..". 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...

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...

Before 1967, Israel had the overwhelming support of world opinion. So long as Israel's existence was in harmony with politically correct assumptions, it was supported, or at least accepted, by the majority of -progressive- Jews, especially in the wake of the Holocaust. This is no longer the case. The Jewish Divide Over Israel explains the role played by prominent Jews in turning Israel into an isolated pariah nation.

After their catastrophic defeat in 1967, Arabs overcame inferiority on the battlefield with superiority in the war of ideas. Their propaganda stopped...

The Subjection of Women, which Mill wrote in 1861 but did not publish until 1869, is one of the seminal texts of feminism and aroused more antagonism than anything Mill ever wrote. Conservatives predicted it would do to the English family what socialism would do to England's economy. Liberals believed that women would vote conservative. Many prominent Englishwomen, such as Charlotte BrontE, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and George Eliot, opposed women's suffrage. Even such advanced thinkers as Sigmund Freud were hostile to the book.

In The Subjection...

Before 1967, Israel had the overwhelming support of world opinion. So long as Israel's existence was in harmony with politically correct assumptions, it was supported, or at least accepted, by the majority of -progressive- Jews, especially in the wake of the Holocaust. This is no longer the case. The Jewish Divide Over Israel explains the role played by prominent Jews in turning Israel into an isolated pariah nation.

After their catastrophic defeat in 1967, Arabs overcame inferiority on the battlefield with superiority in the war of ideas. Their propaganda stopped...

Robert Bechtold Heilman was a great literary figure of the twentieth century. This collection of his correspondence includes over 600 exchanges with more than 100 correspondents, among them Saul Bellow, Kenneth Burke, Malcolm Cowley, Richard Eberhart, Charles Johnson, Bernard Malamud, and William Carlos Williams. The letters follow Heilman's career from the time he was a thirty-six-year-old member of Louisiana State University's English Department, through his tenure at the University of Washington from 1948 to 1975, until a few years before his death in 2004. Two of his appointees who...

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,...