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Episode 54: Typewriter Combat · Political Junkie Podcast

0:00
SPEAKER_03: Picture this.
0:01
SPEAKER_03: It's 1936,
0:02
SPEAKER_03: the depths of the Great Depression in New York City,
0:06
SPEAKER_03: and you are a bright,
0:07
SPEAKER_03: Jewish,
0:08
SPEAKER_03: first-generation American man.
0:10
SPEAKER_03: You are a teenager,
0:11
SPEAKER_03: maybe even as young as 15 or 16,
0:14
SPEAKER_03: from the Lower East Side,
0:15
SPEAKER_03: Brownsville,
0:16
SPEAKER_03: Brooklyn,
0:17
SPEAKER_03: or the Bronx.
0:18
SPEAKER_03: You're smart.
0:19
SPEAKER_03: You finished high school,
0:21
SPEAKER_03: and what your parents want more than anything else is for you to get a college
0:24
SPEAKER_03: degree and be a professional,
0:26
SPEAKER_03: not a garment worker or shopkeeper like they are.
0:30
SPEAKER_03: If your family has a little money, you'll commute to Columbia.
0:33
SPEAKER_03: If your parents have done better,
0:34
SPEAKER_03: they might be able to scrape together tuition and board for Yale,
0:38
SPEAKER_03: Harvard,
0:39
SPEAKER_03: or some other elite school that takes its quota of Jews every year.
0:43
SPEAKER_03: But for ambitious men without money,
0:46
SPEAKER_03: there's a college a subway ride away on the north end of Manhattan,
0:51
SPEAKER_03: and it's free.
0:52
SPEAKER_03: It's a college that's so good and so famous for its radical politics that its
0:57
SPEAKER_03: nickname is the Harvard of the Proletariat.
1:01
SPEAKER_03: It's City College,
1:02
SPEAKER_03: and there are so many smart people there that going to lunch is like taking a whole
1:07
SPEAKER_03: other class.
1:08
SPEAKER_03: Here's conservative William Crystal, whose father, Irving, graduated with the class in 1940.
1:14
SPEAKER_03: He was a history major, a Trotskyist, and a devoted member of the Young People's Socialist League.
1:20
SPEAKER_03: And he held down one of the alcoves in that lunchroom where students argued hotly about politics.
1:27
SPEAKER_00: Well, they were just alcoves, were just, you know, the little parts of the dining room, I guess.
1:31
SPEAKER_00: Maybe they were technically called Alcove 1 and Alcove 2, but these got associated.
1:35
SPEAKER_00: The people would bring their lunches.
1:36
SPEAKER_00: Either they'd go buy very cheap lunches from the cafeteria.
1:38
SPEAKER_00: and would sit with their fellow ideological group.
1:41
SPEAKER_00: But I think there were maybe more than two,
1:42
SPEAKER_00: Social Democrats and Mensheviks,
1:44
SPEAKER_00: and there were many varieties of Marxists,
1:46
SPEAKER_00: quasi-Marxists,
1:47
SPEAKER_00: anti-Stalinist Marxists,
1:48
SPEAKER_00: pro-Stalinist Marxists.
1:49
SPEAKER_00: My father was a Trotskyite.
1:51
SPEAKER_00: Much has been made of this afterwards.
1:53
SPEAKER_00: I don't know that it was quite as big a deal.
1:54
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
1:55
SPEAKER_00: he had fond memories of it,
1:56
SPEAKER_00: and he thought he learned a lot having to argue with Stalinists and argue with
1:59
SPEAKER_00: other socialists and having a sort of system of thought that made you,
2:03
SPEAKER_00: you know,
2:04
SPEAKER_00: be very serious about the world and make distinctions and have complicated
2:08
SPEAKER_00: arguments about why the Soviet Union was or wasn't in the spirit of Lenin and was
2:12
SPEAKER_00: Lenin itself in the spirit of Marx and all of that.
2:14
SPEAKER_00: I think one thing he learned from all of that was the limits of all these systems and ideology.
2:20
SPEAKER_03: These verbal battles represent what became famous in 20th century American
2:24
SPEAKER_03: political thought as left sectarianism,
2:28
SPEAKER_03: reading Karl Marx not just against the evidence of what had been done in Marx's name,
2:33
SPEAKER_03: but in relation to the American democratic ideal and everyone who had written after Marx.
2:39
SPEAKER_03: Their arguments were more than abstract.
2:42
SPEAKER_03: Adolf Hitler was on the march in Europe.
2:44
SPEAKER_03: The Communist Party was becoming increasingly prominent among intellectuals and
2:48
SPEAKER_03: artists in the United States.
2:51
SPEAKER_03: Kristall's intellectual lodestar,
2:53
SPEAKER_03: Leon Trotsky,
2:54
SPEAKER_03: one of the original Bolshevik revolutionaries,
2:56
SPEAKER_03: was both writing furiously and struggling to stay one step ahead of Joseph Stalin's assassins,
3:03
SPEAKER_03: who killed him with an ice pick a few months after Kristall's class graduated.
3:08
SPEAKER_03: Their politics were all deadly serious.
3:11
SPEAKER_03: It's even possible that a young electrical engineering student named Julius
3:15
SPEAKER_03: Rosenberg occasionally joined one of the alcoves at City College.
3:19
SPEAKER_03: But these men, Crystal, Irving Howe, Sidney Hook, Seymour Lipset,
3:25
SPEAKER_03: All students of philosophy professor Morris Cohen also had another project.
3:30
SPEAKER_03: They were inventing a virile intellectual style and agenda that was distinctively
3:35
SPEAKER_03: Jewish and secular,
3:37
SPEAKER_03: and imagining how they would get their ideas to the public.
3:40
SPEAKER_03: Like one of Cohen's associates,
3:42
SPEAKER_03: Lionel Trilling,
3:43
SPEAKER_03: the first Jewish literature professor to be hired at Columbia University,
3:47
SPEAKER_03: they believed that the looming battle against totalitarianism would be fought with words,
3:52
SPEAKER_03: pens,
3:53
SPEAKER_03: and ideas.
3:55
SPEAKER_03: After World War II and through the 1980s,
3:58
SPEAKER_03: they did exactly that in publications like Menorah Journal,
4:02
SPEAKER_03: Commentary,
4:03
SPEAKER_03: Partisan Review,
4:04
SPEAKER_03: and Dissent.
