Irving Howe and the Critics: Celebrations and Attacks

21. The Relevance of Irving Howe

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [185], (3) Lines: 17 to ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [185], (3) 21 Gerald Sorin The Relevance of Irving Howe Gerald Sorin has taught history at the State University of New York at New Paltz since 1965. He has also taught in the Netherlands at the University of Utrecht’s School of Journalism and at the University of Nijmegen, where he held the John Adams Distinguished Chair in American Studies as a Fulbright professor. He is the former chairman of the history department (1986–96) at suny, New Paltz, and continues there, since 1983, as director of the Jewish studies program. In 1989 he founded and continues to direct the Louis and Mildred Resnick Institute for the Study of Modern Jewish Life. And in 1994 he was awarded suny’s highest rank—Distinguished University Professor. HisearlyworkcenteredontheCivilWarera,slavery,andtheabolitionists and included several essays and two books: The New York Abolitionists: A Case Study of Political Radicalism (1970) and Abolitionism: A New Perspective (1972), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in history. Sorin’s interest in radicalism carried over into his later work in Jewish studies with essays in scholarly journals and with his book The Prophetic Minority: American Jewish Immigrant Radicals, 1880–1920 (1985). He went on to write The Nurturing Neighborhood: The Brownsville Boys Club and Jewish Community in Urban America, 1940–1990 (1990), a work described by critics as “a model account of neighborhood life, adolescent culture, generational change, and American ethnicity.” This was followed by A Time for Building: The Third Migration, 1880–1920, which is part of the acclaimed five-volume series The Jewish Experience in America, edited by Henry Feingold (1992). In 1997 Sorin published his concise interpretative overview of three hundred years of American Jewish experience, Tradition Transformed. His work on Irving Howe began with his article “Irving Howe’s ‘Margin of Hope’: World of Our Fathers as Autobiography,” published in American Jewish History 88, no. 4 (2000), and culminated with Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent (2002), a biography that won the National Jewish 186 Gerald Sorin 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [186], (4) Lines: 42 ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal P PgEnds: [186], (4) Book Award in history for 2002 and was awarded the Saul Viener Prize by the American Jewish Historical Society for Best Book in American Jewish History 2001–2002. “It is hard,” one critic wrote of Irving Howe in the year 2000, “to imagine another individual who achieved so much success during his lifetime in such disparate fields of endeavor and yet whose contributions are more thoroughly ignored today.”1 The critic errs immediately in seeing Howe’s three main professional interests—democratic radicalism, literary criticism, and Jewish culture—as “disparate” but even more profoundly in assuming Howe’s contemporary invisibility and even irrelevance. Howe had to struggle mightily at times to reconcile his desire to live the introspective, reflective life of a critic with his need to contribute actively to progressive social change. But he did manage to combine the contemplative and the active partly through his writing. Howe’s many seminal and provocative essays, including “This Age of Conformity” (1954), “The New York Intellectuals” (1968), and “Writing and the Holocaust” (1986), made him an instructive spokesman for culture at the crossroads of literature and politics. Whether he had successfully synthesized his cultural, literary, and political aspirations, however, was less important a question for Howe than whether his political conscience, partly shaped by his urban secular Jewish experience, led him to support good causes and whether his critical consciousness led him to write pieces up to the standard of George Orwell and Edmund Wilson, the essayists he most admired. But Howe’s writing, his public life, and the disputes he entered—disputes about Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Hannah Arendt, race and multiculturalism , Marxism and postmodernism—demonstrate that critical consciousness and political conscience did continue to inform one another in powerful ways. This process of mutual reinforcement moved Howe to a broader, more humane...