Arguing the World: Howe, Kristol, Glazer, and Bell
Added 2024-04-09 17:06:49 +0000 UTCIt was inevitable that Know Your Enemy would eventually discuss Arguing the World, the 1998 documentary about four Jewish intellectuals who emerged from the alcoves and arguments of City College in the 1930s and influenced American politics and letters for much of the rest of the twentieth century, and beyond: Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, and Nathan Glazer.
Why now? Most of all, it's the kind of documentary we love—the personal rivalries, the gossip, the self-conscious intellectuality, and the, well, arguments. But we'll also be publishing an episode next week with historian Ronnie Grinberg about her new book, Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals, and while the overlap in subject matter is not perfect, this documentary would make for a great primer for listeners (since we know you're the kind of listeners who do not despise homework). It's also an excellent chance to revisit the history of the left, old and new, and their fraught relationship with each other; to consider the place of intellectuals and thinking in a time of urgent action; and, as ever, to talk about the ways the subjects of Arguing the World might fit into America's right turn and "how we got here."
Watch:
Arguing the World, dir. Joseph Dorman (1998); YouTube, PBS, IMDB
Read:
Irving Howe, "This Age of Conformity," Partisan Review, Jan-Feb 1954
Irving Howe, "Socialism and Liberalism: Articles of Conciliation?" Dissent, Winter 1977
Irving Kristol, “Memoirs of a Trotskyist,” NYTimes, Jan 23, 1977
Comments
The timing of this release, just before the explosion of protests on college campuses, mirroring the 1968 college protests/new left... Just uncanny
Leonardo Restrepo
2024-04-26 13:20:22 +0000 UTCI taught in Brownsville, Brooklyn a few years back. Always shocks me to hear the role that community played in shaping American and international politics
Leonardo Restrepo
2024-04-26 00:24:56 +0000 UTCVimeo still has it
JayRamone Was
2024-04-21 13:51:21 +0000 UTCNever mind, I forgot Sam said Vimeo has it. I only wanted there to be a conspiracy…
Stan Mir
2024-04-18 22:22:49 +0000 UTCCurious if anyone else can’t find a way to watch this film? YouTube no longer has it. KYE does an episode and suddenly Arguing the World vanishes from circulation!
Stan Mir
2024-04-18 22:21:13 +0000 UTCLearning about the Partisan Review, and it's founding out of the John Reed club, I was surprised to find that John Reed is back in a very different form! https://us.johnreed.fitness/
Matthew Shor
2024-04-18 14:47:18 +0000 UTCThe Peter Steinfels comment reminded me: In the late 80s/early 90s, Commonweal's office was down the hall from DSA's, in a gloriously decaying building on Dutch Street. (Apologies if KYE has already covered that lore somewhere.)
David Glenn
2024-04-16 20:21:36 +0000 UTCParaphrasing but this is really beautiful: “A voice in the wilderness. It was our wilderness, it’s our voice, that voice is in my bones.” ❤️
Jennifer Reft
2024-04-14 12:32:23 +0000 UTCIt’s amazing how the contemporary left has truly lost the materialist lens on history. Tom Hayden, for example, seemed to base his claims on ideas, even though his generation was being drafted to fight in Vietnam. Unsurprisingly, most anti war protest disappeared after the draft was rescinded.
Chad Bailey
2024-04-13 17:54:50 +0000 UTCThis was lovely. Also in brushing up on Howe after the episode I deeply appreciated this anecdote from his Wikipedia bio: He had a few famous run-ins with people. In the 1960s while at Stanford University, he was verbally attacked by a young radical socialist, who claimed Howe was no longer committed to the revolution and that he had become status quo. Howe turned to the student and said, "You know what you're going to be? You're going to be a dentist."