4:05
SPEAKER_03: They and new recruits like Norman Podoritz and Daniel Bell,
4:09
SPEAKER_03: as well as a select group of women,
4:11
SPEAKER_03: Hannah Arendt,
4:12
SPEAKER_03: Mary McCarthy,
4:13
SPEAKER_03: Elizabeth Hardwick,
4:14
SPEAKER_03: Midge Dechter,
4:15
SPEAKER_03: and Lionel Trilling's wife,
4:17
SPEAKER_03: Diana,
4:18
SPEAKER_03: became known as the New York Intellectuals,
4:20
SPEAKER_03: a generation of thinkers who redefined the art of political argument in the United
4:25
SPEAKER_03: States and elevated it to a contact sport.
4:29
SPEAKER_03: That's the story historian Ronnie Grinberg tells in her new book,
4:33
SPEAKER_03: Write Like a Man,
4:34
SPEAKER_03: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals,
4:37
SPEAKER_03: just out from Princeton University Press.
4:40
SPEAKER_03: Join Ronnie and me for this episode of Why Now, where history and politics meet the challenge of today.
4:45
SPEAKER_03: And I'm your host,
4:47
SPEAKER_03: Claire Potter,
4:48
SPEAKER_03: Professor of History Emeritus at the New School for Social Research,
4:51
SPEAKER_03: a contributing editor at Public Seminar,
4:53
SPEAKER_03: and the author of The Political Junkie Substack.
4:57
SPEAKER_03: This is Episode 54, Typewriter Combat.
5:25
SPEAKER_03: Ronnie, I have to tell you what a pleasure it was to read your book.
5:28
SPEAKER_03: I want to start by saying I spent a whole summer reading the memoirs of these people,
5:35
SPEAKER_03: Anne Roife and Norman Podoretz and Midge Dechter and so on.
5:39
SPEAKER_03: I thought what you did with this book, Bringing Men and Women's Voices Together,
5:46
SPEAKER_03: in this world of New York intellectuals was masterful.
5:51
SPEAKER_03: So can you tell me how a book about Jewish masculinity also needed to have a lot of women in it?
5:59
SPEAKER_01: That's a very good question.
6:00
SPEAKER_01: You know, a lot of books have been written about the New York intellectuals.
6:04
SPEAKER_01: They're not a topic that has not been explored.
6:07
SPEAKER_01: And certainly a slew of books came out, especially in the late 80s and early 90s.
6:12
SPEAKER_01: And then I think
6:13
SPEAKER_01: In the late 2000s, too, with neoconservatism, there was like another visit.
6:18
SPEAKER_01: And it was always recognized that this was a predominantly male and Jewish group.
6:22
SPEAKER_01: But sort of putting those two things together was not something someone had done.
6:27
SPEAKER_01: And as I was writing the manuscript,
6:30
SPEAKER_01: I increasingly came to feel that you really couldn't understand how this group sort
6:36
SPEAKER_01: of operated and how
6:37
SPEAKER_01: ideas about masculinity operated without looking at the women and that included the
6:43
SPEAKER_01: women who counted and why and how they counted but also the many women who were
6:48
SPEAKER_01: writers who kind of circled them either as wives or divorcees or whatever it was
6:55
SPEAKER_01: who for whatever reason didn't count um
6:58
SPEAKER_01: And so the women were always part of the story.
7:00
SPEAKER_01: I do have to give a props to one of my peer reviewers.
7:02
SPEAKER_01: It's an academic book, so it went out for peer review.
7:05
SPEAKER_01: And one of the peer reviewers told me, you need to center the women even more.
7:10
SPEAKER_01: And so I moved actually aspects of the women into the beginning of the chapter.
7:16
SPEAKER_01: I had always been focused on Midge Dechter and Diana Trilling,
7:20
SPEAKER_01: but I expanded to talk about even more some of the other ones and really was more conscious,
7:25
SPEAKER_01: I guess,
7:26
SPEAKER_01: of making
7:27
SPEAKER_01: women a through line in the story,
7:29
SPEAKER_01: because I think to understand how masculinity operated in American intellectual life,
7:33
SPEAKER_01: in this case,
7:34
SPEAKER_01: Jewish masculinity,
7:34
SPEAKER_01: you had to also understand women's sort of roles there too.
7:38
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
7:39
SPEAKER_03: And there are two women in the story who aren't Jewish, Mary McCarthy and Elizabeth Hardwick.
7:44
SPEAKER_03: They have to write like men too.
7:47
SPEAKER_03: And in many ways, they're not feminist icons, are they?
7:52
SPEAKER_01: No, they, all of these women were at best,
7:55
SPEAKER_01: apathetic to feminism.
7:57
SPEAKER_01: Most were dismissive.
7:59
SPEAKER_01: I'm not the first to sort of explore that.
8:01
SPEAKER_01: There's a journalist who had a book called Partisans,
8:04
SPEAKER_01: who sort of talked about how they were the generation that fell between first and
8:07
SPEAKER_01: second wave feminism,
8:08
SPEAKER_01: so they sort of missed the boat.
8:10
SPEAKER_01: But I think it was more than just that.
8:12
SPEAKER_01: I think precisely because
8:15
SPEAKER_01: they never would have put it this way.
8:16
SPEAKER_01: I mean, they saw themselves just as writers.
8:18
SPEAKER_01: And I actually want to say to listeners,
8:20
SPEAKER_01: I am not making an argument that there's a way to write like a woman or that
8:23
SPEAKER_01: there's a way to write like a man.
8:25
SPEAKER_01: It's not an essentialist argument.
8:26
SPEAKER_01: But who was taken seriously in this group?
8:30
SPEAKER_01: And then who was taken seriously kind of in American intellectual life when this
8:33
SPEAKER_01: group held a certain sway over that?
8:37
SPEAKER_01: Had to do, I think, whether they were seen as serious writers, aggressive writers in a particular way,
8:44
SPEAKER_01: that the men sort of tied to notions of masculinity.
8:48
SPEAKER_03: And there's this idea about argument that you argue fiercely.
8:52
SPEAKER_03: And part of what it means,
8:54
SPEAKER_03: not just to be a man,
8:56
SPEAKER_03: but an adult,
8:58
SPEAKER_03: is to take ideas seriously,
9:00
SPEAKER_03: to argue seriously,
9:02
SPEAKER_03: and to write.
9:04
SPEAKER_03: So let's roll it back a little bit.
9:06
SPEAKER_03: One of the things all the men in the book have in common and some of the women is
9:10
SPEAKER_03: that they are the children of immigrants and often the children of very poor immigrants.
9:16
SPEAKER_03: How does this affect their own reflections on masculinity?
9:22
SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
9:22
SPEAKER_01: it's a really central part of,
9:25
SPEAKER_01: I think,
9:25
SPEAKER_01: their understandings of masculinity as they're sort of growing up in interwar America,
9:31
SPEAKER_01: right?
9:31
SPEAKER_01: So this is years when
9:33
SPEAKER_01: Native sentiment climaxes.
