A truncated version of the following interview, conducted in 1986, first appeared in the Jerusalem Post on September 5 of that year.

—The Editors

America in the 20th century was a strange place. It could let a man spend 30 years writing essays, translating Yiddish stories, and editing a socialist magazine, which had few readers and barely paid the rent, and then, overnight, make him comfortable if not rich with a best seller about the vanished world of his immigrant parents.

Irving Howe (1920–1993), thanks to the commercial success of World of Our Fathers—his elegiac, not-so-sentimental account of the sweatshop Jews of Lower East Side—was able to move to the snazzier, safer side of Central Park. The book also made him, as he wrote in his autobiography, “famous for fifteen minutes.” Perhaps because his modest measure of money and fame came late in life, perhaps thanks to some strength of character acquired through early poverty, Howe’s popular success didn’t seem to have gone to his head.

As he answered my questions in his apartment in 1986, he was straightforward and serious, and as he stroked a fringe of white beard he seemed simultaneously bemused and grieved by what America had given him and what it had taken away from a generation of Jews like him.

He’d published more than 30 books on literature, politics, culture, and history. He taught English for many years at Brandeis, Stanford, and Hunter College. His wife, Ilana, was an Israeli, and he had two children from two previous marriages.

His autobiographical A Margin of Hope was a fairly honest and occasionally moving report on, among other things, Howe’s attempt to “reconquer” his Jewishness as “American socialism reached an impasse.”

The son of Yiddish-speaking garment workers, Howe was a Trotskyite in his youth, and even after World War II—during which he was in the army in Alaska—he clung to a vision of socialism in the New World.

He made his first mark among New York Jewish intellectuals by writing for Partisan Review, and Commentary. Soon, however, when he judged that they were celebrating America too uncritically, he launched his own magazine, Dissent, which for three decades had been trying to keep the ideals of socialism, or at least social democracy, fresh and bright. But, Howe admitted in his memoirs, Dissent was often boring.

Politically and culturally, Howe’s search for a Third Way had left him lonely—even stranded him. He broke with the New Left when it degenerated into tantrums, and was estranged from former friends and colleagues in the New York Jewish intellectual “family” who became neoconservatives and who flayed him for not learning all he should from his disillusion.

As for Jewishness, Howe had written that he, and others like him, long “avoided thinking about it.” He’d been, he said, rather indifferent if not actually cool to Israel—yet he’d relished the victory of the IDF in 1967. Howe, the ex-Trotskyite, had edited an anthology defending Israel and Zionism against the left. And he was known as an American supporter of Peace Now.

Edward Grossman:

In A Margin of Hope, you hardly mention any Zionists in your early years in the Bronx and at City College.

Irving Howe:

When I was a young socialist, we used to encounter the kids from Hashomer Hatsa’ir, [the Young Guard, a Zionist-socialist group], who were politically very close to us. We had difficulties with them stylistically because we felt that they were, especially the girls, very puritanical. They wouldn’t wear lipstick. They didn’t want to read James Joyce. There was a certain narrowness about them. But many of them were also very smart kids, so we had ambivalent feelings about them. I don’t recall ever encountering any of the ordinary Labor Zionist kids.

Edward Grossman:

Did any of these people actually go to Israel?

Irving Howe:

I don’t know.

Edward Grossman:

I’ll ask a crude question—were the Zionists right?

Irving Howe:

In the sense that they insisted that the Jews needed a homeland, and this was a legitimate and important thing—in that basic sense the Zionists were right. There’s no question about it. And I’m ready to say it ten times a day. Most of them, not all, sadly underestimated the severity of the Arab problem, and in that sense there were serious deficiencies. But as against those Jews who denied the need for a homeland, the Zionists were absolutely right. I say that as someone who doesn’t consider himself a Zionist because I don’t think it makes any sense to call yourself a Zionist and live in America.

Edward Grossman:

How much is Israel a topic nowadays among Jewish intellectuals in the U.S.?

