New York Intellectual/Neocon/Jewish; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Ignore Ruth Wisse

The following is a much-shortened adaptation—a sample—of a much larger project, a polemic, on the New York intellectuals: specifically on how we can (or should) talk about them, given a critical concern with Jewish identity and identification. There's a lot that should be here that's not, most notably careful consideration of the writings of the New York critics that form the context of my broadsides; for that I apologize, but I'm hoping those broadsides will compel readers to turn to those writings. A brief note on my subtitle: I am writing this as a critic of Jewish literature, and it is not meant in any way as a statement of editorial policy. Many readers know Ruth Wisse as concerned with the politics of a Jewish literary canon, most visibly, perhaps, in her 2000 work The Modern Jewish Canon, which for many scholars cemented her reputation as an arbiter of literary Jewishness and Jewish canonicity. Many readers also know her from her militant stance against liberalism and those Jews she deems self-hating for insufficiently martial Zionism. My point here is that these two roles are inseparable, and stem from specific ideas about the representational function of literature. Wisse's literary historical framing of Jewish identity works in tandem, I argue, with her neoconservative politics, and it aims to block interpretation at variance with that politics. A primary goal of my current work is to de-couple ideas about identity in literature from reading practices marked primarily by patterns of deference, reverence, and/or recognition that suppress critical thought. Wisse is obviously a major Jewish intellectual—and she wouldn't be the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Comparative Literature at Harvard University if she weren't a productive and authoritative one—but I am opposed to instrumentalizing literature to make arguments about what Jews should be and do. In any case, vast universes of reading and criticism open up when we loosen a bit the links between literature and what we consider it to represent.Alan Wald begins his important book on the New York Intellectuals by arguing that a “mystification” makes studying political culture in the United States very difficult (xv). As anti-Stalinist intellectuals committed to revolutionary Marxism increasingly “came into harmony with the dominant ideology of the liberal intelligentsia during the Cold War” (8), and in some cases migrated much further to the right to become the state philosophers for the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush regimes who articulated the hegemonic justification for reactionary triumphs like the supply-side unraveling of the social safety net and the war in Iraq, Wald (writing in the mid-1980s) points to a “neoconservative self-portrait being created by many of the New York intellectuals” that, among other things, has been instrumental in “perpetuating an amnesia” about these critics' “previous political history” as “Marxists” (8–9). This “amnesia” papers over important differences between the “anti-Communism (originally, opposition by revolutionary Marxists to Soviet Communism, after the rise of Stalin, as a deformation or perversion of socialism)” that these writers shared in the thirties and forties and the intransigent “anticommunism (in the United States, an ideological mask for discrediting movements for radical social change and supporting the status quo by amalgamating these movements with Soviet crimes, expansionism, and subversion)” (6) that came to characterize a significant subset of them starting as early as the 1950s. Now, Wald's interest is in rescuing the New York intellectuals as an important part of a Marxist strain in the American intellectual tradition, but I want to take his key point here—that the New York critics' “ultimate evolution was not the only one possible” (10), which stands as a powerful antidote to a dominant neoconservative narrative—in a slightly different direction. It's hard to see the New York intellectuals outside the framework that neoconservative history has constructed, a history that on the one hand dismisses as irrelevant or wrong (and in some cases un-American) the anti-Stalinist Marxism that characterized the group in the thirties and forties, and that on the other hand—in the course of a process of a kind of ideological selection—redeems as a useful past only those currents in their thought that can be retrospectively organized as constitutive of neoconservatism. Writers on the left like Wald, Terry Cooney, and Harvey Teres have done important work in retrieving the legacy of the New York intellectuals from the clutches of the Neocons. Here I want to continue that labor, but by focusing on one of the crucial pivots of the neoconservative narrative: the New York intellectuals' Jewishness. I contend that Jewishness for the New York critics is far more complex than Wisse—or her typology of intellectual production—allows.In 1944, the American Jewish Committee's journal Contemporary Jewish Record—the journal that would the following year, under editor Elliot Cohen, be succeeded by Commentary—published a symposium entitled “Under Forty: A Symposium on American Literature and the Younger