9:35
SPEAKER_01: Anti-Semitism is prevalent on both sides of the Atlantic.
9:39
SPEAKER_01: Jews are very much seen as others in a multitude of ways.
9:44
SPEAKER_01: Judaism,
9:45
SPEAKER_01: there's no notion of a tri-faith America yet that emerges after World War II or
9:51
SPEAKER_01: Judeo-Christian tradition.
9:52
SPEAKER_01: All of that is like a post-World War II construction.
9:55
SPEAKER_01: So Jews are very much outsiders in religious terms, but also
10:00
SPEAKER_01: Jewish immigrants have long been involved in the labor movement and with radical ideas.
10:05
SPEAKER_01: So sort of politically they're outsiders.
10:07
SPEAKER_01: You know, some scholars will argue that Jews weren't quite considered white in this period, right?
10:13
SPEAKER_01: That there's sort of this spectrum of whiteness in this period where scientific
10:17
SPEAKER_01: racism is kind of dominating academic thought and intellectual thought.
10:21
SPEAKER_01: And so Jews are outsiders.
10:23
SPEAKER_01: And I think very much this is an era when white Protestant norms of masculinity also hardened.
10:29
SPEAKER_01: and are exclusionary towards other groups.
10:31
SPEAKER_01: And this is in reaction partly to this sort of fear of immigrants,
10:35
SPEAKER_01: what we would call replacement theory,
10:36
SPEAKER_01: right?
10:37
SPEAKER_01: Today, this idea that immigrants were going to ruin the stock of true white Americans.
10:42
SPEAKER_01: And also African-Americans are moving in large numbers from the South to the North
10:47
SPEAKER_01: as part of the great migration.
10:49
SPEAKER_01: So I think,
10:49
SPEAKER_01: you know,
10:50
SPEAKER_01: other scholars have talked about kind of the hardening of masculinity around white
10:53
SPEAKER_01: Anglo-Saxon Protestant norms that included things like athleticism and
10:57
SPEAKER_01: physical strength that sort of other groups supposedly lacked.
11:00
SPEAKER_01: And so I think that these sons of immigrants are sort of denied access in many ways
11:05
SPEAKER_01: to those norms of masculinity,
11:07
SPEAKER_01: but not entirely,
11:08
SPEAKER_01: right?
11:08
SPEAKER_01: So this idea of kind of aggression and combativeness,
11:12
SPEAKER_01: you know,
11:12
SPEAKER_01: being a heroic fighter,
11:14
SPEAKER_01: they put that into sort of being intellectuals and writers.
11:16
SPEAKER_01: And that has roots also with the Talmudic tradition in Judaism that had long sort
11:21
SPEAKER_01: of venerated the religious scholar as the ideal Jewish male.
11:25
SPEAKER_01: Now in this period, they're secular.
11:27
SPEAKER_01: There's a historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison named Tony Michaels who's,
11:30
SPEAKER_01: you know,
11:30
SPEAKER_01: has sort of written about how it was socialists in the United States that became
11:34
SPEAKER_01: like the ideal arguers,
11:36
SPEAKER_01: you know,
11:36
SPEAKER_01: or religious scholars are sort of passe.
11:38
SPEAKER_01: But there's a merging kind of,
11:40
SPEAKER_01: I think,
11:40
SPEAKER_01: of traditional Jewish ideals of masculinity with kind of American conceptions in
11:45
SPEAKER_01: the early 20th century that create this new construct or that they help create.
11:50
SPEAKER_03: So they're creating a new man, which is the Jewish American intellectual.
11:57
SPEAKER_03: And I think one of the things you note in the book,
12:00
SPEAKER_03: which I thought was wonderful,
12:02
SPEAKER_03: is that because a lot of these guys were working class,
12:06
SPEAKER_03: they're growing up on the mean streets and they have to deal with gangs and they're
12:11
SPEAKER_03: playing a lot of tough physical games and they're fighting.
12:15
SPEAKER_03: And so there is this...
12:18
SPEAKER_03: childhood experience of having to fight
12:23
SPEAKER_03: as a Jew that then gets translated into intellectual and literary life.
12:29
SPEAKER_03: And one of the things I find fascinating about these men and the women is almost
12:36
SPEAKER_03: none of them go to graduate school.
12:38
SPEAKER_03: And only one of them, Lionel Trilling has a PhD.
12:42
SPEAKER_03: And I was like,
12:42
SPEAKER_03: what a great world it was where you could be taken seriously as an intellectual
12:47
SPEAKER_03: without spending seven years in graduate school.
12:50
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was a different world.
12:51
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
12:51
SPEAKER_01: those opportunities were made possible in the immediate post-war era,
12:55
SPEAKER_01: right,
12:55
SPEAKER_01: with the GI Bill and the expansion of higher education.
12:59
SPEAKER_01: I think it's a moment that we're never going to see again,
13:01
SPEAKER_01: when you don't need a PhD to go into academia or to be a thinker.
13:07
SPEAKER_01: You know,
13:08
SPEAKER_01: many of them do,
13:09
SPEAKER_01: and Irving Howe sort of complains in the 1950s,
13:12
SPEAKER_01: because for him,
13:13
SPEAKER_01: the intellectual vocation kind of always requires being outside of
13:17
SPEAKER_01: mainstream institutions.
13:19
SPEAKER_01: But, you know, he also says we had to make a living.
13:22
SPEAKER_01: And universities provided a place where they could both make a living and continue
13:27
SPEAKER_01: to write to a broader public.
13:30
SPEAKER_01: And I think what you mentioned earlier,
13:31
SPEAKER_01: sort of about the streets,
13:32
SPEAKER_01: you know,
13:33
SPEAKER_01: one of the other points I wanted to make in my book in the first chapter is that
13:36
SPEAKER_01: this is not the only model of Jewish masculinity available to the sons of immigrants.
13:41
SPEAKER_01: There are various models of American Jewish masculinity that are developing in these years.
13:45
SPEAKER_01: Not everyone is becoming a combative
13:48
SPEAKER_01: intellectual scholar, but that's the model that prevails for this group.
13:52
SPEAKER_03: I mean, there's sports, there's art, there's finance.
13:56
SPEAKER_03: There are a range of occupations in which a new generation of educated Jewish men
14:04
SPEAKER_03: and some women are beginning to move in and distinguish themselves.
14:09
SPEAKER_03: And yet masculinity is important to these guys.
14:13
SPEAKER_03: They talk about it all the time.
14:15
SPEAKER_03: And one of the threads in your story is the influence of Freud, right?
14:20
SPEAKER_03: And their discussions about psychotherapy,
14:24
SPEAKER_03: which some of them were in,
14:26
SPEAKER_03: and how it was that both men and women became adults in part through realizing
14:33
SPEAKER_03: their heterosexual selves.
