A Case of Unrequited Love
Irving Howe and many other New York intellectuals believed that New Leftists, their leaders and theoreticians included, tended to lack intellectual sophistication. Specifically, most of them failed to engage robustly in an exchange of ideas. They relied too often on style rather than substance. They were immature, that is they had not won their intellectual spurs through long, hard preparation, and the rigors of verbal combat. They were, to Howe’s generation, crude adolescent boys. In the eyes of New Leftists, these middle-aged alte kakers were passive armchair intellectuals. They endlessly argued, put pen to paper, but never took to the streets to protest — not in the 1960s and not in the 1930s when they were young radical anti-Stalinists who spurned the Popular Front.
New Leftists did not care much for anti-communism, nor were they initially interested in the intricacies of Marxism. They considered themselves incisive thinkers and wrote a great deal, too, contrary to what Howe and other Old Leftists thought. But masculinity and meaningful political engagement for them also meant taking to the streets in protest. It meant putting their bodies on the line, something they felt the New York intellectuals never did.
Both groups were cognizant of each other’s Jewishness. Todd Gitlin, a Students for a Democratic Society leader turned academic, described the New York intellectuals as “seasoned scrappers, trained in the Talmudic disputation characteristic of Trotskyism.” Employing a Yiddish word that combines annoyance and amusement, he noted that “they had little patience for us, young and inexperienced pishers.” The New York intellectuals were equally aware of the Jewishness of many New Leftists. In a 1969 volume on student radicalism, edited by Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset wrote that “the student left in the United States is disproportionately Jewish.”
Howe, for his part, did not mention Jewishness when he wrote about the New Left. But he often told a story about being taunted by “a gang of New Left kids” while teaching for a year at Stanford in 1969. As he walked across campus “this very bright boy named Cohen, who was the leader of this gang,” verbally accosted Howe. Howe had grown accustomed to ignoring the taunts of this group, but that afternoon he turned to Cohen and yelled: “When you grow up … you are going to turn out to be a dentist!” Both men understood it as “the most dreadful of insult[s].” There was of course the bourgeois connotation. But it was also emasculating. Although the stereotype of Jewish mothers had them bragging about their sons becoming doctors or lawyers, Jewish leftists — old and new—equated masculinity with brains, not professional success and wealth. Of his encounter with Cohen, Howe ruefully concluded: “It was very hard because it was like seeing your own children going off the deep end.”
When the New Left emerged in the early 1960s, Howe and the editors at Dissent were initially optimistic. After all, they had founded Dissent six years earlier in part to train a new generation of leftists. The editors might have only been in their thirties and forties — still “young and buoyant,” according to Howe, and looking “forward to polemical battle against our rightward-moving friends, especially those who had been less than lionhearted in standing up to McCarthyism.” But they were already looking for “successors.” Thus when civil rights activists broke through “the psychic smog of the Cold War,” catalyzing a political awakening among young white college students in the process, the editors at Dissent were excited and “very hopeful.”
Dissent covered the New Left intently. It devoted its spring 1960 issue entirely to “The Young.” Michael Walzer provided the magazine with a first-person account of the Southern student-led sit-in movement. Walzer had graduated from Brandeis in 1956. In 1959 he joined Dissent’s editorial board as its youngest member. He was a good 10 to 15 years younger than the other editors. Then enrolled in a doctoral program in government at Harvard, he became the magazine’s point man on the New Left.
The New Left brought new readers to the magazine and revitalized the left in the United States. By 1966 the magazine was able to change from a quarterly to a bimonthly publication. Yet from the beginning, anti-communism divided these two generations of leftists. For the Dissent group, anti-communism was essential to any leftist politics. When they announced the formation of the magazine in 1954, the editors specified that it would “be open to a wide arc of opinion, excluding only Stalinists and totalitarian fellow-travellers on the one hand, and those former radicals who have signed their peace with society as it is, on the other.” Six years later their position had not changed.
