A tale of two critics.

Whitfield, Stephen J.

How can the study of history be enlisted to explore the possibilities of an authentically Jewish collective life in the United States? Here was a society that was Christian though the state itself was not, a refuge where the contours of freedom were dramatically expanded even as millions of coreligionists were being tortured and massacred during the 1930s and 1940s. How responsibilities were weighed, even as Jews sought to give shape and meaning to the promise of American life, has been examined from numerous angles. A profile of two intellectuals whose editorial careers and critical legacy were so alike may suggest the consequences of divergent Jewishness.

One was an active Zionist who worked for the eventual termination of the Diaspora, where he remained. He put an exceptionally keen intelligence and a cosmopolitan sensibility in the service of communal purpose. The other came to typify the independent thinker at home in several cultures. But he settled in an America that his radicalism was intended to alter. Their lives began in utter obscurity in Tsarist Russia around the turn of the century. Indeed, to make the comparison more taut, they were born with the same surname: Greenberg. In the 1920s both came to the United States, which is where this tale of two critics truly begins and where their careers would flourish. Both were autodidacts, and polyglot as well. As editors and critics, they addressed distinct coteries of readers. Neither was a systematic thinker.

Both were inescapably affected by the historical course of a century transformed by two events occurring in the same week in 1917: 1) the Bolshevik Revolution, which not only led to the formation of a Soviet state in their own homeland but also provoked in part the rise of Nazism and thus the Second World War and the Holocaust; and 2) the Balfour Declaration, which promised a national homeland in Palestine to the Jewish people. Amid the cataclysms of the 1930s and 1940s, these two men produced their most exigent writing, and their responses are among the political and ethical indices that public intellectuals have bequeathed in diagnosing such crises. Though both of these figures lived in New York, it is unclear if they ever met one another. Neither of them wrote an autobiography or became the subject of a biography. But their careers reveal the character of Jewish thought in the United States, which offered a vigor and allure too powerful for the imperatives of Zionist return to match.

Hayim Greenberg exemplified what was most decent, humane and idealistic in the minority subculture that Jews had created. But his reputation is cursed by oblivion. Even Zionist historians tend to ignore him; no biography exists even in Hebrew. When the first collection of Greenberg's essays, The Inner Eye, appeared posthumously in 1953, its publisher did not disclose who picked his "selected essays." Not only was the design of the book (plus its sequel 11 years later) so nondescript as to discourage purchasers and other readers, "no jacket required" was the policy of his thrifty publisher. Needless to say, the two volumes were barely noticed. Though an academic press reprinted many of the essays in a 1968 anthology, no extra credit is granted for guessing whether these volumes are still available in bookstores. Though the Times obituary ran 10 paragraphs and highlighted his organizational commitments, the intellectual achievements of "Dr." Hayim Greenberg were ignored. So evanescent is his legacy that one scholar gallantly proposed to rescue Greenberg from "unpersonhood,"(1) as though he had fallen down the memory hole.

He was born in 1889 in Todoristi, a Bessarabian village, and was something of a child prodigy, attaching himself so quickly to Zionism that by the age of 17 he had already attended one of its international conventions. With no formal religious or secular education, Greenberg invented himself as an orator, a polemicist, and an essayist on philosophical (especially ethical) and literary topics. By 1914 he was editing Razswiet ("The Dawn"), a Russian-Jewish weekly based in Moscow. But not long after the Revolution, Zionist political agitation was a crime for which he was jailed on several occasions, and in 1914 Greenberg emigrated to Berlin, where he became the editor of Ha Olam ("The World"), the weekly magazine of the World Zionist Organization, and the editor of Atidenu ("Our Future"), a Zionist monthly. In 1914 he arrived in the United States, where he edited two Yiddish-language journals, Farn Folk ("For the People") and--beginning in 1932.--a weekly called Der Yiddisher Kempfer ("The Jewish Militant"). Having already edited journals in Russian, Hebrew and Yiddish, Greenberg was ready by 1934 to operate in English, serving as editor-in-chief of the monthly of Labor Zionism, The Jewish Frontier. Editing ceased only with his death in New York City in 1953.

One of his closest colleagues eulogized Greenberg as having "actively loved and enjoyed America[,] though a melancholy tenderness for the Russia of his youth never left him, and the dream of Israel always possessed him." Marie Syrkin recalled how often he "spoke with regret of his quadrilingual existence." He had achieved "a genuine literary command of four languages," but a polyglot existence put him fully at ease nowhere in particular. He paid the price of the insecurity of exile. However pleased Greenberg was to secure U. S. citizenship, it takes no shrewdness to guess from his c.v. that he was a socialist. But he also knew that "there is no social substitute for individual life. Personality refuses to live by proxy."(2)

Though he was devoted to the realization of the idea of Jewish statehood, its attributes repelled him. He had not fled two countries to enroll in obedience school, and forms of authority--the bureaucracy, the military, the censors of free expression--did not become attractive merely when phrased in Hebrew. Though he was a secularist bereft of any theological confidence, he was learned in the biblical and classical Judaic texts upon which he relied for orientation and contemporary applications. As Robert Seltzer has suggested, Greenberg worked most comfortably within the tradition of the musar, the "special literary genre . . . which offers ethical instruction, social criticism, and personal encouragement," drawing upon the inventory of responsa and of halakhic judgments.(3) He was not quite suited to be a public intellectual, for his instincts were skeptical. The reservations he was adept at voicing generally do not conform to the urgencies of political action demanded by the crises of modern history. For him the way in which commitments are formed mattered as much as discovering which commitments are sound. Though he was a polished speaker, the preferences that he would otherwise have honored were away from the podium. Zalman Shazar, Israel's third president, was not alone in discerning the depths of Greenberg's reserve: "A certain refined solitude kept him apart . . . he was somehow apart and alone."(4)

But the vortex of politics--and the pressure of deadlines--drew him away from the contemplative life. The fate of his fellow Jews required him to address three intertwined issues: 1) the rise of Nazism, 2) the experiment of Bolshevism, and 3) the solution of Zionism. All were to test then dilute and finally extinguish his commitment to pacifism.

Greenberg took Nazism seriously and in 1938--four years before the Wannsee conference--wrote with apodictic prescience that "Hitler and Hitlerism wish to annihilate the Jews." In the summer of 1942 a group of Bundists had managed to smuggle out of Poland a Yiddish document describing the murder of several hundred thousand of their fellow Polish Jews. In September the Jewish Frontier published a full translation of this document, entitled "Murder in Poland." The following issue came out in November 1942; framed by a stark black border, the magazine provided precise accounts of atrocities. "Jews under the Axis, 1939-1942." opened with Greenberg's lead editorial, which announced the stunning fact of systematic annihilation: "In the occupied countries of Europe a policy is now being put into effect, whose avowed object is the extermination of a whole people. It is a policy of systematic murder of innocent civilians which in its dimensions, its ferocity and its organization is unique in the history of mankind." He wanted "this somber record to acquaint the free world with these facts and call on the governments of the Allied Nations to do whatever may be done to prevent the fulfillment of this horror."(5) The Jewish Frontier became the first anglophone periodical to present full accounts of the destruction of European Jewry. The November issue could not be ignored, and a month later the Department of State confirmed reports of the Holocaust as substantially true.(6)

