The "Other" New York Jewish Intellectuals (review)

Book Reviews 213 stories and tantalizing insights about a writer who is regarded by many in his profession as a true genius. Kristine Holtvedt Division of Theatre Purdue University The "Other" NewYorkJewish Intellectuals, edited by Carole S. Kessner. New York: New York University Press, 1994. 382 pp. $55.00. Introduced by an Irving Howe Commentary essay in 1968, the phrase "New York Intellectuals" has long since become entrenched in American letters, designating a group of people united by common intellectual sensibility and socio-cultural orientations, primarily but not exclusively Jewish, primarily but not exclusively New Yorkers. The members of this coterie coalesced around the Partisan Review, wrote literature and literary criticism punctuated by socialist idealism and political radicalism, and constituted a potent and defining force in American culture from the 1930s through the 1950s. Disproportionately Jewish, the "New York Intellectuals," who in recent years have become the subject of searching studies by Alexander Bloom, Terry Cooney, Russel Jacoby, and Alan Wald, were, not surprisingly , typically equated in the public mind with Jews, giving rise to one of the more interesting ironies in twentieth-century American Jewish life: those labeled "New York Oewish) Intellectuals"-Irving Howe, Sidney Hook, Philip Rahv, Leslie Fiedler, Daniel Bell, lionel Trilling, Delmore Schwartz, among others, were terribly alienated from their Jewish roots, from Judaism, and from the established American Jewish community. Carole Kessner's delightful and very welcome collection of essays highlights what she has called the "other" NewYorkJewish Intellectuals-a clever and meaningful phrase denoting a group of "proudly affirmative Jews" of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, influential men and a few women who exuded a passion for things Jewish and dedication either to the Jewish religion or to secular or national Jewish culture, but at all costs to Jewish ideas and values and to the well-being of the Jewish community. If some of them advocated more universal issues of justice and fair play, they did so "out of" rather than "over and against" Jewish cultural traditions. Divided into three sections entitled "Opinion Makers," "Men of Letters," and "Spiritual Leaders," and introduced by a trenchant overview by the editor, this book features essays by: Robert Seltzer on Hayim 214 SHOFAR Spring 1996 Vol. 14, No.3 Greenberg; Carole Kessner on Marie Syrkin; Arthur Goren on Ben Halpern; Deborah Dash Moore on Trude Weiss-Rosemarin; Milton Konvitz on Morris Raphael Cohen and Horace Kallen; Stanley Chyet on Ludwig Lewisohn; Ira Eisenstein on Henry Hurwitz; Susanne Klingenstein on Marvin Lowenthal; Emanuel Goldsmith on Maurice Samuel; Milton Hindus on Charles Reznikoff; Rachel Feldhay Brenner on A. M. Klein; Jack J. Cohen on Mordecai Kaplan; Simon Noveck on Milton Steinberg; and David Datin on Will Herberg. The essays on the whole are elegantly written and informative biographically, and reflect really ripened thinking by the authors about their respective subjects. Some of the contributors have written prior books on their subjects and/or knew their subjects personally and intimately. Although most of the essays celebrate rather than criticize, their thoughtfulness, engaging style, and evocative admiration for the Jewish thinkers discussed make the book a pleasurable and, in many respects, insightful volume for anyone interested in Jewish culture in America between the '30s and '50s. While one can quibble with the categorization of certain individualsit is not clear, for example, why Cohen and Kallen were placed within the "Men of Letters" unit and not that of "Opinion Makers," while one can more seriously question the representative selection here-most of the subjects are secular cultural Zionists or come out of Conservative Jewish orientations: were there no Reform or Orthodox Jewish intellectuals of note in this period?-nevertheless, one can still admire the end product. Among those essays that particularly stood out for their freshness, subtlety of interpretation, and penetrating critical perspectives, I especially commend those by Seltzer on Greenberg, Goren on Halpern, and Chyet on Lewisohn. Benny Kraut Judaic Studies University of Cincinnati Agnon's Art of Indirection: Uncovering Latent Content in the Fiction of S. Y. Agnon, by Nitza Ben-Dov. Brill's Series in Jewish Studies, Volume VII. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993. 167 pp. $57.25. Agnon's fascination with dreams and dream-like accounts has been...