As early as 1961, Howe and fellow editor Lewis Coser were pressing the New Left on its anti-communist commitments. Just as Old Leftists ignored the murderous authoritarianism of Stalin, Howe and Coser warned that young leftists were romanticizing authoritarian Marxist revolutionaries like Patrice Lumumba of Congo and Fidel Castro of Cuba. Castro in particular appealed to young radicals because he “dared tweak Uncle Sam’s nose, fought heroically, spoke rhetorically and dressed spectacularly.” Howe and Coser suggested that due to outward appearances these revolutionaries seemed heroic to younger radicals, and manly. But their appeal was all a performative masculinity. Moreover, their hip style obscured their authoritarianism and Leninism (and Soviet backing).
Foreshadowing what would become the major critique of the New Left by the Dissent crowd, Howe and Coser argued that New Leftists focused on “style” at the expense of intellectual sophistication. When they “turn to politics,” Howe and Coser argued, “they have little concern for clear or precise thought. What attracts them is the surface vitality, the appearance of freshness, the gesture of drama. They care more for style than conviction, and incline more to outbursts than sustained work.” For a group that understood intellectuality and thought as central to masculinity, this was an argument that had much to do with gender. The New York intellectuals’ ideology of secular Jewish masculinity was cerebral and involved meticulously debating ideas. For New Leftists, however, masculinity also meant something different. It meant acting and protesting.
In 1965 Howe published a full-blown critique of the New Left, “New Styles in Leftism.” The article first appeared in Dissent and thereafter in various edited volumes. Howe now expanded on the concerns that he and Coser had raised in 1961. But at forty pages, it was a much longer polemic — a diatribe against the New Left. Howe no longer cast his concerns as a warning of what could happen, but rather as a description of reality. New Leftists were “ideologues and desperadoes,” he argued, some of whom verged on authoritarianism. He cast theirs as a politics of “impotence … because movements that are powerful, groups that are self-confident, do not opt out of society: they live and work within society in order to transform it.” In Howe’s view, New Leftists were nothing more than immature adolescent “desperadoes.” He and his fellow editors had offered to give them the training and leadership to become men of intellectual substance, but they shrank away from the challenge. Their show of rebellion curdled, for Howe, into an escape from politics — from engagement with ideas and with reality — altogether.Theirs was a masculine politics of style and outward appearances but not substance.
New Leftists took offense to the essay. Marshall Berman described it as an “extravagant acting out” against a younger generation that would not follow Howe’s lead. According to Berman it was Howe who “was a man obsessed with style” and “only people with THE RIGHT STYLE were allowed to play.” The right style was the masculine debating style of the New York intellectuals.
Ultimately, Howe and Dissent’s concerns about the New Left proved prophetic. The Vietnam War, racial unrest, the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, all tore the movement apart. The self-destruction of the New Left dashed the Dissenters’ hopes for the resurgence of a leftist politics in the United States. “There are signs today of a massive withdrawal from political involvement, a spreading mood of cynicism about the possibilities of political success,” Michael Walzer ruefully wrote in Dissent in the spring of 1972. “It is clear that any sort of sustained leftist activity is going to be extremely difficult. In the New Left fall/We suffered all.”
Howe touched on Jewish masculinity in the encounter with the New Left in his 1984 memoir, A Margin of Hope. Was his, and the Dissenters’, reaction to the New Left perhaps a “case of unrequited love?” Howe asked. “Hadn’t middle-aged Socialists like you set for yourselves the role of mentor to the young, and weren’t you now reeling from blows of rejection?” He conceded that there was some truth in that notion. He also admitted that he “overreacted” to the New Left, “becoming at times harsh and strident.”
He was argumentative because he took the New Left seriously and wanted them to succeed where the Old Left had failed. For Howe, there was a real sense of kinship with the New Left, which made the situation between the two groups all the more tragic. Howe admitted in his memoir that the New Left’s attacks on older liberals and radicals like himself felt personal. “They wanted to deny our past, annul our history, wipe out our integrity.” When New Leftists painted “the slogan ‘Up against the wall, motherfuckers!’ on campus buildings,” they not only had police and the political establishment in mind but “parents of the New Deal generation who had raised them.” It felt like a schism between fathers and sons, a theme that animated his 1976 best seller, World of Our Fathers.
Excerpted from Write like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals by Ronnie A. Grinberg. Copyright © 2024 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.
