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This pioneering effort links history and personality by pairing intellectual friends, most notably Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe, but also Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, D. H. Lawrence and Bertrand Russell, George Eliot and Emanuel Deutsch, Theodore Roethke and Robert Heilman. Chronologically the essays range from the early 1830s, when Carlyle and Mill discovered each other, to 1975, when Lionel Trilling died.

The essay that gives this volume its title is also the most ambitious. Alexander examines Trilling and Howe in relation to one another and to Jewish quandaries,...

..". 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...

This volume features powerful essays by Edward Alexander on the phenomenon of anti-Zionism on the part of the Jewish intelligentsia. It also analyses the explosive growth of traditional anti-Semitism, especially in Europe, among intellectuals and Muslims. Alexander notes that anti-Zionism has established a presence even in Israel, where it frequently takes the form of intellectuals sympathizing with their country's enemies and perversely apologizing for their own existence.

Alexander begins with an examination of the origins of Jewish self-hatred in nineteenth-century Europe. He then...

The Holocaust and the War of Ideas begins with an analysis of ancient and modern anti-Semitism as the primary cause of the destruction of European Jewry. Alexander proceeds to interpret representative works from the three main bodies of Holocaust literature--Yiddish, American, Hebrew--in relation to the war of ideas that surrounds the historical catastrophe that is their subject.

The chapter on Yiddish writers explores religious ideas and the claim that Yiddish, having become the language of martyrdom, has replaced Hebrew as the Jews' sacred tongue. The discussion of American writers...

This study defines the relationship between humanism and liberalism by comparing the two Victorian figures who were most concerned with the preservation of humanistic values in a free and democratic society: Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill. The book sets apart Arnold and Mill from their contemporaries and points out their similarities to one another in discussions of their theories of history, poetry, their celebration of the contemplative life and their willingness to welcome democracy. At the same time it examines the differences between the two men, which he uses to create a...

This volume features powerful essays by Edward Alexander on the phenomenon of anti-Zionism on the part of the Jewish intelligentsia. It also analyzes the explosive growth of traditional anti-Semitism, especially in Europe, among intellectuals and Muslims. Alexander notes that anti-Zionism has established a presence even in Israel, where it frequently takes the form of intellectuals sympathizing with their country's enemies and perversely apologizing for their own existence.

Alexander begins with an examination of the origins of Jewish self-hatred in nineteenth-century Europe. He then...

The State of the Jews examines the current predicament of the Jewish people and the land of Israel, both of which still stand at the storm center of history, because Jews can never take the right to live as a natural right.

The volume comprises celebrations and attacks. Edward Alexander celebrates writers like Abba Kovner, Cynthia Ozick, Ruth Wisse, and Hillel Halkin, who recognized in the foundation of Israel shortly after the destruction of European Jewry one of the few redeeming events in a century of blood and shame. He attacks Israel's external enemies--busy planners of...

Edward Alexander launches a counterattack in the war of ideas over Zionism, very much a warrior using words and ideas as his weapons. This book begins with a dissection of the first (1987) Intifada and deals with people and events through 1994, when Israel, having embraced the PLO, began their withdrawal from the disputed territories. Alexander shows how the Intifada proved to be a potent propaganda tool for its organizers. The spectacle of young Palestinians facing Israeli soldiers won for Arabs precisely the victory they had sought: it moved liberal, especially Jewish liberal, sympathy...

The incongruence if not antagonism between modern liberalism and the Jewish sense of the world has been most notably articulated by Lionel Trilling. Certainly the imaginative limitations and intellectual smugness he discerned in his own ideological party found a parallel, in his view, in the embrace of liberalism by the American Jewish community. The consequences of that embrace entail both a superficial intellectual and religious culture and a misunderstanding of the social and political dimensions of Judaism. In Classical Liberalism and the Jewish Tradition, Edward Alexander...

This volume deals with the modern fate of the traditional conception of Jews as a covenanted people chosen to receive the Law, whose ultimate purpose is contributing to the universal salvation of mankind. The author shows how, under the influence of liberalism, rationalism, relativism, and other Enlightenment ideologies, this idea was distorted, denied, inverted, yet never entirely obliterated. In his discussions of modern Jewish thinkers and writers and the ideological and political struggles of Zionism and the state of Israel against enemies from without and from within, Alexander shows...