Though the New York Times minimized the murder of two million Jews in the East by positioning the December 9, 1942, story on page 20,(7) the Jewish Frontier could not be so indifferent. Greenberg published an open letter, dated February 12, 1943, entitled "Bankrupt!" It was a jeremiad against the leadership of American Jewry, which felt helpless to reconsider the Allied objective of subordinating every policy and every tactic to military victory over the Axis. "The time has come, perhaps, when the few Jewish communities remaining in the world which are still free to make their voices heard and to pray in public should proclaim a day of fasting and prayer for American Jews. No--this is not a misprint. I mean specifically that a day of prayer and of fasting should be proclaimed for the five million Jews now living in the United States. They live under the protection of a mighty republic," he wrote bitterly. But "they deserved to be prayed for. They are not even aware of what a misfortune has befallen them . . . If moral bankruptcy deserves pity, and if this pity is seven-fold for one who is not even aware of how shocking his bankruptcy is, then no Jewish community in the world today (not even the Jews who are now in the claws of the Nazi devourer) deserves more compassion from Heaven than does American jewry." As others were being consigned to the inferno, Greenberg wondered why Jews in the United States remained so undisturbed, so free of the derangement that would signify moral health. He did not recommend specific policies; he did not know if the flow of blood could be stanched. But he could at least "refuse to understand how and why all of us have fallen to such a state of shameful degradation."(8)

Greenberg provided information on the genocide to Ben Hecht, whose "The Extermination of the Jews" was published in the American Mercury that same month. As a result Hecht brought a detailed--if abbreviated--account of the Final Solution to national attention, and then his article was excerpted in the February 1943 issue of the Reader's Digest.(9) Moral complacency is what he observed in American Jewry. A generation later, when one of the remnant who survived the Shoah would describe "the Jews of silence," Elie Wiesel meant not only the muzzled Soviet Jews but also American Jews whose voices were not raised in protest.

In the terrible struggle against fascism, Greenberg never yielded to the temptation of romanticizing the Soviet Union. In the 15 years since it had expelled him, he wrote in 1936, his "opposition to the prevailing capitalist system has become more passionate and determined." But he could not "accept the 'atheistic faith' . . . Official Communism has declared war not only on the Church," which Greenberg conceded had been reactionary and corrupt, but also on "the Synagogue," and also (,against every honest effort towards a religious orientation in the universe." As a Jew he could not stomach the systematic anti-Zionism which the Soviet state fostered. As a social democrat he had to uphold the "freedom of conscience" and the right to propound "heresies" which the USSR extirpated. As a moralist, he caught the terrible contradiction that stalked the justification of terror, the duplicity entailed in the claim that the cruelties of the dictatorship were only temporary: "How can one transform a man into something worthless in order to endow him with worth? How can we introduce slavery for the sake of freedom, an epidemic in the interests of sanitation?"

Like Jefferson, Greenberg believed that the earth belongs to the living, and therefore its interests could not be subjugated for the sake of those not yet born. The coercive sacrifice of one generation for the sake of future generations appalled him. Writing an open epistle to "a Communist friend," Greenberg declared that, from his reading of the Soviet press, achievements in industrialization deserved to be acknowledged. But he added: "I would now congratulate you heartily upon your success, if I did not know how costly it has been, if I did not know what a price millions of men have paid for it. Without human dignity, without elementary freedom, what is all this worth? Of what value are these achievements, if the individual is degraded, if he is surrounded by spies, if he is perpetually terrified?" Greenberg proclaimed what later writers like Arthur Koestler would become honored for insisting that "ends and means in politics are analogous to form and content in art. Form in art is not merely technique; means in politics are not mere instruments. The content must be felt in the form. The means must contain the basic elements of the end." Despite the threat of fascism and Nazism, Greenberg did not want to purchase socialism at the price of "force and terror."(10)

Both volumes of The Inner Eye suggest how cosmopolitan a figure Greenberg was. His concerns and his commitments were mostly across the ocean. His writings on the New Deal (or the Fair Deal) were quite negligible; interpreting the motives of Lenin and Stalin was more pressing than explaining the policies of FDR. No essay is reprinted on the crisis of capitalism that the Great Depression portended, but a chapter is devoted to the Soviet Constitution Of 1936 (as though such issues as the "court-packing" controversy were too petty to be worth noticing). But it should be noted that shortly before Roosevelt announced his plan to squeeze more justices onto the Supreme Court, the Jewish Frontier published Marie Syrkin's article, exposing--probably for the first time in an American publication--the phoniness of the Great Purge trials in the Soviet Union. Yet one might speculate that residence in the United States, with its tradition of political and--to a lesser extent--ethnic pluralism, may have affected Greenberg's assessment of what bedeviled the Soviet system. Not only as a Jew with a special sensitivity to minority needs, but also as a new American who could appreciate the legitimacy of factional difference, Greenberg condemned the 1936 Constitution that Nikolai Bukharin composed shortly before his execution: "The one-party system remains in force as before . . . Since Russia has become a `classless' society, there can be no economic conflict between the various sections of the population; consequently there is no need for rival political parties." But Greenberg wondered "why must we take for granted that every political party always and only expresses class interests? Were that the case, the capitalist countries would have only one proletarian party and one capitalist party." The logic here is bullet-proof. He conceded industrial progress under the Bolsheviks. But "bread tastes better with freedom."(11)

Five years later he reconsidered socialism, as he felt the need to stress the value of political democracy and respect for individual worth. He also anticipated Hannah Arendt's case for revolutionary councils (soviets) that would effectuate participatory democracy and pursue more than economic gains. If Greenberg's anti-Bolshevism was not indistinguishable from other left-wing criticisms in that era, at least he avoided the temptations of fellow-travelling despite his sensitivity to the lethal threat of Nazism. What he supplemented was a special concern for the fate of the Jewish community he had left behind in 1921. Exactly three decades later he identified its prospects in an open letter to the Soviet ambassador to Washington: "The Jewish community as such, the Soviet Jewish people, is faced with extinction." Greenberg feared that Soviet Communism intended "to eradicate the last spark of Jewish group-consciousness." What separated him from other anti-Stalinist Intellectuals was the importance he attached to Jewish survival, even under totalitarianism. Marxist theoreticians, Greenberg commented, shared even with some American liberals the hope that Jews, when no longer persecuted, would opt to disappear. That would be best for everyone, he acidly noted: "The greatest ideal which a certain type of liberalism holds out for us is still one of painless death."(12) To circumvent it, Zionism was essential.

