Commentary In American Life

Notes

Notes Chapter 1 1. Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 709. 2. Ibid. 3. No single monograph has ever focused on the journal. Even Naomi W. Cohen’s history of the AJC, Not Free to Desist: A History of the American Jewish Committee 1906–1966 (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1972), only mentions Commentary on a handful of pages, and these references are scattered and vague. Although Alan Wald’s The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1987) does examine the magazine, it does so as part of the wider intellectual movement of the time. The same can be said for Alexander Bloom’s Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) and Neil Jumonville’s Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Therefore, Commentary is yet again not examined in enough detail, and hence the scope and effect of the magazine are not fully considered. 4. The single major study of the American Jewish Committee is Cohen, Not Free to Desist. 5. Oscar Handlin, “The American Jewish Committee: A Half-Century View,” Commentary 23 (January 1957): 3. 6. Ibid., 8. 7. Ibid., 5, 8. 8. Menahem Kaufman, An Ambiguous Partnership: Non-Zionists and Zionists in America 1939–1948 (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1991), 150–1. 9. Handlin, “The American Jewish Committee,” 5, 7, 9. 10. Cohen, Not Free to Desist, 262–3. 11. I shall use the term “Jewish intellectuals” as shorthand to refer to what has become known as the “New York Intellectual family”: Elliot Cohen, Sidney Hook, Philip Rahv, Lionel Trilling, Meyer Schapiro, William Phillips, Hannah 191 192 Notes to Chapter 1 Arendt, Diana Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Richard Hofstadter, Saul Bellow, Delmore Schwartz, Bernard Malamud, Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, Lionel Abel, Paul Goodman, Isaac Rosenfeld, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Leslie Fiedler, Robert Warshow, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, Nathan Glazer, S.M. Lipset, David Bazelon, Norman Podhoretz, Steven Marcus, Robert Brustein, Midge Decter, Jason Epstein, Robert Silvers, Susan Sontag, Theodore Solotaroff, Norman Mailer, and Philip Roth. This list is drawn from Daniel Bell, “The ‘Intelligentsia’ in American Society,” in his Sociological Journeys: Essays 1960–1980 (London: Heinemann, 1980), 128–9. 12. See Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Noonday Press, 1987); Peter I. Rose (ed.), The Ghetto and Beyond: Essays on Jewish Life in America (New York: Random House, 1969). 13. See Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 14. Many articles expressing this theme appeared. Clement Greenberg wrote that the “position of the Jew becomes like every other plight today, a version of the alienation of man under capitalism; all plights merge, and that of the Jew has become less particular because it all turns more and more into an intensified expression of a general one” (“Under Forty: A Symposium on American Literature and the Younger Generation of American Jews,” Contemporary Jewish Record 7 [1944], 32–4). Delmore Schwartz wrote, “the fact of being a Jew became available to me as a central symbol of alienation” (ibid., 12–4). 15. Terry Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 43. 16. Ibid., 50. 17. See Stephen A. Longstaff, “The New York Intellectuals: A Study of Particularism and Universalism in American High Culture” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, 1978), 117–22. 18. Ibid, 4, 124–32. 19. See Stephen A. Longstaff, “The New York Family,” Queen’s Quarterly 83 (1976): 556–73. 20. See Hugh Wilford, The New York Intellectuals: From Vanguard to Institution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 32–6, 60. 21. See Longstaff, “The New York Intellectuals,” 200. 22. See Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals, 232–4. 23. For the experience and effect of the war on Jewish intellectuals, Longstaff is especially good. See his “The New York Intellectuals,” 169–212, 228–81. 24. Daniel Aaron, “Some Reflections on Communism and the Jewish Writer,” in The Ghetto and Beyond, ed. Rose, 259. There are two possible reasons for greater identification through Army service. First, citizenship meant the right to bear arms and fight for one’s country. To do so, as...