“Ye Town Crier” (1908) | Robert Seaver / CC0 1.0 Universal
Earlier this year, the historian Ronnie Grinberg made a bit of a splash with her first book, Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals (Princeton, 2024). In her biographical study of the New York Jewish intellectuals behind journals like Partisan Review, Dissent, and Commentary, Grinberg focuses on prominent postwar writers and editors like Irving Howe, Norman Podhoretz, Lionel Trilling, and Irving Kristol, many of them native New Yorkers and graduates of City College. Women, with a few exceptions, were excluded from their circles, and those who made the grade—Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and Elizabeth Hardwick among them—were expected to “write like a man.” This meant viewing the life of the mind as a blood sport, a metaphorical boxing match for bruising intellects, honing skills forged in fights between Stalinist and Trotskyite Marxists in the 1930s, and updating the kinds of Jewish masculinity that had evolved out of hair-splitting rabbinical disputes over the Talmud.
Mitchell Abidor: It struck me that your account of the Jewish intellectuals of the forties, fifties, and sixties was virtually an update of Irving Howe’s bestselling 1976 memoir, The World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made.
Ronnie Grinberg: Yeah.
Mitchell Abidor: Did Howe or any of his cohort shape you in any way?
Ronnie Grinberg: It’s a funny question. I think the reason the book has resonated in the way that it has has nothing to do with me. I mean, it’s a first book, and I’m unknown, but the attention it’s gotten has to do with the fact that it deals with these particular figures. So I think you’re right: there’s a sense that some people are reading about their fathers, or the generation that came before them. For me personally, my parents are immigrants—my father’s Mexican and my mother’s Israeli—I’m not looking at my parents and seeing them as part of that generation. They don’t come from this world, they don’t come from New York. They don’t even come from the United States. But I’ve lived with these figures now for about twenty years and I felt like I knew them.
But to get back to your question, I definitely feel an affinity for Irving Howe, and I felt a desire to defend Diana Trilling. I’ve read people who’ve written about her, like Daphne Merkin, and it’s clear that she was not an easy person, that she wasn’t a kind person. But most of the men weren’t easy or kind either. And so there was something there in terms of how Diana was portrayed as excessively difficult, and I wanted to think about whether or not that portrait was gendered. I say in the book that the men are not remembered for being difficult, but Diana was. I feel a little bit of an affinity for her, but my heart is with Irving Howe. If you’ve seen the excellent 1999 documentary Arguing the World, which chronicled the political trajectories of four New York intellectuals—Nathan Glazer, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, and Irving Howe, all of whom attended CCNY in the late 1930s and honed their polemical skills debating communists in CCNY’s famed cafeteria alcoves—there is the scene at the end of the film where Irving Howe reflects on his friendship with the other three men. He remained tied to Bell and Glazer throughout his life but of Irving Kristol he said: “I feel no longer any tie whatsoever. He has gone way over to the other side. He’s a spokesman for corporate interests, for the Republican party. I look at him as a political opponent. And the fact that we were together 50 years ago [at CCNY] doesn’t stir the faintest touch of sentiment in me. I wish him well personally,” Howe concluded with a wry smile and a twinkle in his eye, “with many political failures, I hope.”
I think that scene captures not only Howe’s politics, which I respect and relate to, but it also reveals his sense of humor. And I also came to admire that Howe was able to look back and admit mistakes and missed opportunities—with the New Left and especially feminism. If he were alive, I think we would have gotten along.
I think—I hope—that I did a good job of treating everyone fairly. It’s not a polemic … I certainly have my politics, but I’m not writing as a polemicist. I tried to treat everyone with respect.
Abidor: You said it’s not a polemic, so in a sense you didn’t write like a man.
Grinberg: No, I didn’t. I’m a historian, and I think the role of the historian is to understand the past and take your figures seriously, whether you agree with them or not. I’m not looking to take down my figures.
Abidor: When did you hit on the idea that the crux of the matter here was an ideology of secular Jewish masculinity?
Grinberg: That came pretty early in grad school. A kernel of it came from my studying neo-Conservatism in grad school, back in 2004. I read Breaking Ranks, Norman Podhoretz’s book, and Bush was leading the war on terror and we’d invaded Iraq, so I wanted to study Conservatism, which was still a hot field. And that led to thinking about these Jewish intellectuals. There was a book that came out that was not very well known, I don’t think—a book about the generation of policy makers who took us into Vietnam that was called Imperial Brotherhood, by Robert Dean. It was published in the late 1990s, and it talks about the ways gender shaped these foreign-policy makers. He was the one who actually used the term “ideology,” so that term, thinking of Jewish secular masculinity as an ideology, dates back to that book. As for the term, I went to the archives and I went to City College and I found these amazing images in the 1936 yearbook about how this all-male school in the 30s, filled with somewhere between 80 percent–90 percent Jewish men … that when they engaged in political debates in the alcoves it turned into this kind of muscular manhood.
I’d also been reading Irving Howe and Irving Kristol, Sidney Hook, Seymour Martin Lipset, all of them reflecting on their experiences in the alcoves and how much it was about developing their argumentative styles. The ideology of secular Jewish masculinity has roots in Talmudic masculinity in Ashkenazi culture, how the scholar was the ideal male. And when you read these guys, they talk about their forefathers being Talmudic scholars. They’re reconstructing that masculinity on American soil, and they’re also growing up in immigrant New York, where they’re influenced by other models of manhood and want to be American.
