Remembering the golden age of the New York Jewish intellectual male - The Jewish Chronicle

In the aftermath of the Second World War, a new Jewish American male came of age: combative, intellectual, unashamedly masculine and indelibly shaped by the style and swagger of New York City. Among its eminences were Irving Howe, Norma Podhoretz, and Norman Mailer, the “Jewish mama’s boy, who longed to be taken for a tough Irishman”, as one of his fellow club members put it. Here Ronnie A Grinberg, author of a new book, Write Like A Man, talks to David Cohen about this influential New York set, and wonders whethers that fiercely discursive Jewish intellectual confidence is now a thing of the past.

What’s the thesis of your book, and why did you settle on this work?

 My book is about the New York intellectuals, a prominent group of writers and critics at mid-century – a group that somehow still holds a mystique to this day. Most of them were secular Jews, though not all, and most were men. I argue that in the 20th century they came to embody a new type of American-Jewish masculinity that centred on combative debate and disputation, arguing about ideas in ways that transformed American intellectual life and the world of letters.

As opposed to an earlier Jewish period?

Before the Second World War, Jews were outsiders, in all sorts of respects. In terms of religion, this was the high tide of antisemitism on both sides of the Atlantic. In terms of being working-class immigrants, often adhering to the labour movement and socialism. And in terms of gender to some extent – that is, Jews were seen as unable to embody American norms of masculinity.

To what degree did the bad manners of New York City come into this and to what extent is this a distinctly Jewish thing?

In chapter one, I write about how they grew up in tough working-class neighbourhoods. These were Jewish enclaves, yes, but these were also places where one street might have been Jewish, the next Irish, the next Italian. The streets of New York City really did play a big role in the forging of this combativeness. But tying it into the life of the intellectual has a Jewish tradition.

You make it sound like a stateside version of the cliché about bronzed kibbutzniks out in the Israeli sun forging a new identity far removed from that of the European ghetto.

There was deﬁnitely a new Jew being consciously created with Zionism. Nathan Abrams at Bangor University has written about this group too. Although he doesn’t focus on gender in the same way I do, he argues that Elliot Cohen, the first editor of Commentary, a magazine founded in 1945 that became central to the New York intellectuals, also sought to project a new sort of more masculinised Jew. But I would say this was more self-conscious among Zionists than for this group I’m writing about.

In both cases, though, is it a negative thing – a kind of lingering shame about the Holocaust – or can it be seen more positively as an assertiveness born out of new-found security?

I think it’s more positive. I trace the emergence of this secular Jewish masculinity to before the Holocaust, to the 1920s and the 1930s. The Holocaust is a watershed, obviously, for world Jewry. And for the speciﬁc ﬁgures I write about. Some of them, as Trotskyists, initially opposed America’s entry into the war, which would be something they would deeply regret later. The years following the Second World War were in many ways a golden era for American Jews, a time of prosperity and increasing acceptance. It is not an accident that these New York intellectuals became prominent when they did. They reﬂected the moment.

How bygone is all of this in 2024?

 Well, there was Franklin Foer’s cover story in the The Atlantic recently about how antisemitism from the left and right has ended the golden era for Jewish Americans. I know people who both agree and disagree with that. But in many ways, there was a golden era for American Jews that went well into the 1960s. And I think part of the reason why my book has resonated is there is nostalgia for this era when Jews fiercely debated politics and ideas.

Why the particular interest in men? You mention Susan Sontag, say, only in passing, and Dorothy Parker not at all. And someone like Ayn Rand – a self-described male chauvinist who exhibited the same intellectually brawling qualities – would seem to have ﬁt the bill.

Well, women do play a role. According to these intellectuals, there were only seven women considered true members of the group: Diana Trilling, Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, Midge Decter, Gertude Himmelfarb and Susan Sontag. While I discuss all these women, I focus especially on Diana Trilling and Midge Decter. Dorothy Parker? They knew of her, but she wasn’t considered a New York intellectual. In many ways, this is an imagined community – in terms of who counted and who didn’t. And women often did not easily count. All who did, except Sontag and Hannah Arendt, had relationships with men in this group. That is not insignificant. Brilliant though they were, they were not always treated well. I argue that they came to embody this type of masculinity in the public sphere. They had to be taken seriously.

You seem to use sexuality and gender interchangeably. Do you see them that way?

No, I don’t. I often use “sex” not gender in the book because that is the language this group used; they talked about “sex roles”, not gender roles. They didn’t have a sense that these concepts were social constructions, at least not initially. In the book, I show how this group relied on Freudian concepts to understand gender and sexuality. So, to some extent, you’re right, there’s a crossover. But it was my attempt to stay tied to the language they would have used, as well as not to make the book jargony.

Do you see any parallels between this aspect of American Jewry and British Jewry? 

I don’t know enough to answer the question. I wish I did. Certainly, this group had ties to Great Britain. Lionel Trilling was an Anglophile, and his mother was British. Other New York intellectuals travelled to England, beginning in the 1950s when they were active in the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. The British poet Stephen Spender, who was half-Jewish, as I recall, was one of the initial editors of the magazine Encounter alongside Irving Kristol. So yes, there’s a trans-Atlantic connection of ideas and people. Perhaps also this sort of aggressive cerebral Jewish masculinity developed in London. Or other major cities. I don’t know. It’s not something I explore in this book. But it is a question I hope other scholars take up.

David Cohen is a New Zealand-based journalist and author

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