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25

LITERATURE  - "INTELLECTUALS"
-- "THE FAMILY"

"By the early 1960s ... Jews were even more heavily
represented in the knowledge professions than they had
been a decade earlier. They clearly dominated the political
culture of New York, where their style and views had been
adopted by relatively large numbers of non-Jewish intellectuals.
They also became increasingly influential in other cosmopolitan
centers such as Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and
Berkeley. In all these cities, they played an important role
in educating non-Jews to a more cosmopolitan perspective."
-- Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, 1982, p. 103

"It is ironic that many of the literary figures who shied
from Jewish themes embodied in their writing more alleged
Jewish traits than more consciously Jewish writers. There
remains in their innermost self unsuspected residues of their
inherited culture which no amount of rejection or denial
could wholly eradicate. In both the self-hater and the detached,
the affinity of supposed Jewish characteristics has been observed
by both critics and laymen alike."
-- Lothar Kahn, Jewish author, 1961, p. 31

"If the literary output of 1999 reveals anything, it reveals that
Jewish writers are among the privileged citizens of the global
village ... Given the unprecedented international reach of their imaginations, their absorption in Jewish history and theology,
and the staggering diversity of emergent American voices, it
just may be that these young Jewish American writers find that
they share more in common artistically with their Jewish contemporaries writing in Israel, Europe, Asia, and the rest of
the Americas than they share in common with their non-Jewish contemporaries writing in the United States."
-- Andrew Furman, one of the judges for the National Jewish Book award, MAY/JUNE 2000, p. 30]

  

 

---

 

 

In a 1974 book, The American Intellectual Elite, Charles Kadushin produced the results of his studies. He had tabulated lists of contributors to leading American "intellectual" publications, narrowed the names down to 200, and in a series of queries or interviews asked his subjects who were the most influential intellectuals around. Of the top 21 most highly rated (by others in this publishing circle), 15 were Jewish, including Hannah Arendt, Daniel Bell, Saul Bellow, Noam Chomsky, Paul Goodman, Richard Hofstadter, Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, Norman Mailer, Herbert Marcuse, Norman Podhoretz, David Riesman, Robert Silvers, Susan Sontag, and Lionel Trilling. [KADUSHIN, p. 30]  Half of the total 200 were also reputed to be Jewish. As Kadushin notes,

 

      "Jews are indeed much more strongly represented among leading

      intellectuals than the population at large. They compose about half

      of the American intellectual elite. Catholics are vastly underrepresented,

      but Protestants, who are one-third of the group, are also relatively

      underrepresented ... [KADUSHIN, p. 23] ... Even in comparison with

      elite American professors (those who published more than 20 articles

      in academic journals and who teach in high-quality colleges and

      universities) of the same age and in the same fields, there are between

      two and five times as many Jews in the intellectual elite." [KADUSHIN,

      p. 24]

 

In the world of academia (professorships) at-large, 60% of the "intellectual elite" were found to be Jewish. [KADUSHIN, p. 24] The "intellectual elite" also had a geographical flavor -- half of the academic elite held positions at four East Coast universities -- Columbia, New York University, Harvard, and Yale. [KADUSHIN, p. 23]

 

Another (Jewish) professor echoes this study in claiming that by the late 1970s 50% of the "top intellectuals" in America were Jewish, the percentage rising to 51% of all "elite" academics in the social sciences and 61% in the humanities. [RUBENSTEIN, p. 64]  Stephen Whitfield cites evidence that as many as 30% of the professors at "major universities" by the 1980s were also Jewish. [WHITFIELD, American, p. 9]  Yet another Jewish professor used such figures to declare that 76% "of the most influential intellectuals had at least one Jewish parent." [DAVIS, D., p. 29]

 

To begin to understand the implications of all this, (other than the popular Jewish explanations that  Jews are "just smart," or socially positioned as marginalized "others" to recognize greater philosophical insights) one must examine how someone gets on such a list of prominent people. Kadushin's study sample was selected from those published in "twenty or so leading intellectual journals." These included the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, the New Republic, Commentary, Partisan Review, Daedalus, Ramparts, Dissent, the Village Voice and other such periodicals. All of these were founded, controlled, or edited by Jews, as were many of the others on the list. "As might be expected," noted Kadushin, "the persons most often named as having the power to make or break reputations were the editors of the key journals -- Robert Silvers, Jason Epstein [and his wife Barbara], and Norman Podhoretz. [All are Jewish] A few persons [of the intellectuals surveyed in Kadushin's study] commented on the alliance between journals and book publishers represented by Silvers and Jason Epstein." [KADUSHIN, p. 53]

 

Kadushin's definition of a "leading intellectual" underscores its incestuous current; a "leading intellectual" is "simply any person who writes regularly for leading intellectual journals and/or has his books reviewed in them." [KADUSHIN, p. 8]  Kadushin himself confronts the inbred dimensions of the "intellectual elite": "I have the impression from reading autobiographical accounts of intellectual life that young intellectuals tend to be sponsored by older intellectuals and into intellectual prominence through a combination of journals, circles, and political parties controlled by the older intellectuals." [KADUSHIN, p. 25]

 

In order to fully understand this scenario, one must begin with the 1930s and a group of mostly Jewish individuals that have sequentially risen en masse in New York City as part of an  interconnected literary, publishing, and "intellectual" network, often self-referred to as "The New York Intellectuals" or "The Family."  The Family, wrote Philip Nobile, is "an elite array of critics, editors, novelists, and poets that manage the country's high culture." [NOBILE, p. 13] "The New York literary world," says Family member Norman Podhoretz, "began to acquire a recognizable identity .... [one could] think of it as a Jewish family." [PODHORETZ, Making, p. 109] To those outside the Family circle in the literary world, they -- and their heirs today -- are the Jewish (literary) Mafia. Homogeneous only in that they are almost all Jews (not uncommonly warring among themselves), they inevitably linked with the many webs of the expanding Jewish-predominated mass media; a few "intellectuals" even became household names. As a group, they are credited with profound influence in the shaping of the twentieth century American cultural, social, and even the political scene.

    

 "During the last few years," wrote Family member Irving Howe in 1969, "the talk about the New York Establishment has taken an unpleasant turn. Whoever does a bit of lecturing about the country is likely to encounter, after a few drinks, literary academics who inquire enviously, sometimes spitefully, about 'what's new in New York.' ... As polite needling questions are asked about the cultural life of New York, a rise of sweat comes to one's brow, for everyone knows what no one says: New York means Jews." [HOWE, p. 267]

"[I]n the frothy turbulent 'mix' of America in the 60's, with its glut, its power drives, its confusion of values," Alfred Kazin decided in 1966, "the Jewish writer found himself so much read, consulted, imitated, that he knew it would not be long before the reaction set in -- and in fact the decorous plaint of the 'Protestant minority' has been succeeded by crudely suggestive phrases about the 'Jewish Establishment,' the 'O.K. writers and the Poor Goy,' 'The Jewish-American Push.' Yet it is plainly a certain success that has been resented, not the Jew." [KAZIN, A., 1966, p. xxiv]

 

Of course the New York Intellectuals  were -- and their descendants are -- not a formal organization, but rather an informal clique, a communally self-promotive camaraderie of writers, critics, editors, and publishers. Alexander Bloom suggests that the following individuals may be considered to be part of the Family's inner ring:

 

     Philip Rahv, William Phillips, Lionel Trilling, Diana Trilling, Meyer

     Schapiro, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Dwight MacDonald,

     Elliot Cohen and Sidney Hooks. A later generation included Irving Howe,

     Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Delmore Schwartz, Leslie Fiedler, Seymour

     Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer, Alfred Kazin, Robert Warshow, Melvin

     Lasky, Isaac Rosenfeld, and Saul Bellow. Still later came Norman Mailer,

     Philip Roth, Michael Harrington, Theodore Solotanoff, Jason Epstein,

     Midge Decter, Norman Podhortetz, and Susan Sontag.

 

    Other candidates for connective inclusion include Henry Roth, Michael

    Blankfort, Leon Uris, Meyer Levin, Arthur Cohen, Louis Untermeyer,

    Herman Wouk, Arthur Miller, Muriel Rukyeser, Louis Zara, Paul

    Goodman, Barbara Epstein, Steven Marcus, John Simon, and many

    others.

 

Rings radiating outward include I. F. Stone, Herman Kahn, Hans Morgenthau, Sidney Hertzberg, Ronald Steel, David T. Bazelon, Nat Hentoff, Oscar Handlin, Daniel Boorstin, and others.

 

 In 1980, Daniel Bell, a prominent Family member, broke down his version of the Jewish contingent of the New York Intellectuals and their "fields of interest" into the following categories:

 

      ART: Meyer Schapiro, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg

      PHILOSOPHY: Sidney Hooks, Hannah Arendt (Ernest Nagel)

      LITERARY CRITICISM: Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv, Alfred Kazin,

           Irving Howe, Leslie Fiedler, Paul Goodman, Lionel Abel, Steven

           Marcus, Robert Warshow, Robert Brustein, Susan Sontag, Diana

           Trilling

      INTELLECTUAL JOURNALISM: Elliot Cohen, William Phillips,

           Irving Kristol, Robert Silvers, Norman Podhoretz, Jason Epstein,

           Theodore Solataroff, Midge Decter

      THEOLOGY: (Will Herberg) (Emil Fackenheim) (Jacob Taubes)

           (Arthur Cohen)

      SOCIOLOGY: Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, S. M. Lipset, (Philip

            Selznick)

            (Edward Shils) (Lewis Coser)

      HISTORY: Richard Hofstadter, Gertrude Himmelfarb

      ECONOMICS: (Robert Heilbroner) (Robert Lekachman)

 

Bell further lists eight Jews as the "Elders of the Family" (1920-1930), with six Gentile afforded "cousins" status. Bell adds ten more Jews as the Family's "Younger Brothers" (1930-40) and seven more Gentiles as "cousins." In the "Second Generation" of the Family (his own group), Bell lists ten new Jews and, rather noteworthy, the Gentile "cousin" group has dropped to two. The 1940-1950 new "Younger Brothers" category lists ten more Jews and, alas, we are down to one non-Jewish cousin. [BELL, Intelligentsia, p. 126-127] "These political intellectuals," says Stephen Isaacs, "include a number of people who have known one another well for many years and who have been tagged the "College of Irvings" after Irving Kristol (a professor at New York University and co-editor of the Public Interest and Irving Howe (a professor at the City College of New York and editor of Dissent). [ISAACS, p. 53]

 

However one portrays the best known American "intellectuals," New York-oriented or not, a huge proportion invariably came up Jewish. In the 1970s one commentator, Michael Novak, framed his own Most Important American Intellectuals List like this:

 

    IVY LEAGUE PRAGMATISTS AND HUMANISTS: Henry Steele

       Commager, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

   LITERARY MODERNISTS: Lionel Trilling, Louis Kampf, Irving Howe,

       Leslie Fiedler

   PLURALISTS: Nathan Glazer, Daniel Moynihan, David Reisam, Talcott

       Parsons, Will Herberg

   NEW RADICALS: Noam Chomsky, and "the New York Review of

       Book" gang

   CONSERVATIVE LIBERALS: Sidney Hooks, Norman Podhoretz, Irving

       Kristol

   EUROPE-ORIENTED HUMANITIES: Hannah Arendt, Philip Rahv,

       George Lichtheim, Saul Bellow

 

Jack Porter responded to Novak's Intellectuals List with his own about the subject, specifically focusing on a compilation of Jewish intellectual "insiders" who "despite their political differences, agree on two essential points: the survival and integrity of the Jewish people and the survival and integrity of the state of Israel. If any intellectual opposes either one of these, he or she stands outside the Jewish people." [PORTER, p. 38 -39] Porter's group includes David Brudnoy, Milton Friedman, Meir Kahane, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Milton Himmelfarb, Nathan Glazer, Leonard Fein, I. L. Horowitz, Irving Howe, Arthur Waiskow, Morris U. Schappes, and Paul Jacobs.

 

The most notable factor in these last two lists is that Noam Chomsky, a Jewish professor of linguistics, is mentioned on the first, and is "left standing outside the Jewish people" on the second. Chomsky has in fact long since been ostracized and marginalized by the Jewish "Family" for his attacks against Jewish chauvinism and Israel. "What sets Chomsky ... apart," notes David Herman, "is his fierce attack on his fellow intellectuals as a class ... Instead of producing truth, he argues, they often betray their vocation and produce amnesia about the past and distortion of the present ... Intellectuals in the universities, think tanks, and media create a consensus of public opinion. All criticism is then marginalized by placing it beyond the pale of informed debate." [HERMAN, p. 39] Not unusually, an American-born professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Barry Rubin, cited Chomsky as someone who was "intellectually unbalanced or psychologically disturbed." [RUBIN, p. 217]

 

The New York Intellectuals, says Alexander Bloom, "held out for their personal independence but maintained their connections ... They moved across the political landscape together ... occupying the same large area at the same time ... There is no question that these individuals embodied many of the most important political and social forces of recent years, that they helped shape what America thought -- in its universities, its leading journals, and its political debate." [BLOOM, p. 7]   "Once journals have attained positions of eminence," notes Charles Kadushin, "they have independent power to make or break the prestige of individual intellectuals. This power is exercised through the clique and star system, the ability to publish some people and not others, and the ability to select some ideas and not others. And as will be evident, the power to support one idea while ignoring or denigrating another gives one the key to the kingdom of the intellectuals." [KADUSHIN, p. 51]

  
By the time [Jewish mogul] Punch Sulzberger [inheritor of the New York Times] occupied his father's chair in 1963," says former Times Executive Editor Max Frankel,

      "American society had shed many of its anti-Semitic prejudices and permitted
      the rapid advancement of Jews in professional life and corporate suites. The
      general revulsion against fascism turned into a revulsion against bigotry itself,
      as demonstrated by the election of the first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy.
       Exploiting this atmosphere, and Gentile guilt about the Holocaust, American Jews
      of my generation were emboldened to make them themselves culturally conspicuous,
      to flaunt their ethnicity, to find literary inspiration in their roots, and to bask in the
       resurrection of Israel." [FRANKEL, M., 1999, p. 400]

"Jews play a markedly disproportionate role in political intellectualism in the United States," wrote Stephen Isaacs in 1974, "Jewish intellectuals tend to stand out because many of them have been heavily advertised and, having a touch of the tummler, they themselves are often experts at self-promotion. They thrive not on mass awareness of their concepts but on the quality of their audience. The Jewish intellectuals predominate among the editors of the small but influential intellectual journals..." [ISAACS, p. 53] "Careers like those of [non-Jew] Margaret Mead, David Riesman, and Daniel Bell," notes David Hollinger, "indicate the extent to which social scientists replaced the clergy as the most authoritative public moralists for educated Americans." [HOLLINGER, p. 23]

"In a time of intoxicating prosperity," wrote Alfred Kazin in 1966 about this profoundly influential Jewish secular pulpit, "it has been natural for the Jewish writer to see how superficial society can be, how pretentious, atrocious, unstable -- and comic. Thus, in a secular age when so many people believe in nothing but society's values, is the significance of literature of the Jewish writer's being a Jew." [KAZIN, A., 1966, p. xxv]

 

 "These people are the Diores and Shiaperillis of intellectual fashion," the novelist George P. Eliot observed about the Family, "What they think today, you're apt to find yourself, in a Sears-Roebuck-ish sort of way, thinking tomorrow." [BLOOM, p. 313]  "The literary field in which Jews are without qualification in the highest rank is that of the essay," wrote Jewish author Marie Syrkin in 1964,

      "be it column or book-length exposition. As social analyst, political commentator
      or literary critic, the Amerian Jewish writer occupies a major role. In journalism
      every shade of political opinion has Jews among its ablest exponents. The gamut
      runs from the conservative Arthur Krock through the less predictable Walter
      Lippman to the liberal Max Lerner on to extreme radical pundits. In literary criticism
      the same variety and excellence are present." [SYRKIN, M., 1964, p. 231]

 

 The Family took shape around the journal Partisan Review in the 1930s; they initially expressed a radical, confrontational and communist posture towards mainstream non-Jewish American society. The central theme of their communal identity -- not yet overtly expressed as being Jewish -- was that they were all outsiders, "alienated," struggling in the margins of mass culture. Eventually, distinctly as Jews, notes Alexander Bloom, "they claimed ... an expertise in marginality based on hundreds of years of experience." [BLOOM, p. 169]  "[The Family]," notes Norman Podhoretz, "did not feel that they belonged to America or that America belonged to them.' [PODHORETZ, p. 117] "There was something decidedly Jewish about the intellectuals who began to cohere as a group around the Partisan Review in the later 30s," notes Family member Irving Howe, "and one of the things that was 'decidedly Jewish' was that most were of Jewish birth!" [HOWE, p. 240] (What was/is a common situation for a non-Jew who sought/seeks to crack the Jewish-dominated publishing world? Take the case of British novelist George Orwell, of Animal Farm and 1984 fame. "His first publisher, Victor Gollanz," says Milton Goldin, "was a Communist who described himself as a Christian socialist and had been born into an Orthodox Jewish family. Orwell's second publisher, Frederic Warburg [also Jewish, was] a descendant of the Swedish branch of the Warburg banking family ... Jewish editors of the Partisan Review (then located in New York) acquainted a readership across the Atlantic with Orwell's views. And when Jewish editors at the Book-of-the-Month Club chose Animal Farm as a club selection, the breakthrough at last provided him with a decent living.") [GOLDIN, M., 11-29-2000]

 

"The chic word among the best Jewish writers today is 'alienation,'" wrote Arthur Hertzberg in 1964, "which is a way of recognizing the truth that a Jew is irretrievably different. Writers like Norman Mailer and Leslie Fiedler, and a host of others, have the merit of seeing this fact continues to exist even where Jewish learning or active commitment have evaporated. They may not know why, and they may deny those reasons that they do know, yet these writers proclaim that the Jew in his very existence is alien to the world ... the Jew is not becoming like everyone else they say; it is that everyone worth mentioning is really becoming just like the Jew. There is some superficial truth to this assertion at a moment in American life when so much of its literature is being written by Jews." [HERTZBERG, p. 294] Jewish poet Delmore Schwartz once noted this "alienation which only a Jew can suffer, and use, as a cripple uses his weakness in order to beg." [ATLAS, J., 1977, p. 166]

 

Among the literature promoted and disseminated by many Family members was the secular Jewish "religion" of Freudianism. One Partisan Review staffer noted that, "We were all more or less saturated with psychoanalytic jargon. Psychoanalysis was at that time very much in the air, and everybody seemed to be in it or contemplating it." [TORREY] Partisan Review editor William Phillips edited two books on psychoanalysis as a basis for socio-cultural perception, Art and Psychoanalysis (1957) and Literature and Psychoanalysis (1983). Lionel Trilling's influential volume, The Liberal Imagination, had chapters on "Art and Neurosis" and "Freud and Literature." Louis Fraiberg wrote in his own Psychoanalysis and American Literary Criticism that "No other critic (than Trilling) has shown a comparable grasp of the significance of psychoanalysis; no other critic has so well incorporated it into his criticism." [TORREY] "Many Jewish intellectuals," suggests E. Fuller Torrey, "sought expiation of their guilt and remorse (about the Holocaust) in psychoanalysis." [TORREY] In 1990 a random survey of New York psychiatrists, 50 to 80% of local book and literary journal editors were believed to be veterans of psychoanalysis. [TORREY]

 

Norman Podhoretz even described the Family's bitter arguments among themselves in psychoanalytic -- and Jewish -- terms:

 

       "To be adopted into the Family was a mark of great distinction ... But

        once adopted, you could expect to be spoken of by many (not all) of

        your relatives in the most terrifyingly cruel terms ... Transposed into a

        different key, it was the Jewish self-hatred that has always been the

        other side of the coin of Jewish self-love." [PODHORETZ, p. 152]

 

While most of these Great Thinkers, in the beginning, distanced themselves from issues of their "Jewishness" (although, notes Irving Howe, "this severance from Jewish immigrant sources would later come to be a little suspect" [HOWE, p. 241],  their collective path to money, status, and power is manifest in a most distinctly Jewish way: they were an influential clique, a clan, initially homogeneous only in that they were all part of the same mutually promotive network. Over the following decades their radicalism softened into an assertion of "anti-communist liberalism"; ultimately individuals spread from there across the political map. Increasingly however, after World War II, their most pressing common link was a strong reaffirmation of their Jewish identities, allegiance to Jewish parochialism, and emphatic support for the state of Israel.

 

Ironically, history has proven the Jewish Mafia's essential self-image of being "alienated" and "marginalized" (later understood by them to be an ancestral reservoir of special Jewish insights) to become ridiculous. The Family has proven to be exactly the opposite of what they proclaimed themselves at first to be. History has revealed them as a group of literary hustlers and self-promoters who were profoundly influential and centrally located in deconstructing the institutions of the surrounding non-Jewish culture they so much despised until they gained entre to prestigious empowerment, at which time they vigorously struggled to affirm the status quo of which they had become so much a part, save overt adjustments to their new-found "Jewishness," and a reconstruction of the world in that image.

 

Family member Harold Rosenberg explained  the way modern Jewry seeks to rationalize Jewish particularism as being beneficial to American universalism like this:

 

          "Since modern life is so complex that no man can possess it in its

          entirety, the outsider often finds himself the perfect insider."

