Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent (review)

Best known as the editor of Dissent magazine and author of the best-selling World of Our Fathers, Irving Howe engaged many of the twentieth century's most significant political questions. Coming of age as a Trotskyist in the 1930s, Howe journeyed, with many of his fellow New York intellectuals, through the Jewish left's disillusionment with Stalin and Marxism, the liberal embrace of Cold War anti-Communism, the rise of a younger generation of New Leftists, and finally the emergence of Jewish neo-Conservatism. In Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent, the recently announced winner of the American Jewish Historical Society's Saul Viener Book Prize, Gerald Sorin chronicles the evolution of "one of the most important public thinkers in America" (ix).

Sorin weaves three complementary themes through the book: political activism, literary work, and Jewish identity. In his analysis of Howe's socialism, Sorin emphasizes his subject's unrelenting commitment to democratic ideals, an outstanding framing device that orders an otherwise chaotic political journey. "What really finally mattered to Howe," Sorin argues, "were freedom and democracy, even more than socialism and its promise of equality" (164). A socialist from his youth, Howe broke from many of his classmates at the City College of New York when he criticized Stalin's dictatorial power. In the postwar era, Howe maintained his leftist convictions, even as his fear of totalitarianism inspired him to back U.S. intervention in Korea and, in its early phase, the Vietnam War. "A victory for a Communist or Communist-dominated movement," Howe surmised, "means another totalitarian dictatorship suppressing human freedoms" (218). In the 1960s, Howe, an icon of the Old Left, challenged a younger generation of New Leftists for their embrace of non-democratic political leaders and regimes.

In the most impressive sections of the book, Sorin combines primary source articles with interviews, personal letters, and autobiographical accounts to create a richly textured analysis of Howe's literary development. First as editor of the socialist journal, Labor Action and later as a writer in New International, Politics, Partisan Review, and Commentary, Howe built an impressive career that led him to his most important and best-known work as the founding editor of Dissent, a postwar publication dedicated to creating a via media between liberal anti-Communism on the one hand and rigid Stalinism on the other. Sorin's analysis of "The Age of Conformity," Howe's pathbreaking 1954 critique of American society and culture, is especially good.

Irving Howe resisted overt expressions of Jewish identity until much later in his life. A committed secularist, he "claimed to be in possession of a 'worldview' and above 'national identity'" (25). Those beliefs weakened when he began a serious academic exploration of Yiddish literature. Howe trumpeted the eastern European Jewish language's contributions to the canon, writing and editing a number of books that culminated in his magisterial history of Jewish immigrant life, World of Our Fathers. Howe also came to embrace Zionism, especially in the years after Israel's victory in the 1967 Six Day War. A critic of the right-wing Likud party, Howe remained a committed Zionist even as many leftists around him recast Jewish nationalism in imperialist and colonialist terms.

Sorin also offers powerful critiques of Howe's shortcomings. Despite his own military service, Howe opposed U.S. involvement in World War II, blasting liberals whom he claimed saw "no moral discrimination between their overflowing love of humanity and their support of British, American, and Stalinist imperialism in the war" (36). Howe believed that the military conflict amounted to nothing more than a battle "between two great imperialist camps" fighting over "which shall dominate the world" (34). As Sorin laments, Howe's reductionist analysis diverted attention away from the persecution of Jews in Hitler-dominated Europe.

While Howe backed the civil rights movement in the American South, he never embraced the...