Click here to send a letter to the editor. NORMAN: But I wrote it on the basis of what he was trying to say. When it comes to the point of view in the magazine, it would be pretty fair to say that, with the exception of maybe a judgment about a certain novel or movie or something like that, you found it almost impossible to publish articles whose thematic approach and conclusions you did not agree with. JOHN: Line editing is the act of going through an article sentence by sentence or paragraph by paragraph and improving the article that way—even to the point of reorganizing the piece if necessary because the argument is flipped around or points are made that would be better made later, whatever. Some editors would say, “Well, you know, that’s really interesting. Commentary’s editors, from left, Theodore Solotaroff, Marion Magid and Norman Podhoretz in 1966. Credit... Gert Berliner It was an elite organization. It won’t happen if you just sit back and publish what is sent to you. You and I know how very hard it is to produce such writing, because almost nobody is born with the talent. What COMMENTARY had in your day and still has in my day is what is called an incredibly low “churn rate.” Eighty to 90 percent of our subscribers in any given year subscribe the following year. It’s something similar when people say, if you’re a conservative publication, that what you really need is more liberals. I mean they were his ideas, not mine. But when it comes right down to it, it’s just 20 items per issue, every month. Maybe if you publish more liberal articles, then liberals would read you, and conservatives would read you, too. A good editor can be a good editor even without technical skills, but good because he or she has some sense of what’s going on out there, what’s relevant, what’s interesting. What’s its purpose?”. I don’t really agree with it, but people will find that that’s an interesting take, so maybe I’ll run it anyway.” That was not your approach at all. And then it went to a printer, was printed and was mailed from there. And she demanded a retraction. Norman Podhoretz is former editor-in-chief of Commentary. And that can be a hardship. There are arguments about whether this is a good way or a bad way, but that’s the way it was at COMMENTARY. It’s your business to give them something that they might want to read. Walter had written something I had rejected for some reason or other, so he sent it to Midstream. 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. It was full of jargon, allusions that were not explained, so that most lay readers would be unable to follow it. He reveals the causes of his animosity and then, later in the essay, says: But COMMENTARY has, from the beginning, been an editor’s magazine. The typographer had to lay the type out and send it back. 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. Podcast: Inflation fears and the Russian bounties plot. HH: We now go to Commentary Magazine’s John Podhoretz. msnbc / Opinion. That’s what COMMENTARY is about in my opinion, and that’s the value that COMMENTARY has and had, and I would say not only the important contribution but almost the indispensable contribution it made to the cultural life of the country. NORMAN: Thirty-five years I was editor in chief, and I was there for, I don’t know three or four years as a junior editor—and every few years, there would be an effort, either to get me fired or to shut the magazine down. JOHN PODHORETZ: COMMENTARY is 75 years old, and it has had only four editors in that time. It refers to Jews because the original neoconservatives were Jews who felt the New Left was anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist. Now, in one way, and only one way, maybe, COMMENTARY is like a sonnet. They were superior. It really has to be created. In that sense, it’s much easier now. 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. And the result is often obscure to the lay reader. 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. 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. That’s not true of all magazines or many magazines, and particularly matching the right author. JOHN: The art of producing a complicated, highbrow, very serious, analytical, and quite formal publication—a publication that is “journalism” only in the sense that it appears in a journal—has all but vanished. Culture and Books. 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. And I can tell you that our single-minded way turned out to be very successful. 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. Start your risk free trial with unlimited access. NORMAN: Well, people wouldn’t speak to me in the elevator. NORMAN: It concentrates the mind. NORMAN: Everybody is less literate than Neal. The Cold War’s over. And they hardly tried to hide it. NORMAN: Ideally, from beginning to end, first page to last, which is how I always read. JOHN: People don’t really understand what editors do, which is completely understandable. You don’t want to be in the vicinity of an author who you’ve edited. It’s a special kind of talent because it takes two qualities that rarely go together in the same person. But as long as it didn’t, keep your hands off the magazine. From the Harper’s audience, there was a huge controversy. Lost your password? 