Paul Moreno

LABOR HISTORY SYMPOSIUM

THOMAS A. KOCHAN Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 2005 ISBN: 0262112922 In Restoring the American Dream, Thomas Kochan, one of Americas foremost industrial relations scholars, addresses the pa...

Military Tribunals and Presidential Power: American Revolution to the War on Terrorism: Fisher,: Louis Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 279 pp., Publication Date: February 2005

mation from liberal to neocon ideologue (George H. Nash); and Commentary’s third generation of neocon thinkers and policy makers (John Ehrman). Ultimately, the underlying burden of the book is to explain two astounding ironies in Commentary’s history: First, how did a magazine, initiated by a cluster of alienated liberal intellectuals on the Left become, decades later, the voice of a neoconservative movement and set of ideas on the intellectual and political Right? Second, how did a supposedly independent Jewish magazine, led essentially by Jewishly illiterate and anti-establishment Jewish intellectuals divorced from Jewish interests and institutions, become launched and sustained by the American Jewish Committee, a pillar of the Jewish communal establishment? And how did this magazine come to represent and vigorously defend core Jewish interests such as Israel, American Jewish rights and opportunities, and the repudiation of anti-Semitism? On these questions, Nathan Abrams’ essay on the beginnings of Commentary and its relationship to the American Jewish Committee, Glazer’s critical participantlobserver memoir on the early years, Wisse’s offering on how Commentary’s defense of Jewish interests in the 1960s adumbrated its subsequent neocon transformation in the 1970s, and Nash’s article rooting Podhoretz’s neoconservative transformation in his reaction to the extreme anti-Americanism of the Left are absolutely pivotal and compelling. In sum, the growing scholarly and memoir literature on American conservatism and neoconservatism has been significantly enhanced by this collection, whose focused attention to Commentary magazine, its public policy impact and intellectual legacy, has resulted in a book accessible to scholars and laypeople alike.