But why Palestine? Here Greenberg offered a kind of metahistorical vision: "For such a Genesis the land we call the Land of Israel is not the best, not politically the most convenient; and if history were rationally planned some other country in some other continent might have been more easily the assembly point for Israel. But this is the way it happened. The vitality in us which seeks a Genesis had a familiar address. It let itself be directed not by practical common sense and calculation, but by a historical compass; and the compass led to the Land of Israel." For the sake of Zion, Greenberg overcame his oratorical reluctance and cajoled audiences in Yiddish and Hebrew as well as English. Bereft of any ambitions to engage in organizational politics, he even became a bureaucrat during World War II by serving as chairman of the Executive of the Zionist Emergency Council in America. When the battle for statehood was joined after the war, he helped persuade several Latin American delegates at the UN to support the cause of Jewish sovereignty.(13)

Some of his arguments were directed at his fellow Jews. One target of his polemical gifts was Lessing Rosenwald, the former chairman of Sears, Roebuck. As the president of the American Council for Judaism, Rosenwald had endorsed King Ibn Saud's dismissal of Jews as merely a religious--not a national--group, indeed as not a people at all. How then could there be "so many millions of Jews--in Europe, in Asia, in Rosenwald's own America--who identify themselves as a people with a destiny of their own, with the drama of their own history, with common hopes and aspirations for the future"? That struggle to realize a collective dream "should have given Mr. Rosenwald cause to stop repeating the perverse nonsense on which he and others like him have been brought up." Greenberg could not understand why, because the Jews had "created a universalistic religion--or has been the medium through which that religion has been revealed--that people should disappear from the face of the earth."(14) For no one else, he concluded, was such extinction proposed; and its cultural and moral benefits were dubious.

The vigor of Greenberg's Zionism also compelled him to challenge the political activist who had exerted the greatest influence upon his thinking. That person was not a Jew--indeed the problem stemmed from Mohandas K. Gandhi's quite understandable ignorance of so anomalous a people as the Jews. "I have read, in the languages familiar to me, all that you have written," an open "Letter to Gandhi" announces; the Mahatma had helped make Greenberg a pacifist. The vision that would eventually help India achieve independence Greenberg managed to correlate with what the Jews practiced in the Diaspora, which was "ahimsa. Some call it `passive resistance,' but in reality it has nothing to do with passivity or acquiescence," he wrote. Instead "self-concentration upon a truth; fixed determination not to renounce that truth . . . not to capitulate even when we faced physical annihilation, the gallows, burning at the stake--all this is a far higher and more intense degree of vitality, of doing, battling and combating, than the use of weapons and physical force." The ideal of Kiddush ha-Shem meant "not merely readiness for sacrifice, for triumphant death. It is also an urge to keep life holy."(15) But such was Greenberg's stature in trying to reconcile means and ends in politics that he found Gandhi tragically wrong on the two issues that mattered most to the Jewish people. After Kristallnacht Gandhi had recommended that German Jews adopt satyagraha ("soulforce") against the Nazi regime. Greenberg was withering in his reply. The struggle against British imperialism hardly resembled whatever anti-Nazi resistance might have been feasible. The "heroism" Gandhi asked from Indians deserved to be contrasted with the "superheroism" demanded of German Jews, which Greenberg considered "unexampled in history." He added: "A Jewish Gandhi in Germany, should one arise, could `function' for about five minutes-until the first Gestapo agent would lead him, not to a concentration camp, but directly to the gallows." To advocate passive or nonviolent resistance on a massive scale was cruelly irrelevant.(16)

But Greenberg also asked Gandhi to apply the same standards to the Zionist struggle against the British--and against the Arab world--that were invoked against the British in India. A double standard in asserting nationalist claims was objectionable. In 1938 Gandhi had publicly declared it to be "wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs." To force them to make room for the Jews to resettle in Palestine would be "a crime against humanity." Instead of succumbing to nationalism, the Jews should "maintain and cherish" the wonderful, exalted extraterritoriality of a spiritual state. The editor of the Jewish Frontier had to infer that Gandhi's failure to grasp the enormity of the extinction of European Jewry was connected to his denial of the Zionist claim to national restoration, a denial which Greenberg suspected was based on the political exigencies of Hindu-Muslim cooperation and hence made Gandhi susceptible to Islamic hostility to aliyah.(17) When he recognized the insult to Arab honor that a Jewish homeland would represent, Greenberg saw something askew: why was Jewish honor ignored? And "if real national honor is at stake, why should the Arabs enjoy it throughout the length and breadth of the Arabian peninsula, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Egypt (an area almost as large as the European continent), while the Jews should be deprived of this honor even in an area which occupies about one per cent of the above-mentioned lands"? He thus caught the striking imbalance in the competing claims which these peoples invoked and in the needs that propelled them.(18) If Indians needed a ration of their own, Greenberg asked Gandhi, why not the Jews?

Gandhi's anti-Zionist remarks had been reported in several leading American dailies; Greenberg's response was unnoticed except in the Anglo-Jewish press. For a Zionist to defend Zionism, no matter how incisively, was not newsworthy. Nor is there any evidence that Gandhi ever read these open letters; to search for a reply in any archive would be fruitless. The best-known study of Gandhi's effort to reconcile political action and ethical insight, Erik Erikson's 1969 Pulitzer Prize winner, does not mention Greenberg's criticism. In hitting the Mahatma with friendly fire, the Zionist editor could hardly have expected to change his addressee's mind. The intention was rather to contest misapprehensions among his fellow Jews, whose nationalist hopes needed vindication. Yet Greenberg's own mind was changed, as he came to realize the inapplicability of Gandhi's pacifism and to acknowledge more fully the peculiar status of the Jews.(19) Martin Buber had also published an open letter to Gandhi, had also defended Jewish national rights and had also underscored the impossibility of a movement of non-violent resistance to Nazism. But Greenberg's letters were clearer and sharper.

Unlike Buber, Greenberg was a freethinker and a secularist. But his rationalism apparently weakened shortly before his death, a softening that suggested the difficulty of devising a version of Jewish culture distinguishable from religion. Though never observant himself, Greenberg feared for the religious elan of American Jewry. He considered spiritual revitalization essential to combat assimilation since so many were Jews only in the sense that they were not Christians. In a decade when religiosity was endowed with such prestige, Greenberg advocated a new pietism, or hasidut. He had apparently recognized how constricted were the boundaries of collective life bereft of a sense of the sacred. Though acknowledging the value of learning and faith in forming Jewish identity, he could not imagine the danger of utter assimilation in the United States or any dramatic attenuation of ahavat Yisrael. Greenberg could not have considered identity mutable or have predicted its re-definition as only a form of "social construction." But he could not escape a paradox: If the sense of Jewish selfhood is inevitable, why did he advocate commitment to Jewish education and culture as necessary for communal continuity? How was the historical determinism that shaped the Jewish condition to be reconciled with the believe in agency and collective will?(20) When he died this tension remained unreconciled.

