When Irving Kristol joined the new magazine Commentary, he distinguished himself from the other editors--Clement Greenberg, part-time then, Robert Warshow, and me. First, he had an interest in politics, real politics, electoral politics, and not just the politics of left-wing anti-Stalinists, mulling over what was living and what was dead in Marxism, the fate of socialism, the future of capitalism, communist influence in the intellectual world--no mean issues, but hardly ones to affect who won and who lost an election. So Irving discovered the wonderful political reporter and analyst Sam Lubell in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post, persuaded him to write for Commentary, and made me an enthusiast for his books, now hardly noted (although Sam Tanenhaus’s recently published The Death of Conservatism uses one of Lubell’s central theses as a guiding theme). None of the rest of us had ever read or noticed The Saturday Evening Post.

When Irving Kristol joined the new magazine Commentary, he distinguished himself from the other editors--Clement Greenberg, part-time then, Robert Warshow, and me. First, he had an interest in politics, real politics, electoral politics, and not just the politics of left-wing anti-Stalinists, mulling over what was living and what was dead in Marxism, the fate of socialism, the future of capitalism, communist influence in the intellectual world--no mean issues, but hardly ones to affect who won and who lost an election. So Irving discovered the wonderful political reporter and analyst Sam Lubell in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post, persuaded him to write for Commentary, and made me an enthusiast for his books, now hardly noted (although Sam Tanenhaus’s recently published The Death of Conservatism uses one of Lubell’s central theses as a guiding theme). None of the rest of us had ever read or noticed The Saturday Evening Post.

“For two thousand years,” wrote Harold Rosenberg, “the main energies of Jewish communities have gone into the mass production of intellectuals.” For Rosenberg, the art critic who belonged to the receding constellation of writers known as the New York Intellectuals, such a claim was something between a boast and a self-justification. The New York Intellectuals were mainly second-generation Americans, whose self-sacrificing immigrant parents won them the opportunities America offered to newcomers, including Jews. But their inheritances did not include, in most cases, a traditional Jewish education. Instead of learning the Mishnah and Talmud, like their cousins back in Eastern Europe, they drilled themselves in Marx and Henry James.

“For two thousand years,” wrote Harold Rosenberg, “the main energies of Jewish communities have gone into the mass production of intellectuals.” For Rosenberg, the art critic who belonged to the receding constellation of writers known as the New York Intellectuals, such a claim was something between a boast and a self-justification. The New York Intellectuals were mainly second-generation Americans, whose self-sacrificing immigrant parents won them the opportunities America offered to newcomers, including Jews. But their inheritances did not include, in most cases, a traditional Jewish education. Instead of learning the Mishnah and Talmud, like their cousins back in Eastern Europe, they drilled themselves in Marx and Henry James.