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206 Chapter 11 Susanne Klingenstein, “Thoughts on Jewish Intellectual Life and the American Academy,”12 December 1988. Introduction1 Susanne Klingenstein came to America from Germany in the fall of 1987 to do graduate work in American studies at Harvard University. Observing that in contrast to most European countries, where the academic teaching of the national literatures had been and continued to be the domain of a fairly homogenous group of native-born (usually male) scholars, the faculty in America teaching the national literature also included large numbers of Jews whose parents or grandparents had been immigrants. She wondered whether the Jewish literary scholars adapted entirely to the American academic environment shaped by white, Anglo -Saxon Protestants and moved into their precursors’ critical mold. Conversely, she wondered whether Jewish literary scholars actually maintained Jewish points of view, honed either by particular social experiences or by exposure to the rich spiritual and intellectual tradition of the European Jews, and brought that point of view to bear on their interpretation of English and American literature. Did America shape the Jews or did Jewish literary scholars reshape our understanding of American literature? In 1985, Irving Howe went up to Harvard to present his reading of nineteenth -century American literature in the Massey lectures, which were published a year later under the title The American Newness: Culture and Politics in the Age of Emerson. By that time, Howe was a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. But to go up to Harvard to present a series of lectures on the very subject that was at the heart of Harvard’s self-definition was an act of Interview with Susanne Klingenstein, December 1988 207 defiance, or perhaps of chutzpah, even if Harvard had just hired a fluent Yiddish speaker to teach American literature from the Puritans to the Romantics.2 This was the context for Klingenstein’s interview. She came to see Howe in his apartment on New York’s Upper East Side, in a building featuring a marble lobby and doorman, around the corner from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The neighborhood was a far cry from the world of Howe’s fathers. Klingenstein’s key interest was to draw Howe out on the issue of Jewish literary scholars in American academe, the social difficulty of their integration, the potential newness of their work, and the mediating role of Brandeis University, where Howe himself had taught. Klingenstein, as yet unschooled in the niceties of American confrontation-avoidance, was forthright, and Howe seems taken by surprise. The sardonic undercurrent in his answers, however, also reflects his dislike of personal questions. Howe considered everything “personal” immaterial to his work as a “public ” intellectual. He shared with European intellectuals, especially British intellectuals such as Orwell, a certain reserve. Private matters were irrelevant to “serious,” “proper” criticism. In his autobiography, A Margin of Hope, the reader never learns, for instance, that Howe had four wives. Howe never refers to his first wife, Anne Bader, at all, and only the fourth wife is mentioned by name. Some critics argue that Howe’s insistence on foregrounding his public self goes beyond an understandable desire for privacy and verges on an obsessive secrecy. Nevertheless, in this previously unpublished interview Howe is reasonably forthcoming when asked about his personal history. He explains his concept of secular Jewishness as reflecting a person’s ethnic history: “My parents were neither religious nor antireligious. They simply were part of a whole tradition or national community.” When the question of Israel comes up, Howe is touchy. The very young Howe, who adored the universalism of Socialism, would have been extremely impatient with any Jewish claims to a national homeland. By 1988, the old Socialist hostility for Zionist ideas survived only as a reflex. As an American Jew, Howe now saw that he needed in some way to relate to the state of Israel, but he linked this to a left-wing concern for the underdog, in this case the Palestinians . Specifically, he saw the issue as involving Israel’s legitimacy; its treatment of the Palestinians, he claims, “involves the very future of the Jews [and] what kind of people the Jews are going to be.” That the issue of Israel came up at all was due to an explosive conference in San Francisco, entitled “The Writer in the Jewish Community: An Israeli-North American Dialogue,” that both Howe and Klingenstein had attended a month before the interview.3 Under the auspices...

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