Irving Howe--Socialist, Critic, Jew

by Edward Alexander

Book Overview

" . . . scrupulous, fair-minded and richly-detailed study . . . the book charts one of the most remarkable intellectual careers of the 20th century's latter half. . . . What is most heartening about Mr. Alexander's biography is its exemplary civility and nuance in discussing ideas across the lines of political difference." --Nathan Glick, Washington Times

"Anyone interested in Howe's varied career, and the historical context that has given...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0253333644
• ISBN13: 9780253333643
• Release Date: April 1998
• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

A provocative account of the life and work of Irving Howe

This is an excellent book, illuminating both the life and intellectual development of Howe, one of this country's foremost literary critics, and the world of New York's literati much throughout the twentieth century. It gives insight not only into the thoughts and work of this serious, idealistic, and highly intelligent man, not only into his complicated, social, religious, and intellectual background, and his encounter with the new world, at times clashing against the values of his ancestors, but also into the riveting history of Jewish socialist ideas, stemming directly from the Pale, shaping the American political, intellectual landscape throughout the century. In the process, it reveals the widening split within the Jewish community, the potential of the developing "kulturkampf," and the winding path of the bitter struggle, still characterizing the polarized groups of the more traditional and the more radical academics of our time. Reading Alexander's work, one learns not only to appreciate Howe's vision and moral development but also to place them in the context of the history of Jewish intellectual thought in search for the Messianic age. One may even note some of the crucial commonalities between this search and that of a number of European Jewish literati in our century. Of course, Howe's paradoxical attachment to the "world of our fathers" was not an option there. As true children of the Enlightenment, some of the European intellectuals remained simply detached and alienated from the tradition; others became communists or "Catholic socialists," following the instructions of the Popular Front and struggling against the transgressions of Franco rather than paying attention to the threat against Jewish life and being in Nazi Germany. Howe was more complicated and more "Jewish" than that (of course, he also had both more freedom to be Jewish and later more time to learn about, and recognize the consequences, of the Holocaust). Yet the process of living in, and the difficulties of assimilating to, a hostile world in need of redemption show deep-seated commonalities between these groups. They also reveal the ramifications and the price of such process and such need. While aware of the power of these forces, Alexander treats his subject truthfully and sympathetically. And despite his critique of Howe's initial opposition to both US involvement in World War II and the creation of the State of Israel, Alexander remains true to his task to trace Howe's steps and penetrate his ideas and imagination as truthfully as possible. The result is that he paints his subject as a great tragic character, vulnerable, torn by contradictions, intelligent, insightful, and despite everything, "better than ourselves." This is an excellent book, beautifully written, moving, exhilarating, and dramatic.

Outstanding critical biography of Irving Howe

Edward Alexander is not going to win the hagiography (lives of the saints) award of the year but he just might capture the critical biography prize because his tripartite study of the intellectual condominiums that co-mingled in the mind of Irving Howe is work of meticulous scholarship, felicitous writing style and a literate feistiness. The latter is perhaps the most endearing part of this absorbing book: Alexander has chosen to write a biography of a man whose political views, historical understanding and religious thinking (or lack thereof) he does not share. In fact, in a personal communication with his future biographer, Howe once referred to Alexander as my favorite reactionary. It is therefore a tribute to Alexander's skill th! at he has been able to reconstruct Howe's remarkable contributions to the American socio-political agenda and the Jewish component thereof while at the same time offering his, Alexander's, editorial strictures of Howe's political, literary and cultural myopias and tunnel vision. In his youth adolescence and early 20s - a period that coincided with the rise of Nazism and the outbreak of World War II - Irving Howe (né Horenstein) pledged his troth to the Trotskyite vision of the world, that is to say, an anti-Stalinist yet totalitarian form of communism which filtered the all political events through the doctrinaire lenses of the party line. The contrition which Howe expressed later in life about this part of his career could not be anticipated in the ferocious advocacy he advanced in his numerous articles in Labor Action about a version of history in which only the workers' causes and the class struggle had any validity. In this shameful and embarrassing period Howe was able! to analyze World War II as a unidimensional clash between! two capitalist systems. Alexander has gone through the painstaking and undoubtedly masochistic exercise of reading the articles that Howe wrote under his own name and under a pseudonym in order to document the vapidity of Howe's incredible ability to write about the most seismic events of the twentieth century - World War II and the Holocaust - without mentioning the uniqueness of Hitler's racial policies and, the targeting of Jews. There is no better example of ideological blindness filtering out unpleasant truths that might alter the rigidities of one's political beliefs. The ideological straitjacket which immobilized Howe's not inconsiderable intellectual potential was seen especially in the Partisan Review magazine crowd, among which Howe was a distinguished representative. The love affair which the largely Jewish coterie of Jewish intellectuals attached to that journal carried on with the American-English poet T.S. Eliot is a curious and archival example of the syndrome ! known as self-hate. Alexander notes with irony and some delectation the affection displayed by Howe and other Jewish intellectuals for a poet whose anti-Semitism was as unsubtle as his poetics was refined. Auth