          [BLOOM,  p. 153]

 

"In addition to their notions of group marginality," observes Alexander Bloom, "which differs from individual feelings of aloneness, [the Family] also attempted to carry their alienation with them to the central position they felt they should occupy [in American society]." "What began in the 30s," says Richard Kostelanetz, "as a collection of ambitious young writers became, by the 60s, the most powerful establishment ever seen in literary America, and they dominated the scene as it had never been dominated before." [KOSTELANETZ, p. 39]  "Upwardly mobile Jews," notes Alan Wald, "comprised a disproportionate number of intellectuals in all radical movements in New York in the 1930s. The veterans of the [Jewish-founded left-wing magazines] New Masses and New Leader were not qualitatively different in their Jewish composition from those of the Partisan Review." [WALD, p. 9]

 

In historical retrospect, it is obvious that noble intellectual endeavors and enlightenment really were not the only -- and probably not the fundamental --  driving forces behind most of the New York Intellectuals. "A strong desire of class was also buried in the whole dynamic," notes Alexander Bloom, "Only subsequently did some of the young men come to see how clearly their own progress was tied to a desire to rise." [BLOOM, p. 27] Norman Podhoretz called the Jewish Mafia's deepest motivation in their struggles "a dirty little secret," and he wrote an entire book, Making It, about his own -- and others -- obsessions with self-promotive hustling and status-seeking within the Family. "The lust for success," he wrote, "... had replaced sexual lust ... especially for writers, artists, and intellectuals, among whom I lived and worked." [BLOOM, p. 360] "After all," noted Irving Howe, "it had never been dignity that we could claim as our strong point." [HOWE, p. 265]

 

(It was also, as noted earlier, a parallel situation in the largely Jewish left-wing Group Theatre world in New York City -- many actors, directors, and producers abandoned their proclaimed purist principles to migrate to Hollywood for wealth and fame. Even in the folk music world, singer Dave Von Ronk recalls the climate of some of the socially-minded, anti-materialist, left-wing folk singers of the 1960s, naming Jewish singers Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, David Cohen, and Gentile Eric Anderson: "They wanted to get rich. They were hungry, scuffling cats looking to grab the brass ring. I felt it, I saw how hungry they were. They wanted to be honest, but they suddenly realized they could say what they wanted to say and make a million dollars. Dylan was a terrible influence ... Bobby always wanted to be a superstar. When he discovered the reality of being a superstar he freaked out." [SCADUTO, p. 227] 

 

 "Among aggressive young intellectuals, ghetto-bred and seeking big reputations," said Alfred Kazin," [Saul] Bellow was making the world's powers resist him ... he was ambitious and dedicated in a style I had never seen in an urban Jewish intellectual; he expected the world to come to him. He had pledged himself a great destiny." [BLOOM, p. 292][

 

 Concerning Norman Mailer, Kazin once noted that

 

      "I've never known anyone whose career was always in public and who

       constantly put himself forward the way movie people do so much as

       Mailer." [MANSO, p. 274]

 

"[Jason] Epstein's literary chutzpah is indeed legendary," says Philip Nobile, "He is possibly the only editor in the history of publishing who reviewed a book he himself edited ... and who even edited a book he himself had written." [NOBILE, p. 91]

 

"Most of my friends and I were Jewish," wrote Seymour Krim of his experiences around the Family, "we were also literary; the combination of the Jewish intellectual tradition and sensibility needing to be a writer created in my circle the most potent and incredible intellectual-literary ambition I have ever seen." [KOSTELANETZ, p. 12] 

 

In 1963, Richard Hofstadter, another member of the Jewish intellectual Family, decided that "intellectuals" were an elite class in modern society:

 

      "It is rare for an American intellectual to confront candidly the

      irresolvable conflict between the elite character of his own class

      and his democratic aspiration. The extreme manifestation of the general

      reluctance to face this conflict is the writer who constantly assaults class

      barriers and yet constantly hungers for special deference."

      [HOFSTADTER, p. 408]

 

The underlying paradoxical paradigm here, of course, which Hofstadter does not acknowledge, is the standard Jewish universalist-particularist tension: to dominate the inner machinations of American culture and society, but be alienated from it; to be democratic in abstract philosophy in public life, but a self-anointed elitist in one's personal and confidential worlds; to be a universalistic American on the outside, and a particularist Jew within. Hofstadter never mentions Jews in his entire volume about American "anti-intellectualism"; instead, he sublimates the Jewish dimension to all this, as exemplified by a quote he selects from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.: "Anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman." [HOFTSTADTER, p. 4]

 

The great ambitions that encompassed the Family at-large were ultimately accomplished, causing members to reflect from time to time upon their phenomenal success and influence in American society. Citing examples like fellow Family members Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Lionel Trilling, and Alfred Kazin, "there emerged," wrote Daniel Bell, "a 'cultural elite,' and this was primarily a 'university culture' ... [but] the notion of elites extended beyond campus boundaries. Many of the new cultural arbiters have affected not only serious painters and novelists, but the standards of the larger public as well." [BLOOM, p. 200]  As Irving Horowitz notes, "The Jew at the start of the century was identified as the pure marginal, the outsider, the immigrant incapable of integration. As this century draws to a close the Jew is now identified as the very apotheosis of American dominant values and culture." [HOROWITZ, I., p. 90]

 

 "The growing complexity of our society," Lionel Trilling observed about himself and his Family, "had helped create a new intellectual class, which stood in a new relation with power. In addition, intellectual life itself took on a new character, providing the means of social mobility and social ascent ... [BLOOM, p. 206] ... The needs of society have brought to the top of the social hierarchy a large class of people of considerable force and complexity of mind. Intellect has associated itself with power as perhaps never before in history, and is now conceded to be itself a kind of power." [BLOOM, p. 200]

 

"The most pervasive event in American letters over the last ten years," joined in Clement Greenberg in the Partisan Review, "is the stabilization of the avant-garde, accompanied by its growing acceptance by official and commercial culture." [BLOOM, p. 297] Among those disturbed with this trend of largely Jewish intellectual status and reward seeking was sociologist C. Wright Mills, a non-Jew, and author of critical attacks of American society called The Power Elite and White Collar. Despite his proximity, as a professor at Columbia University, to the New York Family, he was not part of it. Russell Jacoby notes that

 

          "where Trilling celebrated cultural progress, Mills bemoaned decline,

            the degeneration of political discourse into slogans and toothpaste

            commercials ... [Mills argued in 1955 that] when a stringent

            opposition [to social and governmental norms] had disappeared,

            intellectuals embrace a 'new conservative gentility.' Instead of

            criticizing the mediocrity and mindlessness, they savor their new

            status, instead of acting as 'the moral conscience of society,' they

            confound prosperity with advancing culture. Mills named Trilling

            as one of the intellectuals succumbing to this confusion ... From the

            end of the war until his death, he railed against intellectuals who

            traded ethics and vision for salaries and status." [JACOBY, p. 79]

 

"[As] radical intellectuals," says Alexander Bloom, "the New Yorkers had once felt that their best hope of access to intellectual prominence and authority lay with a reconstructing of society. In the postwar years, they found the very society which they once scorned, and which had once scorned them, much more hospitable. They discovered a 'place' and a 'role' for themselves in it." [BLOOM]  "We are witnessing a process that might well be described as the embourgeoisment of the American intelligentsia," Philip Rahv observed, "This change, coupled with the new liberal policies, accounts for the fact that the idea of socialism ... has virtually ceased to figure in current intellectual discussion." [BLOOM, p. 201] "Instead of standing in opposition to the prevailing cultural flow-- mass, popular, middle-brow," notes Bloom, "highbrow thought and an avant-garde orientation now molded society." [BLOOM, p. 298]

 

Indeed, in their earlier years, many of the Family were communist activists, their later worldview adjusted to success and the comforts of capitalism. "In light of the neo-conservative self-portrait being created by many of the New York intellectuals," noted Alan Wald in 1987, "one is tempted to conclude that they have a stake in perpetuating an amnesia that avoids a forthright disclosure of their previous political history as revolutionary but anti-Stalinist Marxists." [WALD, p. 8-9]

 

The much-published ideas and arguments of the New York Intellectuals and their rise to status and power took them into university classrooms everywhere and even the very seat of government power in Washington DC.  "Intellectuals established intimate connections with government as never before," says Bloom, "Some took jobs in Washington ... While most did not take employment, they nonetheless felt the connection." "President Kennedy began to flatter the intellectual," Midge Decter recalled, "which is to say he invited them to his house for supper." [BLOOM, p. 324] "We became a touch of minor royalty," says Norman Mailer. [BLOOM, p. 324] "All of us in the family," says Norman Podhoretz, "were even friendly with members of the White House staff; they read our magazines and the pieces and books we ourselves wrote, and they cared -- it is even said that the President [Kennedy] himself cared -- about what we thought." [PODHORETZ, 1967, p. 312]

 

Alan Wald notes that:

 

      "The skills and experience [the New York intellectuals] had acquired

      as polemicists and ideologists during their radical years, and

      especially as authorities on communism with an insider's knowledge,

      enabled them to move rapidly into seats of cultural power in the

      1950s. In more recent decades, some even came to have access to

      national power. Irving Kristol, for example, became an intellectual

      consultant to the Nixon administration, Nathan Glazer's work was

      much admired by the Reagan administration, and neoconservative

      articles in Commentary magazine influenced White House policy

      in the 1980s." [WALD, p. 8]

As Jewish commentator Earl Shorris noted in 1982 about these once-Leftist, now influential "neoconservative," individuals:

     "The neoconservative Jews [Shorris notes, as examples, Norman Podhoretz,
      Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Midge Decter, and Sidney Hook]
      have not codified their views. They are still best identified by the half dozen
      middle-aged former leftists who led the garrulous conversions [to the political
      right] ... [T]hey enjoy money as Norman Podhoretz has so loudly said. They are
       unashamedly ambitious, almost greedy. They do not know or wish to know the
      risks of daily life in the world of business; they are more comfortable in the
      role of consultant, advising others on which risks to take." [SHORRIS, E., 1982,
      p. 10]

 

Even those intellectuals without university degrees sooner or later gravitated to teaching positions at universities. Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, and William Phillips found positions without PhDs; Philip Rahv even became a professor without a Bachelor's degree. At Columbia, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell (who also became an editor at Fortune) were deeded PhDs for "research already published." [BLOOM, p. 311]

 

"Once intellectuals had come in from the cold and established connections with power," says Alexander Bloom, "it became clear that their intellectual endeavors no longer represented opposition to the prevailing ethos. They were 'chic' because they were 'in' -- they had achieved what they had long ago set out to achieve." [BLOOM, p. 325] "Where young writers once faced the world together," wrote Irving Howe, "they now sink into suburbs, country  homes and college towns ... They not only lose their traditional rebelliousness but to one extent or another they cease to function as intellectuals." [original author's emphasis: JACOBY, p. 82]

 

The Family -- most of them former communists of various brands -- became so entrenched in the mainstream corridors of power and influence that a number of them even ended up having the covert backing of the CIA. During the height of the post-World War II anti-communist hysteria in America, many Family members joined an organization called the American Committee of Cultural Freedom. "Anticommunism became its only prerequisite," says Alexander  Bloom, ".... New York Intellectuals ... provided the solid center of the organization and filled many positions." [BLOOM, p. 264]

 

Diana Trilling remembers that

 

      "Even before I came onto the Executive Board of the American

      Committee, I was aware, and it was clear impression that everybody

      else on the Board was also in some measure aware, that the institutional

      body with which we were associated was probably funded by the

      government ... We strongly suspected that the Fairfield Foundation,

      which we were told supported the Congress, was a filter for the State

      Department or CIA money." [BLOOM, p. 264]

 

The ACCF's parent organization even funded a British-based "intellectual" journal, Encounter, edited by Irving Kristol and Stephen Spender. A later editor, Melvin Lasky, is generally presumed to have been the CIA agent-editor publicly alluded to by a former CIA-employee. [BLOOM, p. 267]

 

Throughout the rise to prominence, status, and power, the incestuous, connections-laden, interlocking of the New York Intellectual clique ran deep in mutual self-promotion. "What might seem the result of a 'conspiracy,'" notes Richard Kostelanetz, "[is] actually caused by a confluence of attitudes, historical precedents, and initially independent discriminations, all of which combine to function with a conspiratorial effectiveness ... It is de facto censorship [of non-Family writers]. [KOSTELANETZ, p. xvii]

 

"Intellectuals and publishers," notes E. Fuller Torrey, "... are often related or familiar with each other through marriage or shared consorts, recommend and review each others work and pass promising manuscripts around for publication ... The New York intellectual community and the publishing industry are essentially two parts of a single whole." [TORREY]

 

Midge Decter, for example, the secretary of the first editor of Commentary (Elliot Cohen), became the wife of the second editor of that journal, Norman Podhoretz. She also worked for the Saturday Review and eventually rose to become an executive editor at Harper's where Norman Mailer became a featured contributor and Irving Howe a regular contributor. [KOSTELANETZ, p. 101] John Podhoretz, son of Norman, attained jobs at the Washington Times and George Bush's White House before settling in as a television critic for the New York Post.  By 1998 he was the paper's Editorial Page Editor. Podhoretz's daughter, Ruthie Bloom, moved to Israel and became a regular columnist for the Jerusalem Post. Podhoretz's wife -- the aforementioned Midge Decter -- has a daughter by another marriage who married Elliot Abrams, an adviser on Latin America in Ronald Reagan's State Department. [TWERSKY, p. 45] 

 

"Family" members Lionel and Diana Trilling were married. Alfred Kazin remarked in 1976 that he didn't like fellow Family member Daniel Bell (co-editor of Public Interest), "even though he is my brother-in-law." Irving Kristol, another co-editor of  Public Interest (and the editor-in-chief at Basic Books) was the brother-in-law of Milton Himmelfarb, a Contributing Editor for Commentary and also co-editor of the Jewish Yearbook." [BLOOM, p. 278] Lionel Trilling's former students included Jason Epstein, who at Doubleday published Trilling's The Liberal Imagination. Trilling also selected the book titles for the Reader's Subscription and the Mid-Century Book Society, each organization managed by  former Trilling students, Gilman Kraft and Sol Stein, respectively. [KRUPNICK, p. 102]  Likewise, "the writers from Partisan Review now came to dominate the New Yorker," Daniel Bell once asserted to Midge Decter, Partisan Review was getting to be like a farm team for the New Yorker." [BLOOM, p. 311]

 

The self-promotion and clannishness are clearly reflected elsewhere in the interconnectedness of those selected in Family journals for publication. Elliot Cohen, the first editor of Commentary, brought on board Clement Greenberg and Nathan Glazer as editorial assistants and Sidney Hooks as a contributing editor. Irving Kristol and Robert Warshow later joined the staff.  By the end of the first year, Harold Rosenberg, Paul Goodman, Alfred Kazin, Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Robert Warshow, Sidney Hooks, Isaac Rosenfeld, Daniel Bell, Diana Trilling, Irving Howe, Philip Rahv, and Clement Greenberg had articles or reviews in Commentary. [BLOOM, p. 160]

 

 "Just as Willie Morris [a rare non-Jewish member of the Family]," says Richard Kostelanetz, "assuming the chief editorship of Harper's, prepublished sections of Norman Podhoretz's Making It, so did Podhoretz feature sections of Morris' North Towards Home in (Podhoretz's) Commentary."

 

The kind of interrelated media circles Norman Mailer  traveled in, for example,  include -- aside from the central New York Intellectual luminaries -- the following people who were solicited for stories for a book of oral histories about his life (Mailer himself was a co-founder of the Village Voice with Jerry Talmer, Ed Fancher, and Dan Wolf):

 

   * Bernard Farber -- fiction editor at the Saturday Evening Post, later senior

          editor at Trident Press, Simon and Schuster, and then CBS

          Legacy Books. He also served as Vice-President of Mailer's film

          company, Supreme Mix.

   * Benjamin DeMott - columnist for Harper's and The Atlantic, a

          contributing editor to the Saturday Review.

   * Judy Feiffer - Senior Editor at William Morrow, Vice-President of East

          Coast Productions, Orion Pictures.

   * Jules Feiffer - cartoonist at the Village Voice.

   * Henry Geldzahler -- former curator of twentieth century art at the

           Metropolitan Museum of Art.

   * Allen Ginsberg -- Beat Poet.

   * Lionel Hellman -- screenwriter, playwright.

   * Lionel Abel -- "longtime contributor to Commentary, Dissent, Partisan

            Review

   * Leo Lerman -- features editor at Mademoiselle, Vogue, editor in chief at

            Vanity Fair.

   * Max Lerner - an editor at the Nation, columnist for the New York Post 

            and Los Angeles Times syndicate.

   * Max Linenthal -- Director of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State

            University.

   * Adeline Naiman -- Editor at Little, Brown.

   * Sol Stein -- one of ten founding members of the Playwright Group of

             the Actors Studio.

   * Al Wasserman -- producer, director, and writer for NBC News. Married

            to Mailer's sister.

 

In 1996 a Mailer quote was used on the back cover of friend Lawrence Schiller's book about the O.J. Simpson trial. "I couldn't stop reading American Tragedy," he said. "My old friend and colleague Larry Schiller has come up with a book that is impossible to put down." [SCHILLER, 1996] Mailer had good reason to be so engrossed in the accusation that Simpson murdered his wife with a knife. Mailer had once stabbed his own wife, Adele, in the upper abdomen and back, sending her to the hospital. "One of the wounds was near the heart," notes biographer Carl Rollyson, "and the cardiac sac had been punctured." Within a week of the assault, "Mailer appeared on the Mike Wallace television show. He announced his intention to run for the mayor of New York City." [ROLLYSON, p. 137, 138]  In an obvious reflection upon the violent incident, one of his 1962 published poems, entitled Rainy Afternoon with the Wife (in a volume he called Deaths for the Ladies) stated that

 

    "So long/as/you/use/a/knife/there's/some/love/left." [ROLLYSON, p. 141]

 

Some of Mailer's other associations were -- in view of his public image as a "liberal" -- peculiar. Roy Cohn -- a driving force behind right-wing McCarthy anti-communist witch hunts in the 1950s -- helped negotiate a lucrative writing deal between Mailer and the continually morally dubious Newhouse (Advance) media empire; Mailer was initially commissioned on projects for  Parade magazine and Random House. Mailer even rented a cottage to Cohn next to Mailer's own summer home. "Newhouse's overtures to Norman Mailer, made through Roy Cohn," says Thomas Maier, "would pay [Mailer] sizeable fees and commissions, throughout the decade of the 1980s and well into the 1990s, with some of the most lucrative deals ever seen by an American novelist .... By the early 1990s, Mailer was listed on [Newhouse's] Vanity Fair masthead as writer-at-large." [MAIER, p. 108-109]

 

Seizing the opportunity of the New York city newspaper strike in 1963, Jason Epstein, a Vice President at Random House, and editor of Viking Books, was instrumental in setting  up the New York Review of Books (which extended its own mini-empire by purchasing the Kirkus Reviews book reviewing periodical from Maurice Friedman in 1971). Robert Silvers (formerly at Harper's and the Paris Review) and Epstein's wife, Barbara, were installed as editors. [BLOOM, p. 326]  "In the second year of the Review," says Alexander Bloom, "Harold Rosenberrg, Diana Trilling, and Midge Decter contributed; Daniel Bell and Norman Podhoretz did so in the third. The degree to which the New York Review swept the field of contemporary writers and critics led Richard Hoftstadter to refer to it jokingly as "the New York Review of Each Others Books." [BLOOM, p. 329]  Philip Noble, who chronicled the Review's early history, characterized the era as prey to 'nepotism, fratricide, and incest, and even a dose of narcissism. Establishment liberals were reviewing one another wholesale." [NOBILE, p. 29]

As Jewish scholars Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter noted:

     "The New York Review of Books was edited by Robert Silvers and Barbara
     Epstein, and the bulk of its political contributions (especially articles on
     American politics) in the mid-1960s wsa written by Jews. By and large
     then, as Tom Wolfe has pointed out, 'radical chic' in New York was a
     heavily Jewish phenomenon, and the influence of such people spread
     well beyon their own circle." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 105]

 

"In the course of the New York Review's rise," notes Bloom, "two of its prime movers joined the upper ranks of the New York Intellectual world. Robert Silvers ... climbed slowly up the intellectual social ladder. Jason Epstein sprang to the top ... Epstein had helped created the paperback revolution at Doubleday ... Epstein wore his ambition  ... openly." "Jason has the mind of a scholar but the instincts of a pushcart peddler," recalled a former colleague at Doubleday. Dwight MacDonald called him "a caricature of a New York intellectual; a nineteenth century entrepreneur, a robber baron, only his market is not copper, but intellectuals." [BLOOM, p. 327]

 

"There is no such thing as a New York Intellectual establishment," Epstein said to those not part of the Family, "it just looks that way." [KOSTELANETZ, p. 61] "It is fashionable," wrote Victor Navasky, editor of Nation (of whom Diana Trilling once worked as a literary editor), "for the New York Intellectuals to not only deny its existence but, as a corollary, to deny its influence." [KOSTELANETZ, p. 79]

 

As the New York Jewish Mafia built a foundation of interconnectedness and self-promotive power, "the Upper West Side, Wellfleet, and Martha's Vineyard now replaced City College and the Village as centers of their social whirl," says Alexander Bloom, "They all still attended each others parties, still gossiped to one another ... [BLOOM, p. 277] ... They remained vitally aware of one another, even as they expressed their criticism [of each other] in extremely harsh terms. Like prizefighters in a traveling carnival, they might be combatants but they remained part of the same show." [BLOOM, p. 279]

 

Allen Ginsberg, the famous Jewish-born Beat poet, remembers Norman Podhoretz coming up to him at a party and offering him entre into the Jewish Mafia:

 

        "Ginsberg, [said Podhoretz] you really have some talent and I realize

        that you're an intelligent writer and really gifted. You could have a career

        in New York, be part of the larger scene with us if you'd only get rid of

        those friends of yours like [non-Jews William] Burroughs and [Jack]

        Kerouac. You have much better taste than they. Why aren't you

        working with us instead of those people that are so nowhere? .... I

        remember the incident as an ephiphanous moment in my relation with

        Podhoretz and what he was -- part of a large right-wing proto-police

        surveillance movement .... The Beat group was more or less

        based on Vachel Lindsay, Whitman, populism, and individualism."