The enduring features of his legacy are not easy to specify. Most of his essays lack a polemical edge, devoid of the vibrancy of, say, his open letters to Gandhi. Rarely arguing against anyone in particular, Greenberg's editorials were written largely In isolation, and they do not emit the electric charge that might have come from the urgency of conversing with the wider community. Their value to posterity is correspondingly diminished, and he himself must have wondered, as the actuarial tables took effect, for whom he tolled. Such intellectuals, Henry L. Feingold noted, were "marginal" figures, writing for and speaking to "a culture that was slowly fading." The polyglot assurance, the detachment from academic institutions, the combination of radical politics and aesthetic sensitivity, the reconciliation of cosmopolitanism and particularism--these features of the intelligentsia could not be perpetuated after the German and Soviet versions of totalitarianism extinguished the sources from which figures like Greenberg sprang. Yet he deserves something better than obscurity, as "probably the most gifted among the Yiddish intellectuals," according to Irving Howe. Greenberg could not be reduced to simple attributes or all-consuming causes. "At once enthusiast and skeptic, public man and private intelligence, a creature of multiple moods and personae," Greenberg impressed Howe not so much because of "the positions he took but the variety of his tone, the cut of his argument, and insight along the way" punctuated by "suave and mordant ironies, and an underthrust of self-doubt." Maurice Samuel's 1953 eulogy also expressed admiration for a sagacity which was not derived from learning. Greenberg was a sage who cultivated knowledge for the sake of wisdom, whose "chief excellence was his ability to awaken the faculty of reasonableness."(21) Force of intellect was blended with goodness of character so strikingly that the generic nature of the eulogy can not alone account for such a tribute.

The career of Ivan Greenberg serves as a counterpoint. He was born in 1908 in Ukraine (not far from Hayim Greenberg's Bessarabia). The family operated a dry goods store in Kupin but, amid the turmoil of World War I and antisemitic pogroms, emigrated to Palestine, where the son would live twice for brief periods. In 1922, at the age of 14, he came to Providence, Rhode Island, and then moved to Oregon. In the depths of the Great Depression he lived in wrenching poverty in New York City, where he slept on park benches, stood in breadlines, and taught Hebrew on the side. His formal qualifications to be a melamed (or any other kind of teacher) were nil since he had quit high school at the age of 16. He became not only an autodidact but also a radical who sought the abolition of a decadent and doomed capitalism. He naturally joined the Communist Party in 1932 and stayed in it briefly. The surname he adopted is the Hebrew word for "rabbi" or "teacher," rav,(22) which he spelled as "Rahv" (though he did not formally become a teacher until late in life, four years after Hayim Greenberg died).

Starting out in the thirties under the literary sponsorship of the Party, Philip Rahv contributed to the Daily Worker, the New Masses and Prolit Folio. He also joined William Phillips, a son of Jewish immigrants, in cofounding Partisan Review in 1934 under the Communist auspices of the New York City John Reed Club. In its larval stage the magazine was designed to defend the interests of the Soviet Union, to intensify opposition to the rise of fascism and Nazism, and to clarify the aims and methods of a proletarian or "revolutionary" literature. But the switch in the Communists' political strategy toward the Popular Front, as well as the shocks of the Moscow Trials in exposing Stalinist cruelty and cynicism, prompted the coeditors to halt publication in the fall of 1936 (the year in which Hayim Greenberg signalled his own serious dissatisfaction with the course of Soviet history in his anti-Marxist "Notes on Marxism").

When Partisan Review resumed its operations In 1937 the journal had become independent. This break from the coils of the Communist Party has been treated with the detail other historians have lavished on the Protestant Reformation. What mattered was Rahv's success in helping to legitimize an anti-Stalinist left, which provoked the biographer of John Reed to accuse a "particular turncoat" named Rahv of "general incompetence as a literary critic" plus "peculiar unfitness to review books on the Soviet Union."(23) He managed to survive this attack in the New Masses, and instead of vindicating the honor of the Socialist Motherland, his monthly--then bimonthly--defended the modernist achievements of an Anglican archconservative writer like I S. Eliot as well as the fiction of Proust, Mann and Joyce. Instead of supporting a literature reflecting the views of workers, Partisan Review promoted a cosmopolitanism that honored no social class. The magazine cherished a spirit of alienation from the crassness of bourgeois culture, and no forum had earned quite so much prestige among Western intelligentsia.

Though the subscription list did not exceed ten thousand at the peak of its influence, the journal attracted contributions from leading literati in the United States and Western Europe and became required reading for virtually everybody who fancied themselves intellectuals. Among them was a City College undergraduate, Irving Kristol, who remembered poring over "each article at least twice, in a state of awe and exasperation--excited to see such elegance of style and profundity of mind, depressed at the realization that a commoner like myself could never expect to rise into that intellectual aristocracy." Kristol later propelled himself into the Republican Party. But he was obliged to "affirm that it was a most remarkable magazine . . . Partisan Review in its heyday was unquestionably one of the finest American cultural periodicals ever published--perhaps even the very finest." Historian Richard Hofstadter called Partisan Review "a kind of house organ of the American intellectual community." Critic Hilton Kramer recalled how special a place the magazine occupied when members of his own generation were drawn to It in the late 1940s and early 1950s. "It was an essential part of our education . . . It gave us an entree to modern cultural life--to its gravity and complexity and combative character . . . It conferred upon every subject it encompassed . . . an air of intellectual urgency." The bravura with which the New York Intellectuals operated has not been repeated; younger writers and critics have tended to be associated not with independent dissidence but with universities and foundations.(24)

The Jews affiliated with Partisan Review in the 1930s and 1940s elected a life that prized mental agility and alertness. They did not expect their lives to yield rewards other than the satisfaction of curiosity, the resolution of artistic tension, the clarification of the meaning of life, and perhaps (since nearly all were socialists) the pursuit of justice. The New York Intellectuals who emerged in the 1930s differed from their predecessors who constituted the rudiments of an intelligentsia. Unlike the Puritans of the seventeenth century, the mostly second-generation, secularized Jews did not put the exercise of reason in the service of religious faith. Unlike the Founding Fathers of the eighteenth century, the New York Intellectuals did not apply the wisdom of the ancients to the responsibilities of statecraft. Unlike the Brahmins of the nineteenth century, those connected with Partisan Review did not cultivate learning as a form of stewardship or as a sublime enhancement of individualism. They were generalists who respected no disciplinary boundaries, kibitzers ready with an opinion or an argument on virtually any topic. They could as easily be aroused by the crises of modern politics as by the stimulus of modern art; for them ideas mattered. "Reinventing themselves as a native intelligentsia--street smart, contentious, insecure--the New York intellectuals used art and literature as an escape from their Jewish marginality," the critic J. Hoberman has noted, and became the nation's "first ethnic arbiters of taste and political theory."(25)

Their origins were suitably humble: Alfred Kazin's father was a house painter, Howe's a grocer and peddler, Daniel Bell's a garment worker; Saul Bellow's a baker and a bootlegger. Nathan Glazer's family went on welfare in Harlem during the Depression. Even the father of the fastidious Lionel Trilling was a wholesale furrier. The younger ones were scarcely better off. Like Tevye, the father of Norman Podhoretz delivered milk.