Irving Howe:

Less so than several years ago, because there is a feeling that things are stagnant, for better or for worse. When the Begin government was in office, there was a sense of urgency, and those of us friendly to Peace Now felt that we had to raise money and support for the movement. Since the national-unity government came in, the whole Israeli question has subsided, at least temporarily. There isn’t much debate now among American Jews about the West Bank, about the problem of the Arabs, about those two camps—what were they, where the Palestinians were slaughtered?

Edward Grossman:

Sabra and Shatila, [where, in 1982, a Lebanese Chrisian militia aligned with Israel massacred hundreds of Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites. Israel’s then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon was accused of facilitating the atrocities and forced to resign].

Irving Howe:

Yes, that question has subsided, as has the problem of Arik Sharon. It’s not over with, but for the time being it’s relatively quiet—it’s a temporary phenomenon. Meanwhile, something more fundamental is happening.

Israel has begun to lose its glamour for the larger American Jewish community. There was always something unreal about the feeling of American Jews for Israel. It had something of the character of Disneyland for them. There had been so much bad news in Jewish life over the last several decades that they wanted to see Israel through rose-colored glasses as a place of happiness, fulfilment, and success. When they were told that Israel was a country like all others, that there were land disputes and corruption and political battles, they found it very distressing. They were especially distressed to hear it from American Jews, like the Friends of Peace Now. I have the impression that this unrealistic view of Israel is on the way out. The long-range trend among American Jews is to regard Israel with less intensity. Of course, heaven forbid, if Israel were in great danger this would change immediately. But as long as Israel continues to slog along with the usual problems, there is an increasing tendency to take it for granted.

Edward Grossman:

Soon [Labor’s] Shimon Peres will rotate the premiership with [the Likud’s] Yitzhak Shamir. Will this make it more difficult for some people to—

Irving Howe:

That depends on what Shamir does. For example, if he announces a new policy of large-scale expansion of settlements in the West Bank, then I think there would again be a certain amount of activity on the part of the more liberal elements of the American Jewish community. But the tendency of the official community is to go along with the status quo—by and large, whatever the government of Israel does, it will support.

Edward Grossman:

Does this make you unhappy?

Irving Howe:

Yes, it does.

Edward Grossman:

Why?

Irving Howe:

Because all too often the policy of the Israeli government is not a very good one. And because it puts American Jews in the undignified and in some ways humiliating position of being knee-jerk support. The Israelis often have a not-so-secret contempt, a condescension, toward American Jews who allow themselves to be used, to be crudely manipulated this way as errand boys.

Edward Grossman:

So one of the reasons for publicly criticizing Israeli policy is to assert self-respect?

Irving Howe:

Yes. It is also to make clear that the American Jewish community, whatever its failings—and it has many—must exist independently and will continue to survive for a long time.

Edward Grossman:

Politically, though, what good does such criticism do American Jews and those of us in Israel? When you sit here in New York and voice such criticism, do you ask yourself: “Is it good for the Jews?”

Irving Howe:

I do. And I believe that such criticism can be to the good, if it is put in a responsible and moderate way.

Edward Grossman:

After a visit to Israel in 1983, you wrote a piece for the New Republic in which you said the occupation of the West Bank was “a moral shame” and that “something terrible is happening a bus ride away”—that is, a bus ride away from Jerusalem. How does it affect the atmosphere of discourse about Israel here when you write this? Doesn’t it make it easier for [the leftwing anti-Israel writer] Gore Vidal to call us Israelis, and by implication all Jews a “predatory people”?

Irving Howe:

No, I would think it makes it harder. The enemies of Israel are going to say what they have to say in any case. Whereas we can make the case that the community of friends of Israel, the community of Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals, too, is open, that it engages in serious discourse, that it allows for debate. Furthermore, if we kept quiet, then the issue of what is happening on the West Bank would be raised in a hostile and damaging, rather than constructive and friendly, way.

