In a notorious 1963 essay titled “My Negro Problem–And Ours,” Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, wrote of “the insane rage” he felt “at the thought of Negro anti-Semitism.” Podhoretz didn’t elucidate why “Negro anti-Semitism,” which manifested itself most visibly in the ravings of the Nation of Islam, should be any worse than white anti-Semitism—which, after all, was responsible for centuries of persecutions, pogroms, and, ultimately, the Holocaust. But in the pages of Commentary magazine, which Podhoretz edited from 1960 to 1995, other writers frequently took up the theme, airing their anxiety that the rise of African-American political activism would undermine the interests of Jewish Americans.

Commentary magazine is now edited by John Podhoretz, Norman’s son. And its June issue, which came online last month and began receiving critical attention this week, is about racial tension. “African Americans vs. American Jews,” the cover announces.

Last night, Black Jews led Jews of all colors through the most powerful seder I've ever seen.



Also last night some sad lonely men with dusty, cobwebbed ideas at @Commentary magazine dedicated an entire issue to villify all Black people and erase Black Jews. #JuneteenthSeder pic.twitter.com/LxwDUjenIC — Rafael 🔥 (@rafaelshimunov) June 15, 2018

In “My ‘Black Lives Matter’ Problem” (an implicit allusion to the title of the elder Podhoretz’s essay), Jason D. Hill argues that “the kind of dependency that Black Lives Matter promotes lays the groundwork for personal failure”—a strange claim, since political activism would seem to work against dependency. In another entitled “The Rise of Black Anti-Semitism,” James Kirchik (formerly a staffer at The New Republic) condemns an “increasingly fatalistic progressivism” which is “willing to make common cause with all manner of illiberal and regressive political forces provided they hew to the party line.” For example, he cites reluctance of a few figures to condemn Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.



A third deals with the 1968 New York school strike, at which black activists who called for greater community control in hiring processes clashed with Jewish union leaders who wanted to protect the existing system of seniority.

It’s worth revisiting the history of Commentary magazine to see how tired and troubling the current arguments are. In Norman Podhoretz’s original 1963 piece, he bravely acknowledged the formative force of white supremacy in his own thinking, creating a bedrock racism that was impossible to overcome. “The hatred I still feel for Negroes is the hardest of all the old feelings to face or admit, and it is the most hidden and the most overlarded by the conscious attitudes into which I have succeeded in willing myself,” Podhoretz wrote. Podhoretz’s failure came after that essay, when he failed to realize that the internal racism he had rightly admitted to still guided his editorial choices and the ways in which he framed political issues. To be sure, Podhoretz wasn’t alone in that failure. Many magazines, not least of all The New Republic, succumbed to a similar politics of racist resentment in the face of black militancy and African-American cultural resurgence.