Write like a Man : Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals

Ronnie A. Grinberg

ISBN 10: 0691193096 / ISBN 13: 9780691193090

Published by Princeton University Press Mär 2024, 2024

About this Item

Neuware - A spellbinding chronicle of mid-century America, Write like a Man shows how a combative and intellectually grounded vision of Jewish manhood contributed to the masculinization of intellectual life and shaped some of the most important political and cultural debates of the postwar era.

Seller Inventory # 9780691193090

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Write like a Man : Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals
• Publisher: Princeton University Press Mär 2024
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691193096
• ISBN 13: 9780691193090
• Binding: Buch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 246W x 168H x 40D millimeters 246 millimeters width by 168 millimeters height by 40 millimeters depth
• Weight: 698 grams

About this title

Synopsis

How virility and Jewishness became hallmarks of postwar New York’s combative intellectual scene

In the years following World War II, the New York intellectuals became some of the most renowned critics and writers in the country. Although mostly male and Jewish, this prominent group also included women and non-Jews. Yet all of its members embraced a secular Jewish machismo that became a defining characteristic of the contemporary experience. Write like a Man examines how the New York intellectuals shared a uniquely American conception of Jewish masculinity that prized verbal confrontation, polemical aggression, and an unflinching style of argumentation.

Ronnie Grinberg paints illuminating portraits of figures such as Norman Mailer, Hannah Arendt, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Mary McCarthy, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, and Irving Howe. She describes how their construction of Jewish masculinity helped to propel the American Jew from outsider to insider even as they clashed over its meaning in a deeply anxious project of self-definition. Along the way, Grinberg sheds light on their fraught encounters with the most contentious issues and ideas of the day, from student radicalism and the civil rights movement to feminism, Freudianism, and neoconservatism.

A spellbinding chronicle of mid-century America, Write like a Man shows how a combative and intellectually grounded vision of Jewish manhood contributed to the masculinization of intellectual life and shaped some of the most important political and cultural debates of the postwar era.

About the Author

Ronnie A. Grinberg is associate professor of history and a core faculty member of the Schusterman Center for Judaic and Israel Studies at the University of Oklahoma.