COMMENTARY, in the words of Cohen, “is an act of faith in our possibilities in America.” To learn more about AJC, which has worked since 1906 to safeguard and strengthen Jews and Jewish life worldwide by promoting democratic and pluralistic societies that respect the dignity of all peoples, click here.įrom its founding in November 1945, COMMENTARY has been, as our founder and first editor Elliot Cohen wrote at that time, “an act of affirmation.” It remains an expression of belief in the United States, perhaps most of all in America’s central role in the preservation and advance of Western civilization and, most immediately, the continuing existence of the Jewish people. To read it is to take part in the great American discussion.ĬOMMENTARY was founded in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee. Agree with it or disagree with it, COMMENTARY cannot be ignored. A large number of articles can be counted as landmarks of American letters and intellectual life. Many of COMMENTARY’s articles have been controversial, and more than a few have been hugely influential, touchstones for debate and discussion in universities, among policy analysts in and out of government, within the ranks of professionals and community activists of all kinds, and in circles of serious thought worldwide. Since its inception in 1945, and increasingly after it emerged as the flagship of neoconservatism in the 1970s, the magazine has been consistently engaged with several large, interrelated questions: the fate of democracy and of democratic ideas in a world threatened by totalitarian ideologies the state of American and Western security the future of the Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture in Israel, the United States, and around the world and the preservation of high culture in an age of political correctness and the collapse of critical standards. COMMENTARY is America’s premier monthly magazine of opinion and a pivotal voice in American intellectual life.