14:36
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
14:37
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
14:37
SPEAKER_01: I think,
14:38
SPEAKER_01: you know,
14:38
SPEAKER_01: Freud came into this story sort of later for me,
14:41
SPEAKER_01: actually,
14:42
SPEAKER_01: in the Midge-Decter chapter,
14:43
SPEAKER_01: which part of that became an article in the Journal of American History,
14:46
SPEAKER_01: which was a very long process.
14:48
SPEAKER_01: But in that, when you submit to the Journal of American History, you get lots of great reviews.
14:52
SPEAKER_01: And so one of them was really the first one to point out how clear Freudian ideas
14:56
SPEAKER_01: were in Mitch Dechter's thinking about the women's movement and then later gay liberation.
15:03
SPEAKER_01: I mean, she's a conservative writer, homophobic, anti-feminist.
15:08
SPEAKER_01: And so then as I started to think about Freud,
15:10
SPEAKER_01: and I should say,
15:11
SPEAKER_01: that wasn't the first time that I had started thinking about Freud.
15:13
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I
15:14
SPEAKER_01: early on in graduate school,
15:15
SPEAKER_01: so this was ages ago,
15:16
SPEAKER_01: I met Joan Scott at a conference,
15:18
SPEAKER_01: it was a graduate student conference,
15:20
SPEAKER_01: and she was talking to me,
15:20
SPEAKER_01: this was very early in my work,
15:22
SPEAKER_01: but she was like,
15:23
SPEAKER_01: you know,
15:23
SPEAKER_01: all of these guys were analyzed.
15:26
SPEAKER_01: They all were an analyst throughout their life.
15:28
SPEAKER_01: It's a central component of understanding them.
15:31
SPEAKER_01: And the historian David A. Bell, who's the son of
15:34
SPEAKER_01: Daniel Bell and Pearl Kazenbell,
15:36
SPEAKER_01: who I write about in the book,
15:37
SPEAKER_01: also said,
15:38
SPEAKER_01: you know,
15:38
SPEAKER_01: Freud is so central,
15:39
SPEAKER_01: it's all over partisan review,
15:41
SPEAKER_01: especially the writings of the women,
15:43
SPEAKER_01: because I think the men were more guarded in some ways about how Freudianism
15:47
SPEAKER_01: influenced them,
15:48
SPEAKER_01: except Lionel Trilling,
15:49
SPEAKER_01: maybe when he applied it to literature or to politics,
15:51
SPEAKER_01: but in terms of their self.
15:53
SPEAKER_01: But the women were much more open, shaped their ideas of the proper culture,
15:59
SPEAKER_01: understandings of gender roles,
16:01
SPEAKER_01: which they initially saw,
16:02
SPEAKER_01: and some of them always saw,
16:03
SPEAKER_01: as biologically rooted in Freudian theories.
16:06
SPEAKER_01: Now, I think Freud is hard to talk about because he means different things to different people.
16:11
SPEAKER_01: People adapt Freud in different ways, but I think it's central to their thinking for sure.
16:15
SPEAKER_03: Well, and it's very important to define how the New York intellectuals were
16:21
SPEAKER_03: thinking about their sexuality in part because there's a whole medicalized model of
16:26
SPEAKER_03: homosexuality that they don't ascribe to exactly.
16:29
SPEAKER_03: They're very focused on the inner self and the id, the ego.
16:34
SPEAKER_03: They also have a lot of sex with each other.
16:36
SPEAKER_03: And,
16:37
SPEAKER_03: you know,
16:37
SPEAKER_03: one of the things that you get out of reading the memoirs is they were just
16:42
SPEAKER_03: constantly having parties and there was a lot of booze flowing and there was a lot
16:48
SPEAKER_03: of sex happening and,
16:51
SPEAKER_03: Can you talk about researching this very vital world?
16:57
SPEAKER_03: How did you end up feeling about it?
17:00
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I always felt like when I read the letters, you're getting access to this long lost world.
17:07
SPEAKER_01: I didn't have like feelings necessarily of disgust or admiration.
17:11
SPEAKER_01: It just was like I was fascinated.
17:14
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, some of them write really revealing letters.
17:17
SPEAKER_01: And it's so fun to be in the archives because you're reading their gossip about these parties.
17:23
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I was always initially surprised at how many affairs there were and how many divorces initially.
17:29
SPEAKER_01: You know,
17:30
SPEAKER_01: in thinking about the 1950s too,
17:32
SPEAKER_01: we think about as a conservative era when it comes to those ideas.
17:37
SPEAKER_01: But these intellectuals were, you know, having affairs and getting divorced in
17:42
SPEAKER_01: over and over again during this period.
17:44
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
17:45
SPEAKER_01: you know,
17:45
SPEAKER_01: I think the men were not easy to be married to,
17:47
SPEAKER_01: so it's not surprising that they,
17:51
SPEAKER_01: women would,
17:51
SPEAKER_01: I think especially women who were strong writers and intellectuals,
17:55
SPEAKER_01: you know,
17:55
SPEAKER_01: got fed up sometimes living with these men.
17:58
SPEAKER_01: The parties were harder to get access to, I have to say.
18:00
SPEAKER_01: I wish that there was more recordings of like what the party,
18:03
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
18:03
SPEAKER_01: they're in the memoir somewhat,
18:05
SPEAKER_01: you know,
18:06
SPEAKER_01: that's a scene I would have maybe liked to describe a little bit more,
18:08
SPEAKER_01: but I don't think I had the evidence.
18:11
SPEAKER_03: children, of course, kind of get lost in all of this.
18:14
SPEAKER_03: I remember in Anne Roife's memoir,
18:16
SPEAKER_03: she talks about a typical party where you would go to somebody's house and there's
18:20
SPEAKER_03: a room full of coats and basically people,
18:23
SPEAKER_03: small children,
18:24
SPEAKER_03: and people would just bring their small children and dump them into the coats and
18:28
SPEAKER_03: the children would sleep in there while the parents drank.
18:31
SPEAKER_03: You really get the sense that these are marriages where the
18:38
SPEAKER_03: husband and wife were deeply involved with each other, but less so their children.
18:43
SPEAKER_03: Did you pick any of that up?
18:46
SPEAKER_01: Their children are sort of not visible because even in their memoirs,
18:50
SPEAKER_01: their children play very minimal roles.
18:54
SPEAKER_01: Irving Howe gets divorced and his wife, Nina, ends up moving away with his two children.
18:58
SPEAKER_01: I mean, David Bell was born much later.
19:02
SPEAKER_01: He was born in, I think, in 1961.
19:03
SPEAKER_01: And
19:05
SPEAKER_01: Pearl Kazin was a very devoted mother.
