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.
Awards and Recognition
- A Forbes Best Higher Education Book
"Grinberg’s book is filled with such lively anecdotes, attentive to both the energy and absurdity generated by a coterie of brilliant eggheads who identified as fearless brawlers."—Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
"There have been many other notable and worthy books about the influential New York Jewish intellectuals. . . . But none have been as attentive as Grinberg to how their experiences as Jews shaped their understandings of masculinity, or of how that understanding was central to the form and substance of their work. . . . Measured and nuanced. . . . It is a breath of fresh literary air to read a book that takes historically significant intellectuals seriously not only as writers and thinkers, but also as people trying to figure out who they were."—Emily Tamkin, Washington Post
"Ms. Grinberg’s insightful survey persuasively shows that some of the country’s most brilliant midcentury writers cultivated manliness to counter what they saw as their fathers’ meek marginality and thereby forged new ways of being American and of being Jewish.”—Benjamin Balint, Wall Street Journal"—Benjamin Balint, Wall Street Journal
"A sophisticated exploration. . . . The portraits are perceptive and the cultural and historical background highlights how New York’s mid-century intellectual scene negotiated new understandings of and relationships to gender. It’s an enlightening look at an influential literary coterie."—Publishers Weekly
"A persuasive explanation for the demise of the New York intellectuals. . . . A fascinating history."—Michael Kimmage, New Republic
"Erudite. . . . Write Like a Man can be read as a case study for how gender interacts with intellectual projects."—Brian Hillman, Jewish Book Council
"Masterful."—Claire Potter, Why Now? podcast
"Incisive."—Ross Barkan
"Write like a Man is not only accessible but engagingly written, carefully researched, and persuasively argued. Grinberg’s thesis that masculinity was central to the identity of the New York intellectuals is so well presented and so cogent that it is impossible to imagine future scholars overlooking the importance of their gender ideology."—Hannah Joyner, Open Letters Monthly
"A complex but still-relevant phenomenon . . . that is both thought provoking and friendly to the non-academic reader."—Janice Weizman, New York Journal of Books
"Grinberg insightfully recounts the story of New York's Jewish intellectuals through the prism of gender. . . . An extremely well-written, informative, and thoughtful first book that explores the New York Jewish intellectuals through a new lens."—J. D. Sarna, Choice
"Remarkable. . . . Utterly compelling . . . Grinberg makes a convincing case for how these sons of immigrants melded their parents’ educational aspirations with the Talmudic traditions and radical politics that permeated the Jewish world of the early to mid 20th century."—Yael Friedman, Forward
"Write Like a Man is among the most enjoyable and impressively researched books on its subject, brimming with colorful anecdotes and unexpected insights on every page. Grinberg has both redefined and reignited interest in the New York Intellectuals."—David Klion, Jewish Currents
"Fascinating. . . . a valuable, well-researched and highly readable account of an important chapter of American intellectual life."—H.N. Hirsch, Compulsive Reader
"Well-researched and convincing. . . . Grinberg cogently implies that the New York Intellectuals unified around a Jewish masculine form that provided its Jewish male members with a psychologically positive alternative to mainstream American masculine norms that classified them as inferior and their fathers’ masculine norms that the members viewed as rendering their adherents impotent."—Philip Hollander, Reading Religion
"Ronnie A. Grinberg’s analysis. . .makes for fascinating reading, along with a good dose of nostalgia."—Jeremy Dauber, Times Literary Supplement
"Eminently readable . . . deeply relevant, chronicling a compelling blend of literature, politics, and interpersonal rivalries. . . . [Write Like a Man is] a compelling chronicle of the place where artistic and political history come together. It’s an evocative summoning of a particular place and time, but it’s also not hard to draw connections between that period and today. Like the best works of history, it both enlivens the past and puts the present in a new light."—Tobias Carroll, Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“Ronnie Grinberg has accomplished something remarkable in this book: she has produced a history of the work and lives of the New York intellectuals that is original, incisive, empathetic, critical—and a joy to read. No one has understood the lives and work of the women and men in that beloved, notorious cohort so well.”—Michael Kazin, author of What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party
“With flowing prose, historical acuity, and human sensitivity, Grinberg draws our attention to something so obvious about the New York intellectuals that it has been largely unexamined until now: their masculinity. The women who orbited the group—as wives, lovers, and sometimes begrudgingly accepted members—illustrate most powerfully how the Cold War pressures of Jewish masculinity delimited the world of ideas. No matter how iconoclastic these mid-century thinkers tried to be, they were stuck in the stultifying straits of their gender anxiety.”—Lila Corwin Berman, author of The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex
“Ronnie Grinberg’s fantastic book shows us how the post–World War II New York intellectuals drew on the combative Talmudic tradition and their desire to overcome historic stereotypes of Jews as sissies to craft a pugilistic style of writing, thinking, and being that came to be their calling card and definition of masculinity. Write like a Man provides a remarkable look at these figures, revealing much about their time, and ours.”—Kevin M. Schultz, University of Illinois Chicago
