06/27/2010 - 4:00pm to 06/27/2010 - 5:30pm

Location:
Mittleman Jewish Community Center
MJCC
6651 SW Capitol Hwy
Portland, Oregon

Class Description:
Writer and intellectual historian Benjamin Balint will speak about his new book Running COMMENTARY: The Contentious Magazine that Transformed the Jewish Left into the Neoconservative Right.

This event is sponsored by the Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies at Portland State University and the Mittleman Jewish Community Center.

It is free and open to the public.

More Info:
Writer and intellectual historian Benjamin Balint will speak about his new book Running COMMENTARY: The Contentious Magazine that Transformed the Jewish Left into the Neoconservative Right (PublicAffairs, June 2010) at 4 p.m. on Sun., June 27, at the Mittleman Jewish Community Center. Co-sponsored by the Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies and the Mittleman Jewish Community Center, the event is free and open to the public.



Running COMMENTARY is a sharp and lively new history of the influential magazine COMMENTARY, based on unprecedented access to the magazine’s archives and dozens of original interviews. One of the most influential publications in American history, COMMENTARY was the place where, in the years of cultural and political ferment following World War II, a new generation of Jewish-American writers and thinkers arose to make an indelible mark on American culture. It was the magazine where intellectuals such as Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, James Baldwin, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick and many others shared new work, explored ideas, and argued with each other.



Yet beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s, the magazine began to veer away from its liberal and left-wing past, becoming the voice of neoconservativism, the Reagan Revolution and the current war on terror. Running COMMENTARY provocatively explains that shift, politically, culturally, and Jewishly, illuminating the history of the magazine to the present day.



Walter Lacqueur calls Running COMMENTARY, “The most important work of its kind published for years,” and Daphne Merkin calls it, “Intellectual history as it should be written: lucid, capacious and unfailingly readable.” Anthony Grafton writes: “In this eloquent and richly informed book, Benjamin Balint both tells the story of COMMENTARY as a magazine and reads it as an ‘American Talmud’-- a great mass of position statements and debates, always passionate and sometimes contradictory, that illuminate the larger intellectual history of America's Jews.”



Benjamin Balint is a Herman Kahn Fellow at the Hudson Institute, editorial writer for the Jerusalem Post, and former editor at Commentary and Azure. He has published in Policy Review, the Claremont Review, Commentary, the American Scholar, Haaretz, and the Wall Street Journal. He holds an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Washington . He lives in Jerusalem .

*This is a free class.