New York Intellectual/Neocon/Jewish; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Ignore Ruth Wisse

The following is a much-shortened adaptation—a sample—of a much larger project, a polemic, on the New York intellectuals: specifically on how we can (or should) talk about them, given a critical concern with Jewish identity and identification. There's a lot that should be here that's not, most notably careful consideration of the writings of the New York critics that form the context of my broadsides; for that I apologize, but I'm hoping those broadsides will compel readers to turn to those writings. A brief note on my subtitle: I am writing this as a critic of Jewish literature, and it is not meant in any way as a statement of editorial policy. Many readers know Ruth Wisse as concerned with the politics of a Jewish literary canon, most visibly, perhaps, in her 2000 work The Modern Jewish Canon, which for many scholars cemented her reputation as an arbiter of literary Jewishness and Jewish canonicity. Many readers also know her from her militant stance against liberalism and those Jews she deems self-hating for insufficiently martial Zionism. My point here is that these two roles are inseparable, and stem from specific ideas about the representational function of literature. Wisse's literary historical framing of Jewish identity works in tandem, I argue, with her neoconservative politics, and it aims to block interpretation at variance with that politics. A primary goal of my current work is to de-couple ideas about identity in literature from reading practices marked primarily by patterns of deference, reverence, and/or recognition that suppress critical thought. Wisse is obviously a major Jewish intellectual—and she wouldn't be the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Comparative Literature at Harvard University if she weren't a productive and authoritative one—but I am opposed to instrumentalizing literature to make arguments about what Jews should be and do. In any case, vast universes of reading and criticism open up when we loosen a bit the links between literature and what we consider it to represent.

Part 1: Who Were the New York Intellectuals?

Alan Wald begins his important book on the New York Intellectuals by arguing that a "mystification" makes studying political culture in the United States very difficult (xv). As anti-Stalinist intellectuals committed to revolutionary Marxism increasingly "came into harmony with the dominant ideology of the liberal intelligentsia during the Cold War" (8), and in some cases migrated much further to the right to become the state philosophers for the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush regimes who articulated the hegemonic justification for reactionary triumphs like the supply-side unraveling of the social safety net and the war in Iraq, Wald (writing in the mid-1980s) points to a " neoconservative self-portrait being created by many of the New York intellectuals" that, among other things, has been instrumental in "perpetuating an amnesia" about these critics' "previous political history" as "Marxists" (8-9). This "amnesia" papers over important differences between the "anti-Communism (originally, opposition by revolutionary Marxists to Soviet Communism, after the rise of Stalin, as a deformation or perversion of socialism)" that these writers shared in the thirties and forties and the intransigent "anticommunism (in the United States, an ideological mask for discrediting movements for radical social change and supporting the status quo by amalgamating these movements with Soviet crimes, expansionism, and subversion)" (6) that came to characterize a significant subset of them starting as early as the 1950s. Now, Wald's interest is in rescuing the New York intellectuals as an important part of a Marxist strain in the American intellectual tradition, but I want to take his key point here—that the New York critics' " ultimate evolution was not the only one possible" (10), which stands as a powerful antidote to a dominant neoconservative narrative—in a slightly different direction. It's hard to see the New York intellectuals outside the framework that neoconservative history has constructed, a history that on the one hand dismisses as irrelevant or wrong (and in some cases un-American) the anti-Stalinist Marxism...