        [MANSO, p. 314]

Barry Gilford and Lawrence Lee, in an "oral biography" of Jack Kerouac, note beatnik resistant to conventions of the New York/Jewish Freudian literary world:

     "Kerouac appears never to have considered turning to psychiatry for insights
      or comfort, and Allen's [Allen Ginsberg] rejection of psychiatry with the aid
      of the analyst who recognized the value of Ginsber's dissatisfaction was a
      turning point in Allen's creative life. But for many Villagers and other New
      Yorkers of the 1950's, analysis was a secular religion which set forth the
      prospect of salvation through personal accomodations to a world which
      established a defintion of sanity through normative behavior. Thus, for
      many, a simple refusal to adjust to the psychoanalytic view of the world
      as it was became a charged act of rebellion." [GILFORD/LEE, 1994, p. 174]

 

Upon a visit to New York City, the novelist George P. Eliot observed that

 

      "What strikes me, as a visitor, ever more strangely than the intensity with

       which these Jews attack and praise each other, is the attention they pay

       to each other." [KOSTELANETZ, p. 25]

 

Whether hugging or warring, says Norman Podhoretz, the Family was "preoccupied with each other to the point of obsession." [PODHORETZ, p. 110]

 

 The novelist Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) believed a Jewish-inspired plot was amuck to suppress his work for his crime of writing critically about the Jewish community. "He suspected," writes A. A. Swanberg, "that Arthur Pell, head of the Liveright firm, and Simon and Schuster, were parties to the plot ... [To a friend] he wrote: Get me the names of a number of fairly recently organized non-Jewish publishers ... Can you tell me whether W. W. Norton or anyone connected with his organization in a financial control sense is Jewish?"  [GOULD]

 

     Alas, Dreiser was securely marginalized by the American literary-cultural establishment by the early 1960s. "The decline of Dreiser's reputation," notes Irving Howe, "has not been an isolated event. It has occurred in the context, and is surely a consequence, of the counterrevolution in American culture during the forties and fifties ... Dreiser became a symbol of everything a superior intelligence was supposed to avoid ... He represented the boorishness of the populist mentality, as it declined into anti-Semitism." [HOWE, p. 168]

 

     Likewise, notes Ann Douglas, prominent Beat author Jack Kerouac eventually became "ever more paranoid," thinking that "the New York Jewish critics were plotting against him; he joked bitterly about titling Big Sur (1962), 'Another idea for the Jews to Steal.'" [DOUGLAS, A., 19-99] In 2001, Jim Irsay (whose father's original name was Robert Israel), owner of a professional football team, bought Kerouac's original manuscript for On the Road, at auction, for $2.2 million dollars. (Jewish author Franz Kafka's The Trial had "held the previous record for an original manuscript sold at auction.") [HERMAN, J., 5-22-01]

 

      "[There is] a Jewish Mafia in American letters ..., "said popular writer Truman Capote, risking censure and the inevitable charge of anti-Semitism in 1973, "There is a clique of New York-oriented writers and critics who control much of the literary scene through the influence of the quarterlies and intellectual magazines ... All these publications are Jewish-dominated and this particular coterie employs them to make or break writers by advancing or withholding attention ... Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer are all fine writers, but they are not the only writers in the country as the Jewish Mafia would have us believe." [FORSTER, p. 109]

 

     The Partisan Review crowd, for instance, is generally acknowledged to have "made" Saul Bellow. "From the first," says Alexander Bloom, "Bellow established a recognizable and, ultimately, uneasy relationship with the New York Intellectuals, as friends and patrons. Yet he has resisted any notion that they made him famous." But, says Leslie Fiedler, "[Bellow] really owed a big debt to them, because they did help introduce him to the world. Rahv thought of him as one of their boys." [BLOOM, p. 291]

 

     Early in his career, from 1941-1951, Bellow published six short stories and two novels; five of the short stories first appeared in Partisan Review. [BLOOM, p. 291] His second novel, was reviewed in Partisan Review by Family member Delmore Schwartz and favorably compared with Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Henry James, and Walt Whitman. "Bellow's success," says Alexander Bloom, "was more than just personal. whether or not he was 'made' by the Partisan writers is less significant than the degree to which  his success and the history of the achievement of the New York Intellectuals in general intertwined ... Lionel Trilling ... made it clear that a Jew could be a great literary critic; Meyer Schapiro, a great art historian; and Saul Bellow a great American novelist." [BLOOM, p. 293]

 

     "Bellow," said Norman Podhoretz, "was the Family's White Hope, as it were, in fiction." [BLOOM, p. 291] "Bellow was their novelist," observes Alexander Bloom, "because he wrote about them, sometimes literally, but more often socially and culturally." [BLOOM,  p. 293]

 

       "What makes Bellow's work so unusual," decided Alfred Kazin in 1959, "is the fact that his characters are all burdened by a speculative quest, a need to understand their particular destiny." [BLOOM, p. 295] In the 1960s, Leslie Fiedler proclaimed Bellow to be "America's most important living novelist." [BLOOM, p. 292]  Earlier he had declared that of all the contemporary novelists, Bellow "was the one we need most to understand, if we are to understand what we are doing at the present moment." [BLOOM, p. 292]

 

     "It is said," wrote Edgar Siskind in 1978, "that more PhD dissertations have been and are being written on Bellow than any other contemporary writer. No aspect of his work has been more fiercely analyzed than the question of its Jewish component." [SISKIN, p. 90]

 

    "Complementing Bellow's individual success," notes Alexander Bloom, "was his preeminence in what has been called the emergence of Jewish-American literature  in postwar years ... What is striking about the writers included in this literary category is the degree to which they all had close connections with the New York Intellectuals." [BLOOM, p. 295] Such authors include a vast field, including most of the Jewish names in this chapter. Many of Bernard Malmud's stories, for example, first appeared in the Partisan Review and Commentary. Norman Mailer often had pieces published in Dissent in the 1950s. [BLOOM, p. 296-297] Paul Goodman's book, Growing Up Absurd, turned down by nineteen publishers, was promoted by Norman Podhoretz, and serialized in his Commentary. Podhoretz also persuaded Jason Epstein at Random House to publish it, even though his firm had already rejected the manuscript.  [BLOOM, p. 322] Commentary also serialized the diary of Ann Frank, as we have seen earlier, one of the first popular books about the later so-called Holocaust, bringing the subject to public eye.

 

"I cannot prove a connection," wrote Irving Howe, "between the holocaust and the turn to Jewish themes in American fiction, at first urgent and quizzical, later fashionable and manipulative ... but it would be foolish to scant the possibility." [HOWE, p. 265]

 

 "The larger questions of Jewish existence," notes Alexander Bloom, "as well as the narrower ones of Jewish intellectuals -- the themes mined by Saul Bellow -- became the material for a growing literary oeuvre." [BLOOM, p. 297]

 

By 1975, this "literary oeuvre" had sparked Jewish critic George Steiner to proclaim

 

        "It is commonplace that recent American fiction and criticism have to a

         a drastic extent been the product of Jewish tone and explosion of

         talent." [MADISON, C., p. 271]

 

Russell Jacoby had another take on this Jewish "explosion of talent":

 

      "By quality alone, it is simply not possible to distinguish the oeuvre of

       New York intellectuals from that of non-New Yorkers. Essay by essay,

       book by book, the collective work of New York intellectuals is neither

       so brilliant nor so scintillating that all else pales. It is almost more

       feasible to reverse the common opinion: the significant books of the

       fifties were authored by non-New Yorkers ... New York intellectuals

       received the lion's share of attention less by reason of genius than by ...

       their New York location and their personal and physical proximity to the

       publishing industry. In addition, their tireless monitoring of themselves

       lays the groundwork for further studies (and myths). For those padded

       cultural histories with reports on what writer X said to editor Y

       at Z's party, the New York scene is a mother lode ... [JACOBY, p. 102]

       ... New York intellectuals specialize in the self; theirs is the home of

       psychoanalysis, the personal essay, the letter to the editor." [JACOBY,

       p. 103]

 

As one unnamed "intellectual" responded to Charles Kadushin's study of American intellectuals, "Power is in the circles around Commentary, Dissent, the New York Review of Books, and Partisan. Ninety-nine percent of what goes on in these circles is bullshit." [KADUSHIN, p. 52]

 

Norman Podhoretz noted the crucial importance of hustling and politicking to further one's career in the Literary In-Crowd, and the desperate Status Chase of it all:

 

      "Did so-and-so have dinner at Jacqueline Kennedy's last night? Up five

      points. Was so-and-so not invited to the Lowell's to meet the latest

      visiting poet? Down one-eighth. Did so-and-so's book get nominated for

      the National Book Award? Up two and five-eighths. Did Partisan Review

      neglect to ask so-and-so to participate in a symposium? Down two."

      [KOSTELANETZ, p. 129]

 

This "explosion of talent" within the Jewish Mafia's self-promotive web has been profoundly successful. As example, of all the thousands of talented writers in America, "for several years in succession," wrote Charles Angoff and Meyer Levin in 1970, "Jewish authors won the National Book award with works about Jews. Jewish novels headed the bestseller list." [ANGOFF/LEVIN, p. 13]  "[The New York] mob writers," complained Richard Kostelanetz in 1974, "usually sit on the selection juries of the National Book Award ... and win these awards regularly (Bellow getting an unparalleled three)." [KOSTELANETZ, p. 124] Among the National Book Award winners, twelve years later Family member Irving Howe even took the prize with his nostalgic look at early Jewish America, World of Our Fathers. National Book Award winner for fiction in 2000? Jewish author Susan Sontag.

 

 Likewise, in the Nobel Prize for Literature world, Jewish author Elias Canetti won the award in 1981, notes the (Jewish) Forward, "shortly after Saul Bellow and Isaac Bashevis Singer, in a sequence that some anti-Semites in the Hispanic world shamelessly called 'Stockholm's Jewish triumvirate." [STAVANS, 1999, p. 1]  In 1987, Jewish writer Joseph Brodsky also took the Nobel prize.

 

 In 1994, Jewish author Lois Lowry won for the second time the American Library Association's Newberry Medal for books for young adults. She had won the award in 1990 for Number the Stars, "the stirring tale of the Danish people's heroic efforts to protect their Jewish population from the fate that befell their brothers and sisters in the rest of Europe." [HOFFMAN, M., 4-10-94, p. 23]

 

"We live in a moment where everywhere in the realm of prose Jewish writers have discovered their Jewishness to be eminently a marketable commodity," wrote Jewish author Charles Madison in 1976, "the much vaunted alienation to be their passport into the heart of Gentile American culture." [MADISON, C., p. 272] "Everyone is by now aware," noted Robert Alter in 1965, "of the fact that literary Jewishness has become a distinct commercial asset." [KOSTELANETZ, p. 13]  "The new atmosphere has created a phenomenon which is especially evident in intellectual circles and on college campuses," noted James Jaffe in 1968, "Jewishness is now acceptable, sometimes even fashionable. At the opera and other important cultural battlegrounds in New York, socially prestigious women are constantly seen with Jewish escorts ... Yiddish words pepper the speech of television personalities from Jerry Lewis, who is Jewish, to Johnny Carson, who isn't." [JAFFE, J., 1968, p. 45]

 

     Pop singer Linda Ronstadt read Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar (first published in 1955) as a teenager: "It screwed me up about love and romance and everything. But I loved it then, and it made me wish I was Jewish." [WHITFIELD, AMERICAN, p. 12]  Marilyn Monroe once expressed an affinity for the Jewish world that surrounded her in Hollywood, saying,, "It's like the Jews are the orphans of the world. Maybe that's why I feel so close to them." [STRASBERG, S., p. 56]  Upon marrying Jewish playwright Arthur Miller, she declared that "if I have kids, I think they should be Jewish. Anyway, I can identify with the Jews. Everybody's always out to get them, no matter what they do, like me." [STRASBERG, p. 112] As Susan Strasberg notes, "Over the next year she'd pepper her conversations with Jewish expressions as if reaffirming her conversion [to Judaism]. 'Hi Bubuleh, oy vay, what tsures.'" [STRASBERG, p. 112]

 

     A Jewish friend of Elvis Presley, Larry Geller, even "introduced Elvis to new ways of thinking about Judaism ... Both he and Marty [Lacker, another Jewish friend] claimed credit for encouraging Elvis' decision that Christmas to have a new headstone placed on [Elvis' mother's] grave -- with a Jewish star on one side, a cross on the other." [GURALNICK, p. 190]  (Elvis' world of Jews included music agents, movie directors, his Beverly Hills dentist Max Shapiro, and the South African doctor (later exposed as a fraud) Laurenz Johannes Griessel Landau who, while treating Elvis for acne, made a homosexual pass at him. [GURALNCK, p. 47, 620]

 

      "The mostly Jewish New York intellectuals and their magazines -- Partisan Review, Commentary, Dissent, New York Review of Books, Public Interest -- have assumed an almost mythic position among American intellectuals," says Edward Shapiro, "Thus, Elizabeth Hardwick once noted that she had left Kentucky to become a New York Jewish intellectual (her conversion took place in the office of the New York Review of Books). Hardwick was not alone in assuming mistakenly that to be a New York intellectual (or any intellectual) one had to be Jewish. Victor Navasky [also Jewish] editor of the Nation, jested in 1966 that 'rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, you don't have to be Jewish to be an intellectual.'" [SHAPIRO, Sidney, p. 153]

 

     The commercial pluses to being Jewish (and its attendant homage as eternal victims) in a Jewish-controlled environment were obvious. Even Gentile writers like Robert Lowell and Mary McCarthy stretched back to claim distant Jewish blood in their family trees. [KOSTELANETZ, p. 28] "The exotic appeal that ethnicity offered to the participants in mass culture," says Stephen Whitfield, "has sometimes even seemed to put the dominant group on the defensive. Nelson Rockefeller found it advantageous to ventilate hints of his admittedly distant Jewish ancestry. Caroline Kennedy marched down the aisle of a church [with a Jew]; a character in the film Pete 'n Tillie (1972) emphasized his one-fourth Jewish ancestry because, 'I'm a social climber.'" [WHITFIELD, American, p. 11]

    African-American radio personality Howard Lester, once emphatically decried as an anti-Semite by New York Jews (even threatened and physically assailed by Jewish protest rallies), eventually decided that, considering the fact that he had a great-grandfather who was Jewish, he would convert to Judaism. A key influence in his decison was all the information he was hearing about Jews in the Holocaust; it is the key entre to empathy for Jews for many: the Jewish victim paradigm. "The more I read [about the Holocaust]," Lester wrote, "the greater my numbness at the horror, the greater my numbness as I read of Jews affirming God even in the midst of their own negation." [LESTER, H., p. 122] One day Lester wakes ups "and my lips are moving. I listen. I am trying to say 'Sh'ma Yisrael Adonai Elohenu Adonat Ehad' [Hear O Israel. The Lord our God the Lord is One]. At night those words resound in me and when I awake, they are the first words I hear from my lips" [LESTER, H., p. 123] ... I have lived these past nine months amidst the ashes of the crypt in heaven. Auschwitz and Treblinka are part of my daily pain. The spirits of murdered Jewish children shoot marbles with me in the dirt of a parsonage yard." [LESTER, H., p. 133]

Alfred Kazin noted the Jewish take-over of American literature, in 1966:

"Definitely, it was now the thing to be Jewish. But in Western universities and small towns many a traditional novelist and professor of English felt out of it, and asked, with varying degrees of self-control, if there was no longer a good novel to be written about the frontier, about Main Street, about the good that was in marriage? Was it possible, these critics wondered aloud, that American life had become so deregionalized and lacking in local color that the big power units and the big cities had pre-empted the American scene, along with the supple Jewish intellectuals who were at home with them? Was it possible that Norman Mailer had become the representative American novelist? It was entirely possible, and certainly the thought would not have astonished Mailer, just as the power of his example for other novelists did not astonish Saul Bellow." [KAZIN, A., 1966, p. xxiv]

     In 1998, Ross Wetzsteon, a Montana-born WASP (who made the pilgrimmage to New York City), wrote an extraordinarily definitive explication of WASP-self hate, and his cravings to be a Jew, in a Village Voice (Jewish-owned and edited) article. The strange product of Freud's Judeocentric psychotherapy, a journalism career dominated by Jews, alienation from the norms of American popular culture, long-term romantic relationships with ONLY Jewish women, and estrangement from his own family lead him to the rescuing lifejacket of Jews. Wetzsteon embraces all Jewish-enforced stereotypes of the Jew: Jewish moral superiority, Jews as eternal victims, Jewish powerlessness, Jewish bluntness and vulgarity as a form of liberation, and Jews as being more intellectually interesting. What one begins to recognize at core here is a kind of ideological indoctrination process, in Wetzsteon's case deeply rooted in his psychotherapy sessions. Wetzsteon below maps his metamorphisis into his configuration as an 'honorary' Jew:

     "Everyone always assumes I'm Jewish ... So why do people think I'm Jewish? My
     name? My profession? But more interesting than why I pass for Jewish is why it
     pleases me so ... I was immediately drwn to the Jews because they seemed so
     attractive and because the WASPs seemed so repellent. It was at this time, in
     one of the most painful choices of my life, that I decided to become a scholar
     rather than play centerfield for the Yankees ... It became clear ... that the Jews
     represented ... an acceptable rebellion, in that they embodied both a rejection
     of unfulfilling values and a repository of honorable new ones ... Jews were
     both homeless and universal, which appeals to a mind enamored of
     'disengaged' sensibilities. And, since most of the Jews I knew were leftists
     ... [there was] radicalism as the Jewish version of juvenile delinquency ...
     What Jews seemed to be saying was, 'In our powerlessness, we have a
     superior moral heritage' -- an appealing conceit for a teenage intellectual
     who faced the dilemma of being at the center of his culture while
     feeling both socially ill at ease and psychologically estranged ... I came to
     to see WASP life as a rigid, deceitful facade that had to be penetrated if
     one cared at all about what was real. Self-control, self-restraint, self-
     effacement were the pious names given to what were really decorous
     lies ... [I had] a yearning affectionfor what I perceived as 'Jewish
     openness' ... So-called Jewish vulgarity, in short, became a kind of
     intellectual and moral critique of WASP mentality ... I'll never forget how
     much my therapy had to do with my pleasure. For me, therapy was
     primarily a means of liberating inner vulgarity, of releasing a kind of
     pushiness and ostentation in my psychic life -- it was a way of
     discovering that the things I valued most were radically opposed
     to the WASP ideals that I internalized ... The important point is
     that it was quite clear to me that the Jew and the psychotherapist
     joined forces in the abolition of WASP hypocrisy, WASP decorum,
     and WASP censorship. I even came to see a parallel -- while
     obviously aware of the disparities -- between Jewish social
     liberation and my own psychological liberation. My ghetto was
     my head, my assimilation was through therapy ... I've always been
     attracted to Jewish women -- in fact, every long relationship I've
     ever had, including my marriage, was with a Jewish woman ...
     I regard myself as an 'honorary Jew ... [But] I realized .. that
     by seeking my identity in Jews ... I was denying their identity to
     themselves.'"  [WETZSTEON, R., 9/6-12-98]

     Chaim Bermant notes the necessary pro-Jewish metamorphosis that often takes place among non-Jews in Jewish-dominated environments -- in this case Hollywood:

     "One met the occasional gentile [in Hollywood], like the Skouras brothers,
     who were Greek, or Winfield Sheehan, who was Irish, but the whole
     ambience was Jewish and even the gentiles acquired Jewish mannerisms,
     expressions, and habits of speech. As the Scottish director, John Grierson,
     observed after a stay in Hollywood, 'After a few years in the place, your
     foreskin falls away.'" [BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 92]
     

      Indeed, this kind of anti-WASP deconstructionist world view needed strong ideological encouragement to prosper. After World War II, and militantly after 1967, the Family and its various satellites began to pay more and more attention to their Jewish identities. "New questions arose," says Alexander Bloom, " ... and an essential component of [the Family's] character -- their Jewishness -- reemerged to demand attention." [BLOOM, p. 125] Largely children of immigrants (or immigrants themselves), "we knew," wrote Irving Howe, "that but for an accident of geography we might also be bars of soap." [BLOOM, p. 137]

 

     "Unable to talk about the Holocaust itself," says Bloom, "[the Family] began in postwar years to talk about themselves as Jews, something they had rarely done before ... By the 1950s ... many had become 'enthusiasts of Martin Buber, while the whole of the New York literary world was ringing with praise of the Yiddish storytellers, the Hassidim, Maimonides, medieval Hebrew poetry, and even Rabbis of the Talmud." [BLOOM, p. 142] "To 'write Jewish,'" noted Charles Angoff and Meyer Levin in 1970, "is in fashion, but recently the Jewishness in much of our fiction has been one of bland nostalgia ... or else it is a Jewishness of mystification cum mysticism, in which the ancient wisdom-image of the Jew is invoked through Hasidic themes or the idea of Buber ... or it is a Jewishness treated satirically -- basically an attack on the complacent middle class." [ANGOFF/LEVIN, p. 15]

 

     The move away from Jewish allegiance to the American melting pot, universalism, and left-wing causes to rationales for Jewish parochialism within American universities and public life had begun. Some members of the family -- Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, and Nathan Glazer -- even joined Milton Himmelfarb, an official of the American Jewish Committee, for group study of Maimonides' texts and other Jewish religious literature. "One after another," notes Alexander Bloom, "under the influence of political pressure, social analysis, and personal awareness, the intellectual began to reassess and reconsider their Jewish past." [BLOOM, p. 143]

 

     Susan Sontag found overwhelming connection to photographs of concentration camp victims:

 

       "Nothing I have seen -- in photography or real life -- ever cut me as

       sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed it seemed plausible to divide my

       life into two parts ... Some limit had been reached, and not only that of

       horror; I felt irrecoverably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feeling

       started to tighten; something went dead; something is still crying."

