"Commentary" was the successor to the "Contemporary Jewish Record", which was published by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and ran from 1938 to 1945. When the "Record"s editor died in 1944, the AJC consulted with New York intellectuals including Daniel Bell and Lionel Trilling: they recommended that the AJC hire Elliot Cohen, who had been the editor of a Jewish cultural magazine and was then a fundraiser, to start a new journal. Cohen designed "Commentary" to reconnect assimilated Jews and Jewish intellectuals with the broader, more traditional and very liberal Jewish community. At the same time the magazine would bring the ideas of the young Jewish New York intellectuals to a wider audience. It demonstrated that Jewish intellectuals, and by extension all American Jews, had turned away from their past political radicalism to embrace mainstream American culture and values. Cohen stated his grand design in the first issue: