Download or read book Irving Howe Socialist Critic Jew written by Edward Alexander and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1998-04-22 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "... 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 it its particular shape -- American radicalism, the Cold War and anticommunism, the New Left, literary modernism, Jewish life -- will profit handsomely from reading Alexander's respectful book." -- Wilson Quarterly "Edward Alexander's captivating study of Irving Howe is illuminating andscrupulous; it is also temperate, generous, and deeply fair-minded. IfHowe were alive, he would thank the author -- and even now, in Paradise, heis surely doing so (while hotly continuing the discussion)."Â -- Cynthia Ozick "... a singular achievement." -- Jerusalem Post "... a masterpiece" -- National Jewish Post and Opinion "... meticulous scholarship, felicitous writing style and a literate feistiness." -- Chicago Jewish Star "An excellent work of insight and criticism, recommended for academic libraries." -- Library Journal "An insightful, balanced contribution..." -- Booklist "Edward Alexander's estimable intellectual biography... studiously avoids both undue sentimentality and overly harsh censure." -- Sanford Pinsker, Philadelphia Inquirer "Edward Alexander's well-informed and engaging portrait of Irving Howe does full justice to the complexities of mind and the political passions of one of this country's leading intellectuals. This bracing, perceptive study honors Howe's admirable career by treating it with the same high degree of moral seriousness that characterized Howe's own work at its best." -- Alvin H. Rosenfeld Irving Howe, author of World of Our Fathers, the prize-winning history of American Jewish immigrant culture, and founding editor of the influential magazine Dissent, was for over 50 years a dominant -- and controversial -- figure in American intellectual life. Through a clear and eloquent study of Howe's politics, writings, and thought, Edward Alexander constructs a sympathetic yet critical intellectual biography of this complex individual.
Download or read book World of Our Fathers written by Irving Howe and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 714 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new 30th Anniversary paperback edition of an award-winning classic. Winner of the National Book Award, 1976 World of Our Fathers traces the story of Eastern Europe's Jews to America over four decades. Beginning in the 1880s, it offers a rich portrayal of the East European Jewish experience in New York, and shows how the immigrant generation tried to maintain their Yiddish culture while becoming American. It is essential reading for those interested in understanding why these forebears to many of today's American Jews made the decision to leave their homelands, the challenges these new Jewish Americans faced, and how they experienced every aspect of immigrant life in the early part of the twentieth century. This invaluable contribution to Jewish literature and culture is now back in print in a new paperback edition, which includes a new foreword by noted author and literary critic Morris Dickstein.
Download or read book A Voice Still Heard written by Irving Howe and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-01 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An indispensable collection of one of America's most outspoken and original critics of the second half of the twentieth century Man of letters, political critic, public intellectual, Irving Howe was one of America's most exemplary and embattled writers. Since his death in 1993 at age 72, Howe's work and his personal example of commitment to high principle, both literary and political, have had a vigorous afterlife. This posthumous and capacious collection includes twenty-six essays that originally appeared in such publications as the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and the Nation. Taken together, they reveal the depth and breadth of Howe's enthusiasms and range over politics, literature, Judaism, and the tumults of American society. A Voice Still Heard is essential to the understanding of the passionate and skeptical spirit of this lucid writer. The book forms a bridge between the two parallel enterprises of culture and politics. It shows how politics justifies itself by culture, and how the latter prompts the former. Howe's voice is ever sharp, relentless, often scathingly funny, revealing Howe as that rarest of critics--a real reader and writer, one whose clarity of style is a result of his disciplined and candid mind.
Download or read book Jews and Power written by Ruth R. Wisse and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2008-12-24 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part of the Jewish Encounter series Taking in everything from the Kingdom of David to the Oslo Accords, Ruth Wisse offers a radical new way to think about the Jewish relationship to power. Traditional Jews believed that upholding the covenant with God constituted a treaty with the most powerful force in the universe; this later transformed itself into a belief that, unburdened by a military, Jews could pursue their religious mission on a purely moral plain. Wisse, an eminent professor of comparative literature at Harvard, demonstrates how Jewish political weakness both increased Jewish vulnerability to scapegoating and violence, and unwittingly goaded power-seeking nations to cast Jews as perpetual targets. Although she sees hope in the State of Israel, Wisse questions the way the strategies of the Diaspora continue to drive the Jewish state, echoing Abba Eban's observation that Israel was the only nation to win a war and then sue for peace. And then she draws a persuasive parallel to the United States today, as it struggles to figure out how a liberal democracy can face off against enemies who view Western morality as weakness. This deeply provocative book is sure to stir debate both inside and outside the Jewish world. Wisse's narrative offers a compelling argument that is rich with history and bristling with contemporary urgency.