Edward Grossman:

When you write as you did in the New Republic, the reader infers that there is an alternative path for Israel to follow, if only—

Irving Howe:

Not necessarily. You could argue that there’s no realistic alternative to the occupation, that you have to do certain bad things on behalf of overriding considerations of security. I don’t think that’s true. But it is possible to make that argument.

Edward Grossman:

You couldn’t think it’s true, could you?  You couldn’t think there was no alternative to the occupation and still pass those judgments in a constructive way, could you?

Irving Howe:

No, I could. I could say something deplorable is happening on the West Bank, but that on behalf of ends which are more consequential, these things have to be done.  I just don’t want people to say it’s a good thing that’s being done.

Edward Grossman:

Do you think the occupation for the time being is unavoidable?

Irving Howe:

I think there were occasions soon after 1967 when the occupation might have been put to an end. Obviously, the longer it exists, the harder it is to end it and the more intractable the problem becomes. I’d favor roughly some version of the Shemtov formula—a readiness on Israel’s part to negotiate with anyone willing to recognize the legitimacy of Israel. The Palestinian question is going to have to be raised.

Edward Grossman:

Is it up to Israel to take this first big step?

Irving Howe:

I’m not in the Israeli foreign office, so I can’t answer such a question of tactics. But I think it’s necessary to indicate, publicly or secretly, a readiness to accept that there are two peoples in greater Palestine, that both have national aspirations and that is desirable to find some way of satisfying both so long as the security of neither is violated. I know that’s a simple formula which doesn’t necessarily lead to successful results. But until that issue is faced, I don’t think there’s going to be peace.

Edward Grossman:

You and Vidal were both in Alaska during World War II. He wrote his first novel there. Did you ever run across him?

Irving Howe:

I’ve never met him. I don’t like his work, and I’ve never met him.

Edward Grossman:

Is this dispute between him and Norman Podhoretz [over U.S. support for Israel] a personal thing, or does it stand for something larger?

Irving Howe:

There may be a personal element in it, but Vidal represents a kind of American nativism which goes back to Henry Adams and no doubt before. This is a feeling of resentment at the intrusion of immigrant communities or ethnic groups that violate the purity of American being. In expressing this nativism, Vidal picked on the Jewish issue, the Israeli issue, the so-called dual-loyalty issue.

Edward Grossman:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen the sort of language Vidal used in a respectable American magazine. Is this a new turning?

Irving Howe:

If something like this happened in the 1930s, one would not have been surprised, because then anti-Semitism could still be expressed openly, without scandal or shame.

After the war anti-Semitism became unfashionable in this country. It was shoved into the corner, so to speak. Yet, there was still plenty of it, and sometimes it did peek out. For example, Truman Capote some years ago indulged himself in remarks about Jews controlling the media in New York. The thing about Vidal that was shocking and aroused a very strong and violent response was the explicitness, the venom, the vulgarity of his piece, which I can’t remember having encountered—certainly not in intellectual life—in the last couple of decades.

Edward Grossman:

What about behind the scenes? Did Vidal say out loud what was being whispered? This charge of dual loyalty, for instance.

Irving Howe:

Every couple of months I get a postcard from some crank in Brooklyn with this kind of stuff.

Edward Grossman:

Can we make a distinction between that and pseudo-respectable literary talk?

Irving Howe:

Yes. That’s why I mentioned Capote. It’s very hard to put one’s finger on it, but there probably has been a little more gossip here, a whisper there, about the New York Jews taking things over, doing this, being noisy, etc.

Edward Grossman:

And specifically in connection with Israel?

Irving Howe:

Not that I recall.

Edward Grossman:

Do you think Israel has a certain responsibility in this respect toward American Jews, a responsibility to think twice?

Irving Howe:

No.

Edward Grossman:

For example, before hiring an American Jew to spy on the U.S. for Israel?