Generation of American Jews.” The symposium collected brief essays by eleven young Jewish writers, who were asked to reflect on “the participation of writers of Jewish descent in the development of American letters” (3), as the first sentence of the editors' introduction puts it. The introduction begins from the assumption that with this rising generation, American Jews “are taking their place in the front ranks of American literature. They are spectators no longer but full participants in the cultural life of the country” (3). Specifically, the editors suggest to the “representative group of American authors” they have “invited” to “record their views and experiences” (4): “The Jewish heritage is historically of so remarkable a character, and its effects are so significant on every level of existence, that the American writer of Jewish descent can hardly dismiss it as irrelevant to his problems” (3).As suggested by their use of the word representative, the editors take Jewish literary production as the record of a historical agent or subject, the American Jew, or the Jew as s/he becomes American. To be representative, of course, is to be representative of: there's not much to representativity without this “of,” and what it's of is some category, some object of interpretive desire. Already in the first sentence of the one-page introduction, therefore, we have a dedication to—maybe faith in—the evidentiary legibility of certain categories or sets, including Jews, America, and Literature. The intersection of these sets, of course, largely constitutes what we now call the field of Jewish American literature, along with the conditions of possibility of its canon, its literary history, and its criticism. Which is to say that the editors seem to be staking out what is by now a fairly familiar geography of Jewish American literary study: they take as axiomatic that Jewish literature is Jewish because it is marked by the “Jewish heritage,” a categorical archive that differentiates Jewish cultural production. Attesting to an identifiable historical subject, the editors' archival “heritage” thus already functions as a prescription, tasked with policing the representation of Jewish identity. What's interesting, however, is that the symposium participants (almost to a one) will actually challenge—albeit tacitly or sometimes implicitly—the positivism underlying the CJR editors' understanding of the generative productivity of the Jewish heritage. In fact, the symposium participants destabilize the summons to recognize a self-evident Jewish subject that necessarily underlies any identity-based literary history that begins from the assumption that literature represents a given population. “Heritage,” which the editors understand as the statist archive of a secure historical Jewish subject, is better understood as the disruptive counter-archive of a spectral history that displaces Jewish identity from the positively located, coherent cultural narrative the CJR editors expect to evince. In the tension between the editors' representational statism and the participants' spectral displacement of identity, the symposium therefore figures precisely the epistemological and methodological field of a literary and cultural criticism invested in a concept of Jewish identity.The participants trouble the inheritance of a “heritage” with a tension between authoritative modes of Jewishness as they are currently recognized and possible modes of Jewishness as they could be. Muriel Ruckheyser, for example, explicitly rejects the possibility that she's representative—that is, of a normative Jewish subject—instead claiming that this tension polices her work, “guarantees” against aligning with some particular authoritative version of Jewish life (a definitive alignment that she labels a temptation to close the spirit): a vigilance against rather than an assertion of. Others, like Howard Fast and Albert Halper, develop this sense of vigilance as social consciousness, arguing that the Jewish heritage produces a platform to critique injustice. Delmore Schwartz argues that his sense of Jewish identity is beneficial but only insofar as it allows him to gauge his alienation, and Lionel Trilling, similarly, sees his Jewishness not as a positive identity but as a kind of spectral ethics, marking his unwillingness to be “parochial and provincial.” Isaac Rosenfeld, whose essay brings the symposium to a close, begins by pointing out that, as “everywhere” a “minority group,” Jews face a “particular misfortune” to be a minority group these days in the United States: “a conscious member of such a group is necessarily overconscious: he is distracted by race and religion, distressed by differences which in a healthy society would be considered healthful” (34). Jews are compelled to dwell too much on their own particularity, on how they are recognized at the present time. If an artist should be able to consider himself “an equal, a man among men, a representative even if extraordinary individual,” the “Jewish writer unconsciously feels that he may at any time be called to account not for his art, nor even for his life, but for his Jewishness” (35). As the symposium participants attest, this process of being “called to account” has multiple itineraries, at once Jewish and Gentile, alternately empowering