"If the literary output of 1999 reveals anything, it reveals that Jewish

"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]

25
LITERATURE - "INTELLECTUALS"
-- "THE FAMILY"

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,

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

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

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)

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

(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,

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

Parsons, Will Herberg

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

CONSERVATIVE LIBERALS: Sidney Hooks, Norman Podhoretz, Irving

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."

"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

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

* 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

* Adeline Naiman -- Editor at Little, Brown.

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

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

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.