Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent (review)

T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Fall 2004) 719–722 GERALD SORIN. Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent. New York: New York University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv Ⳮ 386. Irving Howe is probably best remembered for having written (with the assistance of Kenneth Libo) World of our Fathers, an eloquent and moving account of Jewish secular life and culture in New York in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that relatively brief period when Yiddish, the Jewish unions, and Jewish socialism flourished. He was also a prolific literary critic and professor of literature at a number of distinguished institutions of higher learning, a historian of the American left, and a key figure in bringing Yiddish literature to the attention of the English-speaking reader. Moreover, he was a public intellectual (a dying breed these days), a forceful advocate of anti-Stalinist socialism, and one of the major figures in the small but intriguing world of the post–World War II American left. Such a multifaceted and talented man clearly deserves a biography; Gerald Sorin is the second scholar to take up this task, the first having been Edward Alexander.1 Sorin does a solid and convincing job of chronicling Howe’s life and times. He has read just about everything that Howe wrote (quite an achievement), has interviewed many of his friends and adversaries in the rough-and-tumble world of the New York intelligentsia, and has put his correspondence to good use. He does not conceal his admiration for Howe, considering him to have been ‘‘one of the most important public thinkers in America, preeminent in three major fields of general interest: radical politics, literature, and Jewish culture’’ (p. ix). Howe, so we are told, was an ‘‘outstanding writer of literary and social criticism’’ (p. xi) and, although often irascible and unwilling to suffer fools gladly, and not always faithful to his wives, a real mensch (p. xiv). Throughout his career , Sorin believes, Howe (who died in 1993) remained committed to a secular version of the old Jewish ideal of mending the world (tikkun ‘olam). Sorin correctly sees Howe’s life as emblematic of an entire generation of brilliant and ambitious Jews of East European origin, almost all men, whose roots were in the working-class, Yiddish-speaking neighborhoods 1. See Edward Alexander, Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew (Bloomington, Ind., 1998). Alexander’s work is cited in Sorin’s bibliography, but he does not refer to it in the text. 720 JQR 94:4 (2004) of New York City, and whose talents enabled them to flourish in tolerant America. Much of Sorin’s book is taken up with charting the elaborate minuets danced by these engagé intellectuals as they formed and broke political alliances, defended or rejected Stalinism and Trotskyism, founded and abandoned various journals of left-wing opinion, and jockeyed for positions of influence. Anyone wishing to understand the ideological stances of the various journals Howe wrote for, such as Partisan Review, Dissent, and Commentary, and to follow Howe’s complicated relationships with such luminaries as Daniel Bell, Sidney Hook, Norman Podhoretz, Phillip Rahv, and William Phillips, will profit by reading this book. Sorin is a lucid guide to Howe’s views on the crucial issues of his time, including the nature of the Soviet Communist ‘‘experiment,’’ the civil rights movement , the new left, the Vietnam War, and the status of Israel. Indeed, all those interested in the most recent chapter in the history of the American left will find here much of interest. Sorin is by no means an uncritical admirer of his hero. Thus he tells us that ‘‘Howe was tolerant, perhaps too tolerant, of Norman Mailer,’’ since he did not take seriously enough Mailer’s cult of violence (p. 143). As for the famous quarrel between Howe and the black writer Ralph Ellison, Sorin thinks that Howe’s essay attacking Ellison for distancing himself from his own African American community was ‘‘misbegotten’’ (p. 192). Sorin also believes that Howe was overreacting when, as a member in good standing of the old left, he harshly criticized...