      [TORREY]

 

      The classic irreconcilable dialectic of divisive Jewish values in an all-inclusive, universalistic society began to be addressed by the Jewish Mafia and explained away:

 

     "Insistence upon being 'one-hundred-per-cent something," wrote Harold Rosenberg, makes us "uncomfortable when they debate whether one can be an American and a Jew." [BLOOM, p. 145] "I was born in galut and I accept, now gladly, " wrote Daniel Bell, one time editor of the New Leader, and editor at Fortune, and a co-editor of the Public Interest, "though once in pain, the double burden of my self-consciousness, the outward life of an American and the inward secret life of a Jew." [BELL, Reflections, p. 322]

 

    Leslie Fiedler found it useful to tie the particulars of "being Jewish" into its traditional messianic subsuming of all humanity under the dominion of ennobled Jewish suffering:

 

      "In this apocalyptic period of atomization and uprooting, of a catholic

      terror and a universal alienation, the image of the Jew tends to become

      the image of everyone; and we are approaching the day when the Jew

      will come to seem the central symbol, the essential myth of the whole

      western world." [BLOOM, p. 150]

 

     "Some, like [Gentile] social critic Dwight MacDonald," says Steven Zipperstein, "felt sickened by much of what he read in Commentary, where, as he saw it, his friends engaged in self-indulgent trivia. Why, he asked, were such bright people devoting so much time to 'uninteresting exercises in Jewish culture?'" [ZIPPERSTEIN, p. 20]

 

     But the first steps of the "Holocaust is Unique" formula, and the "humankind should look to the Jews for guidance" enforcement had begun in earnest, and the maze of Jewish guilt and self-obsession was spread like a tablecloth over the American scene. "The Jews' life and wanderings," decided Daniel Bell, "are, in a sense, the image of the world's destiny. His heightened sense of his own alienation is a prescient tremor of the quake to come." [BLOOM, p. 153] (This "alienation" from the American power structure has been, of course, at key points a complete delusion. Chaim Bermant, for example, notes the Jewish "outsider" status in Hollywood, the most profound influence upon popular culture: "An essential part of Jewishness is the feeling that one is an outsider, not part of the crowd. In Hollywood the entire crowd was so Jewish that non-Jews felt outside. Nor did they have to feel strange whenever they moved east to confer with the New York end of the business, for that too was Jewish.") [BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 99]

 

     "Whereas  [the Family] had earlier argued for a role as the modern 'cleric' and arbiter of modern culture because of their intellectual calling," says Alexander Bloom, "they now claimed to offer a uniquely appropriate view of modern society, thanks to their ethnic background." [BLOOM, p. 151] "One cannot ... simply discount the possibility that some essentially Jewish qualities may adhere to the writing of the most thoroughly acculturated Jews," wrote Robert Alter in the 1960s, "Most readers have sensed in at least some of the 'post-traditional' or 'transitional' Jewish writers certain modes of imagination or general orientation towards art and experience that seems characteristically Jewish, even though the writer scrupulously avoids all reference to his ethnic origins." [ALTER, p. 54] "A Jewish book," declared Ludwig Lewisohn years earlier, "is one written by someone who is well aware that he or she is Jewish. Jewish literature, therefore, consists of all the works -- written in every age and language -- whose creators knew they were Jewish." [SHAKED, p. 169]

 

     Clement Greenberg (who was for a while the editor of the Contemporary Jewish Record),  says Bloom, "asserted that [the Jewish author Franz] Kafka held a steady belief in halakhic order, the belief that Jewish history stopped with the extinction of Palestine and will begin again when the Messiah comes. Until then, Jewish life is to be kept 'humdrum, thoroughly prosaic and historically immobile within the fence of the law. Such history as persists in Gentile history.'" [BLOOM, p. 154]

 

     Whereas in earlier years Harold Rosenberg was "bothered by the chauvinism of certain Jewish zealots in Commentary," [BLOOM, p. 160] and William Phillips "complained throughout the 80s that intellectuals were now asking whether or not policies were good for Jews, [TWERSKY, p. 40] the New York Intellectuals had come, says Alexander Bloom, "to accept and, largely, to proclaim their Jewishness. Their ethnic identity overcame their former universalism ... Now self-defined Jewish intellectuals, they laid claim to a special appropriateness for their personal viewpoint and to a high value for their insight." [BLOOM, p. 153]

 

    "The Alfred Kazin who proclaimed his revolt from Jewish sentimental chauvinism," notes Edward Shapiro, "was the same person who wrote in an autobiography titled New York Jew how the Holocaust became the consuming event of his life." [SHAPIRO, p. 156]  Irving Howe had come to believe that "the only subject truly worthy of a serious writer ... [is] the problem of collective destiny, the fate of a people."  [KOSTELANETZ]  At Philip Rahv's death, it was found that he had donated his estate to Israel. [SHAPIRO, p. 287]  "I remember," notes Mary McCarthy, "Philip Rahv saying that all Gentiles, without exception, are anti-Semitic." [MCCARTHY, p. 98]  Midge Decter's views of Israel? "What I do know," she says, "is that Zionism was bred in my bones ... As for me, the unswerving Zionist, there was the miracle of the establishment of the state of Israel." [DECTER, M., 1999, p. 185, 187] Susan Sontag? She was awarded Israel's Jerusalem Prize for 2001. As Alexander Cockburn notes:

     "[Israeli minister Shimon] Peres has been quoted as admiring Sontag's definition
     of herself. 'First she's Jewish, then she's a writer, then she's American. She
     loves Israel with emotion and the world with obligation' ... Sontag has always
     been appreciative of irony. Does she see no irony in the fact that she, relentless
     critic of Slobodan Milosevic (upon whose extradition to face trial in its
     Hague Court as a 'war criminal' the US is now conditioning all aid to
     Yugoslavia) is now planning to travel to get a prize in Israel, currently
     led by a man, Ariel Sharon, whose credentials as a war criminal are robust
     and indeed undisputed by all people of balanced and independent
     judgement ... Does Sontag sense no irony is getting a prize premised
     on the author's sensitivity to issues of human freedom, in a society
     where the freedom of Palestinians is unrelentingly repressed?"
     [COCKBURN, A., 3-20-01]

 

     Hannah Arendt, a German-Jewish refugee, accelerated this interest in Jewishness and, especially, the Holocaust, with her controversial 1963 volume, Eichmann in Jerusalem (first serialized in the New Yorker). Her evidence for Jewish complicity in their own demise in Europe (and her critique that the Israelis' focus upon only crimes against Jews by the captured Nazi was a disservice to wider justice) provoked a firestorm of Jewish outrage. "It is this tension between the parochial and the universal," wrote Daniel Bell, "that explains the furious emotions over Miss Arendt's book. For she writes from the standpoint of a universal principle which denies any parochial [Jewish] identity." [BELL, ALPHABET, p. 312]  Irving Howe wrote that, in Jewish reaction to her book, "the long-suppressed grief evoked by the Holocaust burst out. It was as if her views, which roused many of us to fury, enabled us to finally speak the unspeakable." [BLOOM, p. 329]

 

     What,  wondered Howe, would the goyim say to this Jewish dirty laundry?

   

        "Hundreds of thousands of good-middle class Americans will have

        learned from those articles that the Jewish leadership in Europe was

        cowardly, inept, and even collaborationist, and that if Jews had not

        'cooperated' with the Nazis, fewer than 5 to 6 million would have been

        killed. No small matter: and you will forgive some of us if we react

        strongly to this charge." [BLOOM, p. 330]

 

       Dissent, of which Howe was editor, organized a public discussion about Arendt's book. Mary McCarthy, a non-Jewish member of the Family, thought the book "splendid." "Apparently," she noted, "this is so because I am a Gentile ... I don't 'understand' ... It is as if Eichmann in Jerusalem had required a special pair of Jewish spectacles to make its 'true purport' visible." [BLOOM, p. 330]

 

     "The emotions tapped," says Alexander Bloom, "demonstrated the degree to which Jewishness remained a sensitive issue. Having worked out their own personal sense of Jewishness in the first postwar years, after the decade of cosmopolitan universalism, the New York Intellectuals had not fully resolved the more general questions of Jews in society. Did Jews constitute a particular social grouping with unique collective attributes?"
[BLOOM, p. 331]

 

      Disbanding allegiance to universalistic values, says J. J. Goldberg, throughout the Jewish community "a new set of basic values came to replace them: loyalty to the Jewish people, commitment to its survival, and hostility to its enemies." [GOLDBERG, p. 162] Norman Mailer set sights on one of them:

 

     "In their immaculate cleanliness, in the somewhat antiseptic odor of their

      stringent toilet water and perfume, in abnegation of their walks, in the

      heavy sturdy moves so many demonstrated of bodies in life's harness,

      there was the muted tragedy of the WASP." [SCHRAG, p. 187]

 

      Mailer points the way to what Jewish observer James Yaffe outlined in 1968 as the nature of the generic "Jewish intellectual":

 

     "The Jewish intellectual, whatever else he may do, seldom stretches

     under a tree and just thinks. And then, the intellect can't be just a

     tool for him; it has to be a weapon too. He doesn't use it simply to

     discover what the world is like, or to create something beautiful, or

     to communicate his ideas. He must use it to beat down his competitors,

     to prove his superiority. From him controversy is inseparable from

     intellectual activity. Watch him at a party: note the vicious delight

     with which he backs lesser intellects into a corner. He's implacable;

     neither social decorum nor human compassion can soften his

     attack ... Above all he is very concerned about his 'significance.' He

     must always have something profound to say, even if he has

     nothing profound to say. There is nobody like a Jewish intellectual

     for making Important Statements." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 235]

 

      "Intellectuals," wrote Jack Porter, "are far from ineffectual, although they may be snobs. On the contrary, they exert enormous power, more than any of the 17th century Hof-Juden ever dreamed of. At the same time, in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the establishment of the Jewish state -- there has been a definite shift in their allegiance to Jewish causes." [PORTER, p. 35]

 

     "These intellectuals," says Alexander Bloom, "posited that Jews had a central place because of their Jewishness. They now felt that Jewishness, once a source of scorn among some writers, offered a special insight, useful in the analysis of the modern condition." [BLOOM, p. 150] "The Jews," proclaimed Jewish author Isiah Berlin,

 

     "like the strangers seeking to lose themselves in the strange tribe,

     find themselves compelled to devote all their energies and talents

     to the task of understanding and adaptation upon which their lives

     depend at every step. Hence the fantastic over-development of

     their faculties for detecting trends, and discriminating the shades

     and hues of changing individual and social situations, often before

     they have been noticed anywhere else. Hence too, their celebrated

     critical acumen, their astonishingly sharp eye for the analysis of

     the past, the present, and sometimes the future also -- in short

     their well-known genius for observation and classification --

     above all for reportage in its sharpest and finest forms." [ISAACS, p. 55]

 

     "Through their Jewish writers," declared Leslie Fiedler, "Americans, after the second World War, were able to establish a new kind of link with Europe in place of the old pale-face connection -- a link not with the Europe of decaying castles and Archbishop of Canterbury, nor with that of the French symbolists, and the deeply polite Action Francaise -- for those are all Christian Europe; but with the post-Christian Europe of Marx and Freud, which is to say, of secularized Judaism, as well as the Europe of surrealism and existentialism, Kafka, neo-Chassidism .... " [KOSTELANETZ, p. 14]

 

      "By the 1960s," notes Robert Christopher, "Jewish writers had undeniably supplanted white southern ones as the nation's leading school of novelists; they had, in fact, come to dominate American fiction to such an extent that, as Norman Podhoretz recalls in Making It, that wayward WASP Gore Vidal was moved to complain that there was no longer room on any list of important contemporary American writers for more than one 'OK goy.'" [CHRISTOPHER, p. 228] (Symbolic to all this, in 2002 the new Jewish president of Brooklyn college, Marty Markowitz, made the news when he called an old portrait of George Washington that hung in his office "an old man" and announced that "he will probably hang a portrait of a black or a woman in his office in place of the country's first president.") [SOCKWELL-MASON/SEIFMAN, 1-16-02]

Alfred Kazin noted the arrogant Jewish displacement of the WASP intelligentsia, and rising Jewish power to frame the world to Jewish perspective , like this:

"Generally speaking, the Jewish intellectuals who since the 40's have exercised so much influence on American culture started very far back. If the young man from the provinces, as Lionel Trilling named him, typifies the encounter with the great world in 19th-century novels, it was significantly the Jewish intellectual who was now to write the key book on Matthew Arnold, the definitive biographies of Henry Adams, Henry James, James Joyce ... Just as it was Southern writers, with their knowledge of defeat and thier instinctive irony, who in the 40's spoke to the chastened American mind, so it is Jewish writers who now represent to many Americans the unreality of their prosperity and the anxiety of their condition. In situations of inestimable complexity, requiring the most 'sophisticated' and 'expert' 'analysis' of the 'complex factors,' it was often enough Jews, born and pushed to be intellectuals, who became the connoisseurs of the new chaos, the mental elite of the power age. Never was interpretation, explanation, commentary, a vital new midrash, so much needed as in the period, starting with the war, when the world was so much compressed and subtilized by the new technological revolution -- and never were there so many Jewish intellectuals prepared to do the explaining." [KAZIN, A., 1966, p. xxii]

      "Jewishness has become fashionable," wrote Jewish author Peter Schrag in 1971, "In New York, which is where most of the soapboxes are kept, it is the goy and not the Jew (or the Negro) who feels defensive. Half the major book publishers are Jewish and probably more than half of the art dealers, the music managers (booking agents, publishers, Tin Pan Alley flacks) and the senior brass of network television." [SCHRAG, p. 108]

     Gentile writer Chandler Brossard noted (in the American Jewish Committee's Commentary magazine) the trend of Jewish dominance in American "intellectual" life, and the way Jewish culture subsumed all others, as early as 1950. Brossard recognized the strong influence upon him to submit to Jewish intellectual landlords in order to succeed:

     "There is a new alienated man around. He is the Gentile intellectual in New York
     City. Hopelessly outnumbered by his Jewish colleagues on the New York
     intellectual scene, of late he has begun to feel that his back his against the wall ...
     Partly consciously, partly unconsciously, [the Gentile] starts assuming some
     of the wise style of the Jewish intellectual, to overcome what he thinks is his
     own naivete, in order to become part of the group surrounding him. The
     implications of this are almost infinite. Strange things happen. His vocabulary
     becomes spiced with Jewish inflections and expressions (his friends teach him
     the correct pronunciations: he has an increasingly strong tendency to say [the
     Yiddish term] 'nu?' instead of 'so?' His gestures become sensual, curvilinear,
     and an elaborate and necessary part of his communication. His humor becomes
     less mirthful -- so long, Mark Twain! -- and more ironic, twisted, oblique,
     and gaggy. (If he is a writer this gag quality finally gags him insofar as his
     originality is concerned). He cannot remember the last time he told a joke
     that did not involved a Jew or the Jewish point of view ... He feels, in effect,
     a kind of clown. His confusion is not helped by the fact that for the first time
     in his life he is now a member of a minority. It almost seems that he is a kind of      
     extravagance of his Jewish circle ... He wonders whether he is ever really being
     accepted; he feels that his Jewish friends do certain things for each other that
     they do not do for him. Is he at the center or the periphery? ... He often winds
     up playing straight man to his friends at a nearly all-Jewish party ... He has the
     choice now of recognizing his background and origins, his difference, and living
     accordingly, or of denying them and reshaping himself with the help, or
     proximity, of his Jewish friends. The temptation to submit to reshaping is
     strong; it is hard to be different in these surroundings." [BROSSARD, C.,
     in ROGOW, A., 1961, p. 349-353]

In a 1966 introduction to an anthology of Commentary articles, Alfred Kazin framed the central current of that journal with the declaration that Jews are the heart of world and "being Jewish" related to everything.

"It has always been natural for Protestant Americans to believe, in the words of John Jay Chapman, that 'the heart of the world is Jewish.' But after 1945 and the unparallelled, inexpressible martyrdom of the Jewish people in Europe, it was natural for non-Jews everywhere to believe, as Jews now had more reason than ever to believe, that Jewish survival and Jewish self-determination related to everything in the world. The particular distinction of Commentary among Jewish magazines has been to articulate and to support this many-sided relatedness ... [KAZIN, A., 1966, p. xxii] ... [A]s this anthology goes on to show, the Jewish art critic, essayist, economist, political observer, psychoanalyst, sociologist had only to take up aspects of contemporary experience in general to show the relevance to all this experience of his native, obstinate, questing spirit as a Jew." [KAZIN, A., 1966, p. xxii]

"It is not just that Jewishness was chic in mainstream circles," says Karen Brodkin, "It also became mainstream. Observing that J.D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth were the great American -- not great Jewish -- writers of the period, Peter Rose notes that '[f]or perhaps the first time in American literary history, the Jew became everyman and, through a curious transposition, everyman became the Jew ... Most American Jews are part of the big wide -- and white -- Establishment.' Indeed, as Neil Gabler has argued for Hollywood up to World War II, Jews helped create white Americanness." [BRODKIN, p. 142]

 

In the world of academe, Irving Horowitz centers on Jewish preeminence:

 

     "An intellectual immigration took place that changed the landscape

     of American sociology no less than that of American sociology itself ...

     The coming to American shores of [immigrant Jewish scholars] Theodore

     Abel, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Theodor Adorno, Franz Neumann, Marie

     Jahoda, to name just a few, changed the emphasis in sociology from

     civilizational issues to psychological issues ... [HOROWITZ, I., p. 75]

     Can one seriously imagine the study of sexuality without references to

     [Jews like] Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and [non-Jewish adherent to

     psychoanalytic theory] Carl G. Jung? ... Without them, there would be 

     no Helene Deutsch, or Anna Freud, or Marie Bonaparte; that is, particular

     inquiry into the nature of female sexuality ... The same holds true for

     subdisciplines like political theory. One presumes that a literate person

     has a working knowledge of the works of Hannah Arendt, Harold

     Lasswell, and Leo Strauss, among others ... It is conceivable, perhaps

     imperative, if the focus is international law versus national power, that

     one world substitute Hans Morgenthau, Hans Kohn, and Hans Kahn

     for the aforementioned trio." [HOROWITZ, I., p. 125]

 

Karen Brodkin cites another commentator about the Jewish molding of American values in broader, popular culture:

 

     "In the century of Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, and Dinah Shore, need

     we ask who but a Jew is best a packaging unwhining blonde fantasy

     figures? I don't know about you, darlings, but ever since I found out

     that Kathie Lee Gifford was nee Epstein, I don't assume anything.

     Why be surprised then, that Barbie, the ultimate shiksa goddess, was

     invented by a nice Jewish lady, Ruth Handler (with her husband

     Eliot, co-founder of Mattel?) Indeed, the famous snub-nosed plastic

     ideal with the slim hips of a drag queen is in fact named after a real

     Jewish princess from L.A., Handler's daughter, Barbara (who must

     have been hell to know in high school!) Her brother's name was Ken."

