Introduction: Public Intellectuals and Jewish Americans      

   The term “Public Intellectual,” by its nature far-reaching, is often used to refer to a small group also known as the New York Intellectuals.  This may be due to the priority of naming—those who coin a term have some proprietary rights—and to the construction of meaning.  More generally, the term refers to those who disseminate specialist ideas to a wider public, and the New York Intellectuals, and those who followed in their wake, certainly did this.  In a broader sense, since what distinguishes human beings from other animals is primarily intellect, it might be said that all of us are intellectuals, and since our species is a social one, it might be said that all of us are public.  Indeed, the United States is replete with eddies and hidden currents of amateur intellectualism, of people constructing their belief systems from bits of flotsam here and there, most commonly tied to various versions of individualism, liberty, and American nationalism.  Yet the United States has also been called an anti-intellectual nation, and those whose primary life activity is sustained and systematic reading of books, and especially of books in the Great Tradition of philosophy and literature derived from Europe, are considered best confined and tamed in our university system.  There they might teach youth, but have little to do with the actual workings of society; they may be public, but only in a rarified setting where their ideas have little immediate impact.

            It was not always so.  Perhaps the greatest fore figure of the Public Intellectual is Socrates, who acted as a gadfly, a social critic eventually executed for corrupting youth and yet, simultaneously, an upholder of the individual’s duty to the society which raised him or her, not as a blind follower of tradition but as an improver, an idealist seeking social perfection.  Socrates embodies what have often been considered opposite poles: the public intellectual as simultaneously organic and oppositional.  And the United States has its own great tradition of those who might be called Public Intellectuals who have spoken truth to power in an attempt to improve society, to push America toward its stated ideals, from emancipationists and suffragettes, to Civil Rights era leaders, to today’s proponents of cultural diversity.

The New York school, an almost entirely Jewish group who achieved great influence in American society, certainly drew upon these traditions, although Europe was their primal source.  Starting from various schools of communism and socialism, from the 1930s to the 1980s the New York Intellectuals embarked on a generally rightward course toward liberalism, neo-liberalism, and neo-conservatism.  A useful analogy for modeling the journey of Jewish American Public Intellectuals—and the organization of this special issue—is that of a train trip.  The train begins at Stalinist Station and journies rightward; its ultimate destination is Neoconservativism, although relatively few of the passengers will remain on board that long.  The first major stop is Trotskyism, but the train continues onward to Social Democracy and thence to Cold War liberalism.  Most passengers disembark at this station, some boarding other trains toward Multiculturalism, while an influential few continue onward to the Neoconservative stop.

Alongside their strong political and social emphasis, the New York Intellectuals immersed themselves in the seemingly antithetical project of championing modernist literary forms that thrive upon ambiguity, irony, and experimentation.  The political and aesthetic realms, then, existed uneasily side by side in the same group of individuals and the magazines they founded and edited, most famously Partisan Review, but also Commentary and Dissent.

            Why did these schools of thought, socialism and modernism, appeal so strongly to a group of second-generation Jewish immigrants?  Irving Howe has characterized the New York intellectuals as “the first group of Jewish writers to come out of the immigrant milieu who did not define themselves through a relationship, nostalgic or hostile, to memories of Jewishness” (241).  The appeal of socialism is obvious for a people rejecting narrow versions of its heritage and attempting to assimilate into a new land; it offers a form of universal society, and an ideology replacing religion.  For a people isolated from a mainstream society that they aspired to join, socialism offered a universal humanism that would wipe the past clean. 

            Modernism, strangely enough, offered benefits parallel to socialism for a diasporic people integrating into a multicultural environment (although the word “multicultural” had not yet come into use, and American society certainly privileged mainstream European culture).  Although one version of modernism, that of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, is both elitist and anti-semitic, modernism is also culturally eclectic and individualistic, traits fitting the agenda of a people reconstructing their identity in a new world.  If all Public Intellectuals have had strong ideas about the role of the arts in society, and if socialism had its narrow notions of art in direct service to political ideals, with the New York Intellectuals we see a strange ambivalence about the social role of art (including literature).  Art is to be created by highly individualistic personalities, subject to aesthetic imperatives unattached to political agendas.  Yet art is to be analyzed within a definite social framework, partly, at least, as a product of its time.

            Yet modernism, while artistically radical, is not, by its nature, political radicalism, and many of its key figures were conservatives.  Modernism’s complexity may have served as a medium in the journey of Jewish public intellectuals away from all-encompassing left-wing ideologies.  Surely a greater force in this journey was the bloody failure of most (ostensibly) communist societies which, rather than creating egalitarian paradises ended in totalitarian nightmares.  Eugene Goodheart portrays the “religious intensity” of the commitment to communism, and the brutal shock of its unmasking.  With belief in the religion of Judaism weakened and its replacement, communism as a secular religion, dead, what is left?  This has many answers.  For Goodheart what remains is an unfixed identity, a multitude of choices, a kind of ideological diaspora which, in a way, represents a new freedom.