Irving Howe:

I don’t think Jonathan Pollard is what bothered Vidal. He might have used that as an argument if he had remembered, but it isn’t the cause of his feeling. What bothers him is that Podhoretz isn’t interested in the American Civil War. For Vidal, that’s a sign that we American Jewish intellectuals have not assimilated ourselves into the national mythology. We have to be as absorbed in the Battle of Chancellorsville as he is. He’s asking for a monolithic outlook, a monolithic style. It’s an anti-pluralist kind of thing.

Behind this is an idea with a long history, going back, as I said, to Henry Adams. The idea is that the Jews somehow contaminate the language, the sensibility, the purity of national life. Besides, there has always been a sort of “respectable” anti-Semitism of people who just don’t want you to come around to their club.

Vidal now links all this up with the Israeli thing, and identifies Podhoretz’s conservative politics with Israel.

But the real problem, as far as I’m concerned, is not so much Vidal as Victor Navasky, the editor of the Nation, in which Vidal’s piece was published. Navasky is a Jew who I know is a decent fellow. It’s mystifying to me how he could have published such a piece. He afterwards claimed that Vidal was being ironic, but that’s preposterous.

Edward Grossman:

Vidal put out a lot of smoke. But is there any fire there? Is there any truth to his assertion that Jewish organizations in this country are allying themselves with the far right?

Irving Howe:

The bulk of the American Jewish institutional community has moved to the right.  But it has not become ideologically conservative. It does not support William Buckley’s National Review or Podhoretz’s Commentary, which I’m told has lost circulation. What has happened is that Jewish liberalism has been conservatized. Liberalism covers a wide spectrum. You can go all the way from the sort of left-liberalism of Michael Harrington or Ralph Nader or George McGovern to the liberalism of Scoop Jackson or even further right. What has happened is that within the framework of a loose liberalism, the temper, the tone of Jewish liberalism has become conservatized.

There are reports—I have no idea how accurate—that some ultra-religious groups in Israel have made alliances with [Christian] fundamentalists here. The fundamentalists have funneled money to people who want to set up a third Temple and other meshugas. But this is marginal to the American Jewish community.

Before the last presidential election, I did a bit of traveling and lecturing. I was struck that whereas some of the American Jewish spokesmen were very worried about Jesse Jackson, when you went into the sticks, the smaller towns, what worried people more was the Moral Majority. It touched them immediately when their kids heard a schoolteacher say who was responsible for Jesus’s death. This frightens Jewish people.

Edward Grossman:

When Jews with whom you are at odds are attacked in anti-Semitic fashion, as Podhoretz was by Vidal, does this make you feel that in spite of everything you share something with them which you don’t with non-Jews who are ideologically closer to you?

Irving Howe:

We share the fact that we are Jews and obviously if Podhoretz and I had been unfortunate enough to be living in Germany at a certain point, we both would have been deported to concentration camps. Our ideological differences would not have been of any great importance. I came to the support of Podhoretz’s right, as an American citizen, to say what he wants and to identify Israeli interests with the neoconservative point of view. I attacked Vidal in Dissent for claiming that this makes Podhoretz less an American.

Edward Grossman:

And you did this basically because of your secondhand knowledge of the Holocaust?

Irving Howe:

Yes. That’s the most extreme instance of the common vulnerability of Jews.

Edward Grossman:

You call yourself a “partial Jew” in your autobiography.

Irving Howe:

So is Podhoretz.

Edward Grossman:

Your connection with him, therefore, is no longer a religious or cultural connection, but only one of a certain shared history, particularly the terrible part of that history?

Irving Howe:

When it comes to self-defense, obviously the terrible part comes into play. If you ask me in terms of certain values, practices, traditions, and sensibilities, then no. For example, when I work on the translation of Yiddish literature, the main factor isn’t the Holocaust by any means. Rather it is a positive feeling about one aspect of Jewish tradition.

Edward Grossman:

Is there still a family of New York Jewish intellectuals?

