trilling. They recommended the AJC hire Elliot Cohen (1899–1959) to start a new journal. He had been an editor of a Jewish cultural magazine and was now a fundraiser. ''Commentary'' is a nonpartisan journal focusing on Jewish affairs and other contemporary issues. Cohen designed the new magazine to reconnect assimilated Jews and Jewish intellectuals with the broader, more traditional and very liberal Jewish community. At the same time ''Commentary'' would bring the ideas of the young Jewish intellectuals to a wider audience. It demonstrated that Jewish intellectuals, and by extension all American Jews, had turned away from their past political radicalism to embrace mainstream American culture and values. Cohen stated his grand design in the first issue:〔Ehrman, John (June 1, 1999) (Commentary, the Public Interest, and the Problem of Jewish Conservatism ), ''American Jewish History''〕 As Podhoretz put it, ''Commentary'' was to lead the Jewish intellectuals "out of the desert of alienation...and into the promised land of democratic, pluralistic, and prosperous America."〔 Cohen brought on board strong editors who themselves wrote important essays, including Irving Kristol; art critic Clement Greenberg; film and cultural critic Robert Warshow; and sociologist Nathan Glazer. ''Commentary'' paid well and published such rising stars as Hannah Arendt, Daniel Bell, Sidney Hook, and Irving Howe. Although many or even most of the editors and writers had been socialists, Trotskyites, or Stalinists in the past, that was no longer tolerated. ''Commentary'' articles were anti-Communist and also anti-McCarthyite; it identified and attacked any perceived weakness among liberals on cold war issues, backing President Harry Truman's Cold War policies such as the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and NATO. The "soft-on-Communism" position of the CIO and Henry Wallace came under steady attack. Liberals who hated Joseph McCarthy were annoyed when Irving Kristol wrote at the height of the controversy that "there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing."〔Richard H. Pells, ''The liberal mind in a conservative age: American intellectuals in the 1940s'' (1989) p. 296〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Commentary (magazine)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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