Yet a sociological term like "cultural deprivation" was scarcely applicable. No group seemed more engaged with ideas, often for the sake of fathoming the course--if not accelerating the pace--of history. A few, like philosopher Sidney Hook and art historian Meyer Schapiro, got doctorates and teaching positions in New York before academic antisemitism hardened. In sensitive fields like literature, graduate school was sometimes beyond reach. "We have room for only one Jew," Clifton Fadiman was told upon his graduation from Columbia College, "and we have chosen Mr. Trilling." But the norm seemed to be some formal training, though not enough to complete a PhD (Kazin, Howe, Phillips, Kristol). The doctorates such figures received were honorary or sometimes bestowed upon them for published work well in mid-career, as if to avoid the danger of turning into mere pedants. The author of The End of Ideology (1960) received a doctorate in sociology from Columbia University, where Bell had already been teaching. Having coauthored the classic diagnosis of The Lonely Crowd (1950), Glazer submitted his book on The Social Basis of American Communism (1961) to fulfill Columbia's dissertation requirement; he received a doctorate in 1962. Without an advanced degree, the Berlin-born Lewis Coser was asked to teach American history at the University of Chicago, which he declined, pleading ignorance. Two weeks later Coser accepted an offer there to teach sociology, though he had not yet begun graduate work in that field.(26)

Partisan Review helped create a more sophisticated American culture, heightening receptivity to European literature and to the pressures of political change. The New York Intellectuals showed suspicion toward the hinterland, which they associated with nativism, bigotry, and parochialism as opposed to the cosmopolitanism that these talkers in the city advocated. They felt a sense of superiority--rarely warranted by much direct acquaintance with rural or village America itself--toward all that was not in New York itself. Long before Saul Steinberg's celebrated New Yorker cover had mocked the puny configurations that the nation assumed west of the Hudson River, these intellectuals were absorbed in making their particular subculture sovereign. The title Kazin gave the third volume of his autobiography was almost defiant in its proclamation: New York Jew. They generally ended up as cosmopolitans largely because they belonged to this am-segulah. The Jewish wanderer had seemingly become a representative figure in a civilization permeated with estrangement and the sense of exile, just as the Jewish writer was endowed with special sensitivity and insight into the condition of alienation. As intellectuals, such Jews had propelled themselves away from the pious traditions of their immediate ancestors; as Jews, such intellectuals felt themselves outsiders within a Christendom whose foundations were crumbling. Doubly estranged, the editors and contributors to Partisan Review specialized in the afflictions of modernity, committed to the ideal of detachment from the institutions of a society in decomposition. Podhoretz was asked by the editor of another New York magazine "whether there was a special typewriter at Partisan Review with the word `alienation' on a single key,"(27) as though the magazine were in compulsive secession from society.

With the celebration of ethnic diversity inaugurated in the 1960s, even the New York Intellectuals began to move gingerly toward their own roots; and the mysterious peculiarities of Jewish identity could be at least tentatively explored. Already in 1953, Partisan Review published I. B. Singer's "Gimpel the Fool" as well as Trilling's comparison of Wordsworth to the rabbis. Howe was already engaged in giving English readers access to other treasures of Yiddish literature, and his later World of Our Fathers (1976) remains a towering achievement in the historiography of American ethnicity and immigration. Though Leslie Fiedler was an assimilationist, he regularly contributed to American Judaism in the 1960s, and two of his essay collections and as well as some of his fiction are preoccupied with Jewish themes. Though Kazin is undoubtedly best known for his critical appropriation of a century and a half of American literature, he himself was a Walker in the City (1951) highly conscious of his identity as a New York Jew (1978). Bell disclaimed faith but accepted his fate in the procession of generations: "To be a Jew Is to be part of a community woven by memory--the memory whose knots are tied by the yizkor," an articulation of "continuity with those who have suffered." Kristol, a former editor of Commentary, not only championed the social utility of religion but also positioned himself as a spokesman for Judaism in particular. Though a neo-Trotskyist literary historian lamented that intellectuals who had earlier "subscribed to an internationalist identity" then "lapsed into either Jewish particularism or Israeli exceptionalism,"(28) that is an exaggeration. Some made gestures of ethnic return, and some had never really left.

As a result their alienation from their origins in the Jewish community began to look less obvious. Though universalist in the aesthetic standards Partisan Review promoted, the milieu of the editorial office was saturated in "kosher-style" self-mockery, intensity and irony--sometimes extended to Lower East Side delis. Informing other editors that star contributor Kazin was intending to delve into Melville, for example, Rahv could not contain his glee: "I wonder what Alfred will make of Moby Dick when he turns all that Jewish schmaltz loose on Captain Ahab and the White Whale." Such speculation led Delmore Schwartz to leap up, playing a harpooner but shouting at his prey: "Gefilte fish!" Collapsing back into his chair with a giggle, Schwartz managed to make derision delightful.(29) But readers were spared such in-jokes, and at the peak of Partisan Review's influence Jewish motifs and themes were uncommon. Rahv himself rarely explicitly tackled a Jewish subject, and it was exceptional for him to have explained how Bernard Malamud "fills his `Jewishness' with a positive content." The Jewish dimensions of those writers whom Rahv analyzed, like Kafka or Koestler, tended to be unexplored. However far many of these intellectuals propelled themselves from the community and religion that fostered them, they could not efface their birthmarks--in their exuberant absorption in learning and of argument, in their elevation of critical standards, in their sensitivity to the tremors of history, in their need to clarify the vision of social justice among a citizenry that has overvalued the practical and material aspects of life.(30) The failure to confront the Shoah while it was happening is in retrospect one of the most puzzling and saddening consequences of the cosmopolitanism animating the journal.

Though Partisan Review remained an important organ of thought and taste, the excitement that the journal conveyed could not be sustained past the 1950s. By then anti-Stalinism had become orthodoxy and modernism had triumphed in the academy. But Rahv himself continued to speak for critical detachment and for intellectual independence, and even as many other writers and editors were moving to the center and the right, he still invoked an ideal of vaguely radical dissidence. In 1957 he complained that "we are living in a period of renewed national belligerency, when pessimism is again regarded as `un-American'. . . [and] the appeal to `the sanely and wholesomely American' is taken up as a weapon against the moral freedom of literature." Rahv's "America . . . is far more what its best artists have made it out to be than it is the achieved utopia invoked in our mass media and by officialdom." He urged writers "not [to] degrade wonder into submission [and] acquiescence."(31)

Rahv remained coeditor of Partisan Review and, by virtually all accounts, was its dominant voice. In 1969 he resigned to found Modern Occasions. Inaugurated the following year, the Boston-based quarterly represented somewhat radical politics but also upheld what had by then become fairly traditional literary tastes. Though moved to tears listening to Bob Dylan's singing "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," Rahv could not stretch his own taste, or allow his journal to absorb even the most serious aspects of the popular culture that the New Left admired.(32) Modern Occasions ceased publication after six issues. At his death in 1973, books on Dostoevsky and on Trotsky were unfinished.

Commanding as his stewardship of Partisan Review in its prime had been, the literary criticism that Rahv published--often in that journal--might be deemed even more significant. In particular a series of critical performances at the very end of the "red decade" established his reputation for brilliance. "The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Joseph K." (1940) provided the first influential interpretation of Kafka in the United States and made the case for that writer's relevance in uniting "the realistic and symbolic, the recognizable and mysterious." Rahv's "Dostoevsky and Politics" (1938) was also authoritative, as were several of his subsequent essays on that novelist. Rahv's sensibility was--like Greenberg's--still decisively shaped by the motherland, so much so that Schwartz nicknamed him "Philip Slav" and Wilson nicknamed the journal Partisansky Review. A major contributor like Sidney Hook could not recall much interest on the part of the two coeditors in the cultural evolution of the United States.(33) But Rahv did advance pivotal generalizations about American fiction and poetry, and two essays in particular helped shape the critical appreciation of the literature of his adopted country. "The Cult of Experience in American Writing" (1940) noted its failure to explore serious ideas--or to fashion intellectuals as fictional characters. In dividing major American writers into the categories of "Paleface and Redskin" (1939), he lamented the polarity and fragmentation of the creative mind and showed how wide a chasm separated, say, the patrician Henry James and Emily Dickinson from the plebeian Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. Rahv himself was better attuned to the palefaces, especially James and Hawthorne. Though Yiddish had been his mother tongue, Rahv's writing in English was subtle, elegant and even exquisite.