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. I don’t think any other magazine, except possibly the New Yorker, is as heavily edited as COMMENTARY has always been. - East Brunswick, NJ - Author and editor of Commentary Magazine John Podhoretz will speak tonight at … JOHN: It has remained itself because if it weren’t itself, it would have no reason for being. He blogs as well at the Contentions Blog, which is a must visit many times during the day. In its heyday, the magazine was ed… But it was an unsatisfying experience for a writer to write for these institutional publications. 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. I think this formulation will be quoted 250 years from now when people write about Jewry in the wake of the Holocaust. From our beginning under Elliot E. Cohen, to Norman Podhoretz, the magazine’s second editor, to Neal Kozodoy, its third, and now to current editor John Podhoretz, COMMENTARY‘s mission remains anchored in these principles: to maintain, sustain, and cultivate the future of the Jewish people; to bear witness against anti-Semitism and defend Zionism and the State of Israel; to take inventory in and increase the … 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. The arrogance lies in the fact that you, the editor, thinks he knows better than the author, who is usually a specialist, on how to say what it is he wants to say. I took over from Neal in January 2009. And if you publish liberal stuff, it’s going to anger the conservatives who do read. 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 … It’s still unresolved and may even end up with guns in the street. So not only were we spending too much money, when the number went down because people didn’t renew, our internal critics said, “You see? NORMAN: “Adam and Eve on Delancey Street.”. And the vast majority of articles in COMMENTARY when I was the editor, came from ideas from us, me or Neal or somebody else who might have been on the staff, the vast majority. And they would brag about it even if they disliked it. Culturally, Judaism was very hot, and that gave you maybe a kind of platform from which you could sort of assume that the assimilation had happened. I had two missions. But years later, a friend of hers said to me, “You know, Jeane has never forgiven you for butchering her article.”. And nobody there, two or three people there, had any kind of individual reputation. The monthly magazine of opinion. Navrozov picked Golda Meir as an example. Cohen was founder-editor of Commentary, published by the American Jewish Committee (no longer affiliated) from 1945 until his death by suicide in 1959. JOHN: The ultimate feedback all three of us editors have gotten involves another technical term from the world of publication circulation: Churn. JOHN: Which posited the laws of kashruth were an expression of Jewish sexual neurosis. View John Podhoretz’s profile on LinkedIn, the world's largest professional community. NORMAN: Well one of the early Soviet Jewish dissidents to arrive here, a man named Lev Navrozov, a crazy genius actually, wrote an article. politics@theatlantic.com . JOHN: A magazine issue comprises a series of articles on a variety of different subjects in a series of different topic areas to provide a reader with a menu of the kind of literary, journalistic, rhetorical material that they can dine on. Nobody likes it.”. And that was very instructive. But those were the early seeds. So I often use that example to explain to people why a large circulation is not necessarily a measure of influence. COMMENTARY is a nonprofit 501(c)(3). When you dumb your product down or change it to try to appeal to people who don’t read it, you are then going to offend the people who are reading it and who do read it. The humility or selflessness, which is very important, is that you are willing to lend your talents to someone else’s work without getting any credit for it. Nonetheless, it was observed so scrupulously! So whatever the vision or the mission was, whether COMMENTARY was on the right or the left or liberal or conservative or neoconservative, whatever, that particular ideal has remained. Noah Rothman is the associate editor of COMMENTARY Magazine. Then you had to correct typos and send it back to the typographer. First was its founder, Elliot Cohen, who died in 1959. JOHN: He came to you and said, “Look. And you send out direct mail to a couple of million people. NORMAN: It’s not “all but.” It is unprecedented. NORMAN: We reached 60,000 very quickly from a base of about 25,000. Oct. 17, 2007; When John Podhoretz was 7, he asked his father, Norman, the editor of Commentary, if … And he was very arrogant, as almost all those German-Jewish refugee intellectuals were. John Podhoretz is the editor of Commentary. 