22 - The Role of the Public Intellectual in American Culture

Summary

Jewish American intellectuals, however, were drawn to the Arnoldian tradition as much for the critical personae it made available as for the ideas it advanced. Abraham Cahan is perhaps the first major Jewish American public intellectual, and he played the role in many different ways. If America's distinctiveness, for Lionel Trilling, is its tendency to deny the reality of conflict, the distinction of Judaism is to deny its significance. In her essays of the 1970s Susan Sontag shifts her attention from the heroic individual spiritual athlete to the wider cultural landscape, which begins to strike her as something in need of curation. Like American culture, Jewish culture is significant mainly for the spiritual challenges it poses to its members. Trilling distinguished his frictive opposing self from the monolithic orthodoxies of Matthew Arnold, and of his contemporaries the New Critics, by way of psychological principles derived from William James, John Dewey, and Sigmund Freud.