The excesses of Stalinism, then, are primary among a variety of factors that acted as shockwaves jarring American Jewish intellectuals away from a European inspired socialism.  These include the rejection of enlightenment universalism by European fascism, the continuing anti-semitism of the Soviet regime, and the economic anomy of communist regimes worldwide.  Conversely, Jewish acceptance by, and success within, American society pulled them toward acceptance of a liberal, democratic, individualistic and often capitalist vision of the United States.  The realization of a liberal society accepting of Jews, then, has eclipsed socialism as a primary vision of American Jewish intellectuals.

            The university has been a primary site for integration of Jews in American society.  Throughout the 1930s and ‘40s economic and political conditions, the small size of the university system, and the limited number of professorships granted to Jews, had kept the New York Intellectuals in a kind of semi-professional status, underpaid and often writing as a sideline, a situation conducive to “the intellectual as antispecialist, or as a writer whose speciality was the lack of a speciality: the writer as dilettante-connoisseur” (Howe 262).  Despite poverty and risk, the public intellectual also possessed the freedom of those with little to lose and an outsider perspective conducive to social criticism.  Following World War II, the burgeoning university system enhanced the process of pulling Jewish intellectuals away from radicalism.  It did so partly by creating affluence, by granting job security, benefits, freedom to think, lecture, and write, an actuality as comfortable as that which socialism had promised only in theory.

            Through the 1950s, and, to an extent, the 1960s, the university was a welcoming place only for Jews who submerged their Jewishness.    Lionel Trilling, perhaps the personification of the liberal Public Intellectual, was a key figure in the Jewish transition from outsiderhood to full participation in American intellectual life, not least because of his appointment as a full professor at Columbia University.  Yet this great forefather, this towering figure, was in many ways ambivalent about his achievement.  Daniel Schwarz’s description of a childhood in which Jewish identity is secondary to fitting into American society offers one partial explanation of this ambivalence.  However great Jewish success in the university, the suppression of religious, cultural, and historical expression made for an emotional and intellectual incompleteness.

Mark Krupnick believes that Trilling’s ambivalence permeates the entire New York intellectual atmosphere, fathers and sons (as well as a few mothers and daughters).  To Krupnick, this group was unable to transcend a thin, overly politicized sensibility, to achieve a dynamic integration of intellect and imagination.  Michael Kimmage further develops this theme, presenting Trilling’s The Middle of the Journey as driven by a revulsion to the extreme left and an inability to embrace conservativism.  What remains is a kind of neverland, a less optimistic version of what for Goodheart may be undefined but is nevertheless replete with possibility.  For Kimmage, Trilling’s beliefs also foreshadow the coming of the neoconservatives in the flight from communism and the embrace of Americanism.

            Before the neoconservatives a majority of the New York Intellectuals defined themselves as liberals, but of a particularly anticommunist bend.  Nathan Abrams criticizes the New York intellectuals who, in their reaction against communism, accepted CIA funds and became ideological tools in the Cold War.  Although there were other reasons for the flight from communism, one cannot discount the influence of money and affluence—particularly over the long run, as small, subtle accommodations add up--in molding ideological beliefs.  Beyond the relatively small influence of CIA funding, one could extend Abrams analysis to include other sources of money, extending to the current day.

While many Jewish intellectuals disassociated from Stalinism from the beginning—famously, in the 1920s, in the Trotskyite alcove at City College--and, by the 1950s, most had become anti-communist, they evolved in a variety of directions.  Irving Howe, and the group clustered around Dissent magazine, continued to consider themselves socialists.  Magazines such as Partisan Review moved toward what may now be considered a classical American liberalism, anti-communist but still believing in the ability of government to initiate social change.  Commentary magazine eventually went further, coming to consider the United States, and capitalism, as the primary global light of civilization.  A concern with the unintended, detrimental consequences of government programs became the hallmark of the neoconservatives; by 1980 this philosophy gave intellectual moorings to the Reagan administration.  In describing the ascendance of the neoconservatives, Susanne Klingenstein, focuses on the reaction of older conservatives who, after years out of power, felt themselves eclipsed by Jewish interlopers once a clearly conservative president was finally in office.  Their now largely forgotten diatribes flirt dangerously with classic anti-Semitism.

In the university, meanwhile, a great deal of radicalism remains.  While certainly having a Jewish component, the explosive developments in the 1960s largely bypassed the New York intellectuals.  As the country returned to a quiet rightward drift, in academia neo-Marxist social critique persisted.  Much of this has turned out to be merely professed radicalism or paper radicalism, divided and domesticated by compartmentalization and the search for academic status.  So Russell Jacoby describes the university as an institution that “neutralizes the freedom it guarantees” (119), while the far more conservative Richard Posner makes a similar critique: “Today . . . the typical public intellectual is a safe specialist, which is not the type of person well suited to play [the role of] critical commentator” (5).  While a stream of post-Marxist work continues to circulate throughout the university, this exists only among the same small, intellectually-inbred group, employing esoteric and alienating language, a recipe that has effectively discouraged actual political action.

