And that’s different. So I often use that example to explain to people why a large circulation is not necessarily a measure of influence. The article was a scandal, and though it’s a kind of very amusing piece of writing, it should not, I believe, have been published. And it was published under a grant of editorial independence by the American Jewish Committee, which was savvy, smart, selfless, and very peculiar. Then came you, from 1960 to 1994. Snow, which was a very big deal at the time. NORMAN: I used to say COMMENTARY was originally a Jewish magazine with general interests that became a general magazine with Jewish interests. You and Neal both were, in a way, more energetic than I, in the sense that you were always willing to work with a writer or a manuscript that you didn’t mind basically overhauling from the first sentence to the last. We can get this magazine up to 100,000 paid. You don’t want to be in the vicinity of an author who you’ve edited. And, instead of yelling at me, or grudgingly accepting me, he showered praises upon me. JOHN: Right. And that’s where the defects would reveal themselves. In its heyday, the magazine was ed… And I always took the position, from the day I was hired until the day I retired, that the AJC was the owner of the magazine and that I was its employee and that it had a perfect right to fire me for cause or no cause. I had two missions. And these efforts obviously never succeeded, which is not to say that they didn’t make trouble and create anxiety. I met him at the Century Club in New York and nervously handed him the manuscript because I’d published things by him before, but they had not been as heavily edited as this one. It’s your business to give them something that they might want to read. Noah Rothman is the associate editor of COMMENTARY Magazine. There are arguments about whether this is a good way or a bad way, but that’s the way it was at COMMENTARY. JOHN: There’s a story about Hans Morgenthau, an eminent political scientist. And then it went to a printer, was printed and was mailed from there. People would say, “I’m too busy. I don’t know if you want to know the story of Golda Meir’s suit against COMMENTARY. And the result is often obscure to the lay reader. And that was very instructive. And even though freedom of speech does not in fact govern the notion of whether or not an institution has to allow people within it whom it is paying the right to use their facilities to say whatever they want to say. And you had a lot of perks and benefits. Such a thing is inconceivable today. NORMAN: Jeane was very, very academic as a writer. On paper, that was well established. Nobody likes it.”. Leavis and C.P. If they made it, they made it by leaving Time. It’s not popularization. It simply meant former leftists who became "conservative" in the 1970s. They are more likely to have kosher homes by choice than kosher homes by cultural habit, let’s say. And I’ve often said that I spent the last 40 years of my life trying to make up for the damage I did in those years. NORMAN: COMMENTARY, Partisan Review, and various other small magazines were like the farm teams of American intellectual life. 7d ago. Commentary is a monthly American magazine on religion, Judaism, and politics, as well as social and cultural issues. Commentary Magazine Gets a New Editor. Its editor, Shlomo Katz, took it and read it, and he said, “That son of a bitch, his good stuff he sends to COMMENTARY and the lousy shit he sends to me!” Katz just took it for granted that what he had read by Laqueur in COMMENTARY was written by Laqueur. But he wrote very quickly and sometimes sloppily. I think this formulation will be quoted 250 years from now when people write about Jewry in the wake of the Holocaust. I said to him, well, can you prove it, do you have evidence, and he said, “Everybody knew!” So, I either had to give in or back him, and I decided that it was my duty to back him. NORMAN: I always described it as putting the manuscript under a microscope. NORMAN: Look how I earned a place in the history of business! On the one hand, great arrogance, and on the other hand, great selflessness. msnbc / Opinion. JOHN: At the newspapers and magazines I worked at over the past 40 years, we’d do focus groups, have conversations with readers and former readers and non-readers to try to figure out where we should position ourselves and how we should present our publication to them. culture@theatlantic.com . JOHN: The leaders could have just said, you know what, we’re sick of you, we’re sick of this right-wing stuff, we’ll fire you. Please enter your username or email address. Not so much to the audience, but to himself, and taking himself as the audience, what would I like to read about and what would I like to hear. msnbc / Opinion. The women’s magazines made oceans of money. And they would brag about it even if they disliked it. JOHN: If it were today, it would be breached in five seconds. NORMAN: But we published many articles that the Committee people did not like. He was the editor of Campaigns and Elections magazine until 2011 before moving to Ology.com as political news editor. Podhoretz (editor) wrote a famous article in 1968 titled “My Negro Problem — And Ours”: He began his essay talking about his complex feelings toward Blacks as a Jew in Brooklyn. JOHN: There are magazines that have a reason for being because they are an attempt to turn a profit. Lost your password? There were once even digests of these digests—like Reader’s Digest, whose editors looked at other magazines, took stuff from them, abridged them, put them together, and then sent them out to a vastly larger audience than they would have gotten. You commission an article, you get the article back, and it’s rare that an article doesn’t need some form of massaging, grammatical or thematic. JOHN: Well, that goes without saying. COMMENTARY didn’t only just reassure people they weren’t crazy for holding the views they did, it also expressed and argued for ideas and perspectives usually in advance of the zeitgeist ideas—ideas people were not quite sure