Irving Howe (1920–1993)

It took me an awfully long time to read this, not because I didn't like it or that it wasn't interesting, but because it was so dense. So I had to read it little by little, and not in bed at night. Dense as it was, it was well worth the time it took to read. My parents were immigrants to the US, but they came after WWII, were not Yiddish-speakers, and we never lived in the lower East Side, only in Brooklyn, and then only for a short while before we moved to California. So Howe wasn't describing my family history, and yet somehow he was describing my history. And he described it in every detail, everything related to religion, culture, language, work, politics, art, you name it, he deals with it. This is an excellent history of American Jewish culture.… (more)

Now that Bernie Sanders, a self-declared democratic socialist (the kiss of death, alas, in American politics) has declared his candidacy for president, perhaps Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers will reenter the zeitgeist and receive the attention it so richly deserves, Senator Sanders, in many respects, is the latter-day representative of the social, political and cultural milieu Mr. Howe so thoroughly and affectionately documents in this fine book.

When Eastern European Jews began departing their homelands in the late-nineteenth century, they carried with them the communitarian traditions of the shtetl. Unsurprisingly, these traditions were expressed in and as socialist politics. Much of the political--as well as social and cultural--ferment Eastern European Jews aroused occurred on the Lower East Side of Manhattan (which, after reading this book, I'll look at differently and appreciate even more). When the Williamsburg Bridge went up in 1903, connecting Delancey Street on the Lower East Side with Havemeyer Street in Brooklyn, many of these recently arrived immigrants moved across the East River to Williamsburg, where many of their descendants remain. Bernie Sanders, whose father's family perished in the Holocaust, was born in Brooklyn in 1941. He attended James Madison High School on Bedford Avenue, and there he led the track team.

Irving Howe was a lifelong socialist; the documentary film "Arguing the World" is a very nice biography of Mr. Howe and his erstwhile classmates at the City College of New York (known at one time as "the Harvard of the proletariat"), Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer and Irving Kristol. The film nicely documents the various intellectual trajectories these four sons of the Lower East Side traveled along. One of the primary themes of World of Our Fathers concerns the doctrinal squabbles among the Jewish socialists on the Lower East Side.

Along the way, Mr. Howe presents detailed and fascinating analyses of Yiddish culture and its effect on broader American culture. He does a particularly nice job of explicating Yiddish humor, and its exponents like Henny Youngman, Don Rickles and Rodney Dangerfield, and the extent to which it influenced comedians of all stripes. I found myself wondering what Irving Howe would make of latter-day borscht belt comedians like Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld.

This is an exceptional work of scholarship that it is imbued with Mr. Howe's (born, incidentally, as Irving Hohenstein) obvious affinity with and a fondness for the subject. For some reason, it took me 25 years too get around to reading this book. If the subject of the immigration of Eastern European Jews to the United States, and the influence of those new citizens on American culture and society interests you in any way, I very highly recommend this book--as well as what is arguably its companion, Our Crowd by Stephen Birmingham.
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