Ronnie Grinberg’s erudite first book, Write Like a Man, has two interrelated focuses. First, Grinberg provides a detailed history of a group of writers and critics known as the “New York Intellectuals,” a collection of roughly fifty writers that emerged to prominence during the postwar period. The leading figures of the group included Philip Rahv, Norman Podhoretz, Lionel Trilling, Norman Mailer, and Irving Howe. Although many of the New York Intellectuals were men, women such as Midge Decter, Hannah Arendt, Diana Trilling, and Mary McCarthy were counted among their ranks.
Secondly, this book is a study of these writers’ unspoken assumptions about gender. Grinberg argues that the New York Intellectuals constructed an “ideology” of “secular Jewish masculinity” that was a rebellion against both traditional Jewish norms and cultural perceptions of Jewish men as weak. The “machismo” of this secular Jewish masculinity gave rise to much argumentation in person and in print. Such arguing allowed these men an opportunity to demonstrate their manliness.
Grinberg characterizes secular Jewish masculinity as an “ideology” because it relied on “unstated, even unconscious assumptions, habits, and maxims that informed” how people understood and experienced the world. Secular Jewish masculinity was also shaped by political ideologies such as Marxism, anti-Stalinism, and neoconservatism, as well as Freudianism and second-wave feminism. New York Intellectuals embraced and contested these movements to varying degrees.
The group’s original members met while attending the City College of New York in the 1930s. After graduation, the New York Intellectuals waged battles in the arena of the literary periodicals they founded and filled, including the Partisan Review, Commentary, and Dissent. Dissent, created by Irving Howe, was designed to serve as a platform for leftist politics, although it was criticized by the “New Left” countercultural movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Commentary became a leading neoconservative periodical, especially after Norman Podhoretz became editor. In these literary forums, writers displayed their masculine prowess through scathing book reviews and literary essays. These gendered trends came to a head with Podhoretz and Midge Decter, two writers who married each other. Decter, who worked for Commentary and Harper’s, castigated feminism and homosexuality, embracing a Freudian version of vaginal, procreative sexuality as biologically natural. Podhoretz embraced physical strength as the “mature” masculinity, a value that, starting in the 1970s, dominated conservative, militaristic politics.
As Grinberg details, the “secular Jewish masculinity” of the New York Jews was inseparable from their misogyny. Although some women writers were respected, they were judged by the extent to which they wrote “like men.” The staunch criticism of women’s liberation — as well as Mary McCarthy’s 1963 novel, The Group, which was dismissed by many as a “lady’s novel” — exemplifies this pervasive masculine ideology. What’s worse is that even when women made meaningful intellectual contributions, they were rarely acknowledged.
Write Like a Man can be read as a case study for how gender interacts with intellectual projects. In order to not perpetuate a second injustice against the women whose intellectual efforts were silenced, or who were sexually harassed out of literary culture and academia, we ought to reflect on how our current intellectual and cultural practices are gendered.
Brian Hillman is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Towson University.
