New York is an intense city. Even a short-time visitor will undoubtedly experience the jolt, speed, and sheer rudeness that is unique to New York. Some like it, some hate it, some come to depend on that energy and thrive in it. It takes a certain personality to want to be part of this chaotic urban landscape, but to some, it was a reason for being and, most of all, working.
For a certain set of writers and intellectuals, the city fostered a particular kind of masculinity that manifested itself in their intellectual and literary output. Many were Jewish. The literary world of Jewish New Yorkers is explored in Ronnie A. Grinberg’s Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals.
Grinberg focuses especially on a group of Jewish intellectuals following the end of World War II, and the creation of what she calls a “secular Jewish masculinity”—not just an ethnic or religious trait but a state of being. Grinberg paints portraits of various intellectual giants, both liberal and conservative, such as Norman Mailer, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Irving Howe, Hannah Arendt, and even some non-Jews, like Mary McCarthy.
Intellect, ideology, sexuality, intellectual eroticism, confrontation, aggression—these are just some of the elements Grinberg singles out in order to illustrate what this “Jewish masculinity” is. She describes these intense figures superbly with ample and meticulous research. In addition, Grinberg has a wonderful gift for storytelling, and Write Like a Man flows beautifully and energetically.
“Secular Jewish Masculinity”
Grinberg posits that there was something unique about Jewish masculinity and its development in New York’s intellectual circles. It wasn’t necessarily only linked to men or to Jews. She writes, “Jews and non-Jews in the group all came to espouse a secular Jewish machismo. This evolved into an ideology of secular Jewish masculinity. Those who developed and embraced this ideology prized verbal combativeness, polemical aggression, and an unflinching style of argumentation. Hard-hitting and impassioned arguments, especially in print, undergirded their understanding of a new kind of masculinity.”
This was more than just a performative exercise in personal aesthetics. It had a profound impact on American culture, and perhaps especially on American conservatism. New York culture already has a kind of masculine cast, but New York Jews didn’t simply assimilate into it. They developed their own response to the wider culture. As Grinberg writes, “Intellectual prowess was often seen as a sign of effeminacy—the scholar was the opposite of the virile male athlete. But it also was not merely bound by traditional gender ideals as embodied in the Talmudic scholar. Rather, secular American Jewish masculinity, as the New York intellectuals came to define it, was an amalgam of Jewish and Anglo-American ideals that formed something new: the combative secular intellectual.”
This may sound like the 1940s and 1950s version of “revenge of the nerds” but there is nothing vengeful about the power that these writers and intellectuals exhibited. The entire enterprise was predicated on the notion and defense of particular ideas. In the American context, this is especially important. After all, America as we know it would not exist without an idea.
The “Jewishness” of a New York Jewish intellectual went beyond Judaism. As Grinberg writes, “There were non-Jews in the group.” She quotes Podhoretz on this matter: “The term ‘Jewish’ can be allowed to stand by clear majority rule and by various peculiarities of temper.” There is something deeply metaphysical about this—this is not merely a matter of religion or ethnicity but a matter of attitude, disposition, and a way of being. In this sense, there is a universality to being Jewish that any human being can embrace.
Anti-Communism and Jewish Masculinity
There are several strands in this phenomenon that Grinberg explores. One of them is the fight against communism and the creation of “neo-conservatism.” Many Jewish intellectuals align themselves with leftist thought, even Marxism. But for people like Podhoretz, fighting communism was one of the priorities of a New York intellectual. As Grinberg writes, “For the New York intellectuals, disassociating Jews from communism involved proving the masculinity of American Jews.”
This was a particularly important mission for the magazine, such as Commentary, which is more than just a series of intellectual essays arguing against communism and Marxism. Founded in November 1945 by the American Jewish Committee, the magazine’s first editor, Elliot E. Cohen, “first helped mold the New York intellectuals’ ideology of secular Jewish masculinity as managing editor of the Menorah Journal … [and] worked to make a virile and ‘hard’ anti-communism central to the magazine and the meaning of postwar American Jewish masculinity.”
The development of this brand of conservatism came about naturally from organic questioning by its adherents. The story of Podhoretz, in particular, proves this point. He considered himself a radical before embracing the principles of conservatism. Unlike many of his peers (on the left or right), Podhoretz did not receive his intellectual training at CCNY. He “came of age after World War II” and “attended Columbia University where he studied under Lionel Trilling,” another seminal figure in the Jewish intellectual circles.
Intellectual battles that Podhoretz would engage in later in life were correlative to his childhood in Brooklyn, where he was born in 1930. He was a child of Eastern European immigrants, and this was already a ticket to a difficult life in New York. His neighborhood was that of working-class Jews, Italians, and Blacks. Podhoretz recalled many times how he was bullied by Black kids in school for being a good student. He was beaten up and regularly called a “sissy.” For a boy who does not engage in physical fights because he is not strong enough, that kind of treatment can leave its marks, both physically and metaphysically. It is no wonder that Podhoretz, and many others like him, learned to use brains instead of brawn in order to win.
It’s interesting to look back on this “secular, Jewish masculinity,” which had so much energy and verve, seeking to demolish political correctness through arguments and not just through memes.
Of course, it wasn’t only American Jewish masculinity that was being revisited culturally. Postwar consciousness was firm (from the annihilation of the enemy), but at the same time, the possibilities of a postwar world presented a certain level of uncertainty. Americans were wrestling with that combination of possibility and uncertainty, and the need to redefine American culture presented a fertile ground for exploration. This also applied to intellectual life.