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. JOHN: Or parties. From the Reader’s Digest, 15 million readers, there were three letters. It has to do with the one time when the magazine could have collapsed in the mid-1960s owing to a seductive but terrible business strategy. Yes. But he insisted I be there. And many of those people, including the ones who did not like the magazine, regarded it as sort of the jewel in the crown. 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. And I said, “But Hans, your sentence was ungrammatical.” And he said to me, in a thick German accent, “How do you know?”. JOHN: I sometimes tell writers I’m arguing with that I don’t do this for my health. 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. These are engaged, combative, and intellectually minded people with philanthropic goals who make it possible for the magazine to survive and thrive, in part because it offers a minority opinion within the Jewish community. You’re going to lose them, and then you’re not going to get the ones that you’re whoring after, and so you die out. Very interesting ‘declaration” on the part of Commentary magazine. Or there were. And he came back at the end of his term with this long manuscript. JOHN: It was a kind of cannibalization, but it was also a popularization. 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. Neal Kozodoy, who had worked at the magazine for 30 years as your deputy, was the editor from 1995 to 2008. Subscribe. But it has also been a liberation because editorially we never frame questions in that manner—how to elect a Republican Senate, or how candidates can or should win this or that at the ballot box. His writing was moderately bad. And that’s where the defects would reveal themselves. JOHN: COMMENTARY for 60 of its 75 years was a publication of the American Jewish Committee. I thought he was the perfect author for this, and he wrote a wonderful piece. JOHN: The big magazines weren’t writer’s magazines either. If it didn’t have that, COMMENTARY would have died after the American Jewish Committee came to you and said, “Go out and find outside support for your deficit.” You would have gone out and people would have said to you, “Why should I give you money? NORMAN: The balance of it, the variety of it, it’s sort of like conducting an orchestra. 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. People don’t really have time, and you should really simplify the language, because they like shorter sentences. 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. I began for the first 10 years or so moving to the left from the liberal anti-Communist perspective of Elliot Cohen’s COMMENTARY, and then 10 years later started moving in the other direction. 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. That never happened. Some people might call it high-level popularization. No magazine like this has ever done that before, and we’ll just be cooking with Crisco.” How do you get 100,000 subscribers for a small Jewish magazine? The articles are too long. NORMAN: COMMENTARY, Partisan Review, and various other small magazines were like the farm teams of American intellectual life. But COMMENTARY never made anybody any money and was a source of discomfort and controversy inside the organization that owned it. 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. There’s a way that academics are virtually forced to write in order to gain credibility. NORMAN: And this was true for me, too. JOHN: The most self-confident, intellectually self-confident writers in my experience have very little problem with being edited. In the Obama era, in marketing terms, and maybe in the Clinton era for you and then for Neal, what we could never say was, “We’re here to show you how to beat the Democrats,” even though obviously we stood philosophically in very serious opposition to liberal policies, particularly on the Middle East. So, like a mechanic, you try to repair it. She never either criticized me or thanked me. And, instead of yelling at me, or grudgingly accepting me, he showered praises upon me. 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. I would like to read your thing, but I don’t have enough time.” So the experts we’d engage to run these groups or do this research would say, “Well, you need to shorten the articles. NORMAN: No. I’m bringing this up because, if I remember correctly, Fackenheim didn’t write that. NORMAN: Those AJC leaders, they were a different breed. John has 1 job listed on their profile. He then had a two-year stint at Mediaite as an editor, where he also wrote political opinion pieces. So you sell a year’s subscription for $5. NORMAN: Good editors, really good editors, are very rare, in fact even rarer than good writers. Neoconservative was a label coined by Commentary (magazine) editors Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. So I read it and I was very excited by it, what it said, but it was way too long. And he sat in his chair with the manuscript and I sat next to him. My view was that the other side had many platforms, and our side had at most two. culture@theatlantic.com . Highly variegated, with a unifying perspective. The idea, and calling it the 614th commandment, he hadn’t thought of it in those terms, but he was very happy with it, because that’s exactly what he wanted to say. Commentary Magazine editor John Podhoretz in an undated photo. Editors' Commentary . So there’s an idea for an article, and then there is matching a writer to the idea and then talking the writer into writing it and then doing what you can to ensure that the writer doesn’t screw up an idea. A lot of people started here, who were spotted early by us, and then eventually got picked up, and some got to be very famous. 