and disenfranchising, serving no unified or coherent agenda. The Jew is “overconscious” because the Jew is overdetermined, refused the comfort of self-evidence. Rosenfeld emphasizes this overdetermination's disruptive potential, the challenge it mounts to any attempt—Jewish or not—at taking Jewishness for granted.1Despite seeming to have largely gone either undetected or unremarked, a key element of the “Under Forty” symposium, a document that remains a touchstone of discussions of the Jewishness of the New York intellectuals, is that most of the participants talk about the relevance of the Jewish heritage—at this point, I'm not at all sure whether it's more useful to put the scare quotes around “the,” “Jewish,” or “heritage”—in starkly different terms than do either the editors of CJR or the historicist mainstream of literary and cultural studies. A concept like heritage, if it is going to mean anything, likely needs to imply a generative force, a way of accounting for, measuring, and/or narrating continuity between past, present, and future. It's a positive phenomenon, in so far as it articulates a kind of reproduction—of a categorical archive that enables a potential recognition. What's so fascinating about the “Under Forty” writers is the way in which they talk about the Jewish in these essays or in rather than or The terms Jewish and do not to be understood as as if a and self-evident to the Jewish becomes a when and only when it can be into even as no can be in To a literary as would not necessarily imply a to a Jewish archive but would into critical the in any of categorical recognition. The symposium makes it possible to a criticism of the the for literature to be the we recognize in the of a concept of identity so how we now about literary and cultural production that we are of the or the links or between and between group and between and as these eleven writers do. To say is not to say or but more like I use however, because it an with the in the sense that it produces or the life and in the process a Jewishness is to be the of a positive subject, it has already become the potential of a of that and a of thus do an understanding of Jewish literary that Jewish literature to be representative of a Jewish historical subject and a neoconservative narrative that only a statism as the of Jewish history on the of the Jewish If the editors of the CJR a that the symposium will how this group of Jewish American writers is representative of Jewish the “Jewish in Jewish American how it is and how its cultural or can be participants in the of this field by the possibility of policing a secure of Jewish identity. The “Under Forty” symposium to identity in literature not as a of recognition but as a form of the critique of from the of the major critics of the New York intellectuals the left and the largely to generative or historicist of Jewish identity. Here I'm going to on the in particular its in the justification of neoconservatism. Ruth the New York intellectuals an along largely of those in their work that she to their which she and a and at once and on the other those that for her to the of and to a self-evident between what she and the of the and a by her “a Jewish York for Wisse these about the New York intellectuals it was Marxism that Jews to “the Jewish as and were two of the as the two with the New York intellectuals a for her political of their to to to even as it Jewish and so taking intellectual for the Jewish and the Jewish in the intellectual of which is to the a she of Wisse the to its by the American Jewish in and the editor Elliot two in Jewish “an intelligentsia on its and an with Jewish thus it the between the open to Jewish intellectuals its in the one hand like The or Jewish with Jewish and on the other like and The New which Jewish about This in early Jewish intellectual life the Jewish between the Jew his and the Jew the which a among Jews, one way the and when with the thus she the with the history of and a history for but the of the Jews and the of a state of of cultural with a of that, in the of editor Cohen, heritage and into a sense of in the the journal “an of faith in in Wisse to this a militant the Jew, recognized in the of is of its its editorial was at the for Wisse the that in the between the of the war and the of the field in which the journal would and the and it would to in any case, Wisse after a Jewish intellectual in she in this context the essay about by of its use of “the first as marking a among Jewish intellectuals to and the about Jews in literature and culture of argues that not in his that he is writing a after the from it that the Jewish cultural the and of Wisse by and is than the that she on this the of the of Jewish of the and of what she too “Jewish cultural the participants in the “Under Forty” after to the In a Wisse the of who over as editor in to after of the in The New on of and a his own against of and her of the Jewish as she of in at the intellectual when the reputation of the Jews was at this the of the to the possibility of criticism of Wisse intellectual in the of what she in the essay “the of their “Under Forty” to be representative of the and self-hating into which Jewish intellectuals been the “Jewish Elliot its when the Contemporary Jewish a symposium of of the young Jewish