Download or read book The Romance of American Communism written by Vivian Gornick and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class.” So begins Vivian Gornick’s exploration of how the world of socialists, communists, and progressives in the 1940s and 1950s created a rich, diverse world where ordinary men and women felt their lives connected to a larger human project. Now back in print after its initial publication in 1977 and with a new introduction by the author, The Romance of American Communism is a landmark work of new journalism, profiling American Communist Party members and fellow travelers as they joined the Party, lived within its orbit, and left in disillusionment and disappointment as Stalin’s crimes became public. From the immigrant Jewish enclaves of the Bronx and Brooklyn and the docks of Puget Sound to the mining towns of Kentucky and the suburbs of Cleveland, over a million Americans found a sense of belonging and an expanded sense of self through collective struggle. They also found social isolation, blacklisting, imprisonment, and shattered hopes. This is their story--an indisputably American story.
Download or read book Irving Howe and the Critics written by John Rodden and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Irving Howe and the Critics is a selection of essays and reviews about the work of Irving Howe (1920?93), a vocal radical humanist and the most influential American socialist intellectual of his generation. Howe authored eighteen books, edited twenty-five more, wrote dozens of articles and reviews, and edited the magazine Dissent for forty years after founding it. His writings cover subjects ranging from U.S. labor to the vicissitudes of American communism and socialism to Yiddishkeit and contemporary politics. His book World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made received the National Book Award for Nonfiction. ø John Rodden has chosen essays and reviews that focus on Howe?s major works and on the disputes they generated. He features both Dissent contributors and those who have dissented from the Dissenters?on the Right as well as the Left. Rodden includes a few stern assessments of Howe from his less sympathetic critics, testifying not only to the range of response?from admiration to hostility?that his work received but also to his stature on the Left as a prime intellectual target of neoconservative fire.
Download or read book When the Nazis Came to Skokie written by Philippa Strum and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Strum (political science, City U. of New York-Brooklyn) describes the events when a neo-Nazi group announced it would parade in the Chicago suburb in 1977, and the ensuing court case that tested the devotion of many to the principles of free speech. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Free as a Jew written by Ruth R. Wisse and published by Wicked Son. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First came parents with the good sense to flee Europe in 1940 and the good fortune to reach the land of freedom. Their daughter, Ruth, grew up in the shadow of genocide—but in tandem with the birth of Israel, which remained her lodestar. She learned that although Jewishness is biologically transmitted, democracy is not, and both require intensive, intelligent transmission through education in each and every generation. They need adults with the confidence to teach their importance. Ruth tried to take on that challenge as dangers to freedom mounted and shifted sides on the political spectrum. At the high point of her teaching at Harvard University, she witnessed the unraveling of standards of honesty and truth until the academy she left was no longer the one she had entered.
Download or read book The Critical Point on Literature and Culture written by Irving Howe and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Call It Sleep written by Henry Roth and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2013-10-22 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Henry Roth published his debut novel Call It Sleep in 1934, it was greeted with considerable critical acclaim though, in those troubled times, lackluster sales. Only with its paperback publication thirty years later did this novel receive the recognition it deserves—--and still enjoys. Having sold-to-date millions of copies worldwide, Call It Sleep is the magnificent story of David Schearl, the "dangerously imaginative" child coming of age in the slums of New York.