     [BRODKIN, p. 143]

 

A Jewish author, Irving Berlin, penned the famous Christian-based songs "White Christmas" and "Easter Parade." "No Christimas haters should be put off by [Jody] Rosen's title [of her book White Christmas. The Song that Changed the World], " says Jewish author Stanley Price,

"Her book is much more than just 'the story of a song.' She cleverly uses 'White Chrismas' as a focus to explore the phenonenon of Jewish assimilation into American life in the first half of the twentieth century .. As Rosen shows, in the world of entertainment and culture, it was more a take-over than an assimilation. In that golden era of musical theatre and film, almost the only truly successful gentile was Cole Porter. The Jews owned most of the theatres and almost all of the movie studios. For the Jews there was truly 'No business like show business,' another Irving Berlin hit. America has always been the most comfortable place to be Jewish, and this fascinating book emphasizes [Irving] Berlin's contribution to this process of subtle Judaisation -- what Rosen calls a 'Yankee Doodle Yiddishkeit.' Rosen quotes, as follows, from Philip Roth's 'Operation Shylock': 'God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then he gave Irving Berlin 'Easter Parade' and 'White Christmas,' the two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ -- and what does Irving Berlin do? He de-Christs them both! Easter turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow.'" [PRICE, S., 12-6-02, p. 32]

      Even the 1990s president of the board of directors of the WASP world's hallowed Miss America pageant is David Frisch.

      Ed McClanahan notes the Jewish dimensions to the Gidget surfing icon:

     "No no, not Sandra Dee or Sally Fields, nor Deborah Walley or Cindy
     Carroll or any of the legions of Gidget impersonators of the big screen or
     the small screen or even, yes, the stage. We're talking the Real Deal here,
     the original Gidget, the ur-Gidget you might say, Kathy Kohner Zuckerman
     herself, whose father, a Hollywood screenwriter named Frederick Kohner,
     wrote the hugely popular little novel ... in 1957 ... and made his daughter
     Kathy, who inspired it, a legend in the world of surfing ... The book was
     regarded as mildly scandalous in its day ('Any parents,' fulminated the
     Nebraska Farmer, 'who allow their teen-agers to talk as Gidget does
     should be soundly spanked.") Nowadays, in the era of Sex in the City,
     it seems as innocent as Rebecca at Sunnybrook Farm. Still, the Gidget
     character is a bit of a potty-mouth (it was she who brought the adjective
     'bitchen' into the language.)" [MCLANAHAN, E.]

 

      In the sexual realm, in the formation of popular American values, notes Anthony Heilbut, "The two major therapeutic changes of the sixties and seventies were ushered in by [Jewish] émigrés, Fritz Perls of Esalen and Wilhelm Reich ... Their positions have become the roots of such American phenomena as 'est' or sex therapy ... Of all Freud's disciples, Reich was the most obsessed with sexuality." [HEILBUT, p. 439] (Reich died in an American prison in 1957, held on charges of "criminal contempt" in a case involving his shipments of "orgone accumulators.")

 

    Perls was also "the founder and main figure of Gestalt therapy." [MASSON, p. 209]  At every group Gestalt therapy session, he recited the "Gestalt prayer," famous doggerel that profoundly influenced, and exemplified, 1960s-era ethics:

 

      "I do my thing and you do your thing.

       I am not in this world to live up to

             your expectations.

       And you are not in this world to live

             up to mine.

       You are you and I am I.

       And if by chance we find each other,

             it's beautiful.

        If not, it can't be helped." [MASSON, p. 209]

 

      In the 1960s, the American Jewish Committee even estimated that 40 percent of the youth who emigrated to the Haight-Ashbury Hippie Mecca in San Francisco were Jewish -- a total of about 71,000 of them. The average stay there was 3-4 months. [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 269] Jewish psychiatrist Oscar Janiger (a cousin of famous poet and counter-culture icon Allen Ginsberg -- "administered almost 3,000 doses of LSD to 1,000 volunteers. Among them were [Cary] Grant, fellow actors Jack Nicholson and Rita Moreno, author Aldous Huxley and musician Andre Previn ... Although his work predated that of LSD guru TImothy Leary, he never gained widespread recognition for it." [ASSOCIATED PRESS, 8-17-01]

 

     James Davison Hunter notes, in an article entitled When Psychotherapy Replaces Religion, one of the occupational fields that has profoundly influenced the moral climate of modern America:

 

     "When it comes to the moral life of children, the vocabulary of

     the psychologist frames virtually all public discussion. For decades

     now, contributions from philosophers and theologians have been

     muted or non-existent ... Rather, it is the psychologists, and in

     particular the developmental and educational psychologists who

     have owned this field -- in theory and in practice. All the major players

     in the last half century have been psychologists. Eric Erickson, B. F.

     Skinner, Benjamin Spock, Havighurst, Carl Rodgers, Jean Piaget,

     Abraham Maslow, Rudolph Dreikurs, William Glasser, Lawrence

     Kohlberg, Louis Rath, Sidney Simon, Jane Loevinger, Daniel

     Levinson, Robert Selman, Maurice Elias -- their assumptions,

     concepts, and paradigms have largely determined how all of us

     think about the moral lives of children, and, indeed, about moral

     life generally." [HUNTER, J.D., 2000, p. 5-22]

 

     Not surprisingly, well over half of these influential figures have been Jewish.

 

     In the field of anthropology, Jewish academic Franz Boas was the most preeminent and influential anthropologist in the early years of the twentieth century. This genre of the field absorbed and incorporated many of the premises of Freudianism. "By 1915," notes Kevin MacDonald, "the Boasians controlled the American Anthropology Association and held a two-thirds majority on its Executive Board ... By 1926 every major department of anthropology was headed by Boas' students, the majority of whom were Jewish." [MACDONALD, 1998, p. 25]  Jewish students and ideological descendants of Boas, who themselves became influential academics, included Alexander Goldenweiser, Melville Herskovits, Robert Lowie, Paul Radin, Edward Sapir, Leslie Spir, Alexander Lesser, Ruth Bunzel, Gene Weltfish, Esther Schiff Goldfrank, Ruth Landes, and Ashley Montagu [born Israel Ehrenburg]. 

 

      Sociology? A Jewish historian and social anthropologist even suggested, notes British sociologist W. S. F. Pickering, that "there is something about those characteristic virtues and viewpoints [of the influential Jewish sociologist Emil Durkheim,] which cannot be understood by gentile readers ... that only a Jew can understand him and his sociology." [PICKERING, p. 10]  (Durkheim started out in early life as a rabbinical student). "By the early 1960s," says David Hollinger, "the large numbers of Jews in sociology led to a faculty-club banter to the effect that sociology had become a Jewish discipline. In the literary world the triumph of Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, and J. D. Salinger led Leslie Fiedler to hail the great takeovers by Jewish-American writers of a task 'inherited from certain Gentile predecessors.'" [HOLLINGER, p. 28]

 

        Even some academics who aren't publicly reckoned to be Jewish are Jewish. As Hershel Shanks notes,

 

     "I think of a teacher of mine long ago, one of the most eminent

     sociologists in the country -- Robert King Merton. Even when I

     was studying with him at Columbia University in the 1950s, there

     were rumors that he was Jewish. Recently -- he is nearly 90 --

     he came out. He was born Meyer Schkolnick." [SHANKS, H., 2000,

     p. 16]

 

      "Jews found sociology attractive," noted Family member Nathan Glazer in 1994, 'It was particularly attractive to those who were socialists ... In time the Jewish newcomers became the dominant figures in sociology. Concurrently, they abandoned their early radicalism." [GLAZER, DECOMPOSITION, p. 4]  After World War II, notes Irving Horowitz, "young scholars came from other walks of life into sociology ... The field soon became populated by Jews to such a degree that jokes abounded: one did not need the synagogue, the minyan [the minimum number of Jewish men necessary to hold religious services] was to be found in sociology departments; or one did not need a sociology of Jewish life, since the two had become synonymous." [HOROWITZ, I., p. 77]

     Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter note Jewish radical political dominance in a range of academic subworlds:

     "Within academia, Jewish faculty sparked revolts against the 'establishment'
     in their professions, struggling to turn them in directions of direct political
     action. In the American Political Science Association, for example, the
     the membership of the Caucus for a New Politics, a radical activist group,
     was initially overwhelmingly Jewish. (Jews were also heavily represented on
     the 'liberal' opposition Ad Hoc Committee, but here they constituted no more
     than about half of a highly fluctuating and informal membership).
          The same pattern emerged in the Modern Language Association, where
     the radical caucus was led by Louis Kampf and Paul Lauter, both of
     Jewish background. The Union of Radical Political Economists also
     initially contained a disproportionate number of individuals of Jewish
     background. While William Appleman Williams, the dean of the group,
     was not Jewish, a majority of the leading cold war revisionists among
     historians were (Alperowitz, Kolko, Horowitz, etc.). The largest number
     of those radical educators and writers on education who argued that
     American education was linked to capitalism's need to keep lower
     classes (including blacks) in their place were also of Jewish background
     (e.g., Herbert Gintis, Donald and Beatrice Gross, Jonathan Kozol,
     Edgar Z. Friedenberg, Herbert Kohl, Charles Weingartner, Gerald
     Weisntein). The same thing was true in sociology ..." [ROTHMAN/
     LICHTER, 1982, p. 104-105]

 

      In this growing context of Jewish pre-eminence throughout academia, Richard Hofstadter already felt secure enough in 1963 to write that

 

     "Catholic scholars and writers tend to be recognized belatedly by their

      co-religionists, when they are recognized at all. All this concerns, of

      course, not so much the anti-intellectualism of American Catholicism as

      its cultural impoverishment, its non-intellectualism."

      [HOFSTADTER, p. 140]

 

      Hofstadter, who obviously basked in his many Jewish cultural treasures, also turned for solace to his own identity chauvinism to attack the then-current beatnik movement for its own "anti-intellectualism." Looking past the Beat's moralist, populist, non-materialist, and oft-times Zen worldviews, Hofstadter said that "the beatniks have repudiated the path of intellectualism ... to [live] lives of inverted sainthood, marked by an acceptance of poverty, and their willingness to do without the usual satisfaction of a career and a regular income ... The movement seems unable to rise above its adolescent inspiration." [HOFSTADTER, p. 421]  In 1998, Jewish American professor Jules Chametsky was commissioned to edit a new Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature. "One could argue," says Chametsky, "that without African-Americans and Jews, popular culture would be very thin indeed in America." [CARNEY, p. 22] (With a different set of cultural dominators, one wonders, would it not have been "thin," but something else?) Noting a 1922 novel by Jewish German author Hugo Bettauer (The City Without Jews), Jewish author Michael Brenner excudes the same arrogance and elitism about Jewish cultural dominance of pre-Nazi German culture:

      "As a city without Jews, Bettauer's Vienna soon becomes a dull and boring place
       where rough woolens are declared the latest style of fashion, the state economy is
       overburdened with debts, the currency loses its value, and intellectual discussion
       and cultural activities are defined by the low standard of the surrounding peasant
        population." [GRUNFELD, F., 1996, p. xvii] [By whose criteria are such standards
        "low?"]

 

      The shoving aside of non-Jewish writers and thinkers, and non-Jewish traditions and history, by empowered Jewish particularists has been for decades vigorously undertaken. "One thing did matter to somebody like me, classified as a WASP writer," wrote Edward Hoagland in Commentary, "This was being told in print and occasionally in person that I and my heritage lacks vitality, that except perhaps for a residual arrogance the vitality had long since been squeezed dry, if it had ever in fact existed in this thin blood of mine. I was a museum piece, like some state-of-Mainer, because I could field no ancestor who had hawked tin pots in a Polish shtetl [Jewish village]." [HOAGLAND, p. 62]

     One of the Jewish characters in prominent Jewish poet Delmore Schwartz's prose pieces even proclaimed:

     "My ancestors, in whom I take pride, but not personal pride, were scholars,
     poets, prophets and students of God when most of Europe worshipped
     sticks and stones; not that I hold that against any of you, for it is not your
     fault if your forebears were barbarians groveling and groping about for peat
     or something." [ATLAS, J., 1977, p. 166]

 

     One of the many results of all this kind of Jewish-enforced revisionism was a 1970 volume, The New Novel in America, subtitled The Kafkan Mode in Contemporary Fiction, which featured all Jewish writers except mention of some Gentiles in a final chapter addressed to "Minor American Novelists." [KOSTELANETZ, p. 27]  An intriguing insight on Kafka comes from Clement Greenberg:

 

      "Kafka's own awareness of what he intuited about the Jewish condition

       through his fiction also explains why he became a Zionist ... Kafka ...

       presented the Gentile world and Gentile history as a trap for the likes

       of him and his ... [Kafka's] heroes  ... could, with very few exceptions,

       win out only at the last moments and only by destroying completely

       completely the fabric of the kind of reality in which they are embedded.

       For that reality, and that reality alone, is their enemy." [GREENBERG,

       p. 270]

 

      (This perspective, of course, is not only Zionist but the absolute paradigm for Orthodox Judaism, that is, at the end of time -- in Greenberg's last  "moments" -- Gentile society will be destroyed and Jews, who cannot ever be free in galut, will prevail over their historical nemeses).

 

      Even earlier, in the 1950s, says Richard Kostelanetz, "[Jewish authors] Mordechai Richler was the most lauded Canadian writer, Don Jacobson and A. Alvarez as the most touted Englishmen, and Harold Rosenberg as the chief expert on 'the New.'" [KOSTELANETZ, p. 28] With the publication of Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, in 1971 Peter Schrag delighted in noting that "a few months after it was published an editor in New York rejected a manuscript with a note that 'no one is interested in reading novels about WASPS.'" [SCHRAG, p. 110]

 

     In due time, there were Jews -- heralding the chauvinist core of their mythic past -- who were declaring that even the English language wasn't good enough for them. "I am intrigued," wrote poet Joel Rosenberg in 1971, "with the possibility of Judaizing the English language." [ROSENBERG, J., p. 170] "I feel cramped," decided Cynthia Ozick, "I have come to it with notions it is too parochial to recognize. A language, like a people, has a history of ideas, but not all ideas: only those known to its experience. Not surprisingly, English is a Christian language. When I write in English, I live in Christendum." [EISEN, p. 167]  "One need only call to mind Cynthia Ozick," says Jewish critic Mark Schechner, "currently the most prominent writer associated with the revolt against secular rationalism, to understand that her eminence in our literature, in our culture, portends something of a fairly large movement. In her own mind, and in ours, she symbolizes a distinct movement toward revival of forms of Jewish consciousness which, if not identical to halakhah [Jewish religious law] are certainly unthinkable without it." [in SHAPIRO, M., p. 89]

 

      "Having no longer to defend themselves from real or imagined charges of parochialism," wrote Jewish critic Ruth Wisse in 1976, "the new Jewish writers of the 70s are free to explore the 'trivial' and particularist aspects of Judaism, and even, turning the tables, to speculate on the restrictive limits of English as a literary language." [WALDEN, p. xiii]

 

      By the 1960s and 1970s, notes Harold Wechsler and Paul Ritterband, Jewish scholars and intellectuals were "moved by emotions ... particularly deriving from the Holocaust and the establishment of the state of Israel, to ... explore the Jewish component in their studies of Persian literature or Gregorian chants or Renaissance art." [WECHSLER, p. 282] By 1986 there was enough interest in Jewish religious roots for a Jewish scholar to author an entire volume about "Apocalyptic Messianism and Contemporary Jewish-American Poets." Some of the poets who qualify for this genre, according to Davka, a Jewish ethnic magazine, include:

     David Antin, Edward Ash, David Avidan, John Bennett, Asa Benviniste, Amy Blank,
     Stanley Burnshaw, T. Camri, Neeli Cherkovsky (Neeli Cherry), Andrei Codrescu,
     Leonard Cohen, Richard Culter, Endi Dame, Ben Deutschman, Jacob and Rose
     Drachler, Richard Edelman, Julie Ellis, Mullah Epstein, Marcia Falk, Walter Field,
     Robert Friend, Harold Gershowitz, Allen Ginsberg, Doris Gold, Paul Goodman, Judith      Goven, Ted Gottfried, Carolyn Haddad, Jack Hirschman, Frances Horowitz,
     Benn Howard, Edmund Jabes, Rodger Kamentz, Walter Kaufmann, Abba Kovner,
     Tuli Kuperberg, David Kupferman, Irving Layton, Emma Lazarus, Harris Lenowitz,
     Denise Levertov, D. A. Levy, Dalia Meltzer, Samuel Menashe, Susan Mernit,
     Deena Metzger, Robert Mezey, Ruth Mintz, Sholom Gorevwitz, Ed Ochester,
     Aicheal Palmer, Stuart Perkoff, Marge Piercy, William Pillin, Dahlia Ravikovitch,
     Charles Reznioff, Edouard Roditi, Isaac Ronch, David Rosenberg, Janet
     Rosenberg, Jerome Rothenberg, Muriel Rukeyser, Nelly Sacks, John Sanford,
     Stuart Schoenberg, Howard Schwartz, Eva Shaltiel, Harvey Shapiro, John
     Silkin, Maurya Simon, David Slabotsky, Carl Solomon, Elaine Starkman,
     Julia Stein, Nathaniel Tarn, Malka Tussman, David Weissbort, David Weissman,
     J. Rutherford Willems, Jerry Winston, Bob Witz, Alla Wlebbott, Karl Young,
     Harold Norse, and Natan Zach.
     [http://www.davka.org/what/text/poetrycollectionbiblio.html and Twice Blessed
     online gay and Jewish page]

      "In a single characteristic year," wrote Roger Kahn in 1968, "one careful researcher compiled a list of 'books of Jewish interest in America.' Marginalia were discarded; the list totaled 258. Where books lead, critics follow. Jewish critics proliferated so freely that one writer has made a most curious charge. He argues that Jewish novelists prosper because of the praise of Jewish critics." [KAHN, R., p. 6]

 

     James Shapiro is a Jewish professor in the esoteric field of the English Renaissance, "a culture deeply infused with Christianity." "For years," he noted in 1996, "I'd look around and see that many of the leading scholars of the early modern period were Jews." [WINKLER, K., 1996, 2-2-96, p. A15] Shapiro's narcissistic Jewish ethnocentrism, and exploration of his Jewish roots, eventually led him to decide that "at a time when many writers were trying to reinvent what it means to be English, the English increasingly defined themselves by what they were not. I would argue that the English were obsessed with the Jews." Shapiro, noted journalist Karen Winkler, "admits freely a deeply personal stake in this argument. It is a way for him to confront his own relationship to Jewish history." "I realized," said Shapiro, "that I'm both a professor of English and a Jew, and I wanted to know how my people had shaped the culture I was studying." [WINKLER, K., 1996, p. A8]

 

     Likewise, Natalie Zeman Davis, a Princeton professor and "one of the leading scholars of early modern Europe," remarked that

 

     "I'm Jewish, and I see putting the Jews back into the main story of

     Europe as a way to tikkun, a word that means to repair. I've come to

     feel it as a way to repair the Nazi effort to efface the Jews of

     Europe." [WINKLER, K., 2-2-96, p. A15]

Judith Arcana notes Jewish poet/prose writer Grace Paley's sudden realization that she had to write about things explicitly Jewish: "Then, one evening, someone read a story at [Paley's] house, a story that 'was on Jewish themes,' and she 'all of a sudden felt that somehow I was given permission to write, by that story' ... Her earliest stories included 'The Contest' with its unforgettable 'Jews in the News' puzzle series, and 'The Loudest Voice,' in which a whole neighborhood of first and second generation immigrant Jews debates the required celebrations of Christmas in their children's school pageant." [ARCANA, J., 1993, p. 85]

 

     Increased Jewish fascination with "Jewishness" and Jewish Orthodoxy,  coupled with Jewish dominance in the publishing industry, recently created in the 1990s for novelist Nathan Englander (age 28) a unique opportunity. Englander, raised as an Orthodox Jew, was "discovered" by Lois Rosenthal, the editor of the journal Story. The Knopf publishing firm offered Englander $350,000 for a book of stories about life among Orthodox Jews, "an astonishing sum," notes the Boston Globe, "for an unknown writer's first work -- for the collection [of stories] and a novel not yet written. Suddenly this spring's deal catapulted the Jerusalem bachelor into literary stardom." [ROCHMAN, p. C6]

 

     Along the same theme, in 1994 Publishers Weekly announced the winner of the HarperCollins "get-published" contest, noting that:

 

     "Advertised on the back of Olivia Goldsmith's novel The Bestseller, the

      contest attracted an amazing 7,000 entries." The lucky winner selected

      was Dalia Rabinovich whose book was a Latin magic-realist tale inspired

      by her Jewish grandparents immigration to Colombia." [QUINN, p. 113]

 

     Two years later the same journal noted major publishing interest in -- of all things --  Holocaust cookbooks:

 

       "For a small press title, In Memory's Kitchen: A Legacy from the

        Women of Terezin, edited by Cara De  Silva, translated by Bianca

        Steiner Brown and published in September by Judaica publisher

        Jason Aronson, has received some incredible publicity: articles in

        Newsweek and USA Today, a November 17 full-page review in the

        New York Times Book Review and a People review expected to hit

        today. And now this unusual piece of Holocaust literature, a collection

        of recipes written (some on scraps of Nazi material) as legacy and life-

        affirming defiance by women in the Czech death camp Terezin, has

        received major trade house recognition: it will become a Delta trade

        paperback next September." [QUINN, J., p. 243]

     Then there are the likes of recovering heroin addict and famous author Elizabeth Wurtzel. Her first book, Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America "immediately became a national best seller when it was published in the United States in 1995 ... Overnight she became a poster child for Generation X ... She was paid a half-million dollars advance for her second book, Bitch. In Praise of Difficult Women ... Her mother frets over her tendency to date shaygetzes (non-Jews), nevertheless insisting her mother has nothing to worry about because 'I feel so Jewish ... I am very proud of being Jewish.'" [WENIG, G., 1999, p. 58-61]

 

      By the 1990s, note David Desser and Lester Friedman,

 

       "Critics usually interpret a Jewish author's direct denial of ethnic

       influence as a conscious evasion, a personal blind spot, or a

       psychological problem; more frequently, they ignore denials in

       favor of analyzing the work, not listening to the author. Scholars

       even scrutinize these novels, poems, and short stories lacking

       Jewish characters and having little apparent relationship to Jewish

       culture for Jewish points of view, attitudes toward characters,

       and thematic selection ... the underlying critical assumption is

       that the work of a Jewish writer must either overtly or covertly

       reflect a Jewish sensibility." [DESSER, p. 4-5]

     In 2001, the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles noted the increasing predominance of Jewish authors and Jewish themes in mainstream publishing:

     "It's time to make rom for a newer generation of American Jewish writers, many
     of whom are young women who have not even hit 30. Their debut novels on
     Jewish themes are earning large advances, garnering stellar reviews and reaching
     best seller lists ... Daisy Maryles, executive publisher of Publishers Weekly, the
     news magazine of publishing and bookselling, agrees: 'Writers are a lot less
     self-conscious of their Judaism,' she says. 'They are using their own experiences
     to illustrate their relationship to the world at large and to their tradition ... The
     interest in Jewish themes may be part of the wave of multiculturalism --from
     African American to Asian American -- that has captured public imagination ...
     Three themes predominate in contemporary Jewish fiction, says [Gail] Hochman
      [an agent with Brandt and Brandt Literary Agents]: the legacy of the Holocaust,
     survival in Israel or living in the secular world as a practicing Jew ... Laura
     Matthews, senior editor at Putnam, calls it 'curious but coincidental' that she
     has just published two books with Jewish subthemes .. The 200-plus Jewish
     book fairs held during November and December capitalize on the demand
     for Jewish writers ... But, notes [Carolyn Starman] Hessel, [director of the
     Jewish Book Council], the audience for these books reaches beyond the
     Jewish market. What Jewish women have to say is of interest to the American
     public. [Jewish novelist Susan] Isaacs agrees. 'If we're willing to read novels
     about medieval monks a la 'The Name of the Rose' or Agatha Christie's Miss
     Marple series, about a little Anglican lady in a small town in England, then
     why shouldn't we read about American Jews?" [MUSLEAH, R., JUNE 2001]
     [Specifically noted in the article as illustrations of this increase are Jewish novelists
     Nomi Eve, Myla Goldberg, Anita Diamant, Cheryl Sucher, Katie Singer, Simone
     Zelitch, Fran Dorf, Ruth Knafo Setton, and Susan Isaacs].