most of these intellectuals their from the Jewish and their for its their own on into the and into American they as those who a Jewish state in than their Jewish heritage for their intellectual they it into than The two she likely from introduction to a symposium, entitled and the Younger which in in the after over from As the editor of most of the writers in the “Under Forty” symposium and was in the that the it to be on its way to being in the as the that would so “the to have American Jews the articulates and as to an opposition between the of and Jewish and the of and A further turn of the is when the of the symposium participants for Jewish and practices to the at the time by the concept of which was more than not from what in his to the “Under Forty” symposium, called the all be in all the that American in if he all the were argues that was the of the Jewish which more than for the the young writers of for their Jews in in the critique of and a critical of alienation, and what he the of the framework that will Wisse's “the Jewish with an whose is with this critique of Wisse links the cultural of and along and she it by precisely the that the “Under Forty” writers that “the Jewish of the writings on Jewish literature and the came into use and the of the was to that the of the would have to call the to can an of in on and the and Wisse argues that in that because the to the Jewish and the Jewish was more than the to The Jews of were to the by in the and on the the war against in and it left the Jews not only to but also to the of who to in was the of and the Jews from and from the of liberal of from a productive on the one a by the of a and that's by terms like and given Wisse's on the other an and epistemological that the into primarily and but to Jewish and and them, and Jewish the of because the of a the only Jewish which is to say the the that would in of and its and political if the New York intellectuals who of the “Jewish more than not for when came to the those who were not so to which in the editorial statement that its first after with the to be (3). Wisse much in this to be was not to any political as a that the group its but rather to an ideology that their of and In their the state in which they them to put out any they York The the writers was a they already they were their not only from a to which they were not subject, but also and at the time their from its political the that them more of the but more significant is that Wisse to the of like and to discussions of recognized we see here the particular of her “Jewish which a to her of the of not Jews, for those of the New York intellectuals who were Jewish (and they were the by it the kind of from the the of a Jewish (34). for Wisse the and of in which be considered in “the of because any such ideas or practices at be by an actually and identifiable state which and “the Jewish a that only the but it in are Wisse the the New York intellectuals' Jewish heritage should compel them to to the and of a “Jewish because a state is to every in their case, Marxism has them to not in the of the which for Wisse is to with the and the of “a Jewish of which to seem to be to of the state of Marxism to their as intellectuals, therefore, in their from to the “Jewish which is to say to a Jewish state by a is the inheritance of Wisse's powerful “Jewish her of and political in the of Jewish she up a of that links the Jewish with the Jewish primarily by of to the of Jewish identity, or to a which in the that the intellectual who most its which is to a goal here is to to the possibility and legibility of an to the dominant narrative that understanding of the New York the one this dominant account dismisses the New York critics as either or either case, out of place in and irrelevant to current political and cultural the other this dominant interpretive the as the of the New York intellectual A to this dominant account can with the that has as and of this narrative self-evidence. In fact, in two different in this hegemonic In the first case, we to consider in how we the New York intellectuals the narrative of Jewish American political from early to liberalism to on the left and the this is a of is the Jewishness of such figures as the the and these are so by now that we want to say that that a neoconservative is a liberal been by is the familiar about being a liberal in and in for a In the case, in a as the self-evident of a to but as the of the New York the left and the as the American intellectual of the It's not to as part of the inheritance of the New York the policing the concept of Jewish identity that Wisse and use to Jewish who are more or left of them and/or “Under Forty” and the way to on an concept of representation for its of identity and politics. The statist of Wisse's and identity are the of a generative concept of Jewish heritage with an understanding of literature as primarily A goal for Jewish literary criticism is to call Wisse's of over in all its what it is, and to work to it from in the of literary “Under Forty” can be as part of a counter-archive of Jewishness. The critique of the Jewish subject in “Under Forty” articulates the possibility of a Jewish literary not to but to the criticism of recognition and of literature

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