The New York Intellectuals

Eliezer Greenberg

1969

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 accident of geography we might also now be bars of soap. At least some of us could not help feeling that in our earlier claims to have shaken off all…

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Creator Bio

Eliezer Greenberg

1896–1977

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 for and editing intellectual journals, including Partisan Review, Commentary, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books, 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 for four decades, survived him, continuing his legacy.

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