There was a need to create, yet at the same time, defense was still an important priority. Another enemy had emerged just as one was destroyed. Communism was a real threat to American life, and it captured the attention of Jewish intellectuals. Grinberg writes, “For the New York intellectuals, dissociating Jews from communism involved proving the masculinity of American Jews.” Some figures of the American right viewed both Judaism and intellectual life as effete and weak, a pejorative picture that sometimes had homosexual overtones as well. For example, writers like Nathan Glazer “marveled how the senator (Joseph McCarthy) had combined ‘the image of the homosexual with the image of the intellectual’ … while ‘the Jew becomes merely one variant of the intellectual sissy—actually less important than the Eastern-educated snob!’”
One of the ways that the Jewish conservative, anti-communist intelligentsia sought to dismantle communism and separate Jews from Marxism was through the attack on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The couple was arrested in 1950 for anti-American espionage, and were executed in 1953. According to Grinberg, Julius’ guilt was fully established much later through the declassification of government documents. Although Ethel’s involvement in espionage appears to be questionable, their acts and arrest divided the public. As Grinberg writes, “Many leftists and American Jews believed they were innocent, and that anti-Semitism undergirded the case.”
This was not the opinion of conservative Jews, who saw the Rosenbergs as guilty. In particular, Leslie Fiedler and Robert Warshow wrote and published essays that asserted the Rosenbergs’ guilt and anti-American actions. Fiedler and Warshow saw Julius Rosenberg as a fake, and, as Grinberg writes, “highlighted his [Julius’] most conspicuous shortcomings aside from being a communist—his simple-mindedness. As part of a cohort that viewed intellectuality as masculine, Warshow and Fiedler were effectively saying that cooperation with communists did not just make you a traitor, it exposed you as a ‘sissy.’”
People like Fiedler and Warshow understood what was at stake culturally precisely because they saw what Communist ideology represented for American culture. For the Jewish anti-Communist conservatives, it was necessary in every possible way to “counteract” the connection between Jews and Communism, and Commentary was “central to this initiative.”
“Lady Writers”
Where do women fit into this whole picture of “secular Jewish masculinity”? Many women writers were rejected by their male counterparts. Some criticisms were warranted: many women could not compete with the towering intellect of these men, but this certainly was not true of all women who were part of the New York intelligentsia.
Is there such a thing as a female genius? The question naturally arises in light of Grinberg’s subject. If a woman is a good writer, shouldn’t she simply be known as a “writer” and not a “woman writer?” This seems obvious to many, but culture in America rarely permits such conclusions. It was the feminists then who demanded recognition beyond merit or talent. To call a woman “a lady” in an intellectual world was an insult. New York Jewish male intellectuals were not always kind to women.
Although a man of the left, Mailer had things in common with Podhoretz. Mailer was a literary genius with an oversized personality. Both men eviscerated Mary McCarthy’s novel, The Group, and called it “trivial.” Widely regarded as “the first woman” New York intellectual, McCarthy’s novels found critical acclaim, and “she held her own in this male milieu from the beginning.” She was even dubbed a “Valkyrie maiden” by a junior editor of Partisan Review, William Barrett.
Mailer was known for his bravado and machismo, always trying to prove his manhood to the point of comedy. But nothing about McCarthy’s success was funny to Mailer. Grinberg presents him as obsessed with the symbolism of the Jewish phallus, to the point where his fixation with it became banal. Restraint was never in Mailer’s repertoire, but even so, his criticism was so excessive that it seems to call for some further explanation. Was McCarthy admired and desired by the Jewish intellectuals, Grinberg wonders, in part because she was both an intellectual and not Jewish? Was there a certain fascinating tension in being a shiksa in that environment, which a man like Mailer was unable to tolerate? Or did his reaction mainly stem from jealousy at seeing another novelist admired?
In the Jewish conservative world, it was Midge Decter—the wife of Podhoretz—who focused on family values as a way to affirm both the masculine and the feminine. The husband and wife aligned with each other well, and were consistent in their conservative principles. Both had concerns about gender, and saw feminism as an obstacle to conservatism.
Grinberg, however, feels that Decter’s work was underappreciated by male peers and even her own husband. “Podhoretz rarely gave his wife credit for her pioneering work in post-World War II sexual conservatism. Rather, he ruminated on his own history of personal affronts and slights upon his masculinity as a boy and young man. But we should never forget that the project was a joint one. Decter … was crucial to integrating the neoconservatives into the larger conservative movement.” This is especially true in Decter’s work and emphasis on “mature and distinct sex roles.”
Grinberg shows an admirable objectivity throughout the book, moving beyond familiar divisions between left and right. This is what makes her book strong and interesting. Grinberg maintains enough distance between herself and the subjects, clearly led by genuine curiosity rather than ideology.
Regarding Decter’s role, Grinberg clearly admires the strengths of Podhoretz or other men within the conservative movement, while at the same time raising important questions: can women in this kind of intellectual world be as successful as men, and can they be taken as seriously? Are women already at a disadvantage because they are women? What kind of choices do they have to make in order to succeed?
What remains of this intellectual movement today? In some ways, it feels like a thing of the past. We do not argue today about Jewish masculinity per se, but about masculinity itself. We don’t defend writers but men in general because we are facing different cultural battles, such as the reality of gender. But it’s interesting to look back on this “secular, Jewish masculinity,” which had so much energy and verve, seeking to demolish political correctness through arguments and not just through memes. There is something to be learned from the past about authenticity and fortitude in intellectual debate. Hopefully, it can serve as an inspiration, connecting to the roots that can grow new movements that reflect the order of things.