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Arguing the World: Howe, Kristol, Glazer, and Bell
🕑 Added 2024-04-09 17:06:49 +0000 UTCIt was inevitable that Know Your Enemy would eventually discuss Arguing the World, the 1998 documentary about four Jewish intellectuals who emerged from the alcoves and arguments of City College in the 1930s and influenced American politics and letters for much of the rest of the twentieth century, and beyond: Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, and Nathan Glazer.
Why now? Most of all, it's the kind of documentary we love—the personal rivalries, the gossip, the self-conscious intellectuality, and the, well, arguments. But we'll also be publishing an episode next week with historian Ronnie Grinberg about her new book, Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals, and while the overlap in subject matter is not perfect, this documentary would make for a great primer for listeners (since we know you're the kind of listeners who do not despise homework). It's also an excellent chance to revisit the history of the left, old and new, and their fraught relationship with each other; to consider the place of intellectuals and thinking in a time of urgent action; and, as ever, to talk about the ways the subjects of Arguing the World might fit into America's right turn and "how we got here."
Watch:
Arguing the World, dir. Joseph Dorman (1998); YouTube, PBS, IMDB
Read:
Irving Howe, "This Age of Conformity," Partisan Review, Jan-Feb 1954
Irving Howe, "Socialism and Liberalism: Articles of Conciliation?" Dissent, Winter 1977
Irving Kristol, “Memoirs of a Trotskyist,” NYTimes, Jan 23, 1977
Comments
Leonardo Restrepo
The timing of this release, just before the explosion of protests on college campuses, mirroring the 1968 college protests/new left... Just uncanny
Leonardo Restrepo
I taught in Brownsville, Brooklyn a few years back. Always shocks me to hear the role that community played in shaping American and international politics
JayRamone Was
Vimeo still has it
Stan Mir
Never mind, I forgot Sam said Vimeo has it. I only wanted there to be a conspiracy…
Stan Mir
Curious if anyone else can’t find a way to watch this film? YouTube no longer has it. KYE does an episode and suddenly Arguing the World vanishes from circulation!
Matthew Shor
Learning about the Partisan Review, and it's founding out of the John Reed club, I was surprised to find that John Reed is back in a very different form! https://us.johnreed.fitness/
David Glenn
The Peter Steinfels comment reminded me: In the late 80s/early 90s, Commonweal's office was down the hall from DSA's, in a gloriously decaying building on Dutch Street. (Apologies if KYE has already covered that lore somewhere.)
Jennifer Reft
Paraphrasing but this is really beautiful: “A voice in the wilderness. It was our wilderness, it’s our voice, that voice is in my bones.” ❤️
Chad Bailey
It’s amazing how the contemporary left has truly lost the materialist lens on history. Tom Hayden, for example, seemed to base his claims on ideas, even though his generation was being drafted to fight in Vietnam. Unsurprisingly, most anti war protest disappeared after the draft was rescinded.
Ryan Erickson
This was lovely. Also in brushing up on Howe after the episode I deeply appreciated this anecdote from his Wikipedia bio: He had a few famous run-ins with people. In the 1960s while at Stanford University, he was verbally attacked by a young radical socialist, who claimed Howe was no longer committed to the revolution and that he had become status quo. Howe turned to the student and said, "You know what you're going to be? You're going to be a dentist."
Chris Maisano
The discussion at the end of the episode about the tension between political passion and political discrimination/judgment really resonates with me these days (incipient middle age is tightening its grip on me). In his review of Howe’s memoir A Margin of Hope, Maurice Isserman argued that Howe and his associates committed themselves so thoroughly to political discrimination and sober judgment that they rendered themselves politically irrelevant. There’s something to that criticism, but I look at the history of the twentieth century and can really understand how they got themselves to that point. Can you imagine what it must have felt like to be among the first cohorts of socialists to be confronted with the realities of what “actually existing socialism” had become? I would have been wary of someone like Tom Hayden too!
Know Your Enemy
lolll
mjs
Sadly I flew back yesterday :(
Molly Gardner
Together, the eleventh-hour WFB Jr. jump-scare + surprise "The Bell Curve" appearance in the window of a political bookstore made this doc's last few minutes more frightening than 95% of what's streaming on Shudder
Adam Blistein
Howe might have known that Elmer Davis wasn't Jewish, but if he had merely guessed it based strictly on Davis' names, he could have been wrong. My dad, Jewish, lived all his life in Rhode Island except for WWII service (not in Alaska), birth and death dates almost identical to Howe's, student and later teacher at an ivy league college, was named Elmer. The family that founded THE Kosher deli in Providence in 1906 and ran it until a fire during COVID closed it was named Davis. Maybe we assimilated faster out there in the boonies.
