Congratulations are due to John Podhoretz, chosen to become the next editor of Commentary in 14 months. Nonetheless, the appointment is shocking. Podhoretz is famous on the internet as a gadfly and horse’s ass; once he sent me a note, "We know where you live" when I was talking about neocons… Google him and you come up with a lot of impish invective. Commentary is supposed to be a serious publication.
Neal Kozodoy is the current editor of Commentary. He scores in my book because he has run a challenging and completely absorbing magazine that stands for something, even though I disagree with just about every word. When he was a young man at Harvard, Kozodoy did an important thing: he helped Jacob Katz translate into English (I believe from Hebrew) a historical classic, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770-1870. A beautiful book, beautifully written. Kozodoy’s failure was in not applying the lessons of Katz’s book to the present day, for not understanding that leaving the ghetto has had its reiteration in our day in the ascension into the American power structure of Jews. Of course he’s hardly the only one, but he had the intellectual preparation to recognize the theme. Instead of chronicling assimilation and documenting and explaining the Jewish rise–important journalistic responsibilities–he has chosen to make the magazine a tribune for the Zionist summons, including the work of Ruth Wisse and Hillel Halkin (whose columns J.J. Goldberg also runs, again in a place where he might be chronicling assimilation). On the upside, there is Gabriel Schoenfeld, who is always compelling, and Norman "World War IV" Podhoretz, who has managed to make Islam as diverting as Stanley Kubrick made Communism in Strangelove.
I wonder whether young Podhoretz will grasp the nettle, and assign someone (me?) the important task of coldly describing assimilation and documenting the great sociological rise of American Jews. Somehow I doubt it.
