The New York Intellectuals

The New York Intellectuals were singularly dedicated to rigorous learning and excellence in literature and the arts. As Professor Wisse shows, their constant need to think and rethink—especially about the competing ideas of Communism and Judaism, which held so much of their attention—allowed them to become the primary interpreters of America to the world, and of Judaism to themselves.

In our second lecture, Professor Wisse discusses the poet and critic Delmore Schwartz. Born to immigrant Jewish parents, Schwartz took advantage of American freedom to become a writer of note at a very young age. Nevertheless, he believed that being Jewish was not altogether reconcilable with American life. Revered by many long after his early passing, Schwartz was an important cautionary voice amidst a wave of Jewish optimism.

Norman Podhoretz once called Robert Warshow “one of the best essayists in the English language, and one of the least appreciated.” As Professor Wisse discusses in this lecture, during Warshow’s short life, he trained his discriminating eye on culture; not the high-brow literature that interested many of his colleagues, but the popular films that attracted so many everyday Americans.

In this lecture, Professor Wisse considers the legacy of Irving Kristol. Founder of the Public Interest and the National Interest, Kristol began his life sympathetic to Communism, before systematically thinking and reading his way into becoming a neoconservative, which he famously described as “being a liberal mugged by reality.” Over time, Kristol also came to believe that religion, plays an essential role in the moral health of democratic society, and developed a complimentary view of rabbinic Judaism in particular

Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter, the couple Professor Wisse takes up in this episode, wielded incomparable intellectual firepower. In 1960, Podhoretz became the editor of Commentary at just 30 years old, and for decades would write, edit, and publish some of the most consequential essays ever to appear on the American public scene. Decter, who wed Podhoretz in 1956, had her own distinguished career in the world of ideas as an essayist, editor, and, in her work at the head of the Committee for the Free World, an activist. Together, they took up the cause of freedom, showing how and why America has prospered and how it can continue to.

Milton Himmelfarb stood out from the other New York Intellectuals of his era for one reason: he was primarily interested in the Jews and Jewish issues. As Professor Wisse explains in this lecture, Himmelfarb thought about the condition of the Jews in America in religious, cultural, and political terms. He was fascinated by the phenomenon of American Jews running away from their distinctive Jewish identity, and by focusing on the particular experience of Jews in America, mediated upon the enduring tensions between tradition and freedom.

In this lecture, Professor Wisse analyzes the massive intellectual output of Cynthia Ozick. As an essayist, critic, novelist, and short story writer, Ozick was a literary maximalist with a huge imagination. She exposed problems that Jews didn’t realize they had, powerfully made the case for Israel and America, and persuasively condemned cultural envy, diaspora flattery, and the many trendy ideas that are antithetical to traditional Judaism.

In our final lecture, Professor Wisse takes up one of the most decorated novelists in American history: Saul Bellow. Early in his career, Bellow was concerned with whether it was possible for a Jew be a transmitter of American culture; by the end of it, he himself had become perhaps the foremost guardian of that culture. In his writing about Jewish and American life, Bellow gave voice to his great love affair with America, is dangers, and its possibilities.