"Write Like a Man" (w/ Ronnie Grinberg)

Know Your Enemy

Historian 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.

Further Reading:

Ronnie Grinberg, Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals (Mar 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," Jul 28, 2023

KYE, "What Happened to Norman (w/ David Klion)," Jan 16, 2020