yet that they held. The monthly magazine of opinion. Some editors would say, “Well, you know, that’s really interesting. The result was that neither Leavis or Snow would ever talk to me again, because they blamed me for the article, with some justification. Commentary/Op-Ed Pages commentary@washingtontimes.com Tel: 202-636-4723 : Digital Editor Ian Bishop 202-636-4719 National News Editor Victor Morton 202-636-3211 Editor … My mission was to fight aggressively in what I saw then and see even more today as a war, a war about America and about Israel. It was full of jargon, allusions that were not explained, so that most lay readers would be unable to follow it. And finally when he finished, he had made not a single change, not one, not even a “the.” He understood exactly why I had done what I had done. Irving Kristol was an editor and publisher who served as the managing editor of Commentary magazine, founded the magazine The Public Interest, and was described by Jonah Goldberg as the "godfather of neoconservatism." But those were the early seeds. Commentary Magazine Podcast The Truth About the George Floyd Trial. ‎Commentary is America's premier monthly magazine of opinion: General, yet Jewish. Norman Podhoretz was one of the original signatories of the "Statement of Principles" of the Project for the New American Century founded in 1997. Jews, it says, are forbidden to grant posthumous victories to Hitler. NORMAN: What used to be said to me and to Neal and I imagine to you by readers is this: “Every month I look forward to COMMENTARY to reassure myself that I’m not crazy.” The people who read COMMENTARY live in communities in which nobody agrees with them, and then they seem to think either I’m crazy or they’re crazy or all of them, and they’re very grateful for the reassurance. I’d prefer to surf the Internet all day than to spend 10 hours trying to help turn something good into something that is the best that it could be. So you sell a year’s subscription for $5. My only further explanation would be to note that John Podhoretz is the Editor of Commentary, a magazine that I’ve read for a good long time. Why do you think some people are good at all this and some people aren’t? JOHN: You made it a general magazine on Jewish themes just at the moment that it had almost become its own proof of concept. The most important lesson of my career in journalism that I learned from you has nothing whatsoever to do with commissioning brilliant articles or the mission or anything like that. So I had to cut it and do a lot rewriting in the process, because I had to join things together and so on and so forth. He reveals the causes of his animosity and then, later in the essay, says: Subscribe. Or proofread. In that sense, it’s much easier now. And he said, “You know, I’ve written for many distinguished periodicals and they don’t seem to find it necessary to correct me.” He pointed to a particular sentence in the piece as an example. NORMAN: Well, these days, you get fired for the wrong headline. You made an upper-middle-class salary, which was rare in journalism. I took over from Neal in January 2009. NORMAN: It concentrates the mind. But it was an unsatisfying experience for a writer to write for these institutional publications. JOHN: The ultimate feedback all three of us editors have gotten involves another technical term from the world of publication circulation: Churn. Very interesting ‘declaration” on the part of Commentary magazine. But that war was consistently being fought from 1945 until now in the pages of COMMENTARY, and it’s heated up considerably. - East Brunswick, NJ - Author and editor of Commentary Magazine John Podhoretz will speak tonight at … JOHN: And the most important rabbi in America …. It really has to be created. These are long periods of continuity. Golda Meir was some kind of envoy to the Soviet Union, the functional equivalent of an ambassador. NORMAN: The balance of it, the variety of it, it’s sort of like conducting an orchestra. The monthly magazine of opinion. NORMAN: That’s exactly right. [1] During his tenure at Commentary , the magazine had a liberal point of view. My view was that the other side had many platforms, and our side had at most two. The Cold War’s over. China’s Creative Challenge—and the Threat to America, Crime Against Asians Isn’t Due to White Supremacy, Biden’s Infrastructure Plan Is Not About Infrastructure, When They Say ‘Don’t Panic,’ Maybe You Should Panic, America’s Racial Self-Flagellation at the UN Only Helps Rogue States. Without it, it would have been impossible to maintain that combination of, what shall I say, authority, sophistication, and accessibility. Much of the foreign-policy apparat from the ’60s through sort of like 2008 were people who had at least appeared in COMMENTARY at some point or other. My professional career as a salaried worker in journalism began at Time—it had 4 million subscribers at the time, 4 million, and was viewed as an extraordinarily important voice. JOHN: Or parties. NORMAN: Well, that was only Hannah Arendt, as far as we know. Pat was a very, very witty man, very witty, one of the wittiest I’ve ever known, both in speech and on paper. Cohen was founder-editor of Commentary, published by the American Jewish Committee (no longer affiliated) from 1945 until his death by suicide in 1959. I don’t think any other magazine, except possibly the New Yorker, is as heavily edited as COMMENTARY has always been. He then had a two-year stint at Mediaite as an editor, where he also wrote political opinion pieces. We work at COMMENTARY every month to retain a style of argument and presentation that almost no one practices anymore, and so in that sense, the magazine is a representation of what I think, or what our readers think, or what people who buy it or support it think, the life of a serious person should and could be. View All MSNBC Columnists. But as long as it didn’t, keep your hands off the magazine. I don’t know what a stereo technician does when he opens up a stereo to fix it. That’s not true of all magazines or many magazines, and particularly