In his new book, “Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine That Transformed the Jewish Left into the NeoConservative Right” (Public Affairs, $27 hardcover), Benjamin Balint literally hits the ground running from the first page and doesn’t look back. Neither will readers, as they speed through Balint’s provocative analysis of Commentary, the venerable Jewish journal that has examined Jewish life in America for more than 60 years.

Balint, a fellow of the Hudson Institute whose articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the American Scholar, The Weekly Standard and Ha’aretz, among other publications, dazzles with his breadth of scholarship and his command of the material culled from a veritable cavalcade of American Jewish intellectuals and literati, Commentary contributors all. Just the sheer volume of sources – Irving Howe, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Joseph Epstein, Cynthia Ozick and Elliott Abrams, to name a few – impresses. But Balint is not into mere name-dropping; rather, he draws on the pantheon of Jewish thinkers and writers spanning six decades to artfully tell the story of Commentary’s founding and its rather remarkable metamorphosis from a liberal Jewish monthly to a decidedly conservative one.

Balint’s writing, too, informed by his sources and infused with their bon mots, sparkles with a vibrancy all too often missing in such intellectual histories, adding to the fun of the read and making what could be a dry history into a page turner.

About halfway through the book, Balint hints that Commentary’s move from left to right was nothing more than a natural consequence of its development. And therefore, he goes on, its editors did not view the shift as anything more than a stage in the magazine’s progression.

“Commentary … neither now nor later paused to take full measure of its gyrations or to reckon with its reversals, perhaps because its editors regarded them as continuities,” he writes.

Balint has used these “continuities” as the premise for his book, tracing the magazine’s gradual rightward tilt while subtly suggesting the very rightness of that orientation. Another 20 pages later, he lets slip his own political proclivities when he writes of Commentary’s embrace of “traditional values” and its pursuit of “moral clarity,” the language reinforcing the perception that for Balint, as for Commentary’s current editors, listing to the right is synonymous with seeing the light.

Balint succeeds brilliantly in espousing his point of view and making a cogent argument while prodding the reader to serious reflection. Along the way, he fashions a fascinating cultural history of Jewish engagement in America using Commentary as a means for dissecting the social, political and religious milieu of its founders and its successors. He is at his best in the initial section of the book, “Outsiders,” where he paints a vivid picture of the forces that informed its founding editors, and readers. He reminds the reader that the magazine was founded just after World War II under the auspices of the American Jewish Committee, a bastion of Jewish liberalism dedicated to the defense of Jewish civil and religious liberties. Its vision was to engender vibrant discussion, giving voice to a cohort of writers who reflected both the journal’s political and its literary mission.

Balint effectively employs biography to trace the magazine’s evolution with keenly drawn portraits of its three editors: Elliott Cohen, who reflected its socialist, working-class roots; Norman Podhoretz, who engineered Commentary’s liberal to conservative shift; and Neal Kozodoy, a loyal stalwart who continued to steer the magazine rightward. Podhoretz’s son, John, succeeded Kozodoy in 2009.

Balint colorfully evokes the magazine’s liberal heritage, its later disillusionment with the left growing first from the impact of the postwar boom and then the consuming threat of communism. He shows how the editorial thrust hardened over time, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s with Podhoretz at the helm and increasing discomfort with the radicalism of the New Left and its anti-war and anti-establishment protest. “The Commentary crowd, with its alienated days behind it, could not abide what it regarded as the New Left’s bitter anti-Americanism, the New Left’s feeling that what used to be the land of opportunity was now irredeemably racist and imperialist and fundamentally sick,” observes Balint.

As the magazine moved right, its role as an independent arbiter of opinion was diminished by its growing political clout as neo-Conservatives became policymakers as well as pundits. In the wake of the 2000 election, writes Balint, with the election of George W. Bush, “Norman Podhoretz felt in sync with the nation’s spirit,” his belief in the use of American power for moral purposes to promote democracy validated. His embrace of Bush’s pre-emptive strategy and his support of waging war against fundamentalist Islam was an expression of his fervent Americanism. In 2004, Bush presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom lauding Podhoretz as a “fierce intellectual man” and paying tribute to “his fine writing and his great love for our country.”

Balint has crafted a metanarrative of Jewish life in America through his examination of Commentary as a microcosm of Jewish intellectualism. He fixes his gaze on a plethora of issues from anti-Semitism to Zionism, from Black separatism to Islamic supremacism to examine the story of Jewish engagement. Told through the pages of Commentary, and often in the vibrant voices of its contributors, the story Balint provides is a compelling record, a compendium of opinion and thought, that in its own way validates Commentary’s very mission.

Vicki Cabot reviews books for Jewish News of Greater Phoenix.