19:06
SPEAKER_01: So I think he's a little bit of an exception.
19:08
SPEAKER_01: You know,
19:10
SPEAKER_01: the Trilling son,
19:11
SPEAKER_01: also James,
19:12
SPEAKER_01: I believe James Trilling writes very bitterly of his father later on.
19:16
SPEAKER_01: You know,
19:16
SPEAKER_01: and there's a place in the book and also early on in the 30s where another woman
19:20
SPEAKER_01: named Tess Schlesinger,
19:22
SPEAKER_01: who wrote a book called The Unpossessed,
19:24
SPEAKER_01: I think says that these intellectuals view children as biological traps.
19:28
SPEAKER_01: So some of them ended up have children,
19:29
SPEAKER_01: but they didn't shower,
19:31
SPEAKER_01: I think,
19:31
SPEAKER_01: the attention maybe that their parents did and that their
19:35
SPEAKER_01: you know, later generations did.
19:36
SPEAKER_03: So let's get back to the women who are incredibly vivid in this book.
19:43
SPEAKER_03: And I want to go straight to Diana Trilling because that chapter on Diana Trilling was stunning.
19:50
SPEAKER_03: She sounds like a really, really unlikable person.
19:56
SPEAKER_03: And then I thought about it again.
19:58
SPEAKER_03: And I thought,
19:59
SPEAKER_03: well,
19:59
SPEAKER_03: actually,
20:00
SPEAKER_03: she's one of the few women who's actually pushing back on a lot of the sexist crap
20:06
SPEAKER_03: that's going on.
20:08
SPEAKER_03: Can you talk about that chapter on Trilling a little bit?
20:10
100%.
20:10
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I was always fascinated with Diana Trilling.
20:14
SPEAKER_01: Her archive is rich.
20:16
SPEAKER_01: She's very, she doesn't hold back.
20:18
SPEAKER_01: So her letters are rich.
20:20
SPEAKER_01: And I did feel like she was always dismissed as the
20:26
SPEAKER_01: very difficult one, the bitchy one.
20:29
SPEAKER_01: And,
20:30
SPEAKER_01: you know,
20:30
SPEAKER_01: as I got more immersed in this world,
20:32
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
20:33
SPEAKER_01: I've been with this project for many,
20:34
SPEAKER_01: many years,
20:35
SPEAKER_01: the men were just as difficult and just as hard to be around and they were not nice
20:41
SPEAKER_01: people and they didn't treat others nicely,
20:43
SPEAKER_01: but Diana seemed to be an
20:46
SPEAKER_01: I wasn't the first to say this.
20:47
SPEAKER_01: I should say Daphne Merkin, the writer, she wrote about, she knew Diana Trilling.
20:52
SPEAKER_01: And there was a biography that was published in 2017, I think, by Natalie Robbins.
20:56
SPEAKER_01: And she was reviewing the book.
20:58
SPEAKER_01: And she also mentioned how, you know, Diana was always the one who was snickered at.
21:03
SPEAKER_01: You know, I felt like to understand actually why that was the case is,
21:09
SPEAKER_01: you had to understand the way the gender operated in this group and the way that
21:14
SPEAKER_01: women were dismissed and that women who pushed back,
21:19
SPEAKER_01: who were aggressive,
21:20
SPEAKER_01: who were argumentative,
21:21
SPEAKER_01: they had to be that way to be taken seriously.
21:24
SPEAKER_01: And Diana for a long time was not taken seriously.
21:26
SPEAKER_01: It wasn't until the second half of her life,
21:29
SPEAKER_01: but then it could become used against them as a way to say,
21:33
SPEAKER_01: they're too difficult.
21:35
SPEAKER_01: They're too aggressive.
21:36
SPEAKER_01: They're too opinionated.
21:37
SPEAKER_01: And Diana's husband is just an interesting case,
21:40
SPEAKER_01: Lionel Trilling,
21:41
SPEAKER_01: because he's one of the most celebrated literary critics.
21:44
SPEAKER_01: And I write about in my book how he sort of actually embodied a very different
21:48
SPEAKER_01: public persona because he was a Jew who was trying to be an English professor in an
21:53
SPEAKER_01: era before World War II,
21:56
SPEAKER_01: when Jews were not thought as the proper types of people to study the genteel
22:02
SPEAKER_01: English language.
22:04
SPEAKER_01: And so he has a very soft and reserved kind of public
22:08
SPEAKER_01: detached is the word that's often used to describe him.
22:11
SPEAKER_01: And Diana, in comparison, always seems so much more, not just aggressive, but uncontrolled.
22:18
SPEAKER_01: And she's resentful to some extent about her relationship with Lionel.
22:24
SPEAKER_01: I mean, they're an exception in the sense that they remain committed to each other.
22:27
SPEAKER_01: Neither one of them had an affair.
22:29
SPEAKER_01: I think there was a lot of love and partnership there, but also resentments about who Lionel
22:36
SPEAKER_01: who was recognized for intellectual work.
22:39
SPEAKER_03: Well,
22:40
SPEAKER_03: and one of the things you raise in the book is the suggestion that not only did
22:44
SPEAKER_03: Diana Trilling edit a lot of Lionel's work,
22:47
SPEAKER_03: but that she was in some ways an unacknowledged co-author.
22:51
SPEAKER_03: And you also say that it never seems to have occurred to Lionel that Diana was really unable to write.
23:01
SPEAKER_03: for long periods of time, because she was married to him.
23:04
SPEAKER_01: And that was the case, I think, for other women in this group, too.
23:06
SPEAKER_01: I mean, all of them struggled, like they, they struggled with writing, they had writing blocks.
23:11
SPEAKER_01: And I think that was tied to their very notions of being masculine and being men.
23:16
SPEAKER_01: So it was all the more psychologically devastating for them.
23:20
SPEAKER_01: And the women,
23:20
SPEAKER_01: not just Diana,
23:21
SPEAKER_01: but Pearl Kaysen Bell,
23:23
SPEAKER_01: when it came to Daniel Bell,
23:24
SPEAKER_01: they also had a very loving relationship,
23:26
SPEAKER_01: but they spent a lot of time making sure their husbands would be okay.
23:30
SPEAKER_01: And
23:30
SPEAKER_01: And I think, yeah, and Diana did edit a lot of Lionel's work, as she claims.
23:35
SPEAKER_01: The book on Susan Sontag by Ben Moser came out, you know, as I was working on that chapter.
23:40
SPEAKER_01: And he talks about how Susan Sontag and sort of proves that Susan Sontag helped
23:44
SPEAKER_01: write her first husband's books on Freud,
23:47
SPEAKER_01: Philip Reif,
23:48
SPEAKER_01: Reif,
23:49
SPEAKER_01: Reif.