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. JOHN: I say that COMMENTARY today has a four-pronged mission—a defense of the West and its institutions, defense of Israel, serving as a bulwark against anti-Semitism, and reflecting in its pages the cultural legacy of the West in trying to present what Matthew Arnold called the best that had been thought and said at any given moment. And the article turned into a classic. 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. A Jewish magazine of politics, high culture, cultural and literary criticism, American and Israeli campaigns and elections, and world affairs. The vocabulary shouldn’t be too complicated so they can get through it.” These ideas dominated the news business in the 1980s and 1990s. Jews, it says, are forbidden to grant posthumous victories to Hitler. You can imagine what a storm this created. So, and I wrote two separate pieces, one for the Reader’s Digest and one for Harper’s. But they didn’t. I don’t know if you want to know the story of Golda Meir’s suit against COMMENTARY. If they made it, they made it by leaving Time. People would say, “I’m too busy. At that moment, Jews had ascended to the cultural leadership of the United States—writers, the hottest writers in fiction, in essays, in Hollywood, on Broadway. 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. Then came you, from 1960 to 1994. COMMENTARY has never had a large readership, and yet it has had this outsized impact, wildly outsized impact, as you indicate just with the job prospects, not only of Jeane and Pat, but literally dozens of COMMENTARY contributors who went and populated the administrations of Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, Bush, second Bush. JOHN: I am less of a heavy editor than you were, certainly than Neal was. Eventually you had to have the articles laid out on pages, look at the final images of the pages—which came back to you in the color blue, and were called “blue lines”—for absolutely final check. She said the story was not true and was defamatory and she sued for $3 million, a million against me, a million against Navrozov, and a million against the American Jewish Committee as the publisher. Norman Podhoretz was one of the original signatories of the "Statement of Principles" of the Project for the New American Century founded in 1997. I don’t know what a stereo technician does when he opens up a stereo to fix it. The monthly magazine of opinion. And COMMENTARY would have simply become one of those publications that had once existed but existed no longer. JOHN: But what good was it to the American Jewish Committee to publish a distinguished magazine? The point is, by overruling the business manager and changing your strategy, you saved COMMENTARY from a suicidal approach that has killed off literally hundreds of magazines. JOHN: You made it a general magazine on Jewish themes just at the moment that it had almost become its own proof of concept. NORMAN: He was considered the leading realist theoretician in the country, maybe even in the world. 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. He knew that his English was not perfect, and he was happy to be improved upon. NORMAN: And so did Neal Kozodoy, with a vengeance, even. NORMAN: Well, these days, you get fired for the wrong headline. And COMMENTARY, from almost the first issue that I turned out in 1960, became very hot. Emil Fackenheim will be immortally associated with this paragraph—he is now already—and he didn’t write it, you wrote it. Submit a piece for editorial consideration at The Atlantic Journalists who wish to pitch reported stories or commentaries to The Atlantic’s website should reach out to the following news desks. You could write a cover story for Time Magazine that 4 million people could read, but you were a nobody. JOHN: What about the act of assembling an issue? 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. Very few pieces that Elliot Cohen edited, or that I edited, or that Neal edited, were not worked over, sometimes radically worked over. It is so defiantly itself that there are a sufficient number of people who not only subscribe to it but believe it is important enough that they provide eleemosynary support for it. That’s why heavy editing was necessary. 