Adam Lewis
We all liked the first season of "True Detective."
Zachary Roussie
Unrelated to the episode, but is Matt still in Rome? And related to the episode, Dashiell Hammett was in Alaska during the war and even wrote a book about it. There’s definitely something there.
Steven Ngo
As a true sicko I appreciate this episode because I read Alan Wald’s The New York Intellectuals last year. My conclusion: maybe because I’m a west coast mall rat but New York confuses me.
liam kirby
Found it! Thanks!
liam kirby
Found it! Thanks!
Know Your Enemy
Try vimeo! (-SAB)
Kate O'Hanlon
It's on Vimeo
Sam Seliger
Mary McCarthy is screaming from her grave about having a Jewish grandmother
liam kirby
Looks like the doc was taken down form youtube last night (when I was half way through it, lol). I don't have access to Kanopy. Is there any other option online?
Adam Lewis
The commemorative popcorn bucket must have been something special.
Adam Lewis
Wait a moment. There are Jewish people in New York City?
Fran Diamond
Was just coming in to mention this! Thank you!
colin delargy
"i wish him a long life with many political failures" may slip into my vocabulary
Mark Hartstein
A favorite moment in the documentary: Evil Irving describes being surrounded by Diana Trilling, Mary McCarthy, and Hannah Arendt having a discussion on Freud, with him being “quiet and terror-stricken”. Looking forward to the next pod!
Bugsy
Bit of crossover with my own life: my wife's grandfathers (both) were among five Jewish guys stationed together in Alaska during WWII. They kept up after the war, two of their kids hit it off and here we are. I don't know if the others were any of this week's Special Guest Stars, but I'm really curious to find out.
drizzly_november
So was Dashiell Hammett! He was in his late 40s at the time, and, as an well-known. Communist, was kept on base editing the troop newspaper. Matt’s really onto something with a left literary history of the Aleutian campaign.
drizzly_november
Was thinking the exact same thing. That experiment with social democracy and the opportunities it created are such an interesting throughline of the podcast. It’d be cool to hear previous guest Kim Phillips-Fein come back to talk about how that dream got dismantled in the 70s, her book Fear City is excellent.
Brian Swoveland
Listened to this ep with Danny Bessner's recent article on Larry David in the Nation in mind. For a few decades NYC had social democracy-lite and we're still reaping the rewards.
Alex
It wasn't during WWII, but Bob Ross was deployed to Alaska, which is where he learned to paint landscapes.
Jehovah’s Witness Protection Program
Julius earned his doctorate the honest way.
Christy Kilgore
I came here to say this needs to be a Know Your Enemy t-shirt.
Rick Perlstein
Heh smh
Know Your Enemy
I thought it was pretty clear what Howe meant about those names lol... (-SAB)
Rick Perlstein
Dig: there was SO MUCH MONEY floating around, whether their critical vocation was "oppositional" ala Howe or anti-oppositional ala Kristol, they're are pulling in enough aa teachers and scribblers that they can summer cottages. Another country, that past. Also note the point of that roll call of just the NAMES middle brow critics: not Jews. This, we should want to buy into? These middlebrows don't really want us... (Hilarious that these ultimately parochial debates about who gets the bylines masquerade as melodramas about the State of the Nation, but that's New York for you.)
Matthew Ralls
“I have such a hard-on right now, Sam” is the moment I said “dudes rock” aloud on the sidewalk. One fellow pedestrian just nodded, which I appreciated.
Geoff Swindells
Arguing the World is also available on Kanopy, an online app available through most public libraries.
Rick Perlstein
But srsly, one thing you underplay was that if these guys' parents had stayed in Europe a lot of their parents would have just as likely been Bundists and shul-prowlers. (Then, possibly, Labor Zionists, and just as passionately secular.)
Rick Perlstein
...back when we called voice memos "phone messages."
Rick Perlstein
Gather 'round the Victrola while he tells you about the panel discussion he attended starring Daniel Bell AND Susan Sontag. The Nation Christmas party where he stood but ten yards from Arthur Miller...
Rick Perlstein
Grandpa Perlstein watched this bitch when it dropped. In the THEATER.
Joel
Have the strangest memory of watching this doc ... maybe during early COVID lockdown in 2020 when tooling around looking for stuff online? I remember nothing about it, though lol. I was coming to it for the Daniel Bell content because I had recently been thinking a lot about "post-industrialism" and the "information society." Might do a rewatch for this ep! Thanks for this one ~for the heads~ haha
David S Duhalde
Julius Irving is the coolest Irving, but Howe is def #2
drizzly_november
KYE dudes-rock at its finest.