matching the right author. So who left Time when I was there? So I have a different kind of editorial challenge in this regard, in part because compared to you and Neal Kozodoy, I’m far less literate when it comes to Judaism and Jewish history. When I took that turn toward what came to be called neoconservatism, we were virtually the only voice expressing our point of view, that defense of the West, of America, of Israel, of high culture. Conservative publications that did not have this tax limitation could say, “Read us to get the real inside scoop on how Republicans can and should and are going to beat Obama.” That was a problem because it was very hard to sell COMMENTARY to people who wanted red meat of that sort. NORMAN PODHORETZ: Some magazines are writer’s magazines, where what the writer puts down on paper is sacred to him, and the editor doesn’t do much except maybe change the punctuation. Click here to send a letter to the editor. NORMAN: He was considered the leading realist theoretician in the country, maybe even in the world. A Jewish magazine of politics, high culture, cultural and literary criticism, American and Israeli campaigns and elections, and world affairs. From the Harper’s audience, there was a huge controversy. It’s a special kind of talent because it takes two qualities that rarely go together in the same person. NORMAN: But I wrote it on the basis of what he was trying to say. It’s something similar when people say, if you’re a conservative publication, that what you really need is more liberals. 10 5. It was an elite organization. JOHN: In the very early going, before you were on the staff, long before I was born, the magazine published a scandalous piece by Isaac Rosenfeld. We did publish many symposia in which there were varying points of view, but I resisted that pressure because I think that point of view had many outlets, and we had very few. It’s an aesthetic good, it’s a sort of culturally relevant institutional good, but it’s not an organizational good in and of itself. They were superior. They’ve gone to day schools, they’ve gone to Jewish summer camps. Since 2015, he has been the associate editor of Commentary magazine. NORMAN: Well, plenty of magazines have no reason for being. We always sent the edited versions to the author for final approval, and they would sometimes argue or fight and rarely say thank-you. Subscribe. And yet it was so much itself and had carved out such an identity, that when the American Jewish Committee came to you in 1990 and said, “We’re no longer supporting the deficit,” you were able to turn around and go out and raise a great deal of money to keep it going, never having raised a nickel before in your life. He knew that his English was not perfect, and he was happy to be improved upon. JOHN: It has remained itself because if it weren’t itself, it would have no reason for being. He had been ambassador to India under Nixon. There’s another story, again about a German-Jewish intellectual, Walter Laqueur, who may have contributed more pieces to COMMENTARY than anybody else ever. I mean there’s some that I’m not, I’d say more than some, many that I’m not particularly proud of because I gave a boost to careers that I disapproved of. No one else was fighting that war in the way that we fought it; that is to say, wholeheartedly, aggressively, and with a desire to win. This was a very profitable field. It’s remained COMMENTARY. Latest from Noah Rothman . We finally reached some accommodation by which the American Jewish Committee was allowed to announce in the magazine, on a special page, that it did not agree with the magazine, it agreed with Golda Meir, and Meir accepted that, and that was that. NORMAN: There were many instances when articles were published that offended some important member or leader of the American Jewish Committee. NORMAN: The late Irving Kristol, who once worked as an editor at COMMENTARY, cut his teeth on COMMENTARY, really, once said it was the most important Jewish magazine in history—which is pretty strong. And I said, “But Hans, your sentence was ungrammatical.” And he said to me, in a thick German accent, “How do you know?”. I try to work with writers who need less editing. Explore the scintillating May 2021 issue of Commentary. That never happened. Maybe if you publish more liberal articles, then liberals would read you, and conservatives would read you, too. I took over from Neal in January 2009. This was the period, we’re talking about the ’60s, when the New Left began to develop and the whole culture was moving in the direction that it has reached by now, tragically, in my opinion. You will receive a link to create a new password via email. Reader’s Digest had a circulation of 15 million. Highly variegated, with a unifying perspective. NORMAN: Good editors, really good editors, are very rare, in fact even rarer than good writers. politics@theatlantic.com . Commentary is America’s premier monthly magazine of opinion and a pivotal voice in American intellectual life. JOHN: But it gives you a sense of what an editor does, both at his best, and then also what this selflessness or humility that you mention as a key quality ultimately requires. The award recognized Podhoretz's intellectual contributions as editor-in-chief of Commentary magazine and as a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. And nobody there, two or three people there, had any kind of individual reputation. Emil Fackenheim will be immortally associated with this paragraph—he is now already—and he didn’t write it, you wrote it. Commentary’s editors, from left, Theodore Solotaroff, Marion Magid and Norman Podhoretz in 1966. Credit... Gert Berliner You will receive a link to create a new password via email. Commentary Magazine editor John Podhoretz in an undated photo. Each issue, ought to, as itself, be interesting, relevant, a rich menu, so to speak. Mainly German Jews, and many of them rich. When editing triggers a defensive or hostile response, it’s because the writer himself is insecure and believes that he is coming under attack or criticism.