Know Your Enemy: “Write Like a Man,” with Ronnie Grinberg

Know Your Enemy: “Write Like a Man,” with Ronnie Grinberg

Matt and Sam are joined by historian Ronnie Grinberg to discuss her book Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals.

Know Your Enemy is a podcast about the American right co-hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. Read more about it here. You can subscribe to, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher, and receive bonus content by supporting the podcast on Patreon.

Historian Ronnie Grinberg’s new book Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals couldn’t be better Know Your Enemy fodder. (Main characters include Midge Decter and Norman Podhoretz, Diana and Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, and Mary McCarthy.) These writers, Grinberg shows, built and sustained a novel, secular, Jewish, and masculine concept of the intellectual life, an ideology that would profoundly affect the development of Cold War liberalism, neoconservatism, Zionism, and right-wing reaction against feminism, gay rights, and black power.

As Matt and Sam discover in this conversation, it’s impossible to make sense of the creative and scholarly contributions of the New York Intellectuals — good and bad—without gender as a lens. Moreover, Grinberg shows how scholars can easily misapprehend the deeper motivations for neoconservative reaction (for figures like as Podhoretz and Decter) if they are not attentive to the centrality of gender, sexuality, and patriarchy in these thinkers’ work.

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