Ryan Erickson
2024-04-12 22:27:35 +0000 UTCThe discussion at the end of the episode about the tension between political passion and political discrimination/judgment really resonates with me these days (incipient middle age is tightening its grip on me). In his review of Howe’s memoir A Margin of Hope, Maurice Isserman argued that Howe and his associates committed themselves so thoroughly to political discrimination and sober judgment that they rendered themselves politically irrelevant. There’s something to that criticism, but I look at the history of the twentieth century and can really understand how they got themselves to that point. Can you imagine what it must have felt like to be among the first cohorts of socialists to be confronted with the realities of what “actually existing socialism” had become? I would have been wary of someone like Tom Hayden too!
Chris Maisano
2024-04-12 18:14:33 +0000 UTClolll
Know Your Enemy
2024-04-12 14:38:44 +0000 UTCSadly I flew back yesterday :(
mjs
2024-04-12 10:13:40 +0000 UTCTogether, the eleventh-hour WFB Jr. jump-scare + surprise "The Bell Curve" appearance in the window of a political bookstore made this doc's last few minutes more frightening than 95% of what's streaming on Shudder
Molly Gardner
2024-04-12 02:55:25 +0000 UTCHowe might have known that Elmer Davis wasn't Jewish, but if he had merely guessed it based strictly on Davis' names, he could have been wrong. My dad, Jewish, lived all his life in Rhode Island except for WWII service (not in Alaska), birth and death dates almost identical to Howe's, student and later teacher at an ivy league college, was named Elmer. The family that founded THE Kosher deli in Providence in 1906 and ran it until a fire during COVID closed it was named Davis. Maybe we assimilated faster out there in the boonies.
Adam Blistein
2024-04-11 20:38:24 +0000 UTCWe all liked the first season of "True Detective."
Adam Lewis
2024-04-11 17:53:20 +0000 UTCUnrelated to the episode, but is Matt still in Rome? And related to the episode, Dashiell Hammett was in Alaska during the war and even wrote a book about it. There’s definitely something there.
Zachary Roussie
2024-04-11 10:29:07 +0000 UTCAs a true sicko I appreciate this episode because I read Alan Wald’s The New York Intellectuals last year. My conclusion: maybe because I’m a west coast mall rat but New York confuses me.
Steven Ngo
2024-04-11 01:41:49 +0000 UTCFound it! Thanks!
liam kirby
2024-04-10 23:24:08 +0000 UTCFound it! Thanks!
liam kirby
2024-04-10 23:23:59 +0000 UTCTry vimeo! (-SAB)
Know Your Enemy
2024-04-10 22:40:29 +0000 UTCIt's on Vimeo
Kate O'Hanlon
2024-04-10 22:29:29 +0000 UTCMary McCarthy is screaming from her grave about having a Jewish grandmother
Sam Seliger
2024-04-10 21:18:53 +0000 UTCLooks like the doc was taken down form youtube last night (when I was half way through it, lol). I don't have access to Kanopy. Is there any other option online?
liam kirby
2024-04-10 16:48:27 +0000 UTCThe commemorative popcorn bucket must have been something special.
Adam Lewis
2024-04-10 15:49:52 +0000 UTCWait a moment. There are Jewish people in New York City?
Adam Lewis
2024-04-10 15:43:22 +0000 UTCWas just coming in to mention this! Thank you!
Fran Diamond
2024-04-10 15:40:12 +0000 UTC"i wish him a long life with many political failures" may slip into my vocabulary
colin delargy
2024-04-10 13:37:51 +0000 UTCA favorite moment in the documentary: Evil Irving describes being surrounded by Diana Trilling, Mary McCarthy, and Hannah Arendt having a discussion on Freud, with him being “quiet and terror-stricken”. Looking forward to the next pod!
Mark Hartstein
2024-04-10 03:55:54 +0000 UTCBit of crossover with my own life: my wife's grandfathers (both) were among five Jewish guys stationed together in Alaska during WWII. They kept up after the war, two of their kids hit it off and here we are. I don't know if the others were any of this week's Special Guest Stars, but I'm really curious to find out.
