Commentary magazine has been a family affair almost since its founding in 1945 by the Jewish American Committee. John Podhoretz, who has edited the magazine since 2009 is the son of Midge Decter, who joined the magazine as a secretary in 1948 and wrote for it for many years, and the son of Norman Podhoretz, who started writing for it in 1953 and served as editor from 1960 to 1995 and editor-at-large until 2009. In his autobiography, Norman Podhoretz used the metaphor of “the family” to describe the cluster of distinguished New York intellectuals who wrote for Commentary (figures like Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin and Lionel Trilling). But another, more literal, family has dominated the magazine for seven decades. Innumerable off-shoots of the Decter-Podhoretz clan have found themselves on the Commentary masthead including various children (Naomi Munson and Rachel Abrams), sons-in-law (Steven C. Munson, his other son-in-law Elliot Abrams), and grand-sons (Sam Munson).
If editing Commentary is a family business, it’s starting, like many other mom-and-pop operations, to run into succession trouble. In 2007, Commentary left the aegis of the American Jewish Committee and became a nonprofit. The writer Dan Scott has written an extensive substack post providing an analysis of its public financial statements of Commentary. He argues that the magazine is top heavy with staff salaries, running consistent losses and, most dangerously, surviving by selling off its investment capital.
Is Commentary really in such trouble? Do the difficulties of the magazine relate to its editorial history? To take up these questions, I talked to Jacob Bacharach, who is a novelist and essayist of note as well as an expert in non-profit funding. He brings to the discussion a rare combination of skill in both forensic accounting and intellectual history.
Jacob and I have enormous fun running through the wild ideological shifts of Commentary history (from Cold War liberalism to radicalism to neo-conservatism). Jacob is always an energetic conversationalist. In a previous episode we talked about the Potemkin school of the University of Austin.
(Post edited by Emily M. Keeler)
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Upvoted for using 'ebullient,' a word we should use more often. But you meant 'University of Austin,' which seems to have dropped off people's radar. The University of [Jane] Austen is something I could support!
Fixed!
Ah, the efficiency of community copyediting. Never fails.
I have always found reading (and listening) to your thoughts enlightening. But I wish you had a two step process to your podcasts - one in which only involves you - to inform us of background, which is necessary to get more out of your discussions with your guests, and a second podcast with your chosen guests in a discussion. The time limits of a single podcasts robs from one or the other objectives.
One thing I've always enjoyed about your substack, Jeet, is the attention to detail to the various schools of thought and the various literary cliques who trace their threads of influence like embroidery in the weave. I will admit that I don't have time or energy to read everything I'd like to read in my dotage, even though the pandemic removed various distractions and responsibilities. Even before the pandemic, I have had an itinerant/peripatetic tendency to read "whatever's around", rather aimlessly, as Sarah Palin famously told Katie Couric when asked what she reads to inform her worldview. Many people thought it made her look less serious, on top of what was already her shallow fund of knowledge about world events, so I rarely admit that my reading habits don't often steer me toward thematic magazines like Commentary. I tend to read people like you who alert me to the interesting articles I may have missed that often lead to their own google rabbit holes that may or may not end with a visit to periodicals like Commentary..
Honestly, I'll go down the google rabbit hole on any shiny topic that catches my eye, which is far a less deliberate strategy than my professional reading. I have no idea if I'm just lazy, or too easily distracted by all the news that keeps me doomscrolling on the web because these are crazy times filled with crazy people spouting crazy ideas. Commentary likely suffers because of information junkies like me who don't support one school of thinkers, but graze at the smorgasbord of news and opinion available from the web, at a time when the web is our sole connection to the academic and scholarly universe now that so many of us work from home.