By Benjamin Balint
(PublicAffairs, 290 pages, $26.95)
no institution in the realm of ideas has contributed more to highlighting such shared circumstances [of Israel and the US] than Commentary magazine, founded in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee. Of course, as Benjamin Balint reminds us in "Running Commentary," his acutely perceptive account of the magazine's history, Commentary's concerns have ranged far beyond its keynote focus on the America-Israel relationship
The magazine's core founding community of writers—among them, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin—came to its pages having experimented with Marxism and ambivalent about their Jewishness. If their vestigial leftist orientation inclined them to raise their eyebrows at America's middle-class culture, their Jewishness—their growing recognition that, in the U.S., Jews could succeed and gain acceptance in a way that they had never done in Europe—brought them, over time, to a deep love of America. And if their Jewishness fostered an initial hesitancy toward Israel's birth in 1948—for contributors such as Hannah Arendt, Nazism had cast a pall on all nationalisms—their leftist stance inclined them to welcome a communal, kibbutz-centered state run by a European-style labor party.
Forced to choose between its lingering leftist orientation and an undiluted pro-Americanism, the magazine chose America. Thus it was that Commentary came to its twin solidarities: with Israel, with America.
As Mr. Balint's book shows so vividly, Commentary made—and continues to make—an invaluable contribution to the politics and culture of our time. All one could ask is that it return more often to its roots and give us a little more of that old-time religion.
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