Irving Howe:

No. We have a few survivors who are getting older, like myself, Alfred Kazin, and some others. We have smallish, politically oriented groups, social democratic on my side, neoconservative on the other. But there is no longer any shared community. Right now there must be dozens of dissertations being written about the New York Jewish intellectuals.

Edward Grossman:

I saw one in a bookstore yesterday.

Irving Howe:

Yes, by a fellow named Alexander Bloom.  You know, I once coined the phrase, “The passions of one generation become the dissertations of the next.” Once the dissertations are being written you know the phenomenon is dead. I think it died some years ago—it’s hard to say precisely when. But there are some of us who have survived as individuals.

Edward Grossman:

Isn’t there a younger generation who would fit into this tradition?

Irving Howe:

There are a few individuals. Say a young writer like Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of the New Republic, or David Bromwich, who writes for Dissent and other journals. They are people who aspire to be and in fact are distinguished all-around intellectuals. By intellectual, I mean someone who tries to take a comprehensive view of the world, who knows something, who is not a narrow specialist.

Edward Grossman:

Does this collapse of the “family,” this end of the tradition, have anything to do with a devaluation of the written word?

Irving Howe:

Yes. But it has to do above all with the rise of academicism and the fact that more and more bright young people today turn to the academy. It also has to do with the economy. In the late 30s and early 40s, a freelance writer could scrape by. Today, in a high-priced economy, it’s impossible.

Edward Grossman:

Even if you’re ready to live in a respectable poverty, like Paul Goodman did for years?

Irving Howe:

That’s exactly the example I was about to give. Paul lived in respectable poverty, then he hit it rich a little bit in the 60s when he became popular. Today with an inflationary economy, the rewards for writing have not kept pace.

Edward Grossman:

Nor the prestige?

Irving Howe:

That’s right.

Edward Grossman:

You wrote a piece for Commentary in 1968 about New York intellectuals. There you called Norman Mailer “our genius.” You didn’t say that without some irony, but you were also serious about it. I suppose that by now you wouldn’t call him “our genius” anymore.

Irving Howe:

Well, he had genius. But he didn’t use it fully or properly.

Edward Grossman:

By “our” you meant the New York Jewish intellectuals?

Irving Howe:

Right.

Edward Grossman:

Do these intellectuals, or what is left of them, have a genius now? Is Woody Allen the nearest thing to it?

Irving Howe:

No. You see, when I said our genius, I did so after making a distinction between critical and creative accomplishment. The essential gift of the New York intellectuals was critical, intellectual, not creative. We had a few gifted prose writers like Saul Bellow, Mailer, and Bernard Malamud. And a couple of poets like Delmore Schwartz. But basically the contribution of that community was critical. The history of American fiction and poetry could quite easily be written without mentioning that group. And in general, its importance has recently been overestimated. So what I meant was that insofar as we had a creative genius, Mailer was it. We were happy that this very talented person was associated with us.

Edward Grossman:

When I asked whether Woody Allen might be our genius now, was that actually symptomatic of anything?

Irving Howe:

He’s an amusing, gifted fellow, but he’s totally different.

Edward Grossman:

Until last year you taught. Did you find that your students took Woody Allen more seriously than you do?

Irving Howe:

They take movies more seriously than I do. They tend to know about the history of the movies, the influence of this movie and that movie in connection with this one and that one, the way I once would have known about literature. That’s one of the major signs of what you mentioned earlier, the devaluation of the word.

Edward Grossman:

This includes people studying English literature?

Irving Howe:

Exactly.

Edward Grossman:

They get their PhDs and go off to the academy?

Irving Howe:

Where they often teach film. Film has become a popular subject in the universities.

Edward Grossman:

Now, if you call yourself a partial Jew, what are these Jewish young people who—

Irving Howe:

They’re even more partial. By partial Jew, I mean someone who does not live his entire life within the boundaries of the Jewish community. A member of a hasidic group in Brooklyn is a complete Jew. Maybe in my view not a very attractive kind, but his total life, everything about his life from his sex to his culture to his daily prayers to his morals is determined by the fact that he is Jewish.