Bugsy
2024-04-10 03:15:38 +0000 UTCSo was Dashiell Hammett! He was in his late 40s at the time, and, as an well-known. Communist, was kept on base editing the troop newspaper. Matt’s really onto something with a left literary history of the Aleutian campaign.
drizzly_november
2024-04-10 02:52:03 +0000 UTCWas thinking the exact same thing. That experiment with social democracy and the opportunities it created are such an interesting throughline of the podcast. It’d be cool to hear previous guest Kim Phillips-Fein come back to talk about how that dream got dismantled in the 70s, her book Fear City is excellent.
drizzly_november
2024-04-10 02:47:30 +0000 UTCListened to this ep with Danny Bessner's recent article on Larry David in the Nation in mind. For a few decades NYC had social democracy-lite and we're still reaping the rewards.
Brian Swoveland
2024-04-10 01:25:45 +0000 UTCIt wasn't during WWII, but Bob Ross was deployed to Alaska, which is where he learned to paint landscapes.
Alex
2024-04-10 00:12:25 +0000 UTCJulius earned his doctorate the honest way.
Jehovah’s Witness Protection Program
2024-04-09 23:14:36 +0000 UTCI came here to say this needs to be a Know Your Enemy t-shirt.
Christy Kilgore
2024-04-09 23:12:44 +0000 UTCHeh smh
Rick Perlstein
2024-04-09 22:54:59 +0000 UTCI thought it was pretty clear what Howe meant about those names lol... (-SAB)
Know Your Enemy
2024-04-09 22:36:47 +0000 UTCDig: there was SO MUCH MONEY floating around, whether their critical vocation was "oppositional" ala Howe or anti-oppositional ala Kristol, they're are pulling in enough aa teachers and scribblers that they can summer cottages. Another country, that past. Also note the point of that roll call of just the NAMES middle brow critics: not Jews. This, we should want to buy into? These middlebrows don't really want us... (Hilarious that these ultimately parochial debates about who gets the bylines masquerade as melodramas about the State of the Nation, but that's New York for you.)
Rick Perlstein
2024-04-09 21:49:29 +0000 UTC“I have such a hard-on right now, Sam” is the moment I said “dudes rock” aloud on the sidewalk. One fellow pedestrian just nodded, which I appreciated.
Matthew Ralls
2024-04-09 21:18:20 +0000 UTCArguing the World is also available on Kanopy, an online app available through most public libraries.
Geoff Swindells
2024-04-09 20:57:38 +0000 UTCBut srsly, one thing you underplay was that if these guys' parents had stayed in Europe a lot of their parents would have just as likely been Bundists and shul-prowlers. (Then, possibly, Labor Zionists, and just as passionately secular.)
Rick Perlstein
2024-04-09 20:54:51 +0000 UTC...back when we called voice memos "phone messages."
Rick Perlstein
2024-04-09 20:46:40 +0000 UTCGather 'round the Victrola while he tells you about the panel discussion he attended starring Daniel Bell AND Susan Sontag. The Nation Christmas party where he stood but ten yards from Arthur Miller...
Rick Perlstein
2024-04-09 20:44:26 +0000 UTCGrandpa Perlstein watched this bitch when it dropped. In the THEATER.
Rick Perlstein
2024-04-09 20:41:44 +0000 UTCHave the strangest memory of watching this doc ... maybe during early COVID lockdown in 2020 when tooling around looking for stuff online? I remember nothing about it, though lol. I was coming to it for the Daniel Bell content because I had recently been thinking a lot about "post-industrialism" and the "information society." Might do a rewatch for this ep! Thanks for this one ~for the heads~ haha
Joel
2024-04-09 20:12:00 +0000 UTCJulius Irving is the coolest Irving, but Howe is def #2
David S Duhalde
2024-04-09 18:11:00 +0000 UTCKYE dudes-rock at its finest.
drizzly_november
2024-04-09 17:17:17 +0000 UTC