The first chapter talks about how they constructed this idea. Of course, they never say this outright—gender’s hard to talk about. But if you look at the language and the way they write about their experiences, that’s when I saw all this coming together. I pieced it all together: it was a sort of combative, argumentative, cerebral masculinity.
Abidor: My big question, all the way through the book, was this: In what way, as intellectuals, were they different from other intellectuals? Isn’t it the nature of the beast to be argumentative, to express an opinion? The word itself came into use during the Dreyfus Affair, and certainly the intellectuals in France at the time had definite opinions expressed strongly. You can’t be more pointed than “J’Accuse.” You don’t have to be a Jew to be combative.
Grinberg: I think this kind of masculinity does appear in other groups, so I take the point that it’s not only Jewish. But I will say that the other major group of intellectuals that were functioning at the same time in America were the Southern New Critics. Also, Daniel Bell in his essays in The Winding Passage defines “the intellectual,” and he says that there have only been three distinct groups of intellectuals: the Lost Generation of the 1920s, the Southern Agrarians, and the New York intellectuals.
The Agrarians were concerned with small-town America, with gentility, while the New Yorkers were distinctly urban and Jewish. It wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t insignificant that these Jewish intellectuals were part of this process and that they were bringing something specifically Jewish. I’m not making the claim that they were the only ones, but I see distinct Jewish aspects that informed their understanding of masculinity and their worldview.
Abidor: There are moments when, along with intellectual masculinity, you talk about masculinity in its more classically defined terms. There was the other form of Jewish masculinity that was out there, with sports and figures like Hank Greenberg and Sid Luckman and Slapsy Maxie Rosenbloom, or the Jewish gangsters, like Kid Twist Reles and Murder Inc. No matter what you do if you’re a Jewish male, aren’t you going to be displaying some sort of Jewish secular masculinity?
Grinberg: Yeah, I guess so, but there’s a desire to be seen as American, and I make the argument that before World War II, Jews as a group were not seen as manly no matter what they did. There’s that nativism, that antisemitism—they’re still “other” to some extent. The Jewish athletes and mobsters you list captured something of the American zeitgeist, but most Jews just weren’t seen as manly. Podhoretz recalls being called a “sissy” because he was a good student. What his group did was take intellectual masculinity and make it manly, making it muscular in a way that resonates in American discourse.
Abidor: You speak about the way that Marxism was a way of engaging in intellectual battles, but there’s nothing particularly Jewish in that aspect. I mean, that’s what leftists do.
Grinberg: You’re right, though there was still a Jewish element to it.
Abidor: But everyone who argues isn’t a Jew.
Grinberg: No.
Abidor: A point I very strongly disagree with is when you discuss Irving Howe and the infamous meeting with the leaders of SDS and his 1965 article “New Styles in Leftism” attacking the New Left. You describe their differences as being founded on different forms and visions of masculinity. Howe’s article is a despicable piece of writing, and their differences were based not on masculinity but on the belief on one side—the SDSers—that something had to be done, and on the other that it was necessary to attack those who actually did anything.
Grinberg: I think that for Howe and his allies—this isn’t what I think, but for them—the New Left wasn’t intellectually engaged enough. They were dismissive of history, of the past, of Marxists’ mistakes. From your generation’s perspective, they were archaic and stuck in debates that no longer resonated with what was going on. You guys were trying to bring about actual change, which you did. It’s not all masculinity; there are also real ideological differences. I don’t think masculinity explains neo-Conservatism, but it’s an important element that was overlooked. The older guys felt like, “Our sons are rebelling against us.” And in Alfred Kazin’s case it was his son, because Michael Kazin was in SDS and became a Weatherman. It’s not that gender explains it all, but I think there is a dynamic. I understand your feeling about Howe, but talking later to Michael Kazin and Michael Walzer, Howe regretted the way he spoke to those guys.
Abidor: Something that struck me about all the Jewish intellectuals is that they didn’t do anything when there were things that needed doing. They lived through the war in Spain, they lived through the Civil Rights movement, but few of them ever got off their asses.
Grinberg: Absolutely, they were armchair intellectuals—from your perspective—who didn’t do anything in the real world.
Abidor: In your book, you talk about how there were no women on the editorial board of Dissent. But there were no women on the editorial board of any magazine. So weren’t the Jewish intellectuals, however wrong they were, essentially guilty of being men who came of age in the thirties, forties, sixties?
Grinberg: That’s true. But it reinforces how much this was a masculine world, and women weren’t considered full players. Some critics of my book have said I’m making an essentialist argument, but that’s not what I’m arguing. What I’m saying is that the women who were taken seriously by these men opposed the feminist movement, partly because they pushed past it and took pride in acting and writing like the men did.
Abidor: On the left in the early sixties, women didn’t speak at demonstrations for the most part and were relegated to subordinate, even domestic, chores. This conduct led directly to the birth of the feminist movement in the US, but also in France, as I know from my own research on May 68.
Grinberg: You’re right, and there’s been much written about that. In fact, my next book will be a secular Jewish history of women’s liberation: how women like Vivian Gornick and Alix Kates Schulman and others challenged who could be considered an intellectual.