 

      Many, many Jews are afforded prominence in modern literature and are thereby subject to such scrutiny by fellow Jews. In the best-selling -- often sensationalist and sleazy -- realm are the names of Danielle Steel, Jacqueline Susann, and Judith Krantz. Danielle Steel married Claude-Eric Lazard, grandson of a partner of a famous international French Jewish banking firm. Judith Krantz, who has sold eighty million books in fifty languages, "is the third largest-selling female novelist in history ... She writes about fascinating women, beauty, fame, money, and sex ... She does try to make some serious points and has woven such images as anti-Semitism and the German occupation in her novels." [HYMAN]  Ms. Krantz was introduced to her future husband -- Steven Krantz (eventual director of programming for Columbia Pictures Television) --  by Jewish broadcaster Barbara Walters. "Wherever you go," says Krantz,

 

     "you carry your Jewishness with you, if you want to. I wanted to ...

     [I] would have enjoyed it more if [my sons] married Jewish women.

     Just to continue. Jews have been around for so many thousands of years,

     I hate to think of a world without Jews. Jews contribute so much talent to

     the world, so much spice. What will happen to the talent? Who will play

     the violin?" [BRAWARSKY, S., 6-26-2000, p. 39]

     Krantz's brother Jeremeny Tarcher "became the first and best publisher of New Age books in the United States." [KRANTZ, J., 2000, p. 147] Krantz's autobiography (Sex and Shopping. The Confessions of a Nice Jewish Girl) has a firm foundation of Jewish interconnection to fame, fortune, and power:

     "My parents were deeply involved in Jewish philanthropies, often spending four
     four nights a week at various meetings [p. 11] ... Well-known [Jewish] fashion
     fashion photographer [Milton Greene] and I became good friends ... It was
     a world of interrelationships. Milton's ex-wife, Evelyn, was engaged to [famous
     Jewish portrait photographer] Dick Avedon ... Later, when I became a fashion
     editor, I was always galvanized when we worked together ... [My sister]
     Mimi became engaged to a man named David Karney, an Israeli whose father
     was the real-estate 'Rockefeller' of Israel ... [Later] Mimi and David were living
     in Los Angeles, where he was beginning a magnificent career as a builder [p. 128-129]
     ... [Jewish friend Andre Sussman changed his named to Surmain and 'became
     the owner of Lutece, which instantly became the very best, most famous French
     restaurant in New York [p. 147] ... A friend named Selig Alkon ... called and
     asked if I wanted to go away with a group of other people for the weekend
     of the Fourth ... We were planning to go with Selig's first cousin, Barbara
     Walters [Krantz's husband, Steve, was at one point their boss at
     'NBC's flagship station, WNBT.' [p. 160] .... [In New York] we were part
     of an interesting group of young couples, many of them involved in the
     art world, such as Aaron Shikler and his wife Pete. Aaron .. painted Jackie
     and Jack Kennedy for their White House portraits ... There was David Levine,
     the now-legendary caricaturist ... None of them were as rich as Joanne and
     Alfred Stern, whose money came from Sears Roebuck via Al's mother ...
     Many of the others lived in the most magnificent East Side apartments, like
     Barbara ... and Jerry Goldsmith ... Among other acquaintances were a
     lawyer, Mort Jankow, and his wife, Linda, who was a granddaughter of
     Harry Warner, of Warner Brothers. Mort later became my agent. [p. 208-209]
     ... In New York, through Jack La Vien [a common form of Levine], a friend
     of [husband] Steve's, we became members of an exclusive club that dominated
     the chic New York disco scene [p. 221]" [KRANTZ, J., 2000]

     Krantz's early publisher was Jewish (Nat Wartel at Crown), as was Wartel's executive editor, Larry Freundlich. [p. 252] "Sylvia Wallace, [Jewish novelist] Irving's wife," writes Krantz, "gave me invaluable advice [when arriving to meet her first publisher]: 'Remember, you travel only by limo,' she said, in the voice of experience." [p. 252] Freundlich gave Krantz's novel (Scruples) to Jewish Warners Books mogul Howard Kaminsky, who paid half a million dollars for it. [p. 254] Krantz worked with Crown Public Relations execs Bruce Harry and Nancy Kahane. Crown's local Los Angeles rep was Ernie Greenspan. [p. 261] During her first book promotion tour, "the best moment was on a television show [in Minneapolis] run by a famous local host, Henry Wolf." [p. 272] "The day after Easter Sunday, [friend] Nancy and I had lunch with Leo Lerman, fabled editor of Vogue." [p. 276] "I had a new editor now, a woman I'd only met once, in passing, whose name was Carole Baron." [p. 288] "When the phone rang it was Howard Kaminsky, president of Warner Books, who had published Scruples in paperback. Howard was a very bright and funny fellow, [Jewish film director and comedian] Mel Brook's first cousin." [p. 288] Krantz's novel Mistral "was quickly bought for France by Edition Stock, whose publisher, Jean Rosenthal, as it happened, had translated my other novels into French." [p. 313] "Leo Lerman of Vogue insisted that I call a friend of his named Sybille Gaussen. 'She knows everybody and everything' he told me." [p. 323] "Polly Guggenheim, a sculptor who'd lived in Paris most of her life, became our guide into the art world." [p. 324] "I spent most of my time working on Manhattan on the Salzmann's kitchen table." [p. 334] [KRANTZ, J., 2000]

     "Soon after the success of Daisy [one of her early novels]," Krantz says, in providing a lesson in what she calls "Jewish Geography":

     "Nat Wartels sold Crown to Random House, which was owned by Si Newhouse,
      one of the richest men in America. On my next trip to New York, this unknown
      billionaire gave a dinner party to welcome me, inviting only executives from Crown
      and Random House. He and Bob Bernstein, who was his second-in-command at
      the time, quizzed me, a total stranger, trying to get a grip exactly who this strange
       Californian was besides being a successful novelist.
      'So where did you go to high school?' Bob began.
      'Birch Warthen.'
      'My God, did you know my cousin, Alice Bernstein?'
      'Well, of course I did, we graduated in the same class,' I answered
      'What did you do after college?' Si wanted to know.
      'I worked for Herb Mayes at Good House [Keeping]."
      'Herb? I've known him all my life. A great man' was Si's response.
      'My father was one of his best friends,' I said modestly, 'and Alex is one of my oldest
       and dearest friends,' I added, knowing full well that Si had dated their daughter, Alex, at
       one point her life, and that Mitzi Newhouse, his mother, and Grace Mayes were friends
      Both men's faces beamed with relief. An absolutely perfect game of Jewish Geography
       had just been beautifully played and I had been squarely identified as a highly
       credentialed,  super-nice New York Jewish girl, no potentially oddball California exotic."
      [KRANTZ, J., 2000, p. 303]

 

      Bruce J. Friedman's novels, says one Jewish critic,  usually "center on Jews alienated from Christian America and ignorant of their own roots." [WALDEN, p. 70] Alvin Toffler (Future Shock) is Jewish as is Studs Terkel.  A mere sampling of other Jewish novelists and prose writers includes Ayn Rand (Alisa Rosenbaum), Nathaniel West (Nathaniel Weinstein), Harold Robbins (Harold Rubin), and science fiction authors Isaac Asimov ("As far as I know, I was the first science fiction writer of note [of Jewish descent] who used his own name.") [ASIMOV, I., 1974, p. 2], William Tenn, Carol Carr, Robert Silverberg, Horace Gold, Pamela Sargent, Robert Sheckley, and Harlan Ellison.

     "Two of the best science fiction writers of the 1930s," says Isaac Asimov, in reflections of his career, "were Stanley G. Weinbaum and Nat Schachmer, both Jewish. (Weinbaum published for only a year and a half, during which he immediately established himself as the most popular science fiction writer in America, before dying tragically of cancer while still in his thirties." [ASIMOV, I., 1994, p. 16] Martin Greenberg owned Gnome Press (an early publisher of Asimov's works) Many authors complained of being exploited by this publisher. (ASIMOV, I., 1994, p. 415-416) There was later a second Martin Greenberg (Martin Harry Greenberg). This "Marty," says Asimov, "has become so famous in science fiction that the name Martin Greenberg now applies only to him." [ASIMOV, I., 1994, p. 416] By early 1990s, Martin Harry Greenberg had "published nearly four hundred anthologies, and there is no question that he is far and away the most prolific and, in addition, the best anthologist the world has ever seen." [ASIMOV, I., 1994, p. 419] Joel Davis also "had two fiction magazines, both mystery -- Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchock's Mystery Magazine." He also started "Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine" (IASFM). (The main competitors were [Jewish?] Ben Bova's Analog and Edward Ferman's F&SF (Fantasy and Science Fiction). [ASIMOV, I., 1994, p. 422-423]

     The Cleveland Jewish News had this to say about the science fiction investigations of Jewish American English professor Batya Weinbaum:

      "Existing in two worlds is a also a theme of science fiction written by immigrant
      Jews in the early part of the 20th century, says Weinbaum. Jews, she explained,
       dominated the science-fiction field in those days ... Another [Jewish author]
       Weinbaum is fascinated with is Leslie F. Stone, nee Leslie Rubenstein. Like
      many Jewish sci-fi writers at the time, Stone used an Anglo-Saxon pseudonym
      to conceal her Jewish ethnicity ... Many other Jewish writers of the '30s, including
      Nat Schachner, Moses Schere and Bernard Sachs, wrote similar futuristic stories
       about dictators, political parties and assimilation. Stanley Weinbaum's ... "The
       Adaptive Ultimate' ... is yet another tale drawing from the Jewish immigrant
      experience of cultural assimilation ... Prof. Weinbaum also credits Stanley
      Weinbaum and Stone with the creation of the 'sympathetic alien, a kind,
      intelligent creature who helped people. This was a far cry from the 'bug-eyed beasts'
       of H.G. Wells, whose only goal was to eradicate humanity. Many of these
      tales were published in anthologies by another Jew, Hugo Gernsback, whom
       Weinbaum calls 'the father of sci-fi.'" [GUTH, D., 2000, p. 108-]

 

     Irving Stone (Irving Tennenbaum) is Jewish, as is Saul Bellow, Abraham Cahan, Arthur Cohen, E. L. Doctorow, J.D. Salinger, Isaac Asimov, Bruce J. Friedman, Dorothy Parker (half-Jewish), Herbert Gold, Paul Goodman, Joseph Heller, Stanley Kunitz, Meyer Levin, Bernard Malamud, Hugh Nissenson, Cynthia Ozick, Howard Fast, Ellery Queen (a fictitious detective created by Daniel Nathan and Manford Nepofsky), Laura Riding Jackson (Laura Reichenthal), Grace Paley, Chaim Potok, Norma Rosen, Hortense Calisher, Gertrude Stein, Henry Roth, Marge Piercy, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Erica Jong, Philip Roth, Delmore Schwartz, Constance Rourke, Leo Rosten, Gerald Stern, Mary Antin, Judith Rossner, Edward Lewis Wallant, Jerome Weidman, Leon Uris, E.M. Broner, Stanley Elkin, Daniel Fuchs, Harry Kellerman, Edward Dahlberg, Jonathan Kozol, Ira Levin, S.J. Perelman, Meyer Levin, Edward Lewis Wallant, Irving Faust, Francis Ann Leibowtiz, Michael Gold, Irving Stone, Irving Wallace, Herman Wouk, Irwin Shaw, Sidney Sheldon, Bernard Schlink, Alan Isler, Steven Bloom, David Margolis, Charles Powers (also a former Eastern European bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times), and Anzia Yezierska.

 

     Further Jewish women writers include Ann Roiphe, Alison Lurie, Gloria Goldreich, Rosellen Brown, Julie Ellis, Faye Kellerman, Susan Isaac, Amanda Cross, Naomi Regan, Gail Parent, Louise Blecher Rose, Susan Lukas, Myrna Blythe, Marie Brenner, Sandra Harmon, Sue Kaufman, Rebecca Goldstein, Roberta Silman, Alix Kates Shulman, Daphne Merkin, Vivian Gornick, Rochelle Krich, Marissa Piesman, Batya Gur, Serita Stevens, Rayanne Moore, Carolyn Haddad, Rhoda Lerman, Rona Jaffe, Bel Kaufman, Nora Ephron, Joyce (Glassman) Johnson, Johanna Kaplan, Ilona Karmel, Shirley Kaufman, Irene Klepfiscz, Edith Konecky, Emma Lazarus (who wrote the poem 'The New Colossos' inscribed on the State of Liberty and became a Zionist covert in 1881), [SYRKIN, M., 1964, p. 228] Karen Malpede, Emily Mann, Leslea Newman, Allegra Goodman, Joanne Greenberg, Bette Howland, Fannie Hurst ("known in her era as the highest paid writer in the world") [ANTLER, J., 1997, p. 145(e)], E. M. Broner, Rosellen Brown, Edna Ferber, Kim Chernin, Susan Yankowitz, Helen Yglesia, Ann Birstein, Francise Prose, Nesa Rappaport, Tora Reich, Norma Rosen, Lore Siegel, Jo Sinclair, Tess Slesinger, Adele Weissman, Alice Munro, Bella Spewack, Elizabeth Swados, Ruth Whitman, Emma Wolf, and Lynn Sharon Schwartz. Judith Viorst, wife of prominent journalist Milton Viorst and for six years a student at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, has authored nearly 50 volumes. [BEAL, E., 1997, p. 36]  In the popular romance genre, Jewish authors include Cynthia Freeman, Belva Plains, Julie Ellis, and Iris Rainer Dart.

     Edna Ferber, "author of Giant, Show Boat, and the Pulitzer prize-winning novel So Big, attributed her success to having been born a Jew. 'Being a Jew makes it tougher to get on,' she commented, 'and I like that.'" [ANTLER, J., 1997, p. 140(e)] "Modernist" author Gertrude Stein "admired Jews' 'clan feeling' and their high 'ethical and spiritual nature.' It is widely believed that she survived World War II with her lover, Alice B. Toklas (another California German Jew), because of her relationship with the [French] Vichy regime." [ANTLER, J., 1997, p. 140(e)]

 

     When Jewish novelist Anne Michaels' friend ran across yet another volume about a familiar subject, he complained about "another book on the Holocaust," not knowing that her own new work focused on the same theme. [Brawarsky, S., 1998, p. 29]  Carl Djerassi, a Jewish Stanford University scientist who is considered the "father" of the birth control pill, also writes novels. His most recent, Menachem's Seed, "ponders how a non-Jewish woman who impregnates herself with an Israeli sperm can ensure her child will be born Jewish." [PEARL, L., 1997, p. 34]

 

     "Do we need another ex-junkie from New York publishing autobiographical novels about sex, violence, and death?" wondered the [London] Guardian in 1999. The reference was to Joel Rose's new novel, "Kill Kill Faster Faster," described even by the author as a "genre novel -- pulp shit." Rose, of Hungarian Jewish heritage, is a former TV writer for Kojak, Miami Vice, and McMillan and Wife. [GIBB, 1999, p. T18]

 

      Judy Blume is a best-selling author of children's books. Ever busy socializing children against Christian tradition, Blume notes that "I had letters from angry parents accusing me of ruining Christmas forever because of a chapter in Superfudge called 'Santa Who?'" [BLUME, p. 65] In 1986 a children's book called An American Tail was published. "A Steven Spielberg Production," it was originally an animated movie. Lavishly illustrated, the newly invented fairy tale focuses upon the Jewish Mousekewitz family, a group of mice in late 19th century Russia. Both book and film socialize young children to the persecution myths of Jewish identity (depicted here as harmless, innocent mice), while broadly stereotyping the entire non-Jewish community in Eastern Europe as a realm of bloodthirsty monsters. Beneath an image of three cats with Russian style handlebar moustaches, saliva dripping from their teeth, all creeping along next to what appears to be a Nazi (the viewer only sees his black boots and brown pants) the fairy tale reads:

 

         "Suddenly, the houses began to jump and shake. The sound of horses'

     hooves clattering through the town and shouts of terrified people made

     all the mice tremble with fear.

         'The Cossacks! The Cossacks!'

         In those days, from time to time, Cossacks would gallop through

     the Jewish villages of Russia, burning homes and temples, destroying

     everything in their path. In the same kind of way, cat-Cossacks, known

     as Catsacks, would race through the tiny Russian mouse villages,

     burning and demolishing the little mouse homes and capturing whole

     mouse families as they ran from their flaming houses out into the

     snow." [KINGSLEY, p. 10]

 

      Other Jewish authors in the children's market include Paula Danziger, Allen Pace Nilson, Robert Lipsyte, and E. L. Konigsburg, among others.

