A veteran Commentary reader on J-Pod

VFR reader Sam B., who has been subscribing to Commentary for almost 60 years, shares his feelings about what that magazine meant to him then and what it means now.

Sam B. writes:

Regarding the recent posts on Commentary on VFR, I have been a subscriber to Commentary going back to 1948, almost since its inception in 1945. That was long before Norman’s watch, long before its turn from normative (Hubert Humphrey, old Democratic) liberalism to neoconservatism—a non-complimentary label coined by the late socialist Michael Harrington. My initial attraction to the magazine—apart from its narrower Jewish topics—was literary. I picked up an old issue in ‘48, my first time, while browsing in a used-book shop. The article dealt with the “literary anti-Semitism of F. Scott Fitzgerald.” (I believe that was its title). it was a terrific analysis of The Great Gatsby, definitive in its perception, which influenced many of the later pieces on the novel

I followed it—even ideologically—through its evolution toward neoconservatism, when, as Norman Podhoretz has put it, “I [i.e. he as editor] moved it away from the left” [loose quote]. My own move away from the left took place long before. Indeed, before my discharge from the army in ‘45. (First cracks in the Stalinist edifice had begun to appear to me in the ’30s during the Great Purges, as Robert Conquest called that human tragedy.). Eventually, I found myself a neocon. It has only been in recent years, and since the Iraq mess cum open borders disaster (which Commentary, via Linda Chavez, implicitly supports) that I’ve finally begun to see the cracks in the latter-day Commentary—Norman P.’s desperate need to hold onto the mirage (excuse the poor metaphor) of victory in Iraq (cf. “WWIV” [sic]).

And now with J-Pod due to take over the editorship, I have become completely alienated from both father’s Bush-esque position and, needless to say, the son’s. Dad is a campaign adviser to Giuliani. Does this mean that I will cancel my decades long subscription? No. For Commentary, though it has been “steered” as Podhoretz calls it in a neoconservative direction—after all, it’s the “flagship” as it’s so often called—it is still much larger than Norman, his son, or any one editor. In matters Jewish, it is non pareil—and I say this as a not-very-good (observant) Jew. And it performs a much needed corrective to the likes of Walt and Mearsheimer,. of Jimmy Carter, and of the growing madness of the not-so-new “New-Anti-Semitism,” camouflaged as anti-Zionism. I had my taste of the son when he was still with William Kristol’s Weekly Standard, which I no longer read—its slavish Barnesian defense of George Bush.

I first heard of N-Pod’s move to editorship through View from the Right, and when I read the item, I thought you were pulling our collective legs. He wrote thin movie reviews, if I recall. But nothing more weighty, no “gravitas” as we like to say today. Whether Commentary will go on, with him as its editor, is problematic. Maybe, like the late Partisan Review, it will have outlived its current purpose. But then William Phillips was 90-plus when he gave up the ghost (and editorship) literally and figuratively.

I will still subscribe to Commentary, as long J-Pod continues to publish thinkers like Hillel Halkin and writers of that caliber—unless and until John P. completely destroys what his father—with all of faults—built up.

Finally, Apart from its (neocon) politics, Commentary remains one of the most important monthlies, among the gruel-like tameness of the Atlantics and the Harpers (are they still around?)

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 25, 2007 03:39 PM | Send