His career had exhibited a zest for polemics and for the exposure of fraudulence that showed a keen sensitivity to the zeitgeist, and though his work entailed the severe monitoring of the historic reputations of writers and other critics, his own appreciations and judgments could not be easily categorized. His Marxism was (like Hayim Greenberg's) subdued, revealed most often in his effort to locate writers in their historical and ideological contexts.(34) He shared with Greenberg an uncertain legacy, perhaps because neither left behind a theory that could be developed, tested, modified, overturned. Rahv never managed to write a "big" book on his own. His only works were collections of his essays, some reprinted from previous collections of his essays. Perhaps no significant critic has left behind so thin a body of work. Perhaps his fame would have been diminished had he published more, but it rests on a lifetime's output that was stretched into four overlapping essay collections, beginning with Image and Idea in 1949. In this respect, too, he resembles Greenberg, whose third collection of posthumous essays reprints only those that had appeared in the previous two collections.

Given the astuteness of both these critics, such slender output needs some explanation, and in both cases it is the same. They were gifted conversationalists, which means that too many of their words evaporated. Though Syrkin often found Greenberg "silent and withdrawn," he turned out to be "the most eloquent of speakers. I do not refer merely to his extraordinary oratorical gifts . . . He was a master of an almost lost art--conversation. He merited a Boswell [for his] literary creation with the spoken word."(35) But no such amanuensis or biographer emerged, so the flair for talk could not be preserved. Kazin called Rahv "the Doctor Johnson of his small group of radical intellectuals," a critic who was "naturally a talker rather than a writer" (though that imbalance was not true of Dr. Johnson). Rahv was at the center of his circle of outsiders, and to listen to him make pronouncements "with so much passion and scorn, the syllables crunching in his speech with biting Russian sincerity, was to realize that radicalism was Rahv's destiny," Kazin recalled. "He lived his ideas in conversation"(36) spiced with gossip. He took on a certain legendary status. Fictionalized as Will Taub in Mary McCarthy's The Oasis (1949), as Sidney Sykes in Alan Lelchuk's Shrinking (1978), and perhaps as a part of Emanuel Isidore Lonoff in Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer (1979), Rahv was endowed with so flamboyant a personality that friends labelled it "manic-impressive." A brooding figure, he dominated his associates instead of enchanting them, and his scowl made him look like the permanent "chairman of a grievance committee," one contributor observed. "Philip does have scruples," Schwartz once remarked, "but he never lets them stand in his way," and when caught denigrating a contributor so maliciously that Rahv was forced to plead "analytic exuberance," the poet commented: "Analytic exuberance--Philip Rahv's euphemism for putting a knife in your back." Schwartz was his friend, and so was philosopher William Barrett, who found Rahv menacing and untrustworthy. Hook--who was not a friend--considered him duplicitous and imperious, "a Leninist . . . in method."(37) But Rahv lacked courage and shrank from taking risks, leaving behind no counterpart to a searing essay like "Bankrupt!"

Greenberg's personal relations were far more satisfactory. So abiding was his conscience, however, that his last will asked forgiveness from whomever he might have hurt. "I sinned not out of love of sin," he wrote. "I was guilty out of weakness and I did wrong without the intent to do so." He seems to have lived above reproach but was so reticent that information about his family--indeed even that he had a family--first became available in print in his obituary, when the Times reported that surviving relatives were his widow Lea and his son Emanuel, an attorney.(38) Rahv's private life was more colorful. After living with Mary McCarthy he married an architect, Nathalie Swan, in 1940; they were divorced in 1955. The next year he married Theodora Jay Stillman, who was a direct descendant of the first Chief justice of the United States, John Jay, a coauthor of that highly convincing defense of the U.S. Constitution, the Federalist Papers. In #2 he had claimed that Americans are "descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs."(39) That case for homogeneity would be dramatically weakened by the mass immigration that Rahv typified; his addition to the family tree symbolized the social opportunities that America promised. In 1968, however, his wife died in a fire in their Boston home while she was smoking in bed. Rahv's third wife was Betty Thomas McIlvain, but that brief marriage ended in divorce. None of his wives was Jewish, and he was childless.

The meaning of the two men's careers illumines a term like "cosmopolitanism," which many observers have taken to be among the most important stigmata of modern Jewish intellectuals. Such an ideal was enormously attractive, and its opposite--often called particularism--was seen as a limitation to be surmounted. No one would ever accuse Rahv of narrowness; he could read his favorite French, German and Russian authors in their own languages. But then neither was Greenberg parochial or a slouch in cultivating his own literary tastes--and Gandhi exerted a bigger political and moral influence on him than any Jew did. Which of these critics transcended parochialism? The answer is not obvious. Though a lifelong Zionist, Greenberg never lived in Palestine. Though presumably detached, Rahv lived there twice in the 1920s. Ecstatic over the Israeli military victory in 1967, he came to express some wistful regret, near the end of his life, at having settled in the United States, sensing that Israel was not only less corrupt than his adopted land but also far more faithful to socialist ideals than any Communist power had proved to be. Rahv had emigrated from the yishuv because, ambitious from the start, he sought a more imposing challenge for his literary talents. His collectivist values proved too small when weighed against the size of his personal ambition. But at his death it turned out that Rahv had bequeathed much of his property to the state of Israel.(40) The suspicion arose that the motive may not have been entirely consistent with Zionist ideology: to keep his estate away from his estranged third wife. But even if that was his motive, any canny trust lawyer could have found other objects for Rahv's generosity.

The term "cosmopolitanism" need not be retired--even if, according to contemporary cultural studies, it looks too much like a code word "for an elite, Eurocentric patriarchal culture." That sort of "cosmopolitanism," Alan M. Wald has written, "must also be understood as an ideological bridge back to the society that the Partisan editors claimed to oppose." Nor should the term be confused with "universalism," David Hollinger has pointed out, despite a shared impulse to "look beyond a province or nation to the larger sphere of humankind." Both terms suggest "a profound suspicion of enclosures." But they are not synonymous. The cosmopolitan accepts, explores and appreciates diversity. To the universalist that is an unfortunate phenomenon, and the variety of human organization is merely an historical datum that need not be defended or guaranteed. These divergences may not represent utterly clashing distinctions.(41)

But in this tale of two Greenbergs, the editor of the Jewish Frontier tended to personify one orientation, the editor of the Partisan Review another. Though Greenberg was dedicated to building a homeland elsewhere, it was precisely his consciousness of diversity in the United States that forced him to oppose a spurious universalism. Long before the fashion set in, he became a pluralist: "America is not interested--no country is interested--in having citizens with defective memories and shrunken horizons, citizens afflicted with aphasia and amnesia." In a democracy differences were not to be obliterated but harmonized.(42) Far closer to universalism, Rahv shirked any serious effort to define the place of Jews--or anyone else--in American society, which impoverished his reflections on national identity and democratic principles. But what is intriguing is not how far Rahv had come, or how high he had risen, but how much of a Jewish sensibility persisted.