But someone like myself, or even many of the people who go to synagogue in America today, or I would even say most of the rabbis in America and for that matter many of the people I know in Israel—the totality of my life and their life is not shaped and colored merely by the fact of being Jewish. Other elements enter in.

Edward Grossman:

So some Israelis are also partial Jews?

Irving Howe:

Yes, I think so.

Edward Grossman:

But more whole than you?

Irving Howe:

There are obvious degrees of partiality. Take someone who would be roughly an equivalent of myself in Israel. Someone who is a friend of Peace Now, teaches at the Hebrew University, a literary fellow. From a Jewish point of view he has a certain advantage over me in that he lives in a country where Jewishness is the very element of life. He doesn’t have to decide certain kinds of things which I have to decide here. You see, everything about Jewishness in America has become a matter of decision. Once it’s a matter of decision, you’re a partial Jew.

Edward Grossman:

Are you saying that to be a complete Jew, in the Diaspora or the U.S., you have to be a hasidic Jew?

Irving Howe:

Not necessarily hasidic, but one has to be seriously religious, or you have to be someone who lived in the immigrant community and is totally immersed in it. For example, my father, who went to shul maybe once a year, was a complete Jew, because everything about his life was determined by his being Jewish. There was no element of choice in it, even though he was not strongly religious. The idea of being anything but a complete Jew was not within the reaches of his imagination.

As long as you had an organic Yiddish culture in this country, it was possible to live a completely Jewish, yet secular life. People on the Lower East Side did it. The tragedy of Jewish life from my point of view—the tragedy of Jewish life in America from the secularist point of view—is that we no longer have that organic community. Consequently, people like myself are really up against it. We’re in great trouble insofar as Jewishness is something we take seriously.

Edward Grossman:

Are you using the word tragedy loosely or precisely?

Irving Howe:

I use it in the sense that many people like myself feel that there has been a terrible loss in our lives. It’s not the Aristotelian sense of tragedy, but it’s a serious loss of something which came to us in perhaps attenuated form but which we cannot really pass on to others.

Edward Grossman:

To your children?

Irving Howe:

To our children, to the next generation. I have the sense of coming at the end of a major phase of Jewish life. And one of the signs that strike me of the spiritual sterility of Jewish life in America is that there is so little awareness of sharing this experience—that we are living at the end of a phase of 150 to 200 years, the phase of secular Jewishness.

No doubt it was parasitical in some ways on religious Jewishness, but it also developed an autonomous life and culture. Now it is coming to an end and those of us who were raised on its values, and who in good faith find religion beyond their reach, are really in a very great deal of trouble.

So I agree with Hillel Halkin’s analysis. In the long run—I want to emphasize this, the long run—the only two viable options for the continuation of Jewish life are religion and Israel. American Jewish institutional life will continue indefinitely, but in terms of the vital, significant life, it can be only religion or Israel.

Edward Grossman:

But has the Jewish state really taken root?

Irving Howe:

There’s no question in my mind that it has.  I have a greater belief in its durability than a great may Israelis whom I know. It’s an important factor for me. But I still consider myself, whether I like it or not, an American. Any time I leave America, I am convinced again that I’m an American. I have friends in Israel like A.B. Yehoshua who try to persuade me to make aliyah. It doesn’t seem a realistic prospect for me, especially as I’m a writer who’s struggled for 45 years to learn to write a decent English sentence and is by no means sure that he’s yet succeeded.

Edward Grossman:

Some people I know in Israel throw around apocalyptic scenarios. They say that if this happens or that doesn’t happen, then—

Irving Howe:

My sense of it is that there are troubles and there will be troubles, but that Israel is there to stay, absolutely there to stay. That’s what I think. That’s what I hope.