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17 “A Profoundly Hegemonic Moment” Demythologizing the Cold War New York Jewish Intellectuals Nathan Abrams Introduction Historians of intellectual life in twentieth-century America have largely been content to write within the constraints imposed by the New York Jewish intellectuals ’ memories of their own lives. In recent decades, most notably the 1980s, autobiographies and memoirs proliferated, forming what Richard King called a “flood,” as those Jewish intellectuals who came to prominence during the forties and fifties began to recollect their lives.1 These texts constructed and reconstructed their histories in a form of “discursive self-fashioning.”2 As Morris Dickstein pointed out, “the early New York intellectuals have written so much about themselves”3 that these memories have deeply inscribed the writing of twentieth-century U.S. intellectual history. This inscription has been so profound that historians of this era are often prisoners of their very subjects’ constructed histories. Richard King observed how “most people who write about them are still working with the terms of political, literary and cultural discourse that the New Yorkers themselves have laid down.”4 Indeed, as Norman F. Cantor has written , “The Partisan Review group and their affiliates—‘the New York Intellectuals’ as they are now called—have developed their own mythology.”5 This mythology has grown to such an extent that it must be reevaluated. Although there has been much recent discussion of Richard Posner’s book Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, surprisingly the historiography of the New York Intellectuals has never been extensively subjected to a theoretical analysis Morris_FINAL.indb 17 Morris_FINAL.indb 17 9/25/2008 8:13:35 AM 9/25/2008 8:13:35 AM 18 NATHAN ABRAMS utilizing different models of the intellectual.6 I will attempt here to reevaluate the changing function of the New York Intellectuals as public intellectuals beginning in the 1930s, using the work of, in particular, Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault , and paying specific attention to the 1950s and the cultural cold war. The New York Jewish community of intellectuals was broad, embracing writers, academics, professionals, journalists, poets, artists, critics, politicians, and so on. They were intellectuals in the expansive sense that Antonio Gramsci suggests goes beyond the “traditional and vulgarised type of intellectual” such as “the man of letters, the philosopher, the artist” to include every individual engaged in “some form of intellectual activity” or, as Edward Said has put it, “everyone who works in any field connected either with the production or distribution of knowledge.”7 They are “public intellectuals” in the sense that Russell Jacoby described: “writers and thinkers who address a general and educated audience. Obviously, this excludes intellectuals whose works are too technical or difficult to engage a public.”8 Organic Intellectuals The Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci observed that every community produces its own intellectuals, characterizing them as “organic intellectuals .”9 According to Gramsci, in a process that, unfortunately, he did not fully describe, each community spontaneously produces a layer of individuals who perform the function of intellectuals in that society. It is the task of these organic intellectuals to raise the self-awareness of their own social group. Furthermore, as Said has put it, they “are actively involved in society, that is, they constantly struggle to change minds.”10 During the 1920s and 1930s in America, precisely this type of organic intellectual began to emerge out of the Jewish community. Rejecting the orthodoxy and observance of their parents and exploiting the new spaces opened up to them, these intellectuals sought to accommodate themselves within the mainstream of American culture. Many of them had attended American public schools as youngsters, confronted with what John Murray Cuddihy called a “civilizing” process aimed at transforming them into Americans.11 This process of Americanization began to overcome their organic Jewishness and communal attachments. Allied to this Americanizing impulse was the powerful appeal of secular American culture. Russell Jacoby observed how poverty and distance from the ascendant culture produced, in many cases, “an identification, and overidentification” with its values. Jewish intellectuals, many of whom spoke Yiddish as their first language, “fell in love” with English and American literature .12 Arthur Miller spoke for many when he wrote, “in my most private reveries I was no sallow Talmud reader but Frank Merriwell or Tom Swift.”13 This, in turn, was undoubtedly strengthened by its promise of the full active participation of Jews as citizens in society rather than as the “mere parasites” they had been considered in the Old World.14...

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