The contrast between those orientations should therefore not be drawn too sharply. Some dichotomies are false. Some preferences need not be affirmed--whether "better dead than Red" in the 1950s, more recently Falwell v. Flynt or, for that matter, "paleface and redskin." That Greenberg was a Zionist did not mean that he lacked cosmopolitan tastes. That Rahv was committed to cosmopolitanism did not mean that he "passed" or that a recognizably Jewish perspective was erased. The managing editor of the Contemporary Jewish Record, the startup for the postwar Commentary, was Rahv. Neither he nor Greenberg had expected to address more than a coterie; because of the quality of Partisan Review and its refusal to speak only to a segment of Jewry, that magazine crossed over into the general culture. But the organ of the League for Labor Palestine can hardly be dismissed as provincial or unserious. To be sure, the ideology of Greenberg's Jewish Frontier was Labor Zionist. But that was hardly a handicap. Articles initially published in Hebrew were translated and made available to English readers; the Palestinian authors regularly included a future Prime Minister (David Ben-Gurion), Berl Katznelson and two future presidents of the state of Israel (Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and Zalman Rubashow [later Shazar]). The magazine was also proud to translate into English such poets as Bialik and Alterman. Leading American Jewish thinkers--like Horace Kallen, Mordecai Kaplan, Ludwig Lewisohn and Maurice Samuel--made the journal a vehicle for their own Zionism as well.

Nor did Greenberg hope for or expect worsening conditions in the Diaspora to spur aliyah; he did not want such a migration to be accompanied by a funeral march. Indeed, so appreciative was Greenberg of his adopted land that he "believe[d] that `It can't happen here!' And were I not to believe so, I would have no reason to look to Israel as a haven of refuge." He added: "Should America betray herself, it would mean a moral eclipse on a global scale from which there could be no escape--not even in Israel . . . The State of Israel can exist and endure only if a certain measure of justice and fair play prevails in the world. Should the world descend below that standard (and we all know how low that standard is at present), Israel could not exist for even a day."(43) Such patriotism could be voiced, paradoxically, because he was a Zionist who saw no virtue in alienation.

As an editor Greenberg reached out to others, refusing to inhabit only an alternative universe, and published pieces by Arendt, Will Herberg and Kurt Lewin as well as prominent non-Jews like Reinhold Niebuhr, Charles A. Beard and Norman Thomas. It is likely that Jews unaffiliated with any socialist Zionist stance found stimulation in the Jewish Frontier.(44) One such contributor to Yidisher Kemfer was I. B. Singer, whose "Gimpel tam" Greenberg introduced in 1945. When Rahv published the short story in Bellow's translation in Partisan Review, its author was about to be catapulted to Stockholm. Of course Greenberg took a greater risk of oblivion than Rahv, whose death made the front page of the New York Times Book Review. But the tempo of American culture ensures that almost everybody's name is written on the wind. Bids for immortality usually fail: only Rahv's first collection of essays, Image and Idea, remains in print.

Because Greenberg was enlisted in a cause greater than himself, his career conveys the more satisfactory sense of talent fulfilled and intelligence cultivated. To do so he had to go rather heroically against the grain of his own nature, turning himself into an organization man, forced by the rise of Nazism to repudiate the pacifism that had so decisively shaped his politics. But his passion for learning never left him; his intellectual powers did not diminish for the sake of a movement, an ideal, an historical destiny to which he devoted himself. "To be a Jew in the twentieth century," proclaimed the poet Muriel Rukeyser so resonantly, "is to be offered a gift," and Greenberg did not refuse to accept it. He had never yielded to the temptation of "wishing to be invisible." But the starkness of the choice that her poem proposes need not command uncritical assent. It is simply not the case that to opt out of affiliation with the Jewish people is automatically to "choose/Death of the spirit, the stone insanity."(45) Rahv also led a full and rewarding life, even if stronger Jewish commitments might well have enriched it. He hardly personified "death of the spirit."

Cynthia Ozick once asserted that "if we blow into the narrow end of the shofar, we will be heard far. But if we choose to be Mankind rather than Jewish and blow into the wider part, we will not be heard at all; for us America will have been in vain. 1146 That is not true. Those who have blown at the narrow end of the ram's horn are not necessarily audible; unmerited "unpersonhood" has been Greenberg's fare. Nor have those blowing through the wider part of the ram's horn left no traces of their effort to bring critical acuity to the problems of politics and art. Rahv cleansed and clarified much of what he touched, and his Jewish readers were not exactly reduced to cultural impoverishment as a result. This tale of critics therefore proposes a more nuanced sense of how citizenship and peoplehood might be reconciled.

A shorter version of this article was delivered at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I thank Stanley and Sandra Kutler for their patronage and David Sorkin for his invitation.

(1.) "Hayim Greenberg, Zionist Leader," New York Times, 15 March 1953, 93; Mark A. Raider, "Toward a Re-examination of American Zionist Leadership: The Case of Hayim Greenberg," Journal of Israeli History 15 (Summer 1994): 133-5.

(2.) Marie Syrkin, "Foreword," to Hayim Greenberg, The Inner Eye: Selected Essays, n. ed. (New York, 1953), I, xi-xiii, xiii; Robert M. Seltzer, "Hayim Greenberg, Jewish Intellectual," in The "Other" New York Jewish Intellectuals, ed. Carole S. Kessner (New York, 1994), 28, 29, 33; Hayim Greenberg, "Notes on Marxism," in Inner Eye, I, 249, and Hayim Greenberg Anthology, ed. Marie Syrkin (Detroit, 1968), 2333.

(3) Syrkin, "Foreword" to Inner Eye, I, xii-xiii; Seltzer, "Hayim Greenberg," 45; Raider, "Toward a Re-examination," 158.

(4.) Quoted in Seltzer, "Hayim Greenberg," 2.6.

(5.) Greenberg, "The Jews and Jesus," in Inner Eye, I, 119, and "Under the Axis," Jewish Frontier 9 (November 11941): I, quoted in Raider, "Toward a Re-examination," 155

(6) Raider, "Toward a Re-examination," 155-6.

(7.) Deborah E. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief. The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933-1945 (New York, 1986), 169, 174-5, 186.

(8.) Hayim Greenberg, "Bankrupt!", in The Inner Eye: Selected Essays, ed. Shlomo Katz (New York, 1964), 11, 193-4, 198-9, 202, and in Hayim Greenberg Anthology, 192-3, 198-9, 101-3; Raider, "Toward a Re-examination," Journal of Israeli History, 155-6; Melvin I. Urofsky, We Are One!: American Jewry and Israel (Garden City, N.Y., 1978), 43.

(9.) Lipstadt, Beyond Belief, 155, 181, 187; Ben Hecht, "The Extermination of the Jews," American Mercury 56 (February 1943): 194-9; John Heidenry, Theirs Was the Kingdom: Lila and DeWitt Wallace and the Story of the Reader's Digest (New York, 1993), 131-2.

