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150 Introduction to the Forum For this forum, we invited leading public intellectuals to share their answers to four key questions about the history, influence, and current status of Jewish American public intellectuals. We were pleased when Morris Dickstein, Nathan Glazer, Peter Novick, and Alan Wolfe agreed to participate. We gave participants considerable latitude in their answers; they could choose to answer each question sequentially, answer only selected questions, or use the questions as a prompt to write a related essay. 1. What do you think characterizes the tradition of the Jewish American public intellectual? Who, in your mind, are the leading figures? 2. Fifty years ago, the New York Intellectuals played a prominent role in the world of literary and political opinion. What do you think were the most important contributions of the New York Intellectuals to the tradition of the public intellectual in America? Do you think that they are a phenomenon of the past or that the tradition they founded is alive and well today? 3. Who are the public intellectuals of today? What specific groups of Jewish public intellectuals stand out? How important are the neoconservatives as a group of Jewish thinkers, and why are they now so prominent? 4. How do you feel connected to the/a tradition of the Jewish public intellectual ? How do you feel connected to the Jews? Alan Wolfe 1. I guess this is the appropriate place just to remind readers that not all the New York Intellectuals were Jewish. Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, and others shared with the Jewish intellectuals just about all the characteristics that made them what they were, including their literary sensibility; their ability to write about many subjects; their political passion; their wit; and their on-again, offagain relationship with the left. And without wanting to be too much of a troublemaker , I also have trouble ranking them. Some were leaders in the creative arts, others were scholars, and still others were political thinkers. If we think in Morris_FINAL.indb 150 Morris_FINAL.indb 150 9/25/2008 8:13:45 AM 9/25/2008 8:13:45 AM Discussion Forum 151 terms of long-term significance, Arendt would probably be the most important, but that is because philosophy usually deals with issues of permanent human interest. In that sense, her work on the human condition will surely outlast the more topical considerations of Macdonald or the textually dependent ones of a Philip Rahv. Her philosophical work will also survive her own more unfortunate comments about Little Rock or Eichmann. 2. I do not believe that they were a once-only phenomenon. The tradition to which they contributed is very much alive today. Although many Jews can be found among today’s best public intellectuals, the current group is far more diverse in terms of gender and race than the group of the 1950s. And there are not as many little magazines with great influence in the culture as there were. But more books are read by more people; there are limitless media outlets; and the public still wants to hear from people with interesting things to say. The professionalization of academic life for a while had a negative impact on public intellectuals, but the hunger has returned and purely academic scholarship is increasingly self-referential. The opportunities to be a public intellectual are exciting and numerous. 3. I do not think that neoconservatives are all that important as public intellectuals today. Some of the older generation—Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer—never really became neoconservatives. Those who chose to identify with the Republican Party are more policy wonks these days than intellectuals because in the interest of defending the president they rarely put aside their partisanship. (Indeed the way conservative intellectuals closed ranks around George W. Bush in 2004 despite the president’s disastrous policies serves to remind us that many of them were once involved in the sectarian left.) The so-called Straussians have had little of importance to say since they decided to become players in politics rather than thinkers. Morris Dickstein 1. There is no single tradition of Jewish intellectuals in America. Apart from the brief career of poet Emma Lazarus, there weren’t any Jews among prominent American intellectuals until the First World War, though there was a huge intellectual ferment within the immigrant world itself, as Hutchins Hapgood reported in The Spirit of the Ghetto (1902). The children of German Jews were the first to breach the barriers. Ludwig Lewisohn could...

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