23:49
SPEAKER_01: And then the Society for U.S.
23:50
SPEAKER_01: Intellectual History, which is a blog, also had a debate about Richard Hofstadter's wife.
23:55
SPEAKER_01: So I think this was a thing people were beginning to explore.
23:57
SPEAKER_01: And Diana was explicit that that was the case.
24:00
SPEAKER_01: but she edited Lionel's early works and she was devastated when she went into his
24:04
SPEAKER_01: papers after he died and felt that he purposely destroyed her edits so that people
24:09
SPEAKER_01: wouldn't know.
24:10
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, I want to know so much more about that marriage.
24:13
SPEAKER_03: I can't even tell you.
24:14
SPEAKER_03: And I think it's part of the success of the book that when I finished reading it,
24:19
SPEAKER_03: I wanted to run down a whole bunch of other books and just keep on going.
24:23
SPEAKER_03: I'm also interested in how kind of shitty a lot of these women were to each other.
24:29
SPEAKER_03: And that the whole standard of writing like a man,
24:33
SPEAKER_03: which is what you had to do to get into the room,
24:35
SPEAKER_03: to be heard,
24:36
SPEAKER_03: to be respected,
24:38
SPEAKER_03: was a very fragile one.
24:40
SPEAKER_03: And partly it rested on them seeing each other as rivals.
24:46
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think that the women in particular were pitted against one another.
24:51
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, Tess Schlesinger talks about she was married to a writer named Herbert Salo.
24:55
SPEAKER_01: And in the 1930s,
24:57
SPEAKER_01: he was writing for and he might have been an editor at the Menorah Journal,
25:01
SPEAKER_01: which is the first journal that I explore as kind of helping create this group.
25:05
SPEAKER_01: It was edited by Elliot Cohen.
25:08
SPEAKER_01: who becomes the inaugural editor of Commentary in 1945,
25:12
SPEAKER_01: but he's the managing editor of this Menorah Journal between 1924 and 1931.
25:18
SPEAKER_01: And she talks at length, and so does Diana, actually.
25:20
SPEAKER_01: Or maybe it was Diana who really pointed this out,
25:22
SPEAKER_01: that there was only room for one woman at the Menorah Journal.
25:27
SPEAKER_01: And so Tess Schlesinger was the writer that published stories.
25:30
SPEAKER_01: Diana submitted stories, and Eliot never got back to her.
25:33
SPEAKER_01: And I think that idea of sort of,
25:36
SPEAKER_01: there could be one woman who was celebrated is something that you see throughout,
25:40
SPEAKER_01: you see in the memoir literature.
25:42
SPEAKER_01: And so the women are very much pitted against one another.
25:46
SPEAKER_01: And there isn't this sense of sisterhood to use the language of second wave feminism when it develops.
25:51
SPEAKER_01: And they're not interested in feminism.
25:53
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think they see feminism as fundamentally unserious topics, unserious writers.
26:00
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
26:02
SPEAKER_03: And that in some ways, yeah.
26:04
SPEAKER_03: comes to effect to Mary McCarthy when she publishes The Group in 1963,
26:11
SPEAKER_03: she is derided not just by some of the other male intellectuals,
26:18
SPEAKER_03: but by her dear friend,
26:20
SPEAKER_03: Elizabeth Hardwick.
26:21
SPEAKER_03: Can you talk about that?
26:23
SPEAKER_03: I mean, The Group is one of the first grown-up novels I ever read.
26:26
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
26:27
SPEAKER_03: And it is seen by these folks as a women's book and therefore not worthy of inclusion in their canons.
26:36
SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
26:37
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
26:37
SPEAKER_01: I think Mary McCarthy,
26:39
SPEAKER_01: you know,
26:39
SPEAKER_01: she was always feared for her acerbic prose,
26:43
SPEAKER_01: and she had sort of,
26:44
SPEAKER_01: you know,
26:45
SPEAKER_01: written books before this that are fiction,
26:49
SPEAKER_01: but that was essentially based on some of the figures in this group.
26:51
SPEAKER_01: I'm thinking of The Oasis, which comes out in, I think, 1949.
26:55
SPEAKER_01: But when the group becomes a bestseller,
26:58
SPEAKER_01: these male intellectuals rip it apart,
27:01
SPEAKER_01: yeah,
27:01
SPEAKER_01: and dismiss it as a lady's novel.
27:05
SPEAKER_01: nothing more than a lady's novel.
27:07
SPEAKER_01: And this term lady novel is something that's used throughout to sort of dismiss women's writers.
27:12
SPEAKER_01: And I think also this idea that it was fiction and Mary McCarthy was succeeding in
27:16
SPEAKER_01: writing a novel about fiction that became a bestseller really irked them.
27:22
SPEAKER_01: I think for some of them,
27:23
SPEAKER_01: writing a novel was seen as the ultimate expression of masculine writing,
27:29
SPEAKER_01: even though very few of them were actually novelists.
27:32
SPEAKER_01: And so that fact that Mary McCarthy did this and then she celebrated and that the
27:36
SPEAKER_01: book is a bestseller is something that they have a difficult time handling.
27:40
SPEAKER_01: And yeah,
27:40
SPEAKER_01: Elizabeth Hardwick ends up writing a parody of it under an assumed name that's
27:44
SPEAKER_01: published in the New York Review of Books.
27:47
SPEAKER_01: And she doesn't tell McCarthy before it appears.
27:50
SPEAKER_01: I don't know exactly how long McCarthy doesn't know who writes it, but of course, word gets back to her.
27:55
SPEAKER_01: And
27:56
SPEAKER_01: despite their deep friendship, she denigrated the book too.
28:01
SPEAKER_03: Hardwick is just such an interesting character in this book.
28:05
SPEAKER_03: And you allude to this briefly, but...
28:09
SPEAKER_03: she was treated horribly by Robert Lowell, just horribly.
28:14
SPEAKER_03: And she stayed with him.
28:16
SPEAKER_03: And I read a biography of her that didn't say this,
28:20
SPEAKER_03: but it kind of made it clear that she stayed with him because he had money and she didn't.
28:26
SPEAKER_03: And the only way she could continue her writing.
28:29
SPEAKER_03: And I mean,
28:30
SPEAKER_03: you look at what she's publishing and you couldn't possibly live on,
28:33
SPEAKER_03: on what she was writing,
28:35
SPEAKER_03: but men are making a living by writing and,
28:39
SPEAKER_03: And so how is it that women can't make a living writing and men can?
28:47
SPEAKER_01: It's a good question.
