Congratulations to Ronnie Grinberg, whose book Write like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals has been included on the longlist for the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Award for Criticism.
An incisive snapshot of midcentury American culture, Write like a Man reveals how virility and Jewishness became hallmarks of postwar New York鈥檚 intellectuals. Largely but not exclusively male and Jewish, the writers and thinkers who comprised this prominent cohort nevertheless embraced a secular and uniquely American Jewish machismo that prized verbal confrontation, polemical aggression, and an unflinching style of argumentation. Through illuminating portraits of figures such as Norman Mailer, Hannah Arendt, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Mary McCarthy, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, and Irving Howe, Grinberg shows how their construction of Jewish masculinity helped to propel the American Jew from outsider to insider, even as they clashed over its meaning in a deeply anxious project of self-definition. Along the way, Grinberg sheds light on their fraught encounters with the most contentious issues and ideas of the day, from student radicalism and the civil rights movement to feminism, Freudianism, and neoconservatism.
Since its publication in early 2024, Write like a Man has received wide critical acclaim. The book has been hailed as 鈥渇ascinating鈥� (The New Republic), 鈥渋nsightful鈥� (Wall Street Journal), 鈥渆rudite鈥� (Jewish Books Council) and 鈥渁 breath of fresh literary air鈥� (Washington Post). Writing in Jewish Currents, reviewer David Klion raved, 鈥�Write like a Man is among the most enjoyable and impressively researched books on its subject, brimming with colorful anecdotes and unexpected insights on every page.鈥�
Author Ronnie Grinberg is an historian of American Jewish history and the New York Intellectuals. She is an associate professor of history at the University of Oklahoma and a core faculty member in the Schusterman Center for Judaic and Israel Studies.
This year marks the first time NBCC has shared a longlist for its annual award. Write like a Man is one of ten books acknowledged in the Criticism category, and one of two university press books featured, alongside Jesse McCarthy鈥檚 The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War (University of Chicago Press). This marks the second year in a row that av福利社 books have been honored by the NBCC. In 2023 The Chapter by Nicholas Dames and Pleasure and Efficacy, by Grace Lavery were finalists for the award in criticism. In 2022, Aaron Sachs鈥檚 Up From The Depths: Herman Melville, Louis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times was nominated for the biography category.