Postwar Manhattan hosted a tight-knit, disputatious intellectual culture shaped heavily by the sons (and occasionally the daughters) of shtetl-born immigrants. Applying talmudic rigor to secular debates about literature and foreign affairs, they published little magazines whose ideas spread directly from their pages to the highest political offices. While traces of that culture remain—The New York Review of Books, Dissent, and yes, Commentary are all still publishing, as are dozens of other small-circulation journals in the same tradition—its claim on the political zeitgeist has been displaced by a culture that is comparatively dumbed-down, post-literate, and rooted in petty grievances and cheap provocation.
The singular figure who bridged these two sensibilities, Norman Podhoretz, is dead at 95. He was the last canonical New York intellectual, and the first of a now-familiar breed of discourse demagogue.
A star student born and raised in the slums of Brownsville, Brooklyn, to a Yiddish-speaking milkman from Galicia,at the age of 16 Podhoretz took what he called “the longest journey in the world” to the rarefied salons of the Upper West Side, where he studied under Lionel Trilling at Columbia and socialized with the likes of Hannah Arendt, Alfred Kazin, and Susan Sontag. His book reviews, including gutsy attacks on Saul Bellow and Jack Kerouac, earned him early notoriety, and by age 30, he was the editor of Commentary, published since 1945 by the American Jewish Committee, following the suicide of founding editor Elliot Cohen. He held that job for 35 years before handing it off to his like-minded deputy, Neal Kozodoy, who in turn handed it off to Podhoretz’s only son, John.
On Norman Podhoretz’s watch, Commentary was remade twice: at the start of the 1960s, from a somewhat parochially Jewish communal journal to a trendy signifier of countercultural sophistication, and then by the end of the decade into the neoconservative flagship that it remains today. As the runt of the New York intellectual “family” centered on contributors to Partisan Review—the idiosyncratic, anti-Stalinist left-wing literary journal founded in the 1930s—the young Podhoretz was eager to throw off his elders’ tedious, decades-old ideological debates, which had peaked in relevance during his Depression-era childhood. He wanted Commentary to engage with the present, to publish Norman Mailer in opposition to the Vietnam War and James Baldwin on the crisis of the inner city. When the latter defected to The New Yorker for a higher fee for the essay that became The Fire Next Time, Podhoretz responded by penning “My Negro Problem—and Ours,” an unfiltered reflection on his youthful terror of Black bullies that concluded with a reluctant endorsement of mass miscegenation. It was offensive in multiple ways, but it was also buzzy, and so was Podhoretz, who at the height of this era was throwing dinner parties with the newly widowed Jackie Kennedy and making sure everyone knew about it.