Any picture of intellectual life from the 1970s to today would be incomplete without mention of another key movement: multiculturalism.  Daniel Schwarz espouses the way ethnic studies has led to new freedom of expression for Jewish intellectuals.  The term “multiculturalism,” however, means different things to different people, from an updated version of the melting pot which acknowledges the contribution of many people while leaving America centered largely in its Anglo-Saxon traditions, to a larger recalibration of culture and society that rejects the Western classics.  While conservative critics fear that multiculturalism leads to a segregated, tribalist society, in practice this is rarely the case.  Most proponents of multiculturalism acknowledge a central role for democracy.  So, too, is democracy sanctioned by a movement related to, yet strangely divergent from, multiculturalism: globalism.  For multiculturalists, democracy tends to mean the right of all groups to make their voice heard; globalists emphasize that free societies, and free markets, need democracy.  However the status, and even the basic definition, of globalism remains undetermined.  Most likely, the current global economic crisis will lead to revised thinking about the relationship between capitalism and free society.

The evolving relationship between older Public Intellectual approaches in an atmosphere of interlocking globalism and multiculturalism underlies the conversation between Morris Dickstein and Ilan Stavans.  The common element may be diaspora.  If Dickstein is part of an older wave of immigrants moving into an America that defined itself by assimilation, Stavans’ even more complicated Jewish-Mexico-United States background occurs in a country—and a world—of uncertain definition.  Comparing their experience of exile and reinstatement in a new land to that of newer groups of immigrants, Stavans and Dickstein’s discussion ranges over issues of multiculturalism and cultural hybridity.  Clearly assimilation is a forgotten term here; immigrants are now assumed to change the society they are changed by.  The necessity of a contemporary role for intellectuals in a society increasingly defined by popular culture also emerges as an important issue.  But who will upheld this role?  Will it remain in the rarified preserve of the university system?

            Both Jacoby and Posner describe a current atmosphere of public intellectual failure, not only regarding action but also analysis.  Both blame the isolation of the academy.  They fail to discuss, however, how this world is increasingly threatened as the privileges of tenure give way to armies of underpaid teaching assistants, adjunct instructors, and post-docs, all designed to give the university maximum quantitative output at minimum cost.  Patrick Brantlinger discusses the role of intellectuals in a university system that once seemed a safe haven, now threatened with contraction and perhaps extinction.  While Brantlinger touches on corporatization and the downsizing of the professariat, his emphasis is on how computer technology threatens to demolish the role of the intellectual.

The comfortable life of the liberal university is increasingly illusory, as intellectual labor is drained to the last drop in exchange for the good will of naïve youth toward an idealized version of the university, and for the increasingly distant carrot of tenure.  This trend follows a larger one in the wake of Western victory in the Cold War, an extreme “free-market” ideology that is less free than it proclaims, that may more accurately be described as mega-corporatist than capitalist.  A liberal society marked by a balance between capitalism and state institutions is being swept aside, and with it the privileged role of the university.

If the university is no longer the safe, isolated home for the free-play of intellectuals, in our increasingly complex and dangerous world good Public Intellectuals may be more necessary than ever.  The new millenium is off to a shaky start, with 9/11 only the most obvious alarm signal.  Terrorism, nuclear proliferation, the breakdown of peace movements, a widening gap between rich and poor, a burgeoning environmental crisis, an ideologically stale administration, all indicate the need for stronger analysis and articulation regarding global issues.  Intellectuals today face a situation characterized by two opposite tendencies: a reality of fragmentation and a desperate need for integration.  Fragmentation by the proliferation of a vast array of specialties and sub-specialties, compartmentalized and use of mutually unintelligible technical languages.  Integration as a lost ideal, a unity of knowledge that seems simply impossible yet, as is inherent in the rhetoric of globalization, is imperative.  The looming environmental crisis particularly cries out for global integration.  To take just one example, the transportation systems adapted in the United States, through increasing global warming, impact the spread of disease in Africa.  These diseases will not remain in Africa, but will eventually erode the quality of life in the United States, at the very least by disrupting the safety of our trade partners.  This is merely one cross-current in a fantastically complex network of interaction.  Coping with such a world requires highly trained technical people who adapt complex languages not out of a wish to display their learning, but out of need.  It also requires generalists with broad visions who can untangle interconnected strands of knowledge.  Yet high-quality analysis is useless unless it influences actual policies by actual politicians.  And actual politicians always arrive encumbered with their own backgrounds, problems and agendas.  To influence such an international babble requires skilled rhetoricians committed to democracy and widespread social opportunity, able to convey these complexities to larger publics.  As much as possible, it requires individuals capable of balancing multiple levels of analysis and discourse.  This is the current challenge of the public intellectual, who must be post-diasporic and post-nation-state.  One wonders if those intellectuals forced out of the university system will succumb to passivity and quietude or will return to the public arena with a sharpened edge.  If the latter, perhaps there will be a new burgeoning of the public intellectual, not as aloof social commentator with little real influence, but reviving and extending the best traditions of the New York intellectual.