28:48
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
28:49
SPEAKER_01: I think in the earlier period,
28:50
SPEAKER_01: you know,
28:50
SPEAKER_01: Daniel Bell says that a lot of these men were actually married to women who had a
28:55
SPEAKER_01: stable income as teachers or whatever it was so that they could support their
29:01
SPEAKER_01: husbands and their sort of esoteric writings.
29:03
SPEAKER_01: But in the post-war year, that transforms.
29:05
SPEAKER_01: And maybe that gets to the question of, you know, who got jobs in academia.
29:09
SPEAKER_01: Robert Lowell does not become an academic,
29:12
SPEAKER_01: but I'm just thinking of some of the other ones who are able to continue writing,
29:17
SPEAKER_01: but also have stable jobs in academia.
29:20
SPEAKER_01: Something Elizabeth Hardwick,
29:21
SPEAKER_01: after she divorces,
29:22
SPEAKER_01: starts teaching at Barnard College,
29:26
SPEAKER_01: my alma mater,
29:27
SPEAKER_01: where she,
29:28
SPEAKER_01: I think,
29:28
SPEAKER_01: to make ends meet.
29:30
SPEAKER_01: But she never felt that her writing was going to do that or able to do that.
29:36
SPEAKER_01: And she acknowledges that.
29:38
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
29:39
SPEAKER_01: I think I know the biography you're alluding to,
29:41
SPEAKER_01: but there's definitely moments in her own reflections about her own situation where
29:46
SPEAKER_01: she sort of makes those admissions that I could not have supported myself on my writing.
29:51
SPEAKER_03: So let's talk about politics before we go,
29:55
SPEAKER_03: which is the New York intellectuals are sort of seen as the incubator of neoconservatism.
30:04
SPEAKER_03: But one of the things you really point up in Right Like a Man is it's really just a
30:10
SPEAKER_03: few of them who are committed conservatives,
30:13
SPEAKER_03: and the others are really pushing back against the new left,
30:17
SPEAKER_03: but without...
30:19
SPEAKER_03: becoming part of the new right either.
30:21
SPEAKER_03: And could you talk about that complex political landscape?
30:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really important intervention in my book.
30:28
SPEAKER_01: I think that there were a number of figures who get connected to neoconservatism
30:34
SPEAKER_01: because they react towards the radicalism of the late 1960s,
30:39
SPEAKER_01: or they react towards what they see as the failures of the great society programs.
30:44
SPEAKER_01: And their names stick.
30:46
SPEAKER_01: So the ones that are most often named are Norman Podhortz,
30:49
SPEAKER_01: Irving Kristol,
30:51
SPEAKER_01: Daniel Bell,
30:51
SPEAKER_01: and Nathan Glazer.
30:53
SPEAKER_01: But I think when you look especially at Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer, there's a much more nuanced story.
30:59
SPEAKER_01: Daniel Bell never accepts the title neoconservatism.
31:04
SPEAKER_01: He says that he's a socialist in economics,
31:07
SPEAKER_01: liberal in politics,
31:08
SPEAKER_01: and a conservative in culture is how he always describes himself.
31:13
SPEAKER_01: I mean, there needs to be an
31:14
SPEAKER_01: thorough biography written of daniel bell because i think he's a fascinating figure
31:18
SPEAKER_01: who goes beyond these categories and he ends up leaving the public interest which
31:24
SPEAKER_01: is a magazine that he founded in 1965 with irving crystal to explore social policy
31:29
SPEAKER_01: uh he lives in 1972 or 1973 because irving's politics are becoming too conservative
31:35
SPEAKER_01: and so are the magazines uh and nathan glazer takes over
31:39
SPEAKER_01: But Nathan Glazer, too, is very thoughtful and rethinks his views later on.
31:43
SPEAKER_01: And so he had opposed affirmative action,
31:46
SPEAKER_01: which is one of the domestic policy issues that is often associated with
31:50
SPEAKER_01: neoconservatism or opposition to affirmative action.
31:53
SPEAKER_01: And he rethinks those positions.
31:56
SPEAKER_01: And then there's the foreign policy aspect, which becomes this really hawkish
32:00
SPEAKER_01: you know, preemptive war in the wake of George W. Bush and the war on terror.
32:05
SPEAKER_01: And by that point, even someone like Irving Kristol doesn't easily fit into what's considered a neocon.
32:10
SPEAKER_01: It moves kind of from this focus on domestic politics to foreign affairs.
32:15
SPEAKER_01: Now, anti-communism was always a link.
32:18
SPEAKER_01: Anti-communism is central to all of these figures from the very beginning,
32:21
SPEAKER_01: but Irving Howe is anti-communist.
32:24
SPEAKER_01: And Irving Howe reacts against the new left, but also does not end up
32:29
SPEAKER_01: anywhere close to the new right.
32:30
SPEAKER_01: And so,
32:31
SPEAKER_01: yeah,
32:31
SPEAKER_01: one of the arguments that I make in my book is that if we look at the long durée of neoconservatism,
32:36
SPEAKER_01: the two figures that are actually present the whole time are Norman Podhortz and
32:41
SPEAKER_01: his wife,
32:41
SPEAKER_01: Midge Dechter.
32:43
SPEAKER_01: And in fact, Midge Dechter starts writing about women and sex and gender beginning in the late 1950s.
32:49
SPEAKER_01: And really, it's hard, conservative ways to, you know, conservative how we think of it now,
32:54
SPEAKER_01: influenced by mid-century revisionist Freudianism and its focus on kind of
32:59
SPEAKER_01: heterosexuality and heterosexual marriage.
33:02
SPEAKER_01: And that's a through link into the family values politics that she embraces.
33:08
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
33:09
SPEAKER_01: I make an argument that she actually helps integrate the neocons into the broader
33:13
SPEAKER_01: conservative movement because she's always had those views.
33:15
SPEAKER_01: It didn't come out of Christianity.
33:17
SPEAKER_01: It kind of came out of mid-century revisionist Freudianism, but
33:21
SPEAKER_01: It adds to the family values discourse that comes to define the Republican Party.
33:26
SPEAKER_01: And then also Norman Podhortz,
33:29
SPEAKER_01: you know,
33:30
SPEAKER_01: I feel like his gender anxieties were always,
33:34
SPEAKER_01: people always like notice them because they're so explicit,
33:37
SPEAKER_01: but no one necessarily took them seriously.
33:40
SPEAKER_01: And if you read back and look at Norman too,
33:42
SPEAKER_01: there's these concerns about masculinity,
33:45
SPEAKER_01: about heterosexuality.
33:47
SPEAKER_01: white masculinity in particular,
33:49
SPEAKER_01: also Jewish masculinity and where it fits in that dates to the late 50s when he's
33:53
SPEAKER_01: writing about the Beats.
