Ronnie Grinberg’s Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals narrates how a group of second-generation American Jewish men rose to fame by forming a circle whose members eruditely debated cultural, political, and social questions and thereby accrued the requisite cultural capital to position themselves at the center of postwar American culture and politics. Previous scholars have furnished this remarkable group’s history and have explored its impact, but Grinberg is the first to analyze the “New York Intellectuals” through the lens of masculinity.
Noting that those affiliated with the New York Intellectuals “prized verbal combativeness, polemic aggression, and an unflinching style of argumentation,” and that this found expression through “hard-hitting and impassioned arguments, especially in print,” Grinberg asserts that these values and their performative expression combined with anti-Communism to voice a new form of secular Jewish masculinity that united the group’s members (3).
The dominant path that group members took towards adoption of this secular Jewish masculinity led through the City College of New York. A free, highly selective single-sex college with a predominantly Jewish student population, CCNY offered scions of uneducated fathers who had difficulties supporting their families a place outside their homes and their religious community where they could search out male camaraderie and an assumable Jewish masculine identity. The thousands of bright young Jewish men attending CCNY in the 1920s and 1930s naturally separated into affinity groups offering a sense of belonging and identity, including one composed of individuals who had flirted with Communism and whose fear of Stalin’s totalitarian tendencies had subsequently led them to abandon it. Soon this anti-Communist group’s members found themselves employing the dialectical method to debate the heady issues of the day, both with each other and with outsiders, and, when its debating style found written expression in journals affiliated with it or founded by it, such as Partisan Review, Commentary, and Dissent, the New York Intellectuals emerged as a distinct group.
Presenting an appealing alternative to “Anglo-American ideals of masculinity” that emphasized “physical strength, honor, individualism, and athleticism,” the New York Intellectuals, who advanced a form of secular Jewish masculinity that was neither inherently Jewish nor inherently male, proved able to draw in Jewish men looking for a community, as well as gentile and female acolytes who were accepted based upon their ability to function in accordance with the group’s secular Jewish masculine norms (6).
Before World War II, the New York Intellectuals distanced themselves from mainstream American society and critiqued it from a Trotskyite perspective. Yet the crucial role America played in defeating Nazism led many of them to positively identify with it; they soon adopted what they viewed as a “mature” form of secular Jewish masculinity that required one to work within society to improve it. Hence, Lionel Trilling “called for a ‘mature’ liberalism bereft of childish illusions that socialists—or any political movement—could remake the world, by revolution or politics” (83), and Hannah Arendt warned about the dangers of the far right and the far left in The Origins of Totalitarianism (Schocken Books, 1951). The type of liberalism Trilling and Arendt intimated was necessary for healthy American democracy was regularly advanced through writings on culture, politics, and society that promoted “the sense of sanctity of the human person and the rights of man” in the pages of Commentary (104). These offerings and what they represented drew in both Jews and Gentiles, and Commentary emerged as one of America’s most influential and widest circulation intellectual journals in the fifties.
While mainstream New York Intellectuals’ embrace of the secular Jewish masculinity that unified its members brought the group to prominence, it left them blind to the way that these norms impeded the intellectual development of women within their circle who were inhibited from developing in thematic and stylistic directions more attuned to their dispositions. While accepted for their ability to “write like men,” their qualified acceptance denied their femininity, prevented them from joining together to address the group’s gender problem, and allowed the New York Intellectuals to maintain essentialist ideas about women that lacked the analytical rigor typical of their thought. Through discussion of Diana Trilling, Grinberg effectively raises these issues and shows how Trilling’s engagement with second-wave feminists enabled a late-life publishing renaissance.
Significantly, Grinberg challenges Francis Fukuyama’s claim that contemporary neoconservatism’s roots lie with the New York Intellectuals. Indeed, contemporary neoconservatism can be linked to Commentary and its longtime editor Norman Podhoretz, but Grinberg asserts that Podhoretz and Commentary’s neoconservative shift constitutes a rejection of the secular Jewish masculinity that united the New York Intellectuals in favor of something new. The abandonment of the New York Intellectuals’ argumentative style and employment of “memoir as a lens to examine social conflicts” in Podhoretz’s 1963 essays “Hannah Arendt on Eichmann” and “My Negro Problem–And Ours” constitute Podhoretz’s initial movement out of the New York Intellectual camp (249). As she sees it, this process culminated four years later when Podhoretz responded to the Six Day War by sloughing off the New York Intellectuals’ argumentative and linguistically grounded model of secular Jewish masculinity and turning to Israel as “a startling new model of Jewish masculinity” (259). Enamored of “a victorious, muscular and militarized Israel,” Podhoretz would now join other conservatives in presenting Israel as a model of “how to wield military power effectively” (261, 259).
Having rejected Fukuyama’s linkage of contemporary neoconservatism with the New York Intellectuals, Grinberg concludes her book by pointing to what she sees as the group’s enduring legacy. As noted, most New York Intellectuals looked to positively influence America from within during the immediate postwar period. Yet Irving Howe co-founded the journal Dissent in 1954 in an effort to stay true to the group’s outsider origins. While the journal’s distinctly Jewish character has faded and women are more actively involved with it, Grinberg sees Dissent and other 21st-century “little” magazines keeping the New York Intellectuals “pugnacious vision of combative intellectuals criticizing mainstream institutions” alive (277).
While this study proves well-researched and convincing, consideration of masculinity as the cultural, social, psychological, and behavioral aspects of being a man, rather than an “ideology,” offers a way to more fully understand the New York Intellectuals’ history (3). Grinberg cogently implies that the New York Intellectuals unified around a Jewish masculine form that provided its Jewish male members with a psychologically positive alternative to mainstream American masculine norms that classified them as inferior and their fathers’ masculine norms that the members viewed as rendering their adherents impotent. Therefore, investigation of pivotal moments in the group’s history as times when the Jewish masculine form uniting the groups members ceased to psychologically benefit them and gave rise to modified forms considered able to maintain group cohesion through provision of psychological benefit would likely prove insightful.
Philip Hollander is an independent scholar.
Philip Hollander
Date Of Review:
September 27, 2024