This review is taken from PN Review 284, Volume 51 Number 6, July - August 2025.
on Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals
Ronnie A. Grinberg, Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals (Princeton University Press) £30
Adversarial Minds
In the October 1968 issue of Commentary, Irving Howe published a piece entitled ‘The New York Intellectuals: A Chronicle and a Critique’, which stamped a name on a loosely affiliated group. Most were Jewish sons of immigrants, anti-Stalinist polemicists who generated as much heat as light. Two years earlier, in Steady Work, he had captured their style: ‘You argue, you let some heat come through, and you don’t pretend that gentility is the ultimate virtue’. Their names are synonymous now with the little literary and cultural journal that gave them a radical platform: Partisan Review.
They retain their fascination today as much by the legendary in-fighting as by their combative vigilance through the Depression, the Moscow Trials, the Second World War, the Cold War, Vietnam and, finally, the emergence of a counter-culture that effectively sidelined them. By then they had become insiders, institutional figures, editors and professors. Their ardent left-wing views had either tempered to democratic socialism or migrated right. Republicans listened to the pioneering neoconservatism of some, while a New Left preferred street fighting to the armchair aggression of those who remained liberals.
The first ‘generation’ of the New York intellectuals was born in the early years of the twentieth century, in tough times. Sidney Hook remembered, ‘When I was young, there were three words we dreaded, “diphtheria,” because that meant a child would die; “pneumonia,” because that meant an adult would die; and “slack,” because that meant six months without work.’ Alfred Kazin wrote of his boyhood in Brooklyn in A Walker in the ...
In the October 1968 issue of Commentary, Irving Howe published a piece entitled ‘The New York Intellectuals: A Chronicle and a Critique’, which stamped a name on a loosely affiliated group. Most were Jewish sons of immigrants, anti-Stalinist polemicists who generated as much heat as light. Two years earlier, in Steady Work, he had captured their style: ‘You argue, you let some heat come through, and you don’t pretend that gentility is the ultimate virtue’. Their names are synonymous now with the little literary and cultural journal that gave them a radical platform: Partisan Review.
They retain their fascination today as much by the legendary in-fighting as by their combative vigilance through the Depression, the Moscow Trials, the Second World War, the Cold War, Vietnam and, finally, the emergence of a counter-culture that effectively sidelined them. By then they had become insiders, institutional figures, editors and professors. Their ardent left-wing views had either tempered to democratic socialism or migrated right. Republicans listened to the pioneering neoconservatism of some, while a New Left preferred street fighting to the armchair aggression of those who remained liberals.
The first ‘generation’ of the New York intellectuals was born in the early years of the twentieth century, in tough times. Sidney Hook remembered, ‘When I was young, there were three words we dreaded, “diphtheria,” because that meant a child would die; “pneumonia,” because that meant an adult would die; and “slack,” because that meant six months without work.’ Alfred Kazin wrote of his boyhood in Brooklyn in A Walker in the ...
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