Records of Present Tense Magazine

Present Tense magazine was founded in 1973 to provide a global perspective on Jewish issues to the American Jewish community. Published by the American Jewish Committee’s department of Foreign Affairs, Present Tense represented an alternative to Commentary, the other magazine published by the AJC, which had taken a hard turn to the right under the editorship of the neoconservative pundit Norman Podhoretz. According to the magazine’s Statement of Purpose, Present Tense's mission was to publish journalism “expressing a wide diversity of opinion on the situation of Jews in countries around the world, the special problems of Israel, the relationships among Jewish communities, and those issues and events in the United States and abroad which affect Jewish life and institutions.”

The magazine was edited by Murray Polner, and regular columnists included the novelist and memoirist Anne Roife, and the scholar Arthur Hertzberg. The magazine remained in print until 1990, when a budget crisis forced the American Jewish Committee to restructure. At this time, it was decided that both magazines (Present Tense and Commentary) had to become self-supporting. Commentary was able to find independent funding and stayed in print, while Present Tense did not.

References

Nathan Abrams, Norman Podhoretz and Commentary: The Rise and Fall of the Neocons. (New York: Continuum International Publishing, 2010), 124-126.

Roger Cohen, "Liberal Jewish Bimonthly Magazine to Close," New York Times, February 8, 1990.

Marianne Rachel Sanua, Let Us Prove Strong: The American Jewish Committee, 1945-2006 (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2007), 329-331.