 

      In 1999, recognizing the market and the times, a coffee-table photography book entitled "The Jewish writer" came out by photographer Jill Krementz. [George Gilbert's history of Jewish photographers claims her as Jewish; GILBERT, p. 60] Well connected in the literary world, her editorial dilemma, noted the Jewish Bulletin, was that there was not enough space in her proposed book for all 78 images of Jewish authors she had collected. [FAINGOLD, 1999, p. 41A]

 

      Going to Miami? Jewish journalist Hillel Italie noted in 2000 that Mitch Kaplan is chairman of the Miami Book Festival, "one of the oldest and most influential literature festivals in the United States." [ITALIE, 2000]  Attending a program at the famous Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church on the Bowery in Manhattan? Since 1987 the director of the organization has been Ed Friedman. (Joel Oppenheimer headed it earlier, beginning in 1966.) Wondering who might be the "literary executor" of famed non-Jewish poet W. H. Auden? Edward Mendelson. [MENDELSON, E., 1982, DUST JACKET] Going traveling with a Frommers guide? Arthur Frommer is Jewish. Using a Lasser income tax guide? J. K. Lasser is also Jewish. [ETKES/STADTMAUER, 1995, p. 172-173] Need a Berlitz language guide? It too is Jewish-founded. Editor-in-chief of Webster's New World dictionaries, major gauge of the English language, from 1948 to 1985? Also Jewish: David Guranlnick. [KIRSCHNER, S., 9-14-2000, p. 11]

 

     However restricted, oppressed, marginalized, and unrewarded Jewish women are supposed to be, "in sheer numbers, some 200 titles produced in the twentieth century since the first text was published in 1912 are identifiable as Jewish-American women's biographies -- that is, those in which ethnicity and gender are significant touchstones for the writer's identification and (self) creation." [SHOLLAR, B.] Prominent Jews who have held prominence in the feminist field include Bella Abzug, Phyllis Chesler, Gloria Steinem, Vivian Gornick, Robin Morgan, Susan Brownwiller, Shulamith Firestone, Andrea Dworkin, Meredith Tax, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, and Naomi Weisstein, to headline a long list. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese is half-Jewish. Jews have also been extremely prominent in lesbian activism. "[Jews] have been told that they control everything," noted Jewish lesbian Irene Klepfisz in 1982, "and so when they are in the spotlight, they have been afraid to draw attention to their Jewishness. For these women, the number of Jews active in the movement is not a source of pride, but rather a source of embarrassment, something to be played down, something to be minimized." [KLEPFISZ, I., 1982, p. 47]

      Jewish women, noted Ann Roiphe in 1981, "form a ridiculously high percentage of the women's movement." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 148] "Carolyn Stoloff concluded in a study of the backgrounds of those active in the woman's liberation movement among graduate students at the Univeristy of Michigan. She discovered that, of those whose religious background could be ascertained, almost 58 percent were Jewish." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 109] About half of a 1999 issue of Biography magazine's 25 Most Powerful Women in the business and social world "were either Jewish or had Jewish parents." [SILBIGER, S., 2000, p. 24] "Like [Betty Friedan], many of the leaders and theorists of the 1960s feminists had been Jews, albeit largely secular, unidentified ones." [ANTLER, p. 260]  "Friedan," notes Joyce Antler, "used the language of the Holocaust [in her texts about women's liberation] not merely as a metaphor, or as a tactic to shock readers, but because she had already made the connection between the oppression of women and that of Jews." [ANTLER, p. 261]

 

      David Horowitz adds something else about Friedan (Friedman):

 

     "Her infamous description of America's suburban family household

     as a 'comfortable concentration camp,' in The Feminine Mystique,

     probably had more to do with her Marxist hatred for America than

     for her own experience as a housewife and mother. Her husband,

     Carl, also a leftist, once complained to a reporter in 1970 that, far

     from being a homebody, his wife 'was in the world during the whole

     marriage, either full time or free lance,' lived in an eleven-room mansion

     on the Hudson with a full-time maid, and 'seldom was a wife and a

     mother.'" [HOROWITZ, D., 1999, p. 226]

 

    In 1995, even a non-Jewish Polish-born scholar, Magdalena Zaborowska,  teaching at the University of North Carolina, knew which way the intellectual and publishing winds blew. Like many, she too falls prey to the strong force of Judeo-centrism in the American academic community. In her volume about women immigrants to America, subtitled "Gender Through East European Immigrant Narratives," she focuses on the lives of five women -- Mary Antin, Elizabeth Stern, Anzia Yezierska, Maria Kuncewicz, and Eva Hoffman -- to illustrate her theses. The title of the book, nor its theses of investigation,  have nothing to do with Jews.  Yet, in attempting to exemplify the collective voice of the female immigrant experience, the only one who isn't Jewish in her five subjects is Kuncewicz. Can this, one wonders, be an accurate overview of the lives, dilemmas, identities, and world views of the millions of Eastern European women who weren't Jewish?

 

      In 1996, Jewish poet Hal Sirowitz was awarded a $20,000 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for his first collection of poetry, My Mother Said. His second volume was about his therapist, entitled My Therapist Said. [COLEMAN, S., 1998, p. 9A]  In the poetry world, other prominent Jewish authors include Philip Levine, Denise Levertov, David Ignatow, Howard Nemerov (brother of photography icon Diane Arbus),  Adrienne Rich, Karl Shapiro, Allen Ginsberg, Mark Strand, Kenneth Koch, Maxine Kumin, Stanley Kunitz, Louise Gluck, Louis Zukofsky, Delmore Schwartz (who wrote "Anti-Semitism ever / Sharpens Jews to be more clever"), [ATLAS, J., 1977, p. 163] Charles Reznikoff, David Ignatov, John Hollander, Irving Feldman, Anthony Hecht, Jerome Rothenberg ("who has been called a 'Jew among the Indians" for his work with early Native American poetic traditions"), [SHAPIRO, G., 4-20-01] David Meltzer, Robert Mezey, Rose Drachler, Susan Mernit, Harvey Shapiro, Grace Schulman ("I contain my family of Zionists within me"), [SHAPIR, S., 3-16-01, p. 12] George Oppen, Gertrude Stein, M. L. Rosenthal, Marilyn Hacker, (winner of the National Book Award), Sandra Hochman, Jascha Kessler, Donald Finkel, Naomi Lazard, Marvin Bell, Gil Orlovitz, Kenneth Fearing, David Galler, Stephen Berg, Daniel Hoffman, Peter Davison (his mother was Jewish), Babette Deutch, "beat" poet Stuart Perkoff, Romanian-born Andrei Codrescu, and Muriel Rukeyser, among others. 

 

Part of a much referred-to poem by Muriel Rukeyser in Jewish circles goes: "To be a Jew in the twentieth century/Is to be offered a gift. If you refuse/Wishing to be invisible, you choose/Death of the spirit, the stone insanity." [ANTLER, J. p. 174] "Jewish themes," says Daniel Walden, "pervade much of the poetry of Harvey Shapiro who is probably better known as the editor of the New York Times Book Review." [WALDEN, p. 397] Poet Joseph Auslander was editor of the North American Review. Poet Grace Paley has long been poetry editor of the Nation.

Jewish critic Bonnie Lyon "argues that Jewishness is 'thematically central' to Grace Paley's work [and] says that 'Yiddishkeit [Jewish culture], especially the idealistic socialist version ... is the underlying source of values in her work." [ARCANA, J., 1993, p. 224] Here's what Jewish biographer Judith Arcana adds about Ms. Paley (born Grace Goodside) and her Jewish identity in America:

     "So what would [Paley's father] think if he knew that his daughter Grace
      has begun to attend services for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur? Would
      he, who lived a culturally Jewish milieu all his long life, understand her
      desire to locate and maintain Jewishness every autumn in Christian Vermont?
      He could never have experienced such a need, for his family was strongly
       identified as Jewish, and he lived surrounded by Jews all his years in the
      United States. Unlike, Judaism, Jewishness, [Grace's sister] Jeanne says,
      'was a given' and was never given up. The Goodside family was not
       unconsciously seduced by the insidious force of American assimilation."
       [ARCANA, J., 1993, p. 14]

"Insidious force of American assimilation?!" And this term applied to a family of presumedly universalistic socialists?

 Here's more on how Arcana, the Jewish reviewer/critic, understands Paley, the Jewish poet/prose writer -- Paley, who in the political world is a Left-wing activist:

     "[Non-Jewish husband] Bob [Nichols, her second husband] was, even with his
      Brooks Brothers shirt tucked in, an exotic for this Bronx Jew. Though Grace
      has never been exploitive or condemnatory of Jews in her stories like her Jewish
       brothers-in-print who often attach the unfortunate effluvia of twentith-century
       materialism to Jews (and especially Jewish women), Grace's Jewish women
      nevertheless often couple with non-Jews. From young Shirly Abramowitz's
      tolerance, through Faith's two Catholic husbands and brief dalliance with Nick
       Hegstraw, to the newest autobiographical figure in the cycle, Ruth Larsen, who
      has taken the last name of her husband Joe, Grace's Jewish women exhibit not
      only an acceptance of, but a romantic interest in, goyim. [Note: the term
      'goyim' is traditionally a Jewish pejorative for non-Jews]. In her poetry, which
      she has always acknowledged as being closer to the bone than her stories
      are, Grace has explicitly depicted herself as one who suffers because she
      has forgotten Jerusalem and has coupled with a Gentile. 'Even my lover, a
       Christian with pale eyes and the barbarian's foreskin/has left me,' the speaker
       realizes in 'A Warning.' The speaker in another poem, untitled, admits that she
       'cannot keep [her] mind on Jerusalem' and wonders what will happen 'when the
       Lord/remembers vengeance/(which is his)/and finds me.' Though her sexual
      and romantic interest in the Christian 'other' might be construed as similar to
       that lust for 'blondies' we find so often in fiction by Jewish men, it is also
      based in her lifelong laissez faire acceptance of whatever her companions
      may be and especially her desire for an ongoing cultural, ethnic, and
      racial mixing and blending of peoples. Grace Paley has been mining that
       symbolic vein in her stories and has worked into it the related issues of
       difference, otherness, and, especially, Jewishness."  [Paley divorced her
      first husband, Jess Paley, in 1972. He was Jewish] [ARCANA, J., 1993,
      p. 160-161]

"Goyim-barbarian's foreskin?"

 

From 1977 to 1998, fifteen people were awarded Yale University's prestigious Bollingen Prize (today worth $25,000) for poetry. At least seven of them were Jewish males -- David Ignatow, Howard Nemerov, Anthony Hecht, John Hollander, Stanley Kunitz, Mark Strand, and Kenneth Koch. [BRUNNER, 1998, p. 733] Reflecting changes in the power elite of the literature world, of the 26 earlier award winners going back to 1949, only two were Jewish (still an overrepresentation of Jewry, per their percentage of the American population, by about 250%).

 

From Philadelphia, the American Poetry Review has been described as the "premiere poetry journal in the country." [LEITER, 1999] Editors are Stephen Berg, Arthur Vogelsang, and David Bonanno -- at least one, likely two, but very possibly all, are Jewish. In 1998, "local Jewish activist and patron" Lynne Honickman and her family's Honickman Foundation instituted a yearly American Poetry Review "first book" contest for poets. The 1998 judge, Gerald Stern (winner of the 1998 National Book Award for poetry), was Jewish, (his choice as APR winner was Joshua Beckman) as was the next year's judge, Louise Gluck, who selected another fellow Jew as the best poet, Dana Levin.

 

Sanford Pinsker, a Jewish reviewer, notes with satisfaction the "Jewish dimension" to National Book Award winner Gerald Stern's poetry. Citing Stern's poem called "Behaving Like a Jew," Pinsker's insights into the poem read like a Mad magazine parody:

 

     "In this poem, probably the most anthologized and best known of all

     Stern's work, the speaker ruminates about the death of an opossum,

     refusing to treat the event as yet another instance of the 'joy in death'

     and the 'philosophical understanding of the carnage' he associates

     with the anti-Semitic Charles Lindbergh. Instead, he insists on behaving

     like a Jew, which means touching the animal's face, staring into its

     eyes and pulling it off the road.

        And as Stern describes this (Jewish) moment, the opossum in

     question metamorphoses itself into what looks for all the world

     like a Hasidic Jew:

        'I am not going to stand in a wet ditch ... / and lose myself in the

     immortal life stream / when my hands are still a little shaky / from his

     stiffness and his bulk / and my eyes are still weak and misty / from

     his round belly and his curved fingers / and his black whiskers and

     his little dancing feet.'" [original author's parenthesis: PINSKER, 1998,

     p. 62]

 

Pinsker isn't joking about this. Not only does the reviewer declare the poem to be Jewish, so is the opossum! So much so that the idea of its "whiskers," "round belly," and "little feet" loom as a kind of dead rabbi to him.

 

"Writers are all secret Jews," declared Maxime Kumin, two years after winning a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. [HYMAN, p. 766]  "All poets are Jews," echoed Russian Jewish poet Marina Tsvetayeva. [FINKELSTEIN, N., 1998]  "To be Jewish means to be a poet," declared Holocaust hero Elie Wiesel, affirming an apparent in-house Jewish truism. [STORCH, 1998, p. 8]  "A woman poet is a hunted Jew," declares Erica Jong, "eternally the outsider." [JONG, E., 1994, p. 100] (Delmore Schwartz has his own take on the Jew-poet-sufferer closure, noting his period as a student at Harvard University: " I never thought about anti-Semitism, because everyone was against me as a poet.") [ATLAS, J., 1977, 166] Hilene Flanzbaum suggests the psycho-social forces at play from which such a notion -- any poet as a kind of honorary Jew -- may come from:  "The poet's sense of alienation had come to signal his superiority to a debased American culture ... That poets are seldom appreciated in their own time or nation corresponds to the plight of the Jews, long held to be chosen but nationless." [FLANZEBAUM, p. 267]  Hence, being a poet is understood by many in today's poetry world to be a psychological state of antithesis to the established order, consciously conceived as an echo of the traditional Jewish sense of superiority to the surrounding non-Jewish norms, despite the fact that the elitist cliques that control the avenues towards crowning as a celebrated "poet" in the poetry/publishing industry has become, like all the rest of popular culture, merely an arm of the established -- and increasingly Judaized -- order itself. Being Jewish, after all (really or illusorily), is a strong boost towards the gateway of public sympathy, personal accomplishment, and, in all spheres, success.

 

Flanzbaum notes the case of famous non-Jewish poet John Berryman, and the phenomena of Gentile poets looking for their symbolic selves in the Jewish victimhood paradigm:

 

     "In 1945, John Berryman, a Catholic poet from rural Oklahoma, won the

     Kenyon Review's annual contest for best short-fiction. His eight-page

     story, 'The Imaginary Jew,' featured a southern boy in New York City

     College who is brutally attacked after being taken for 'a Jew.' In that same

     year, Karl Shapiro, a third-generation American Jew won the Pulitzer Prize

     for a collection of poetry called V-Letter ... Berryman is not the only

     imaginary Jew haunting the pages of modern American poetry. In fact,

     many appear at this time." [Flanzbaum, p. 259, 260]

 

For Shapiro's part, among his poems is at least one in homage to the new Jewish state of Israel, described in the work as the "liberation of Palestine." In it he further rhapsodizes that "When I see the name of Israel high in print ... I sink deep in a Western chair and rest my soul." [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 241] (Shapiro was for a few years the editor of the prestigious journal Poetry.). [SYRKIN, M., 1964, p. 229]

 

     Much-heralded Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, killed in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War, had a "fanciful belief that he possessed the blood of gypsies and Jews." [NADEL, I., 1996, p. 23] In Europe, in 1999, a press report noted a requisite homage: "[Britain's] Poet Laureate Andrew Motion will read his poem about Ann [Frank], entitled Ann Frank Huis," marking the 70th anniversary of her birth. [PRESS ASSOCIATION NEWSFILE, 6-7-99]  Nearly forty years earlier, Soviet Union poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, "married to a Jewess, leaped to world fame in 1961 as the author of 'Babi Yar,' a poem he wrote in protest against the world's apathy towards the slaughter of millions of Jews." [LITVINOFF, B., p. 97]  (Yevtushenko was also in New York when a Jewish Defense League bomb -- intended to disrupt a concert by Soviet performers -- killed a Jewish woman, Iris Kones. In a poem, Yevtushenko "compares the smoke-filled room in which Iris Kones died to a Nazi gas chamber." [ROBINSON, H. 1994, p. 446] Another Russian poet and novelist for years elevated to extraordinary attention in the West is Boris Pasternak. He too is Jewish. So is one of Europe's most celebrated post-war poets, Paul Celan. "Though Celan never spelled out his Jewishness," says Jewish scholar John Felstiner, "he aligned himself more stringently with the Jews than with the non-Jews in his pantheon." [GROSS, N., 7-7-95, p. 8]

 

Prominent French author Nathalie Sarraute (Natacha Tcherniak) was also Jewish. Well-known French writer "Colette" wasn't Jewish but she was married once to Maurice Goudket, who was Jewish, and who who founded her "beauty institute" which failed. [THURMAN, 2000, p. 394-395, 441] Here's some of the Jewish perspectives on Colette's world, as described by her biographer, where being Jewish is equated with all things progressive, and liberating, in the social world:

"Colette came of age as a woman and a writer during the Dreyfus Affair, which dominated the history of the French fin de siecle [the Dreyfus Affair is a lynchpin in Jewish complaints of anti-Semitism: a Jewish army officer was falsely tried for treason]. The anti-semitism, homophobia, and misogyny of the period proveed to have much in common. The Jews, the 'New Woman,' and the homosexual were at once fascinating and repulsive figures in the popular imagination. In each case, the danger that they posed to the established order was the same miscegenation. They threatened to corrupt the old fixed categories of national identity in one case, gender in the other two, at a moment when all kinds of boundaries, external and internal, were being transgressed." [THURMAN, J., 2000, p. xv]

Also in Colette's world was Georges Kessel:

"Georges Kessel was a wit, an idler, a pretty boy and a dandy. He had married very young and well, his wife's income supported his passion for gambling. He dabbled in fiction and worked briefly as the private secretary to [publisher] Gaston Gallimard, who was impressed by his decadent charm. But at twenty-four, unexpectedly, Georges shook off his dilettante's torper and became the editor-in-chief of a weekly magazine devoted to crime stories ... The venture was underwritten by Gallimard, who paid Georges an enormous salary. He earned it, but he also began embezzling large sums from his patron, in the form of advances to fictitious writers to pay for his cocaine habits and his debts at the track." [THURMAN, J., 2000, p. 403]

An international Jewish writers conference in San Francisco in 1997 featured prominent authors from Guatemala (Victor Perera), Brazil (Moacyr Scilar), Mexico (Elan Stavans), Romania (Norman Manae), Great Britain (Dan Jacobson), Poland (Henryk Broder) and Hungary (George Konrad, "who has been discussed as a potential Nobel Prize candidate.") [SCHIFRIN, D., 1997, p. 1] Famed Russian author Maxim Gorky wasn't Jewish, but his agent, Alexander Lazarevich Helphand/Gelfand (nicknamed Parvus), was. [VOKOGONOV, D., 1994, p. 112]

As Ilan Stavans notes about the recent upsurge in "Jewish issues" writing in South America:

      "Jewish authors, for example, seem to have more presence [than before] in the
       Southern Hemisphere. From Argentina, there is Ricardo Feierstein, Marcos Aguinis,
      Jorge Goldenberg, and Fingueret herself; from Mexico, Rosa Nissan; from Uruguay,
      Mauricio Rosencof. Many of those authors began their careers decades ago, but
      now the collective impact of their work is beginning to be felt. Some are even achieving
       popular success. And while few take the genocide in Europe as their central focus,
      many do offer it as backdrop. Editorial Mila and the Acervo Cultural in Argentina
      publish Holocaust survivors' accounts, like that of Charles Papiernik, originally a
      French citizen, who endured four years in Auschwitz. And a recent fiction contest,
      organized by Feierstein, brought a handful of Holocaust-related narratives, including
      El ultimo dia, by Mina Weil, about a Jewish girl growing up in Mussolini's Italy. I've
      also seen some nonfiction articles, like one about relationships among Holocaust
      victims by Diana Wang, a psychologist in Buenos Aires, who found out she was
      Jewish as she was about to take first Communion. Films, too, are part of the trend.
      I'm acquainted with fewer than half a dozen movies made in Latin America that
      address the Holocaust directly, but several others deal with the topic at least
      tangentially." [STAVANS, I., 5-25-01]

      Muriel Spark, an avowed Catholic, born of a Jewish father, has been described as "arguably the most formidable Scottish writer." [WHITAKER, R., 1-21-96] Jorge Isaacs, of partial Jewish heritage, has long been regarded as Colombia's "national poet." [SACHAR, H., p. 267] Australia's "most widely read and celebrated poet" is Dorothy Porter, whose father, proudly notes a Jewish ethnic magazine, is Jewish. [MANDIE, D., 1999, p. 68-69] The great German writer, Johann Goethe, wasn't Jewish, but "[Albert] Bielschowsky, like so many Goethe biographers [was] a Jew ... German Jews played a leading role in Goethe societies ... In the mid-1920s, Jews were almost a majority in the Berlin Goethe society." [MOSSE, G., 1983, p. 45] Isaac Deutcher noted in 1968 that "quite a few Polish writers have been of Jewish origin, for instance Julian Tuwim and Antoni Slonimski, the most eminent poets of the inter-war period." [DEUTCHER, I., 1968, p. 54]

 

     And who was America's official "poet laureate" for the late 1990's, whose job -- for $35,000 a year -- is to serve as a poetry "consultant" to the Library of Congress? Jewish poet and Boston University professor Robert Pinsky. "One of his grand works," notes the Los Angeles Times, "An Explanation of America,  (Princeton University Press, 1979)  is an epic poem written for his oldest daughter, now a manager at Borders Books in Los Angeles." [MEHREN, p. E1]  Pinsky is the former poetry editor for the avidly pro-Israel New Republic. In 1999, Pinsky became the "first poet laureate to be named for a third year by Congress." [KUSHNER, L., 5-28-99, p. 1]

 

     In 2000, Stanley Kunitz was named to replace Pinsky as America's poet laureate. Kunitz is also Jewish. Including Kunitz, at least five of the last eight American poet laureates (i.e., since 1988) have been Jewish: Kunitz, Pinsky, Howard Nemerov, Mark Strand, and Joseph Brodsky.

