Alfred Kazin's 'New York Jew'; for Cringe and Country; a Democratic Tea Party?
Reading, Watching 10.19.2025
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You can buy “When the Clock Broke,“ now available in paperback wherever books are sold. If you live in the UK, it’s also available there.
I’m pleased to report that When the Clock Broke received a very insightful and lively review from Mark Lilla in The New York Review of Books, alongside Laura K. Field’s forthcoming Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, which I also highly recommend.
In case you missed it, the audio of my talk at the University of Chicago is up now.—
The podcast page linked to above includes a button to generate a transcript in case you want to read it instead.
I recently returned to an old favorite, Alfred Kazin’s memoir New York Jew, which I think was one of the books that made me want to pursue critical writing. I was struck by this passage, which resonates with the fashionable moods of despair floating around today:
On every side the chorus now went up that the old liberal civilization was at an end because man was vile. “There is a Hitler in each of us.” This unpolitical excuse for the Nazis seemed to gratify ex-radicals by confirming their disappointment with human nature. There was a positive acceptance of some “universal” guilt whose real purpose was to make the Holocaust ordinary, even to sweep it under the rug. In the Village, Franz Kafka was being turned into the only accurate theologian of our time. In Rockefeller Center it was announced that “the Enlightenment has come to an end.”’ How helpful to some careers it became to say so.
Indeed.
But I must confess that the book makes me a little sad now. America, even during the war years, seemed like a nation with a bright future; kept safe by vast oceans from the horrors taking place in the Old World, it was throwing all its energy, physical and intellectual, into solving the problems of the world. New York was a vibrant, exciting place, attracting the most creative and interesting lights from across the country, not to mention all the brilliant exiles from Europe. I think the most stark thing for me was the description of his trip to the newly constructed Pentagon. It was full of interesting and even eccentric characters. They all made their little contribution to winning the war. It sounds like the hustle-bustle of a Golden Age of Hollywood studio lot or a “theatrical agency,” as Kazin puts it. How different they sound from the “warriors” that that crass idiot Hegseth wants to cultivate:
The next morning I went to the Pentagon for interviews with the brass, and found myself caught up on wheels that never stopped whirling. Each time I arrived at the Pentagon to interview still another former college dean, foundation executive, advertising man, psychiatrist, or Broadway producer—all in uniform with the Morale Services Division—I could feel the importance of being at the Pentagon itself. I was rolled round and round endless corridors, was led from one ostentatiously courteous escort officer to another, past a dreamlike succession in of doors with important-looking nameplates. I came to rest in front of the spectacularly tall general in charge of Morale Services. The general was another civilian expert in population problems. He was also a great gentleman, aristocratic, shy, who reddened easily and gave out the official line with some hesitation. Though his office was surprisingly small and his manner one of charming mildness, I knew his importance in the scheme of things and my privilege in getting to him. This was the Pentagon in the middle of the war; this was where all the Washington wheels started turning. The importance of a writer’s being here, watching with hungry envious eyes every human motion radiating out to the war, soon came home to me. Sitting at the general’s side was a subtle-looking major; he seemed to be studying the interview and all parties to it with peculiar attentiveness, and his smiling but tense alertness puzzled me until he turned out to be [Pulitzer prize winning author] James Gould Cozzens. He was practicing on us, and I was to remember his watchfulness on every page of Guard of Honor.
That particular sector of the Pentagon was as crowded with specialty acts as a theatrical agency. One captain, a nephew of the Shuberts, booked camp shows and was as proud of himself as if the only currency anyone needed in this world was free theater tickets. Another, sum- moning people over like a barker, was a speech expert who bet visitors that after listening to them pronounce ten key words he could guess their place of origin. Another was a brigadier, wearing the jeweled badge of the General Staff, who introduced me to the long-playing record. With a look of manic self-satisfaction he let a record fall slowly to the ground, picked it up, let it fall, picked it up, let it fall. “Can’t break!” he said before switching back to his gruff military voice. “Not like your old-fashioned shellac records! Can’t break, you know!” He smiled at me with more enthusiasm than I had yet seen in the Pentagon. “Nothing more important to us here than you writers! We need you to get some amazing developments over to the people!” I did not understand why a brigadier general should be pushing phonograph records. The escort officer told me that the general was famous for his stupidity and that Marshall had given strict orders that he was never to be allowed overseas.
A fat, round, constantly smiling Jewish psychiatrist, now a lieutenant colonel, introduced himself as an expert on soldier breakdowns. He had established himself at the Pentagon by starting a political newspaper fortroops that dramatically lowered the neuropsychiatric rate. He had been taken out of the medical service to become a prime organizer of orientation courses. Dr. Rosencrantz beamed at everybody and he beamed all the time. In his first days at the Pentagon, he must have looked out of place among the many slim chic young West Pointers in the more important corridors. By the time I got to him, he looked as if he had successfully psychoanalyzed the government itself.
“This war,” [Dr. Rosencrantz] said emphatically, “is really a revolution!” And you can see why. The mobilization of millions of Americans in the armed forces was also an opportunity to feed, clothe, and educate. He recounts the story of a young white officer put in charge of black troops in the still-segregated Army. Many were from the South and illiterate:
In a state of patriotic indignation, he announced to his commanding officer that he would not teach them how to fight until he had taught them how to read. The commanding officer was descended from the man who had set up the Hampton Institute for Negroes—a piece of luck that alone explained the permission the young lieutenant received to set up a literacy school. With superb tact he never set foot inside the classroom, but had arranged for black college graduates, languishing in the Navy as kitchen helpers, to become instructors.
….
Thanks to the war, educators in uniform at the Armed Forces Institute were trying to school the millions in the Army and Navy who needed schooling. At the University of Wisconsin they had piled up a great mountain of primers and readers and textbooks going out to soldiers and sailors everywhere in the world. I looked at the books, I studied the correspondence courses men were taking overseas.
Fellow ’stacker
wrote an astute and helpful commentary on my discussion with Dylan Riley, with some very welcome skepticism towards all the clichés about atomization and loneliness that dominate conversations about American society:What has become a general moral panic in the American media about social media, phones, fragmentation, and the “loneliness epidemic” perhaps leads us to overlook the real associative power of those technologies, the way they have created public spheres that extend beyond the internet and produce their own forms of organization. Just because their outbursts seem ephemeral and haven’t given rise to new political parties doesn’t mean we can take their weakness for granted. Personally, and only semi-jokingly, I would call armies of citizens getting people fired for kissing at a Coldplay concert an overdevelopment of civil society.