Jews and Americans, by Irving Malin. Southern Illinois, $4.50 The Jewish intellectual in America has never had it so good. His novels top the best-seller lists; on Broadway he is represented by almost all the musical plays and dramas of the season; the Jewish Museum in New York has become the clearing house for all that is ultra-modern in the field of art; and he has finally breached the last fortress of resistance —the Academy—by becoming its chief spokesman for the newer sociolatry. No wonder Leslie Fiedler could say a little while back: “. . . Jewish intellectuals have discovered their Jewishness to be an eminently marketable commodity, their much vaunted alienation . . . a passport into the heart of Gentile culture.”
Yet, for all his success, the Jewish intellectual still feels himself a failure. For all his breast – beating to gather attention to himself, which he has succeeded in doing to an extraordinary degree, he feels a dread unease that maybe he has not made it at all. The memory haunts him that for all the noise his counterparts made in the thirties with their proletarian visions and footling dreams not one is remembered today with any reverence or respect.
Comments