The periodical strove to construct a new American Jewish identity while processing the events of the Holocaust, the formation of the State of Israel, and the Cold War.

[2] Defunct Newspapers Journals TV channels Websites Other Congressional caucuses Economics Gun rights Identity politics Nativist Religion Watchdog groups Youth/student groups Social media Miscellaneous Other Commentary was the successor to the Contemporary Jewish Record, which was published by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and ran from 1938 to 1945,[3] when its editor, AJC executive secretary Morris Waldman, retired.

It demonstrated that Jewish intellectuals, and by extension all American Jews, had turned away from their past political radicalism to embrace mainstream U.S. culture and values.

Cohen stated his grand design in the first issue:[6] With Europe devastated, there falls upon us here in the United States a far greater share of the responsibility for carrying forward, in a creative way, our common Jewish cultural and spiritual heritage...to harmonize heritage and country into a true sense of at-home-ness.Although many or even most of the editors and writers had been socialists, Trotskyites, or Stalinists in the past, that was no longer tolerated.

[8] Podhoretz said, Commentary was founded to lead the Jewish intellectuals "out of the desert of alienation...and into the promised land of democratic, pluralistic, and prosperous America".

[14][15] Historian and literary critic Richard Pells said that "no other journal of the past half century has been so consistently influential, or so central to the major debates that have transformed the political and intellectual life of the United States.