33:54
SPEAKER_01: His famous essay in 1963 called My Negro Problem in Ours,
33:59
SPEAKER_01: where it's,
34:00
SPEAKER_01: you know,
34:00
SPEAKER_01: it's trying to understand Black Jewish relations and kind of the increasing
34:03
SPEAKER_01: militancy of the civil rights movement by looking up at his experiences growing up
34:07
SPEAKER_01: in Brownsville,
34:08
SPEAKER_01: Brooklyn.
34:09
SPEAKER_01: And he says, I was made fun of by African American youth who seemed so much tougher to
34:16
SPEAKER_01: enviously tougher,
34:17
SPEAKER_01: he says,
34:17
SPEAKER_01: more masculine than I,
34:19
SPEAKER_01: and they made fun of me because I was a sissy Jewish good boy who got good grades.
34:24
SPEAKER_01: And then from 1963 until 1970,
34:26
SPEAKER_01: well,
34:28
SPEAKER_01: Norman Podhortz publishes very little except his memoir in 1967,
34:33
SPEAKER_01: his first of like four memoirs,
34:35
SPEAKER_01: making it,
34:35
SPEAKER_01: which also is filled with gender anxieties.
34:38
SPEAKER_01: And so if you read Dechter and Podhortz together, I think gender is this through line that links
34:45
SPEAKER_01: all the stages of neoconservatism and that these two figures,
34:48
SPEAKER_01: Norman and Midge,
34:49
SPEAKER_01: are kind of present throughout.
34:50
SPEAKER_01: And Norman is still alive.
34:51
SPEAKER_01: I have to think of how old he is.
34:55
SPEAKER_01: And he is actually a supporter of Trump.
34:57
SPEAKER_01: He was initially against Trump because he saw him as a Buchananist,
35:02
SPEAKER_01: meaning he sort of saw that he was a,
35:04
SPEAKER_01: he felt like he was criticizing the interventionist policy of the neoconservatives
35:07
SPEAKER_01: under the Bush years and that he was a,
35:10
SPEAKER_01: you know,
35:10
SPEAKER_01: America first kind of an isolationist.
35:13
SPEAKER_01: But then he got fed up with kind of the critiques of Trump and he decided that he
35:16
SPEAKER_01: was an anti-anti-Trumper.
35:18
SPEAKER_01: And he admires Trump.
35:20
SPEAKER_01: He did an interview in 2019 with the Claremont Institute because Trump is not a sissy.
35:26
SPEAKER_01: He fights back.
35:28
SPEAKER_01: So there's these like interesting,
35:29
SPEAKER_01: you know,
35:30
SPEAKER_01: gender concerns that I think you can see in all the different phases of
35:35
SPEAKER_01: neoconservatism that provide kind of a through line.
35:39
SPEAKER_03: There's a place near the end of the book where you also mentioned that actually
35:43
SPEAKER_03: none of these people really cared about Israel until the 67 war and Israel
35:50
SPEAKER_03: successfully defending itself against Israel.
35:53
SPEAKER_03: several major modern armies.
35:55
SPEAKER_03: And all of a sudden they're like, this is the masculinity of Jews taken to the global stage.
36:02
SPEAKER_03: And then they become passionately pro-Israel.
36:05
SPEAKER_03: And I think that's a really interesting moment given what we're going through now
36:09
SPEAKER_03: as a society in the United States around differences,
36:14
SPEAKER_03: let's call them,
36:15
SPEAKER_03: about Israel.
36:16
SPEAKER_03: It's a really interesting idea about how Israel moves to the center of
36:22
SPEAKER_03: intellectual life and political life as opposed to religious life.
36:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
36:28
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
36:28
SPEAKER_01: I think 1967 is a critical moment and I will say I'm not the first one to sort of
36:34
SPEAKER_01: make the argument that the victory that Israel had over its Arab neighbors inspired conservatives,
36:41
SPEAKER_01: not just the neocons,
36:42
SPEAKER_01: but also other conservatives.
36:43
SPEAKER_01: Like this is the moment when the United States is in the Vietnam quagmire.
36:48
SPEAKER_01: Milton Himmelfarb has this quote.
36:50
SPEAKER_01: He's a, he's,
36:51
SPEAKER_01: He's actually an interesting figure that I don't write enough about that I think people should.
36:55
SPEAKER_01: And he's writing,
36:56
SPEAKER_01: he works at the American Jewish Committee and he writes in commentary and he talks
36:59
SPEAKER_01: about how,
37:01
SPEAKER_01: you know,
37:01
SPEAKER_01: Israel provided an army you could celebrate fighting the good fight in 1967.
37:09
SPEAKER_01: And,
37:09
SPEAKER_01: you know,
37:09
SPEAKER_01: Melanie McAllister has made these arguments about how Israel provided sort of a new
37:13
SPEAKER_01: model of muscular militarism for conservatives more broadly.
37:17
SPEAKER_01: But I think it is a pivotal moment for sure.
37:21
SPEAKER_03: Well, this is a great opportunity for me to ask my last question, which I always end an interview with.
37:27
SPEAKER_03: Why should our listeners read this book now?
37:30
SPEAKER_01: When you look at a world like Twitter,
37:33
SPEAKER_01: the type of vitriolic debates that we see people striving to have on Twitter,
37:40
SPEAKER_01: though I don't think that they're done effectively or fairly,
37:43
SPEAKER_01: and it's all a lot of snark.
37:45
SPEAKER_01: But I think this idea of
37:47
SPEAKER_01: Debating intellectual ideas and that constituting a form of masculine performance still has relevance.
37:55
SPEAKER_01: The muscular militarism and neoconservatism is also a story that continues to interest people.
38:01
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I don't want to talk too much about post-October 7th, but I think you're right.
38:05
SPEAKER_01: The sort of debates about Israel and where Israel fits into our foreign policy,
38:10
SPEAKER_01: you know,
38:11
SPEAKER_01: this book touches on that too.
38:13
SPEAKER_01: But I think there's kind of a nostalgia for this world where people engaged in
38:18
SPEAKER_01: arguments and took each other seriously and people wanting that to exist today.
38:25
SPEAKER_01: It does,
38:26
SPEAKER_01: but it's also devolved into more snark,
38:31
SPEAKER_01: but also just like there's different media landscapes where here there seemed to be
38:35
SPEAKER_01: an intellectual world where people kind of had these conversations.
38:39
SPEAKER_01: They were combative, they were difficult, but I think there's a nostalgia for that too.
39:01
SPEAKER_03: And that's it for today's show.
39:03
SPEAKER_03: Thanks for listening.
39:21
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39:40
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39:46
SPEAKER_03: Why Now and Political Junkie are written, recorded, edited, and produced by me, Claire Potter.
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39:59
SPEAKER_03: See you next time.