Write Like a Man (w/ Ronnie Grinberg)
Added 2024-04-17 02:25:03 +0000 UTCHistorian Ronnie Grinberg's new book Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals couldn't be better "Know Your Enemy" fodder. (Main characters include: Midge Decter and Norman Podhoretz, Diana and Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, and Mary McCarthy!) These writers, Grinberg shows, built and sustained a novel, secular, Jewish, and masculine concept of the intellectual life, an ideology that would profoundly affected the development of Cold War liberalism, neo-conservativism, Zionism, and right-wing reaction against feminism, gay rights, and black power.
As we discovered in this conversation, it's impossible to make sense of the creative and scholarly contributions of the New York Intellectuals — good and bad — without gender as an essential lens. Moreover, Grinberg shows how scholars can easily misapprehend the deeper motivations for neoconservative reaction (among those such as Podhoretz and Decter) if they are not attentive to the centrality of gender, sexuality, and patriarchy in these thinkers' work.
Sources Further Reading:
Ronnie Grinberg, Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals (March 2024)
Sam Adler-Bell, "The New York Intellectuals Were a Boys' Club," Chronicle of Higher Education, Apr 10, 2024
Matthew Sitman, "Midge Decter to Howard Meyer, April 15, 1987," Friends and Enemies, Apr 8, 2024
B.D. McClay, "Of Course They Hated Her: The Uncomfortable Honesty of Mary McCarthy," Commonweal, Dec 18, 2017
William Barrett, The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals (1982)
Mary McCarthy, The Group (1963)
Tess Slesinger, The Unpossessed (1934)
Norman Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir (1979)
Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (1976)
Further Viewing:
D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus,"Town Bloody Hall" (1979)
Further Listening:
KYE, "Midge Decter, Anti-Feminist Cold Warrior (w/ Moira Donegan and Adrian Daub," July 28, 2023
KYE, "What Happened to Norman (w/ David Klion)," Jan 16, 2020
Comments
I was pretty lucky to have Ronnie as an undergrad at Northwestern and, for what it's worth, I've been unpacking how much her course taught me about masculinity and politics since I listened to the ep. There's a lot here we can grant by extension to politics broadly about how men bop between politics and masculinity under the spell of desired power. Either way, I'll always be grateful that Ronnie made me a true hipster in that I saw "Arguing the World" in 2007 or whenever it was before it was cool. I'd add an emoji here if I could, obviously.
Ryan Erickson
2024-04-22 02:52:57 +0000 UTCThis is wildly good
Where there’s a Wills there’s a Way
2024-04-21 23:28:51 +0000 UTCI love comparing these neocon/NY intellectuals podcasts with how the Commentary podcasts frame their discussions. Very illuminating indeed
Kyle Mitchell
2024-04-21 23:11:07 +0000 UTCDo you guys have a go-to podcast or set of podcasts you point to when people ask you for a series discussing the historical and intellectual roots of the American left?
Clayton Flesher
2024-04-20 04:38:03 +0000 UTCColumbia’s rebuke to Lionel Trilling (“as a Marxist, a Freudian, and a Jew, how could he teach the mother tongue of the English?”) had me thinking of a young Saul Bellow getting the same line at Northwestern (“I wouldn’t recommend that you study English. You weren’t born to it”). I’d be curious if any of you three have ever read “The Adventures of Augie March”? It feels awfully relevant to this episode, not least as an exploration of Jewish-American masculinity of a more Midwestern flavor, with Augie caught between alcoves. (Trotsky makes a number of cameos.) Here’s an excerpt from the Hitch’s introduction of the Penguin Classics edition: “Only in the preceding year [1952], for one thing, had Bellow’s peers and cothinkers and kibitzers got around to producing the famous Partisan Review symposium ‘Our Country and Our Culture.’ In those pages, the veterans of the cultural combat of the 1930s—most but not all of them Jewish—had asked whether the time had perhaps come to rewrite their project of permanent opposition. There were demurrals and reservations, but, on the whole, the formerly “alienated” began to speak as lawfully adopted sons and daughters of the United States… “[Delmore] Schwartz, who would be the inspiration for the protagonist of Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift (1975), admired Augie the character for the very quality that some reviewers distrusted: his unreadiness to be committed, or, as Augie puts it, ‘recruited.’ Among the hostile reviewers was Norman Podhoretz (my own touchstone for critical deafness and ineptitude), who, as recently as last year [2000], revisited the squabble and—incredibly—echoed Henry James’s anti-Jewishness in accusing Bellow of 'twisting and torturing the language'!" Anyway—terrific episode, as per usual!
Molly Gardner
2024-04-20 02:50:21 +0000 UTCWill be checking out the Unpossessed!
Brian Swoveland
2024-04-18 19:15:50 +0000 UTCThis was a great episode! Deborah Nelson's Tough Enough seems relevant here too.
Michael
2024-04-18 17:44:20 +0000 UTCI have a mad theory that you can truly assess any intellectual politico by their sense of humor and their willingness to dance. Anatole Broyard in his memoir When Kafka Was in Vogue has a great description of the existential fear that the older generation had when he took them to a dance club. Their working-class solidarity ended at a real filthy back beat that just might seduce their daughters into dancing with a negro. Amis. Humor check. Dancing. I can see him. Hitch. Humor check. Dancing. I can see him but probably not well. Norman Podhoretz. Humorless and as for dancing…you know that he ain’t a dancer.
Steven Ngo
2024-04-17 23:50:25 +0000 UTCThanks for helping me understand the reason I never could get thru a page of Lionel Trilling.
Rick Perlstein
2024-04-17 18:46:36 +0000 UTCI imagine Admis probably gave a similar response to many a needling question from Hitchens and other harangue-happy British leftists about Stalin, Communism, revolution, etc.
Adam Lewis
2024-04-17 18:23:36 +0000 UTCI must mention Martin Amis’s superb witticism about the Mailer stabbing: he stabbed his wife bc he wanted to know how it felt. But we all know how it felt for his wife. Terrible. (FYI Mailer once asked Amis on a panel why he was so afraid of masculinity. Amis’s response: because it’s so frightening.)
Steven Ngo
2024-04-17 17:43:49 +0000 UTCWe almost clipped that in
Know Your Enemy
2024-04-17 03:50:20 +0000 UTC“There are a lot of alcoves in the City College cafe. You use this word, alcoves?” Alcoves, yes, sometimes.
-thundergolfer-
2024-04-17 03:47:12 +0000 UTC
