The New York Public Intellectuals and Beyond is a generous compendium of essays pertaining to a cluster of writers tagged in the 1950s the “New York Intellectuals,” an interdisciplinary congeries linked to East Coast journals and institutions. The selection by Ethan Hoffman and Daniel Morris is from the recent past, chiefly 2003 when seven of the crucial pieces appeared in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, with which the editors of this volume are associated. Other items are from a symposium with questions circulated for written response, books and journals published in the last three or four years, and essays possibly solicited for this volume or emerging from academic conferences or panels. Despite sections of the book expressly given over to “Acknowledgments” and “A Note on Organization,” as well as a twelve-page “Introduction,” an “Afterword,” and an opening essay in Part II that justifies the inclusion of several of the concluding pieces in relation to Part I, the genealogy of the collection is somewhat mysterious and has a slapdash aura about it. (The poor quality of the printing on dozens of pages, with many words unreadable, only aggravates this impression.)

Nevertheless, there is much brilliant writing – Nathan Abraham and Michael Kimmage are especially notable as new voices addressing the New York set, along with veterans such as Mark Shechner, John Rodden, Morris Dickstein and the late Mark Krupnick. The aim of the volume, too, is commendable. First, to do away with the fashionable notion that the political and cultural trend associated with the legacy of journals such as Partisan Review is of principal significance as the seedbed of latter-day neoconservatism, as if the left-wing anti-Stalinism arising in the 1930s – including Trotskyism, its most crystallized form – was the causal factor of the Bush administration's 2003 invasion of Iraq. The far more sophisticated contributions found in this compilation understand that, for the most part, the deradicalizing New York group expressed during the Cold War a complicated moment in liberal humanist thought; their anxious debates about politics and culture remain required reading for anyone wishing to understand the hard choices for intellectuals of the mid- to late twentieth-century United States. At the same time, the editors make a bold effort to draw links, including antipathetic ones, between the New York experience and public intellectuals of other varieties – abolitionists, pre-World War II women writers, black intellectuals, and even the Palestinian exile Edward Said.

Not all of this works flawlessly. A particular problem in Part II is that the essays treating ostensibly prefigurative, parallel or adversarial figures such as Anzia Yezierska, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edward Said, and Alice Walker seem to be added onto the fundamental argument of the book. But even in respect to the volume's focus in Part I on Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, and Dwight Macdonald, the effort to treat the refractory New York intellectuals as a relatively consistent Jewish “public intellectual” phenomenon results in some sleight of hand about the actual scope of discussion; subtitles shift among “The New York Public Intellectuals,” “The New York Intellectuals,” and “The Cold War New York Jewish Intellectuals”; and “The American Protest Tradition” is practically forgotten. In a telling moment, University of Chicago historian Paul Novick objects that the intellectuals collectively under discussion are not properly a Jewish group or noteworthy as public intellectuals in the familiar sense of addressing a broad audience without specialized jargon. Novick even questions the degree of their unique influence in politics and culture, since both the Stalinist politics and Popular Front middlebrow culture that they excoriated were already on the run in the post-World War II era when Partisan Review and Commentary commanded their greatest authority.

Novick perhaps protests too much, but he surely has a point. What made this group distinctive cannot be attributed to an ethnic factor or to a literary taste for high modernism or anticommunism in the conventional meaning. There was a peculiar inflection to all three strands, decisively rooted in the revolutionary sensibility that marked the founding elders in the crucible of the Great Depression. The element of Jewish identity (obviously of not much concern to F. W. Dupee and Mary McCarthy) was exalted by internationalist solidarity, and modernism (the horizon of neither James T. Farrell nor Alfred Kazin) was embraced from a Marxist perspective. Most problematically, anti-Stalinism was grounded in a communist (and often Leninist) position. Seventy years later, this convolution is difficult to explain, but one can get a glimpse of the direction in which the Great Depression revolutionaries were headed before World War II by looking at figures such as Isaac Deutscher or the editors of New Left Review in the 1960s; and, with qualifications, the Western Marxists, such as the Frankfurt school, might provide another helpful foil.

It is obligatory to disclose with more nuance than that available in this volume the stages by which such an avant-garde trend evolved over decades, and was diversely reinvented during and after the Cold War to meet various needs. Moreover, as we are reminded by Richard Cook's 2008 biography of Alfred Kazin, the New York Intellectuals led complicated personal lives significant to their careers yet hidden from the public, and it is disappointing that so little fresh primary research appears in these studies.