Commentary

Commentary or commentaries may refer to:

Publications

Other uses

Commentary (magazine)

Commentary is a monthly American magazine on religion, Judaism, politics, social and cultural issues.

Founded by the American Jewish Committee in 1945, it was edited by Norman Podhoretz from 1960 to 1995. Besides its strong coverage of cultural issues, Commentary provided a strong voice for the anti-Stalinist left. Podhoretz, originally a liberal Democrat turned neoconservative, moved the magazine to right and toward the Republican Party in the 1970s and 1980s.

Commentary has been described by Benjamin Balint as the "contentious magazine that transformed the Jewish left into the neoconservative right", while, according to historian Richard Pells, "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." According to Commentary itself, "Irving Kristol once called [it] the most influential magazine in Jewish history".

History

Founding and early years

Commentary (philology)

In philology, a commentary is a line-by-line or even word-by-word explication usually attached to an edition of a text in the same or an accompanying volume. It may draw on methodologies of close reading and literary criticism, but its primary purpose is to elucidate the language of the text and the specific culture that produced it, both of which may be foreign to the reader. Such a commentary usually takes the form of footnotes, endnotes, or separate text cross-referenced by line, paragraph or page.

Means of providing commentary on the language of the text include notes on textual criticism, syntax and semantics, and the analysis of rhetoric, literary tropes, and style. The aim is to remove, lessen or point out linguistic obstacles to reading and understanding the text.

If a text is historical, or is produced within a culture assumed to be of limited familiarity to a reader, a broader range of issues may require elucidation. These include, but are by no means limited to, biographical data pertaining to the author, historical events, customs and laws, technical terminology and facts of daily life, religious beliefs and philosophical perspectives, literary allusions, geographical settings, and cross-references to related passages in the same work, other works by the author, or sources used by the author.