Reviewed by H N Hirsch
Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals
by Ronnie A. Grinberg
Princeton University Press
July 2024, Hardcover, 344 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0691193090
Long before the internet made it possible for anyone to start a blog or post their thoughts on Facebook, before TikTok and YouTube, becoming a public intellectual required an established venue and credentials. In the early and mid-twentieth century United States, dominated by Christian, Anglo-Saxon values, the Ivy League, and by well-established publishing houses and mainstream magazines, immigrant intellectuals struggled to find a foothold.
The first generation of Jewish immigrants, especially, faced hurdles. Anti-Semitism was real. Economic hardship was real, as were restrictive quotas for Jews at elite universities. Jewish immigrants from Eastern and Central Europe struggled to make ends meet, especially during the Depression. The shtetl, the small, oppressed agrarian communities from which many Jewish families fled—the world depicted in the musical “Fiddler on the Roof”—was a world apart, and provided precious few skills useful in a bustling, modern American economy. Education in the shtetl was religious, not secular.
The children of the first generation of immigrants, on the other hand, had brighter prospects. Many of them, born in the new world, were able to take advantage of the secular education of American public schools and a few relatively affordable institutions of higher education such as City College in New York. There they applied and amplified the long-standing, deeply entrenched Jewish tradition of scholarly seriousness, of reverence for the written word, and the talent for interpretation and intellectual gymnastics.
Some of those children went on to become doctors, lawyers, businessmen. Many prospered. And some became prominent, highly influential and well-known American intellectuals. Anyone familiar with twentieth century American history recognizes their names: Norman Podhoretz, Irving Howe, Philip Rahv, Daniel Bell, Lionel Trilling, and many others. The journals they founded and wrote for, such as Commentary, Partisan Review, and Dissent, are also familiar. Some still publish.
A new, fascinating, somewhat flawed book puts these intellectuals under a microscope, and the lenses of that microscope focuses, laser-like, on questions of gender. According to historian Ronnie A. Grinberg, these intellectuals “refashioned the meaning of American Jewishness through their definition of a secular masculine ideal.”
What did it mean to be “masculine” or “manly”—and hence acceptable–in twentieth century America? To traditional American elites and the culture they embodied, it meant physical strength and athleticism—think of a football or soccer team at Harvard or a Harvard-like institution such as Vanderbilt or Stanford. Think of fraternities or Princeton eating clubs. Think of Ryan O’Neal in the film version of “Love Story” (a wildly popular novel in the 1960s, set at Harvard, written by a Yale professor).
But athleticism was never part of Jewish culture—think Woody Allen–so a different definition of masculinity had to be invented. It was not toughness on the athletic field, not physical strength or endurance, but intellectual toughness that these men pursued and embodied, carrying on a Jewish tradition but now applying it to the secular world of literature and politics.
Writing a biting magazine piece became, for these men, a form of masculine combat and performance. It was the pen and the typewriter, not the lacrosse stick, that served as the weapon of choice. The small, highbrow magazine, not the playing field, the golf course, or the corporate boardroom, was the setting in which they excelled and made names for themselves. In this intellectual world, their Jewishness served them well.
Many of the figures examined here came of age in the 1930s and, in their youth, flirted with democratic socialism and other varieties of left politics, including Communism, a fact that later embarrassed them as Stalin’s crimes in the Soviet Union started coming to light. Moving into World War II and its aftermath, some of these Jewish intellectuals became prominent cold warriors, and later, neoconservatives. Only a few of them, such as Howe, while anti-Communist, continued to pursue a more left-leaning stance.
Lurking in the background as these men developed their intellectual style of course, was the Holocaust, and their perception that the world would not protect Jews unless they themselves were rugged and strong. Many, predictably, became avid supporters of Israel.
Grinberg’s analysis of these figures is smart and perceptive, especially as she describes the gung-ho Americanism of those who abandoned the left politics of their youth. These men had two things to prove in their quest to belong: that they were not “sissies,” as Jewish men were often perceived to be, and that they were not, or were no longer, socialists or Communists.
It is hard, when reading the stories of these men, not to conclude that the need to assimilate to the mainstream, to prove themselves real men and real Americans—their drive to make it (a phrase used in the title of Norman Podhoretz’s autobiography)–led some of them to go to extremes, as when some supported Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts or enthusiastically supported Ronald Reagan and a “muscular,” overly aggressive foreign policy.
Along with this aggressive foreign policy many of these intellectuals also fully embraced middle-class, bourgeois family values, a stance that would eventually lead to intellectually bloody clashes with the New Left and the counter-culture, as well as with second-wave feminism and the gay rights movement of the 1960s. In fact, some of the most anti-feminist and homophobic vitriol in the Sixties emanated from these precincts. For these intellectuals, influenced by Freud, “male” and “female” were set-in-stone biological categories and only heterosexual marriage was proof of “maturity.”
There is no doubt that Grinberg is accurately and perceptively describing the men at the center of this story as well as offering plausible theories about their motivations. Where she goes somewhat astray is in a kind of tunnel vision, viewing everything and everyone as performing or emulating the same set of values and for the same reasons.
For example, Mary McCarthy and Elizabeth Hardwick—not Jewish, not men—are viewed within same framework. But is the concept of “Jewish masculinity” the best lens to use in describing these two brilliant women, one a Catholic from Seattle (who wrote a book about her Catholic upbringing) and one a Protestant from Kentucky? Were they not perhaps representative of something else—talented, intellectual women struggling in an overwhelmingly man’s world before second-wave feminism? They both embodied a kind of intellectual toughness, to be sure, and moved in the same circles as the men. They held their own, and then some—in fact, their contemporary reputations are stronger than many of the men in question. But theirs was not the toughness of a Jewish male not wanting to be labeled a sissy.
Similarly, when Lionel Trilling—a great literary critic, the first Jew to be tenured in Columbia’s English department—tries his hand at fiction, his novel lands with a thud. Grinberg describes the experience as “emasculating.” Is that accurate? Or was it simply a disappointment, a failure, the kind of thing that happens to almost everyone at one point or another in a long professional career?
Masculinity explains a great deal, but perhaps not every element of every life story.
Still, despite occasional over-interpretation, this is a valuable, well-researched and highly readable account of an important chapter of American intellectual life. These individuals lived fascinating lives and had far-reaching impact on American culture. They created themselves, and they signified.
About the reviewer: H N Hirsch is Professor Emeritus at Oberlin College in Ohio. His most recent book is the mystery novel Rain.