A great magazine, says Abraham Socher, can create “an intellectual and aesthetic discourse that gives readers a sense of community, aspiration, and values.” As a reminder, Socher, a 44-year-old associate professor of Jewish studies at Oberlin College, keeps a line from Erica Jong’s 1973 novel, Fear of Flying, tacked to the wall of his office: “It was not that I merely read The New Yorker, I lived it in a private way. I had created for myself a New Yorker world. ... " With that ideal in mind, Socher has conceived and edited the Jewish Review of Books, a quarterly that has just released its inaugural issue.
Some of the highlights: the Hebrew University of Jerusalem political scientist Shlomo Avineri assesses the limits of U.S. power in the Middle East; the novelist Dara Horn marks the demise of a very particular kind of Jewish intellectual, the luftmentsh, an impractical dreamer of meager accomplishment; the journalist Ron Rosenbaum weighs the significance of the Jewishness of Bob Dylan (né Robert Zimmerman); Michael Weingrad, director of the Judaic-studies program at Portland State University, wonders why Jews don’t write more fantasy literature; and in one of the oddest editorial combinations of recent memory, a cartoon by Harvey Pekar sits across the page from a translated excerpt from an 18th-century rabbinic memoir. (The juxtaposition, Socher says, was accidental.)
The initial print run is 32,000. The editorial board of the magazine is a veritable who’s who of Jewish intellectual life: Robert Alter, the Israeli legal scholar Ruth Gavison, Michael Walzer, Leon Wieseltier, Ruth Wisse, and Steven Zipperstein, among others. Socher, who is author of The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon: Judaism, Heresy, and Philosophy (Stanford University Press, 2006), envisions the quarterly as an intellectual center where key Jewish ideas, issues, and books can be discussed and hashed out. In an opening editorial, he describes the magazine as “a forum, not a platform; a conversation, not a polemic.” He writes, “The ideas and achievements of Jewish religion, literature, and scholarship are interesting and valuable in and of themselves. They are not reducible to any position or program, no matter how worthy.”
The magazine grew out of a series of conversations between Socher and Eric Cohen, executive director of the Tikvah Fund, a New York-based philanthropy that promotes Jewish ideas. The conservative bent of the Tikvah Fund—William Kristol, for instance, sits on the Board of Directors—has raised some questions about whether the new journal has a political ax to grind. Socher insists that he has complete editorial autonomy and no ideological agenda.
The Tikvah Fund has committed to support the magazine for five years. Will it then be able to pay its own way? “Let’s be realistic. Little intellectual magazines don’t make money,” Socher says. “The goal is to make it sustainable.” He is, however, bullish about finding an audience. “If you compare the Jewish reading public today with the 1950s, there are demonstrably more sophisticated Jewish readers now than there were then,” he says, adding that many have taken a Jewish-studies course in a college, graduated from a Jewish day school, or attended a Jewish adult-education program.
According to Jonathan D. Sarna, a professor of history at Brandeis University, the Jewish Review “fills an important void.” Commentary and Tikkun, for instance, have long since become political journals that seem little interested in Jewish thought. Sarna says, “One gets the sense that Commentary wants to be true to its Jewish roots, but not too Jewish.” Socher adds, “Commentary is defined more by its political interests, in particular the position it stakes out on Israel, than anything religious, literary, or cultural.” The Jewish Review, he says, won’t reduce an intellectual tradition to a political line.
Breaking Ranks
Commentary was founded in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee to provide readers with an informed discussion of “the position and future of Jews in our country and in the world scene.” The magazine declared itself “free from partisanship and hospitable to divergent views.” Few if any today would describe Commentary in such terms. Indeed, as Benjamin Balint, a fellow at the Hudson Institute, a think tank in Washington, explains in his forthcoming book, Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine That Transformed the Jewish Left Into the Neoconservative Right (PublicAffairs), Norman Podhoretz’s 35-year tenure as editor—1960-95—transformed Commentary into an ever more ideologically conservative organ. By the late 1960s, Balint writes, Podhoretz “began to disdain the student radicals for what he regarded as their infantile ideas and hipster boorishness, their fantasies of revolution, and their self-indulgence.”
Much has been written about Podhoretz—not least by Podhoretz himself, who is author of four volumes of memoir. In Norman Podhoretz: A Biography, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in June, Thomas L. Jeffers, a professor of English at Marquette University, briskly moves the narrative from the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, where Podhoretz was born in 1930, to Columbia University, where he studied with the literary critic Lionel Trilling, and the University of Cambridge, where he studied with the critic F.R. Leavis. An upstart in the fabled world of the New York intellectuals, the pugnacious and opinionated Podhoretz earned a reputation as—in Norman Mailer’s words—a literary “hanging judge” as a result of his sharply negative reviews in Commentary, Partisan Review, and elsewhere. When the founding editor of Commentary, Elliot Cohen, smothered himself with a plastic bag, Podhoretz was offered the position. From that perch, Jeffers writes, he shaped “the form and often the substance of American public discourse” on politics and culture.
That outsized impact flowed in large part from Podhoretz’s recoil, beginning in the late 60s, from the New Left—an apostasy that came to be known as neoconservatism. Depending on your view, Podhoretz either exhibited great moral and intellectual courage in rethinking his political assumptions, or he became a zealous and wrong-headed warmonger. Jeffers, who is also editor of The Norman Podhoretz Reader: A Selection of His Writings From the 1950s Through the 1990s (Free Press, 2004), falls squarely in the former camp. Indeed, though the book is billed as a “critical biography,” Jeffers comes across as an admiring acolyte, likening his subject to a “kind of prophet.” (Jeffers also thanks Podhoretz’s wife, Midge Decter, for reading through an early draft of the book.)
When, in January 1985, a party was held to mark the 25th anniversary of Podhoretz’s editorship, he reflected on his achievements. “Commentary has defended America at a time when America has been under moral and ideological attack. Commentary has defended the Jewish people and the Jewish state when they, too, and for many of the same reasons, have been subjected to a relentless assault on their legitimacy and even their very existence.” Podhoretz continued: “I am proud to have devoted myself so fully to the fight against that threat and the correlative fight for the survival of liberty.”
