Returning home after the war, Kristol discovered a new outlet for his literary as well as his theotropic impulses in the recently founded Jewish monthly Commentary. He hastily wrote a short story which, to his surprise, the magazine accepted and even paid for. Based upon his encounter with a young Jewish survivor in a displaced-persons camp near Marseille — in the story, the meeting takes place in the Zionist headquarters in Marseille — "Adam and I" recounts the confrontation between the troubled, guilt-ridden narrator (clearly, Kristol himself) and the rather aggressive young man seeking his help. This is Kristol's only published story. (He later wrote, and scrapped, a novel, deciding that fiction was not his forte.) It is also his first literary venture with an explicitly Jewish theme. He followed it up with a review of a book on the Holocaust and a short essay on Communist anti-Semitism.

"By the late 1940s," Kristol writes in one of his memoirs, "religious thought was my most passionate interest — though in the secular-liberal milieu in which I lived and worked, it was an interest to be revealed with prudence." This may seem an odd comment to make, for Kristol's "milieu" was then Commentary, where he had become an assistant editor. That Jewish journal, however, was itself of a decidedly "secular-liberal" temperament, not given to any serious interest in Jewish religion or for that matter religion in general. (Nathan Glazer, also on the staff at the time, has said that Kristol was the magazine's de-facto religion editor.) But if Kristol's interest was "to be revealed with prudence," his September 1947 contribution, the first after his appointment as an editor, was anything but prudent. Indeed, one wonders what prompted Elliot Cohen, the founding editor of Commentary, to publish so dense and erudite an essay by his new, 27-year-old junior editor, and what his readers made of it.

"The Myth of the Supra-Human Jew: The Theological Stigma" is a passionate discourse on the Christian origins of anti-Semitism, and it is a challenge from the outset. The essay opens abruptly with a shocking quotation: "Anyone who is not instinctively disgusted by the Synagogue is unworthy of a dog's respect." That sentence, Kristol explains, appeared in a 1905 book by the French novelist and Catholic polemicist Léon Bloy, Le Salut par les Juifs ("'Salvation through the Jews"); Bloy, in turn, had taken his title from the words of Jesus in the gospel of Saint John: Salus ex Judaeis est. "A strange sentiment," Kristol comments on the quotation about the synagogue, "for a book so titled, and one suspects the presence of a spirit of irony." But Bloy was not being ironic, Kristol insists; in expressing these two conflicting sentiments, anti- and philo-Semitic, he was entirely serious.

Nor was Kristol himself being ironic in opening his essay with that startling quotation from a book written early in the century by a theologian little known among American Catholics, let alone American Jews. Nor was he being deliberately pedantic in elaborating upon it with long excerpts and explications from Catholic thinkers like Raïssa and Jacques Maritain, Ernest Renan, Charles Péguy, even Pope Innocent III, as well as the Jewish theologian Joshua Trachtenberg, the German anti-Semite Hans Blüher, and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Where a magazine like Commentary might have been expected to focus on the social, economic, and political sources of anti-Semitism, Kristol subjected it to a profoundly, agonizingly theological examination.