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: Jeane was very, very academic as a writer. NORMAN: COMMENTARY was owned by the American Jewish Committee, and AJC granted from the beginning complete editorial independence to the editors. But they don’t read, and they don’t know what they want to read, because that’s not their business. But he wrote very quickly and sometimes sloppily. Latest from Noah Rothman . JOHN: Steinberg sought to have it shut down and very nearly succeeded. As seen in: Commentary Magazine, MSN, MSN Canada, The New York Times, Fox News, The Washington Post, USA Today, CNBC, Gazeta do Povo, NBC News, New York Daily News and more Associate Editor @Commentary . But they had to get permission to leave. Across the United States, a great unraveling is in progress. NORMAN: I used to say COMMENTARY was originally a Jewish magazine with general interests that became a general magazine with Jewish interests. NORMAN: Look how I earned a place in the history of business! Jewish Faith and the Holocaust: A Fragment, China’s Creative Challenge—and the Threat to America. 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. 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. JOHN: So this is the ultimate editor’s triumph and tragedy. The suit went forward, and there was a lot of bad blood, I mean millions of dollars of legal consultation was spent on this. Now we began by mentioning the 75th anniversary, and as I think about it, it’s really extraordinary that throughout all the changes in point of view, the magazine has been consistently itself. She very grudgingly accepted it, and the article was published as edited, maybe with a few changes. msnbc / Opinion. JOHN: But that goes to what I was saying about the focus groups, which is that, in the end, an editor tells people what he thinks they should know, and then it’s up to them whether they want to listen or say, “Ah, get the hell out of here.” But any strong, good editor is saying, “This is what you should be reading right now.”. You might say that while Jews were Jewier when you took over the editorship, Jewy Jews are Jewier than Jews were then. 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. NORMAN: Let me tell you about the two articles published by COMMENTARY that both resulted in the appointment of the author as ambassador to the United Nations—Pat Moynihan’s “The United States in Opposition” and Jeane Kirkpatrick’s “Dictatorships and Double Standards.”. Commentary Magazine Editor John Podhoretz on the first days of the Obama administration. We want to hear your thoughts about this article. We had a very, very grateful audience. JOHN: People constantly ask me, “What’s COMMENTARY’s mission? Leavis and C.P. I left, Maureen Dowd left, Graydon Carter left, Kurt Andersen left, Pico Iyer left. View All MSNBC Columnists. On paper, that was well established. Explore the scintillating May 2021 issue of Commentary. Commentary is America’s premier monthly magazine of opinion and a pivotal voice in American intellectual life. You will receive a link to create a new password via email. And these efforts obviously never succeeded, which is not to say that they didn’t make trouble and create anxiety. 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. Subscribe. Neal Kozodoy, who had worked at the magazine for 30 years as your deputy, was the editor from 1995 to 2008. You finish that process, and then there is a very technical process that follows, one that was more laborious in your time—when the edited manuscript had to be retyped, sent to a writer, argued over, finished, and then sent to a typographer. 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. We always sent the edited versions to the author for final approval, and they would sometimes argue or fight and rarely say thank-you. Right? It focuses the attention on matters higher than mere electoral success, let’s just say. 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. And if you were desperate because an issue didn’t have enough stuff, what you did was call up G.F. Hudson or George Lichtheim or Richard Crossman, and by return mail you would get a perfectly written manuscript and send it to the printer. I mean they had read Heidegger and German philosophy. JOHN: You raised money, and then Neal raised a sufficient amount of money to secure the magazine’s independence from the AJC in 2006, and we still manage to raise money every year to keep it going. Reader’s Digest had a circulation of 15 million. He had been ambassador to India under Nixon. These are long periods of continuity. Gertrude Himmelfarb, was a prominent conservative historian, especially of intellectual history in the U.S. and Great Britain. Commentary Magazine Gets a New Editor. JOHN: Learning about this experience from you meant that everywhere I went, from newspapers to magazines, I told the people I worked with that it was dangerous to expand circulation through deep discounting. JOHN: And the most important rabbi in America …. [1] During his tenure at Commentary , the magazine had a liberal point of view. NORMAN: I always described it as putting the manuscript under a microscope. NORMAN: The heavy-editing tradition started out of necessity, rather than from the desire of editors to monkey around with other people’s work, because many of the contributors to COMMENTARY at the beginning were themselves immigrants, mostly German. He thought that all the Western powers, including the United States and including Israel, had been naive about Stalin.
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