 

      Jewish American playwrights in (the Jewish-dominated) theatre include Arthur Miller, Neil Simon, Lilian Hellman, Elmer Rice, Paddy (Sidney) Cheyefsky, Abe Burrows (Abraham Solomon Borowitz), George S. Kaufman, Wendy Wasserstein, Moss Hart, Elmer Rice, S.N. Behrman, and Clifford Odets. [PLESUR, M. 1982, p. 173] In France, surrealist Eugene Ionesco's mother was Jewish. In Britain, where Jews are less than one percent of the population, in 1969 "Lord" Goodman, the (Jewish) chairman of the British Arts Council, observed that "in the theatre at this moment the younger school of dramatists is perhaps seventy-five percent Jewish." Such authors included Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker, Bernard Kops, Frank Marcus, Peter Shaffer, Lionel Bart, and Wolf Mankowitz, among others. [LITVINOFF, B., p. 168]  "Their contention is that they are English writers," said Barnet Litvinoff, "... [yet] a hidden sentiment was activated among them in 1967, however, and they made a swift if somewhat condescending rediscovery of their Jewishness." [LITVINOFF, B., p. 168]

      "What could be prompting the increased visibility of so many Jewish figures on the modern British literary scene?" wondered Merritt Mosely (author of The Dictionary of Lietrary Biography: British Novelists Since 1960) in 2001. Mosley notes Howard Jacobson (whose "Jewishness consciousness ... continues to animate his novels") as the best of them. "Two other celebated novels of the year 2000 were about Jewishnessness," he adds, including Will Self's How the Dead Men Live ("Mr. Self has said that [the character] Lily is partly based on his mother, who was also a Jewish anti-Semite") and Linda Grant's When I Lived in Modern Times, winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction (it is "a historical novel about a young Jewish woman growing up in London's Soho during World War II.") "Two widely noticed 1999 titles were about Jews, assimilation and anti-Semitism in England," adds Mosely (these are Gillian Freeman's His Mistress's Voice and Bernice Ruben's I, Dreyfus. [MOSELEY, M., 5-25-01]

     Germany? "Nathan the Wise," notes Michael Brenner, "became one of the most popular figures in post-war German theatre. He was soon to be joined on the stage by many other Jewish figures, ranging from the Fiddler on the Roof to Ann Frank. In recent years in Germany there has also been a remarkable revival of German-Jewish authors, such as Else Lasker-Schuler, Kurt Tucholsky, Erich Muhsam, and Alfred Dublin. Such towering names as Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin are much better known today than during their own lifetimes." [GRUNFELD, F., 1996, p. xxi]

Aside from the many Jewish "Family" critics already mentioned, other prominent Jewish literature/culture critics include Walter Benjamin (Detlev Holz), George Steiner, Louis Untermeyer (whose son, Joseph, was active in Zionist efforts to get weapons to Israel) [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 157] and Clifton Fadiman, among many others.

 

By 1996, Sylvia Barack-Fishman, a professor at Brandeis University, noted that

 

      "A search for the essence of Jewish identity has become a focal point of

       contemporary American Jewish literary and intellectual exploration

       spanning all brow levels, in works from the most complex fiction to

       the soap-operatic life-cycle angst of popular films and television

       programs." [BARACK-FISHMAN, p. 58]

 

She also even notes that these days "Israel figures prominently in fiction by such authors as Saul Bellow, Chaim Potok, Elie Wiesel, Jay Neugeboren, Hugh Nissenson, E.M. Broner, Tova Reich, Mark Helprin, and many others." [BARACK-FISHMAN, p. 279]  "Even Norman Mailer," says Desser and Friedman, "who includes few Jewish characters in his books, and actually fights against his Jewish identity, is usually included in anthologies and critical works about Jewish authors." [DESSER, p. 4-5]

Here's how novelist Jonathan Kellerman's interest in Israel was reported in 2002:

"Best-selling novelist Jonathan Kellerman placed the winning online auction bid for a guitar signed by Don Henley and his fellow Eagles bandmates. Henley is donating the $7,900 from the sale to the Jewish Federation of Greater Dallas for use in supporting Israel and Jewish organizations. Kellerman, the author of 23 books who lives in Los Angeles, is a longtime musician and collector of vintage guitars. But he said he bought the new, Takamine G330 acoustic guitar expressly because the proceeds will provide support for Israel. 'I've lived in Israel, set a novel ('The Butcher's Theater') there and am dedicated to supporting organizations that strengthen Israel,' he said in a statement Tuesday."  [TOP FORTY CHARTS, 6-1-2002]   

 

    "Complementing the focus on [the Holocaust] survivor syndrome," says Lillian Kremer, "is the attention of writers to [a] survivor mission. This is manifest in [Marge] Piercy's and [National Book award winner] Adrienne Rich's advocacy of Zionism." [DAVIDSON, p. 396]  Elsewhere, mystery writer Richard "Kinky" Friedman "is a hawk on the Arab-Israeli conflict." As a Jewish country western singer, he was once awarded the Jewish Defense League's "prize for cultural contribution"; among his compositions (often performed) is "a particularly tasteless song about using a picture of Jesus for toilet paper." [CHAFETS, MEMOIRS, p. 175,  176]  "A number of new books from university presses, Jewish publishers, and mainstream publishers," noted the Jewish Week in 1999, "are searching out women's voices in Jewish history and Jewish texts, reclaiming Jewish tradition."

 

      In the feminist movement, of which Jewish women have been so much a part, publishing and literary heroines began making their inevitable march home to reconnect with Jewish exclusionist/elitist tenets. Abandoning an abstract solidarity with the generalized human community for the narrower, more tangible, glories of Jewish particularism and Holocaust victim/unity, they somehow managed to tiptoe around the massive anti-woman keystones of traditional Jewish teachings.  In an article about alleged anti-Semitism in the women's movement and being a "born-again" Jew, Letty Pogrebin, a founding editor of Ms magazine, announced to her readers that

 

       "During the past few years something has changed, something that

        makes me no less a woman but more a Jew ... [POGREBIN, p. 76,

        1987] .. Looking back, I suppose my first visit to Israel had something

        to do with this epiphany ... As instructive as the first visit was, it was

        the MS tour of Israel that grew out of my account of it in this magazine

        that something clicked for me ... [POGREBIN, p. 77, 1987] ... Before I

        had believed in a universalistic ideal, in feminine synthesis, and

        de-emphasizing differences, but now, secularly as well as spiritually, I

        was 'born again' to my people. The change is subtle but seismic."

        [POGREBIN, p. 77]

 

     "I have never considered myself religious," wrote Betty Friedan, former President of the National Organization of Women (NOW) and author of one of the most influential feminist tracts, The Feminine Mystique, "For me as for other Jewish feminists, religion perpetuates the patriarchal tradition that denies women access to Judaism's most sacred ritual and enshrined them within the confines of their biological roles. But when women like me broke through to our authentic personhood as women, we found the strength to dip deep down into ourselves on other levels ... Now with a sense of confidence born of the women's movement, I and many other feminists found we could embrace our authentic Jewishness in a new way ... In some strange and wonderful way my feminism and my Judaism were merging." [SILBERMAN, p. 264]

 

     "After fifty," says best-selling author (best known for the novel Fear of Flying) and feminist Erica Jong:

 

       "I began to question my ambivalent relationship to my Jewish identity

       and the unexamined assimilation I have written about earlier. It seems

       astonishing to me that a woman born at the height of the Holocaust

       should not have been trained to a stronger sense of Judaism. And I

       also began to regret not having raised my [my daughter] more Jewishly,

       and not having more Jewish children to replace those lost among the six

       million [Holocaust victims]. Lately I have begun to yearn for solidarity

       with other Jewish feminists ... to celebrate Jewishness without shame."

       [TEMPLIN, p. 126]

     (How, by the way, did Jong first get published? Her mother sent her to a Jewish family freind, Bessie Golding -- Jong's grandfather's mistress. Jong presented poems to Golding at her office who read them for twenty minutes, then looked up and decided that "You're going to be the most famous woman poet of your generation." Golding passed the poems along to an executive at the Holt publishing company "who passed it on to Aaron Asher [also Jewish]," the Holt publisher. Thus was born Jong's: Fruits and Vegetables.) [JONG, E., 1994, p. 134-137]

 

      One wonders how prominent author Cynthia Ozick, active in Jewish religious circles, reconciles the virulent anti-female Jewish tradition:

 

     "In the world at large I call myself and am called a Jew. But when on

     Sabbath I sit among women in my traditional shul and the rabbi

     speaks the word 'Jew,' I can be sure that he is not referring to me.

     For him 'Jew' means male Jew. When my rabbi says 'A Jew is called

     to the Torah,' he never means me or any other living Jewish woman.

     My own synagogue is the only place in the world where I, a middle-

     aged adult, am defined exclusively by my being the female child of

     my parents. My own synagogue is the only place in the world

     where I am not a Jew." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 202]

 

     As Rabbi Frisch's Marriage Manual, a traditional view of Judaism, says:

 

     "Even though the woman is a man's partner, she should not think

     of her husband as a comrade but rather as a master. And the woman

     should love her husband and he shall rule over her as it is said:

     'And thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over

     thee.'" [HEILMAN, S., 1992, p. 332]   

 

      Rosellen Brown, a fiction editor at the Jewish magazine Tikkun, notes that stories submitted to her tend to be about old Jewish characters, the Holocaust, and old New York City Jewish neighborhoods. "What you can probably see emerging here," she wrote in 1993, "... [is] nostalgia ... [BROWN, p. 79] ... The majority of work we see is thematically hard breathing and anxious. And where its spirit is I have no idea, except that it seems bent on discharging some long-forgotten obligation." [BROWN, p. 82] 

 

      Andrew Furman, a judge for the National Jewish Book award, noted in 2000 the flavor of modern Jewish literature:

 

     "Jews, the world over, continue to write fiction at a fierce clip ... The

     'ethnic,' mid-century wave of Jewish American writing, fueled by the

     immigrant consciousness, has clearly given way to a new wave of

     Jewish writing. Concomitantly, the burden of alienation and marginality

     amid a host culture are no longer the twin occupations of Jewish

     writers. Rather, the literary grandchildren of Bellow, Roth, and Malamud

     -- at home now amid their environs -- look increasingly inward these

     days as they engage more explicitly Judaic concerns: the toxic legacy

     of the Holocaust, the retrieval of extinct Jewish worlds (e.g., the

     European shtetl, New York's lower East Side), Jewish feminism,

     the viability of Orthodoxy, and the biblical resonances in the modern

     world." [FURMAN, A., MAY/JUNE 2000, p. 29]

 

     In poetry, for instance, Jewish poet Linda Pasten was afforded space in the 1990s in Tikkun for her poem about an almost obligatory theme, concluding:

 

       "and when my mother saw the swastika

        on an envelope in the kitchen table,

        she picked up fast, and we returned

        to the steamy city." [FIRESTONE, p. 4]

     Erica Jong's first collection of poetry (Near the Black Forest) was "weighed with poems about my discovering my Jewishness in Germany." [JONG, E., 1994, p. 133]     

 

     In a book about Jewish women, Paula Hyman and Deborah Moore note that:

 

    "A significant group of contemporary Jewish writers produced an inward-

      turning genre of fiction that explores the individual Jew's connection to

      other Jewish people, to the Jewish religion, culture, and tradition, and to

      the chain or Jewish history. Contrary to the expectations of

      assimilationists and the example of Jewish literature during the first half

      of the twentieth century, particularist woman's Jewish fiction became

      commonplace ... Among the themes that emerged is the late twentieth

      century American Jewish fiction focusing on women, some of the most

      important include: the role of the Holocaust in the identity of survivors,

      their children, and the broader Jewish community; Israel as a focal point

      of American Jewish identity, and a setting for the exploration of Jewish

      identity." [HYMAN, p. 422]

 

     "It must be emphasized," notes Gershon Shaked, "that American Jewish literature today is prouder of its dual identity than any other 'foreign' Jewish literature has ever been." [SHAKED, p. 176]

 

     Also among the major current genres of Jewish fiction is the Jewish "tough guy" story, what Paul Breines calls the "Rambowitz syndrome." Breines notes that he is familiar with about fifty novels that celebrate an "idealized representation of Jewish warriors, tough guys, gangsters, Mossad agents, and Jews of all ages and sexes who fight back against their tormentors." [BARACK-FISHMAN, p. 280]

 

      "A noticeable change has occurred in recent decades," says Stephen Whitfield, "The fresh appreciation of ethnic differences that began in the mid-1960s has included the celebration of Jewish identity in many best-selling novels, in serious analyses of Yiddishkeit [Jewishness] ... in musicals ... and in other cultural artifacts too numerous to mention." [WHITFIELD, Americans, p. 11] "Ours is close to a golden age," wrote Leonard Fein in 2000, "... Here's one piece of current evidence: On the 'new non-fiction ' table in a local (non-chain) general bookstore the other evening, 11 out of 30 titles were on Jewish subjects." [FEIN, L., 9-8-2000, p. 9]

 

     Thanks to such an avalanche, and Jewish power to empower and enforce it, Jewish chauvinism has become an institutionalized norm and is an increasingly integral -- and even dominant --  part of the mainstream American landscape. "According to a theory which seems to be tacitly assumed by many critics," wrote Robert Alter, "the main currents at least of modern culture all derive from subterranean Jewish sources." [KOESTER, p. 21] "The massive entry of Jewish intellectuals into the academy in the late 1940s through the 1960s," says David Hollinger, "was a crucial victory for the cosmopolitans. The attendant de-Christianization of American public culture was sometimes openly proclaimed -- by Leslie Fiedler, for example -- who in 1967 celebrated what he called 'the great take-over by Jewish-American writers' of the task of speaking for Americans." [HOLLINGER, p. 167]

 

      "The acceptance of [Saul] Bellow as the leading novelist of his generation," wrote Fiedler in evaluating the impact of the Jewish literary Mafia upon America, "must be paired off with the appearance of [Herman Wouk's] Marjorie Morningstar on the front cover of Time. On all levels, the Jew is in the process of being mythicized into the representative American." [KOSTELANETZ, p. 1] "Bellows's Humboldt's Gift," noted Chaim Bermant in 1977, "which is in some ways an odyssey of literary America, or at least literary New York (which nowadays has come to mean the same thing), shows how far the process of assimilation has gone, and it is no longer quite certain what has happened to whom: whether the Jew has become Americanized or the Americans Judaized. It is a world in which a writer like Gore Vidal, who can trace his roots back to an older America, must feel like an outsider, or a Court goy." [BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 158]

 

     Efforts by highly placed Jews to appropriate all that is great as innately "Jewish" extended to one of the greatest -- perhaps the greatest -- popular artists in history: Hollywood's Charlie Chaplin. "Chaplin's own background and experience," wrote Hannah Arendt, "taught him the traditional Jewish fear of the 'cop' -- that seeming incarnation of a hostile world; but on the other hand, it taught him the time-honored Jewish truth that, other things being equal, the human ingenuity of a David can sometimes outreach the animal strength of a Goliath." [DESSER, p. 10]

 

     "Chaplin was an English Jew," wrote Albert Goldman, "who was at pains to deny or minimize his Jewish origins ... his infatuation with blond-haired, fair-skinned, voluptuously innocent maidens, whom he courted with eyes brimming with Jewish soul and sentiment, were the classic notes and signs of the Jewish comic hero." [DESSER, p. 10]

 

     The slight problem here, of course, is that Charlie Chaplin was not Jewish. None of his parents were Jewish, nor his grandparents. He was not raised in a Jewish home and he did not know Hebrew or Yiddish; he was not known to have even been in any kind of association with Jews at all, at least until he ended up in Hollywood [DESSER, p. 10]  (where one of his wives  was a Jewish actress, Paulette Goddard -- i.e., Paulette Levy).  Jewish insistence to claim him as one of their own, of course, reflects the widespread inability of Jews to understand the universal dimensions of Chaplin's loveable tragi-comic character, the Tramp, and the universal depth of his follies, misfortunes, and foibles against a world that is hostile to anybody.

 

       If anything, note Desser and Friedman, "Chaplin is an essentially Christian filmmaker. The overarching themes of his finest films involve a redemptive Christian vision revolving around self-sacrifice and charity as the highest form of love." [DESSER, p. 10] These, as we have amply seen, and as these Jewish film critics aptly note, are not particularly classic elements of the Jewish tradition.

 

     *  The issues in this chapter of course have an international flavor. In Russia, during and after the communist revolution, Zvi Gitelman notes Jewish "intellectual" influence in securing the new regime: "The Jewish intelligentsia had neutralized the boycott of the Bolshevik regime by the Russian intelligentsia. In Lenin's words, they had 'sabotaged the saboteurs.' At the same time Lenin suggested this should not be emphasized in the press because 'in a peasant land one must sometimes also reckon with such hateful phenomena as anti-Semitism.'" [GITELMAN, 1972, p. 115]

 

     Venita Datta has written an entire book entitled the Origins of the Intellectual in France, noting that the 1914 Dreyfus Affair (when a Jewish army officer was unjustly accused of being a traitor) "is often cited as the moment at which the intellectual was born ... French intellectuals have served as role models for intellectuals all over the world ... [The intellectual] supplanted the traditional priest as a source of moral authority in modern French society." [DATTA, p. 1]

 

     In recent years, there have been many Jews of influence in the French (and international) intellectual world, including Claude Levi-Strauss, Michael Foucault, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan.

 

     In the years around 1900 the 80,000 or so Jews of France represented less than one percent of the French population of 39 million. Yet, "as many anti-Semites noted," says Datta,

 

      "with the advent of the [French] Third Republic, more Jews than

      ever were visible in the fields of art, literature, journalism, and

      academe. Furthermore, noted Jewish intellectuals, in particular Emile

      Durkheim of the Sorbonne and Henri Bergson of the College de

      France, were seen as pillars of the republican establishment, as

      official 'intellectuals who had risen to positions of power and fame

      via the republican university system ... [DATTA, p. 85] ... This new

      [Third Republic] regime sought to 'de-Christianize' public spaces

      ... In no other country where anti-Semitism was present did it possess

      such a strong literary character. Anti-Semites in France were more

      interested in responding to political, social, and cultural developments

      than in developing racial theories ... [p. 87] ... Many Jews rose to

      prominent positions in the army, politics, and high civil service, as

      well as the arts and academe ... [p. 95] ... Jews were particularly

      prominent as cultural middlemen, that is, as reviewers, critics, and

      art collectors ... Significant numbers of Jews were at the forefront of

      avant-garde movements, not only in the literary and artistic avante-

      garde ... but also in the academic disciplines ... [p. 96] ... [One

      influential journal] the Revue Blanche, was more than a journal,

      it as also a milieu and a group of friends linked by school ties and

      family relations ... Jewish collaborators represented roughly half

      of the review's staff and a much higher proportion of its editorial

      board." [p. 105]

************************

Aside from Jewish publishing and mass media pre-eminence in pre-Nazi Germany [see other chapters], Frederick Grunfeld notes the situation for Jewish authors in that era:

     "Literally dozens of writers afterwards banned as 'Jewish -- though many
       of them hardly thought of themselves as such -- were producing important
     contributions to Germany literature. Among the leading dramatists were
     Carl Sternheim (The Snob), Arthur Schnitzler (La Ronde), Ernst Toller
     (The Machine-Wreckers), Walter Hasenclever (The Sun), Ferdinand
     Bruckner (Criminals) and the Hungarian expatriate Ferenc
     Molnar (Liliom); among the novelists, besides Broch and Kafka,
     Alfred Doeblin (Berlin Alexanderplatz), Jakob Wasserman (The World's
     Illusion), Lion Feuchtwanger (Jew Suss), Franz Werfel (The Forty Days of
     Musa Dagh), Alfred Neumann (The Deuce), Bruno Frank (Days of
     the King), Arnold Zweig (The Case of Sergeant Grischa), Ernest Weiss
     (Nahar), Joseph Roth (Radetzky March), and Vicki Baum (Grand Hotel);
     among the poets, Ernst Blass, Alfred Mombert, Rudolf Borchardt, Albert
     Ehrenstein, Martin Gumpert, Walter Mehring, Nelly Sachs, Berthold
     Viertel, Karl Wolfskehl and Aflred Wolfenstein; among the essayists and
     criktics, Karl Kraus, Alfred Polgar, Maximilian Harden, Theodor
     Wolff, Egon Friedell, Theodore Lessing, Kurt Tucholsky, Freidrich
     Torberg, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch and Felix Salten (who also
     happend to be the author of Bambi)." [GRUNFELD, F., 1996, p. 27]

The non-Jewish German Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann once wrote about the key factor that elevated him to fame and attention:

     "Jews 'discovered' me, Jews published me and propagated my reputation;
     they performed my impossible play; it was a Jew, the late S. Lublinski,
     who wrote of my Buddenbrooks (after it had been greeted elsewhere with
     sour expressions), 'This book will grow with time, and will still be read
     generations from now.' And when I go out into the world, and visit
     cities, it is almost always Jews, not only in Vienna and Berlin, who
     welcome, shelter, dine, and pamper me ... It is a fact that simply cannot
     be denied that, in Germany, whatever is enjoyed only by 'genuine
     Teutons' and aboriginal Ur-Germans, but scorned or rejected by
     the Jews, will never amount to anything culturally." [GRUNFELD, F.,
     1996, p. 28]

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"The man who translated Salman Rushdie's 'Satanic Verses' into Persian -- and was threatened with death for his work -- is seeking asylum in Israel. Dr. Jamshid Hasni, 57, is married to an Israeli woman and is undergoing a conversion to Judaism. He told the Ma'ariv newspaper that he could not "return to my homeland because extremists will harm me. I prefer to live in a Jewish country. I want to be part of the Jewish people."
[Jewish Chronicle (Great Britain), December 6, 2002, p. 13]

When Victims Rule. A Critique of Jewish pre-eminence in America By Jewish Tribal Review Return to Table of Contents       To Next Chapter (26) Return to Home Page