The magazine was started in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee and run by a group of fiercely anti-Stalinist Trotskyite intellectuals, children of poor immigrant Jews from eastern Europe. 

Their dissident leftism hardened into anti-communism. Constantly in the eye of whatever intellectual hurricane happened to be blowing, the magazine then lurched during the Sixties to the New Left under its second editor, Norman Podhoretz. 

And it was Podhoretz who performed perhaps the most stunning volte-face of all when, gazing upon the handiwork of the Age of Aquarius that he had promoted, he was appalled by what he saw — a drug-ridden rejection of bourgeois conventions and self-restraint which he now believed threatened civilisation itself.

Podhoretz had been "mugged by reality" — and so neo-conservatism was born. Through the pages of Commentary, he and like-minded souls effectively refashioned conservatism as a counter to the counter-culture and a muscular defence of American and Western values. The Jewish Left turned into the neoconservative "Right".

Not that the majority of American Jews identify with the Commentary crowd: they mostly define themselves by the secular liberal universalism to which they remain myopically attached. 

And not that traditional conservatives — or "paleocons" — took kindly to liberal apostates who were clearly still more concerned with winning the battle of ideas than elections. With their erstwhile liberal comrades now shunning them as beyond the pale, the neocons thus found themselves isolated. 

Then 9/11 happened. The rest, as they say, is history — or to be rather more accurate, the rewriting of history: about Iraq, the Middle East and neoconservatism. 

The magazine's serial gyrations also represented the progressive struggle of American Jews to negotiate their national identity in a land where they felt outsiders.