Increasingly, the podcast Know Your Enemy has become one of my go-to sources for book recommendations. Sometimes this involves going to the backlist, particularly when it comes to Garry Wills; sometimes it involves checking out a more recent work, particularly when its author was a KYE guest. That’s how I came to read Ronnie A. Grinberg’s Write like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals. That’s an imposing title, but the book itself is eminently readable; more than that, it’s also deeply relevant, chronicling a compelling blend of literature, politics, and interpersonal rivalries.
Grinberg’s book chronicles an intellectual milieu that produced an abundance of thinking that’s still studied today. Readers who venture into this book will learn plenty about the working methods and professional rivalries of some high-profile literary figures, including Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Irving Howe, and Norman Mailer. In the writers and conflicts discussed within, readers will also encounter the roots of neoconservatism, the evolution of anti-communist liberalism, and a host of bitter rivalries that could likely fuel an especially literary Peak TV drama.
As this book’s title suggests, there’s also plenty in here about how politics overlaps with perceptions of gender and gender roles. And it may be here that Write like a Man feels the most resonant with modern political discourse. At one point, Grinberg cites a 1950 Diana Trilling article that “was part of a larger effort by anti-communist liberals to defend and redefine liberalism as masculine.”
Reading this, it isn’t hard to see an inevitable backlash to this coming down the line — and, sure enough, Grinberg goes on to point to a review by Irving Howe of Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics that reveals that questions of gender led to more pitched debate. (And at least one major figure from this period looking terrible in retrospect. Here’s Grinberg discussing the review; note that a lot of the language Howe used to critique Millett in 1970 doesn’t seem too far removed to political discourse in 2024.
Most derisively, Howe called Millett a ‘female impersonator.’ Because she seemed to question whether there really was such a thing as a biological category of sex, Millett revealed a ‘rather comic ignorance of essential experiences of sex, such as the impulse towards the having of children,’ Howe argued. He seemed to say that she was not really a woman, and certainly could not speak for women.
Near the end of Write like a Man, Grinberg explores the broader question of what — if anything — the intellectual legacy of the New York Intellectuals actually is. She cites some notable arguments to the extent that the movement lacked a proper intellectual heir; nonetheless, she also makes a case that its impact can be felt more broadly than specifically.
Write like a Man is, at its best, a compelling chronicle of the place where artistic and political history come together. It’s an evocative summoning of a particular place and time, but it’s also not hard to draw connections between that period and today. Like the best works of history, it both enlivens the past and puts the present in a new light.
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Write like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals
by Ronnie A. Grinberg
Princeton University Press; 384 p.
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