Ethan Goffman – författare

New York Public Intellectuals and Beyond gathers a variety of distinguished scholars, from Eugene Goodheart to Peter Novick to Nathan Glazer, from Morris Dickstein to Suzanne Klingenstein to Ilan Stavans, to revisit and rethink the legacy of the New York intellectuals. The authors show how a small New York group, predominantly Jewish, moved from communist and socialist roots to become a primary voice of liberal humanism and, in the case of a few, to launch a new conservative movement. Concentrating on Lionel Trilling as the paradigmatic liberal intellectual, the book also includes thoughtful reconsiderations of Irving Howe and Dwight MacDonald, and explores the roots of the neoconservative movement and its changing role today.

Presented here is a compilation of Irving Howe's interviews during the last fifteen years of his life that could be viewed as the sequel to his intellectual autobiography, A Margin of Hope. Many of these interviews were never published. Others were originally published in such venues as The New York Times, The Jerusalem Post, and the PBS documentary Arguing the World. Howe never organized his thoughts about the great renown of the last fifteen years of his life, during which he had resounding success with World of Our Fathers, received a MacArthur Fellowship, and became widely regarded as the leading left-liberal intellectual in the United States and, arguably, the leading literary critic in America. During this time, Howe also struggled to redefine the American Left in an environment that discounted and marginalized it. These interviews may have particular significance today, a period of new opportunities for the liberal Left, yet one in which it struggles to construct some coherent identity and program.

Explores the complex ways in which Blacks and Jews have portrayed each other in recent American literature.Imagining Each Other explores Black-Jewish relations by examining the complex ways they have portrayed each other in recent American literature. It illuminates their dramatic alliances and conflicts and their dilemmas of identity and assimilation, and addresses the persistent questions of ethnic division and economic inequality that have so encompassed the Black-Jewish narrative in America. Focusing primarily on the 1960s and its aftermath, the book reveals how Jewish and African Americans view each other through a complex dialectic of identification and difference, channeled by ever-shifting positions within American society. Through the works of Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Amiri Baraka, Paule Marshall, Grace Paley, and others, Goffman unfolds a story of two peoples with powerful biblical and mythic connections that replay themselves in contemporary circumstances. In doing so, he uncovers layers of meaning in works that dramatize this turbulent, paradoxical relationship, and reveals how this relationship is paradigmatic of multicultural American self-invention.