Write like a Man

by Ronnie A. Grinberg

Princeton University Press 2024

“The first thing you thought about was whether they were good-looking and if you could sleep with them,” said Jason Epstein, referring to the women who were part of a midcentury circle of writers known as the New York intellectuals. “But if a woman could write like a man, that was enough.” Epstein, the co-founder of the New York Review of Books, continued suggestively: “You wanted a piece, a piece of writing—you’d forget everything else for a good piece.”

In Write like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals, historian Ronnie Grinberg explains how a group of young Jewish men—along with some like-minded non-Jewish and non-male peers—came together to discuss social theory and contemporary politics. Members of the circle embraced “verbal combativeness, polemical aggression, and an unflinching style of argumentation.” They thought they were “virile in the way that athletes were in American culture,” Grinberg says, and they believed their “intellectual vocation was by definition masculine.” For them, Jewishness and manliness were linked.

In earlier years, waves of Jewish families had immigrated to New York from Eastern Europe. Many immigrant men—especially those with limited English or little training in industrial work—found it difficult to find steady employment. Immigrants’ sons, raised in a larger American society that valorized financially independent male heads of households, were frustrated by what they saw as the emasculation of their fathers.

In contrast, adherents to traditional Judaism revered men who spent long days together studying Talmud at houses of religious learning. Non-Jews considered these men’s religious and academic devotion to be effeminate. But Talmudic scholarship was, as Norman Podhoretz argued, “perhaps the most ferociously tyrannical tradition of scholarship the world has ever seen.” It was a traditional practice that expressed a distinct understanding of manhood.

The New York intellectuals were “the modern descendants of this masculine tradition,” Grinberg explains. As Jews, these thinkers were frustrated by the standard American belief in civil intellectual discourse. Irving Howe suggested that “polemical ferocity” and even rudeness were signs that Jews were becoming “sufficiently self-assured to stop playing by gentile rules.” His critique of gentility highlighted the word’s twinned references: ethnicity and style. Just as important as Jewishness, though, was gender.

Write like a Man doesn’t say what precisely the intellectuals meant by the phrase “write like a man.” Did it merely refer to the pugilistic attitude they prized, or did they believe there were specifically masculine writing traits? Did their overt machismo discourage women—even those who passed this test—from joining the group? Perhaps the opposite was true: they might have created a space for women by “forget[ing] everything” about the gender of the thinker whenever they found someone brilliant enough, or bellicose enough. Did their interpretations of gender change over time as the country embraced new social and political ideologies? None of these questions are explicitly addressed by Grinberg, but her discussion of the group’s ideas about gender and sexuality might suggest some answers.

Most of the first New York intellectuals embraced fairly temperate liberal perspectives. During the early years of the Cold War, many explicitly rejected Marxism and instead sought to “demonstrate the Americanness and anti-communist credentials of American Jewry,” as Grinberg explains. Starting in the late 1950s and 1960s, some began to condemn the “excessive radicalism” they saw emerging in various American social movements. Instead of protesting in the streets with the activists, they kept writing cerebral and argumentative essays. Eventually, many of them moved ideologically further to the right.

Write like a Man suggests that this political transformation highlighted the uneasiness many of intellectuals felt as a result of challenges to traditional gender ideology. They feared the nation faced a crisis of masculinity when, as Grinberg explains, economic changes in midcentury America meant that “American men could no longer assert a rugged individualism and independence.” They also feared the spread of second-wave feminism would threaten their conception of masculinity. Men identified with the intellectual circle—as well as most of the women—dismissed women’s liberation. As late as the 1980s, Mary McCarthy still thought it was, as she said, just “self-pity, shrillness, and greed.”

Grinberg points out that their concern about feminism was accompanied by another danger they saw: the increasing visibility of homosexuality. Midge Decter and Nathan Podhoretz argued that by aping both masculine and feminine styles, gay men disrupted the supposedly natural gender hierarchy. Lesbians were unwilling to accept the responsibilities of mature adult women who, as Decter said, “submitted to the penis.” Without the stability of heterosexual marriage, Decter and Podhoretz feared the domestic social order might collapse entirely. Although these two intellectuals and others embraced so-called family values as Freudians rather than as Evangelical Christians, they soon became comfortable bedfellows with these other conservatives.

Podhoretz and Decter also believed gay liberation was “sapping American [military] resolve” and encouraging the growth of pacifism after Vietnam. That is, homosexuals were not only responsible for “the emasculation of the domestic society,” as Grinberg summarizes, but the emasculation of “America’s position on the world stage.” They began to turn to neoconservatism, arguing that the nation must reembrace a “muscular militarism” when it came to foreign affairs.

Gender ideology contributed to all of these neoconservative positions, but Grinberg points out that it also directly affected female members of the New York intellectuals. Many of these critics eviscerated feminist writers. Even non-feminist women expressly identified with the New York intellectuals were attacked. Hannah Arendt’s intellect was widely respected by the group, but Podhoretz argued that her writing was unnecessarily convoluted and opaque—thereby suggesting she was either uncontrolled or pretentious.

Arendt managed to avoid the disparagement Mary McCarthy experienced. Both Norman Mailer and Podhoretz said The Group (McCarthy’s novel about a set of brilliant women) was merely “a trivial lady’s novel.” What these critics seemed to resent was not a non-masculine prose style but McCarthy’s use of a topic and viewpoint the men believed excluded them. Perhaps what it meant to “write like a man” depended not on the embrace of rigor and vigor but instead on the avoidance of any acknowledgment of women’s thoughts and experiences.

Podhoretz claimed that although McCarthy seemed like “an intellectual on the surface,” her book proved she was just a “furniture-describer at heart.” Mailer argued that her prose had never been truly intellectual or challenging but instead just “mean and silly.” In effect, Mailer was saying that instead of writing like a man, McCarthy wrote like a bitch. Although Grinberg does not suggest it, what the New York intellectuals intended as a compliment could also be twisted to function as a weapon of misogyny.

Although Grinberg could have gone even further in her analysis, 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 lives in Washington, D.C. Her books include Unspeakable and From Pity to Pride. You can find her on Booktube at https://www.youtube.com/c/HannahsBooks.