(10). Greenberg, "To a Communist Friend" (1936), in Inner Eye, I, 251-3, 2-55 257-8, and in Hayim Greenberg Anthology, 23 5-8, 240-1, 244.

(11.) Greenberg, "The New Soviet Constitution" (1937), in Inner Eye, I, 315, 317.

(12.) Greenberg, "What is Happening to Soviet Jewry?" (11951), in Inner Eye, I, 331, 334, and "Notes on the Melting Pot" (1944), in Inner Eye, I, 340, and in Hayim Greenberg Anthology, 315.

(13.) Quoted in Seltzer, "Hayim Greenberg," 39; Zalman Shazar, "The Man Apart," in Greenberg, Inner Eye, II, 16-17.

(14.) Greenberg, "Lessing Rosenwald and Ibn Saud" (1943), in Inner Eye, II, 100-101.

(15.) Greenberg, "Gandhi" (1948), in Inner Eye, I, 160, and "A Letter to Gandhi" (1937), in Inner Eye, I, 219, and Hayim Greenberg Anthology, 180; Syrkin, "Foreword" to Inner Eye, I, xii-xiii.

(16.) Maurice Friedman, Martin Buber's Life and Work: The Middle Years, 923-1945 (New York, 1983), 172-74; Greenberg, "An Answer to Gandhi" (1939), 233, and "Without an Army" (1939), in Inner Eye, II, 163.

(17.) Quoted in Friedman, Martin Buber's Life and Work, 288-92; Greenberg, "Concerning Jewish Statehood" (1943), in Inner Eye, I, 168; Seltzer, "Hayim Greenberg," 35.

(18.) Greenberg, "Answer to Gandhi," in Inner Eye, I, 234-35, 138.

(19.) Raider, "Toward a Re-examination," 154; Syrkin, "Foreword" to Inner Eye, I, xii-xiii.

(20.) Greenberg, "The Future of American Jewry" (1951), in Inner Eye, II, 65-6, and in Hayim Greenberg Anthology, 210; Seltzer, "Hayim Greenberg," 16, 41-2,44-5; Greenberg, "Jewish Culture and Education," in Inner Eye, I, 76-7.

(21.) Henry L. Feingold, A Time for Searching. Entering the Mainstream, 1920-1945 (Baltimore, 1992), 76; Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York, 1976), 511-3; Maurice Samuel, "Thank God We Knew Him," in Inner Eye, II, 12.

(22.) Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill, 1987), 76-7.

(23.) Granville Hicks, "A `Nation' Divided," New Masses 35 (7 December 1937): 11, and "The Writers' Congress," New Masses 13 (15 June 1937): 8-9.

(24.) Irving Kristol, "Memoirs of a Trotskyist" (1977), in Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (New York, 1995), 478-9; Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York, 1970), 394; Hilton Kramer, "Reflections on the History of Partisan Review," New Criterion 15 (September 1996): 20; James Burkhart Gilbert, Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in America (New York, 1968), 188-99; Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York, 1987), 8-9, 12, 72-8.

(25.) J. Hoberman, Vulgar Modernism: Writing on Movies and Other Media (Philadelphia, 1991), 108.

(26.) Quoted in Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (New York, 1986), 30; Neil Jumonville, Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America (Berkeley, 1991), 57, 87, 214

(27.) Hugh Wilford, "The Agony of the Avant-Garde: Philip Rahv and the New York Intellectuals," in American Cultural Critics, ed. David Murray (Exeter, England, 1995), 35, 40-5; James Gilbert, "Introduction to the Morningside Edition," in Writers and Partisans (New York, 1992), xi; Norman Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir (New York, 1979), 283.

(28.) Daniel Bell, "Reflections on Jewish Identity" (1961), in The Ghetto and Beyond: Essays on Jewish Life in America, ed. Peter I. Rose (New York, 1969), 469; Alan M. Wald, "The New York Literary Left" (1989), in The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Selected Essays on Marxist Traditions in Cultural Commitment (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1992), 57.

(29.) Terry A. Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle, 1934-1945 (Madison, 1986), 230-45; William Barrett, The Truants: Adventures among the Intellectuals (Garden City, N.Y., 1982), 46-7.

(30.) Philip Rahv, "A Note on Bernard Malamud" (1967), in Literature and the Sixth Sense (Boston, 1970), 281; Howe, World of Our Fathers, 599-606.

(31.) Philip Rahv, "What and Where is the New Left" (1971), in Essays on Literature and Politics, 1932-1972, eds. Arabel Porter and Andrew Dvosin (Boston, 1978), 353n, and "Self-Definition in American Literature" (1957), in The Commentary Reader, ed. Norman Podhoretz (New York, 1967), 564, 566.

(32.) Alan Lelchuk, "Philip Rahv: The Last Years," in Images and Ideas in American Culture: Essays in Memory of Philip Rahv, ed. Arthur Edelstein (Hanover, N.H., 1979), 207

(33.) Rahv, "The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Joseph K." (1940), in Literature and the Sixth Sense, 41; James Atlas, Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (New York, 1977), 98; Sidney Hook, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1987), 512-3.

(34.) Frederick Crews, "The Partisan," New York Review of Books 25 (23 November 1978): 5, 7-8; Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (New York, 1985), 72, 82-3.

(35.) Syrkin, "Foreword" to Inner Eye, I, xv.

(36.) Alfred Kazin, Starting Out in the Thirties (Boston, 1965), 159-60; Crews, "Partisan," New York Review of Books, 4-5.

(37.) Quoted in Atlas, Delmore Schwartz, 98, and in Barrett, Truants, 38-46; Hook, Out of Step, 514-6.

(38.) "From Hayim Greenberg's Last Will" (1949), in Inner Eye, II, n. p.; "Hayim Greenberg, Zionist Leader," New York Times, 15 March 1953, 93.

(39.) Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison, The Federalist: A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States, ed. Edward Mead Earle (New York, 1937), 9.

(40.) Lelchuk, "Philip Rahv: The Last Years," in Images and Ideas, 218-9.

(41.) Wald, "New York Literary Left," in Responsibility of Intellectuals, 611; David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York, 1995), 83-6.

(42.) Greenberg, "Patriotism and Plural Loyalties," in Inner Eye, I, 181, 183, and Hayim Greenberg Anthology, 150, 151-3.

(43.) Milton Hindus, "Charles Reznikoff," in "Other" New York Intellectuals, 263; Greenberg, "Patriotism and Plural Loyalties," in Inner Eye, I, 1187, and Hayim Greenberg Anthology, 157; Urofsky, We Are One!, 268.

(44.) Aaron Berman, Nazism, the Jews and American Zionism, 1933-948 (Detroit, 1990), 17; Raider, "From the Margins," 256-7.

(45.) Syrkin, "Foreword" to Inner Eye, I, xv; Greenberg, "Without an Army," in Inner Eye, II, 160-1, 163; Muriel Rukeyser, "Letter to the Front" (1944), in The Collected Poems (New York, 1978), 239. (46.) Cynthia Ozick, "Toward a New Yiddish" (1970), in Art and Ardor (New York, 1983), 177.