Download or read book Antisemitism and the American Far Left written by Stephen H. Norwood and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-19 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stephen H. Norwood has written the first systematic study of the American far left's role in both propagating and combating antisemitism. This book covers Communists from 1920 onward, Trotskyists, the New Left and its black nationalist allies, and the contemporary remnants of the New Left. Professor Norwood analyzes the deficiencies of the American far left's explanations of Nazism and the Holocaust. He explores far left approaches to militant Islam, from condemnation of its fierce antisemitism in the 1930s to recent apologies for jihad. Norwood discusses the far left's use of long-standing theological and economic antisemitic stereotypes that the far right also embraced. The study analyzes the far left's antipathy to Jewish culture, as well as its occasional efforts to promote it. He considers how early Marxist and Bolshevik paradigms continued to shape American far left views of Jewish identity, Zionism, Israel, and antisemitism.
Download or read book Selected Writings 1950 1990 written by Irving Howe and published by Mariner Books. This book was released on 1992 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Combative, compassionate, objective, ironic, restless, Howe reflects on people, ideas, and events..." A selection from Irving Howe's work covering 40 years of writing.
Download or read book Steady Work written by Irving Howe and published by . This book was released on 1966 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Margin of Hope written by Irving Howe and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P. This book was released on 1984 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading literary critic-and the author of World of Our Fathers-looks back on his life from the early 1930s through the 1970s. A perceptive account of Howe's intellectual growth. Index.
Download or read book Socialism and America written by Irving Howe and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P. This book was released on 1985 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In six thoughtful, engagingly written essays, Howe surveys a movement he has known firsthand since the 1930s and reflects on its future. "Howe is a marvelously thorough and suggestive critic" (San Francisco Chronicle). Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
Download or read book Worlds of Irving Howe written by John Rodden and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-03 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Worlds of Irving Howe: The Critical Legacy is a wide-ranging anthology of criticism devoted to the literary, cultural, and political work of the writer Irving Howe. The book offers a broad cross-section of critical and biographical writings about Howe. Collected here are assessments of Howe's work written by some of the most prominent intellectuals of the twentieth century, among them Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, C. Vann Woodward, Robert Coles, Daniel Bell, Malcolm Cowley, and Arthur Schlesinger. The critical estimates of Howe's major books, collected here and framed by a major biographical introduction by John Rodden, constitute a sharply focused lens through which readers can re-evaluate the legacy of one of American's leading intellectuals and thereby understand the main issues of twentieth-century Anglo-American cultural history. Contributors: Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, C. Vann Woodward, Newton Arvin, Charles Angoff, Edward Dahlberg, Isaac Rosenfeld, Richard Chase, H.D. Lasswell, Dennis Wrong, Michael Harrington, Christopher Lasch, Robert Coles, Daniel Bell, Malcolm Cowley, Arthur Schlesinger, Theodore Solotaroff, Clive James, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and William Phillips, among others.
Download or read book The Unexamined Orwell written by John Rodden and published by Univ of TX + ORM. This book was released on 2012-08-17 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reflection on Orwell-as-idea that “outlines some of the misconceptions and misuses of the Orwell name” (Modern Fiction Studies). The year 1984 is just a memory, but the catchwords of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four still routinely pepper public discussions of topics ranging from government surveillance and privacy invasion to language corruption and bureaucratese. Orwell’s work pervades the cultural imagination, while others of his literary generation are long forgotten. Exploring this astonishing afterlife has become the scholarly vocation of John Rodden, who is now the leading authority on the reception, impact, and reinvention of George Orwell—the man and writer—as well as of “Orwell” the cultural icon and historical talisman. In The Unexamined Orwell, Rodden delves into dimensions of Orwell’s life and legacy that have escaped the critical glare. He discusses how several leading American intellectuals have earned the title of Orwell’s “successor,” including Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, Irving Howe, Christopher Hitchens, and John Lukacs. He then turns to Germany and focuses on the role and relevance of Nineteen Eighty-Four in the now-defunct communist nation of East Germany. Rodden also addresses myths that have grown up around Orwell’s life, including his “more than half-legendary” encounter with Ernest Hemingway in liberated Paris in March 1945, and analyzes literary issues such as his utopian sensibility and his prose style. Finally, Rodden poses the endlessly debated question, “What would George Orwell do?” and speculates about how the prophet of Nineteen Eighty-Four would have reacted to world events. In so doing, Rodden shows how our responses to this question reveal much about our culture’s ongoing need to reappropriate “Orwell.”
