Creator Bio
Irving Howe
1920–1993
A prominent literary critic and lifelong leftist, Irving Howe was the quintessential New York intellectual, a label he popularized in the 1960s. Born in the Bronx, New York, he turned a quarrelsome temperament into a vocation, writing and editing intellectual journals, criticizing capitalism, and championing democratic socialism. After rejecting Judaism as an adolescent, he changed course dramatically, immersing himself in Yiddish literature and the world of East European Jewish immigrants. Howe lectured widely and taught literature passionately. Dissent, the journal he founded and edited, survived him, continuing his legacy.
Entries in the Posen Library by This Creator
Primary Source
A Treasury of Yiddish Stories
Modern Yiddish literature focuses upon the shtetl during its last tremor of self-awareness, the historical moment when it is still coherent and self-contained but already…
Primary Source
The New York Intellectuals
We were living directly after the Holocaust of the European Jews. We might scorn our origins; we might crush America with discoveries of ardor; we might change our names. But we knew that but for an…
Primary Source
World of Our Fathers
To think of the culture brought over by the immigrant Jews as a “mere” folk culture is a patronizing error, though an error often indulged in by later generations of American Jews. There was, of…