Irving Howe was the towering public intellectual of his generation. He was a grand long-distance runner whose commitment to the life of the mind and social justice was absolute. He reveled in an intellectual playfulness characteristic of a true lover …
Conventional obituaries of Irving Howe list the New Left as one of the misguided groups he attacked, and from which he differentiated his brand of socialism. Communism and the other failed visions on the list are of only historical interest, …
If you become a teacher you will yearn for a teacher of your own. Long before death stole Irving from us this irony of academia hit me when, through his open classroom door, I caught snatches of Professor Howe’s brilliant …
Most white Americans know about the scorn many ghetto youths feel for “acting white” —for studying, for doing well in school, for playing by white rules and meeting the white man’s standards. Most assume it is a passing phase, curable, …
For the past two decades conservative legal theorists have propagated two right-wing approaches to law. Most public attention has focused on the theory of “original intent” as a guide to interpreting the Constitution. In the law schools, though, the theory …
If I were to meet with Irving Howe today, in a New York coffee shop, or at Drenka Willen’s* lovely dinner table, or in our kitchen here in Budapest, where my wife and I would invite a few friends to …
Books about the breakup of Yugoslavia and the genocidal war against the Moslem Slays of Bosnia have become a minor industry. As expected, journalists are at the forefront and social scientists and historians lag far behind. More often than not, …
From 1987 to 1991 the largest construction project in the Soviet Union was neither a new hydroelectric station nor an oil pipeline. It was the world’s largest proton synchrotron accelerator in Protvino, a small science town about a hundred kilometers …
I had a lecture to give one night at Brandeis when Irving was teaching there. The lecture must have been long and the questions and the reception after the questions even longer. By the time all this was over and …
In the 1960s, while exiled in Algeria from the intensifying ruthlessness of the apartheid state, the leaders of the “black consciousness” Pan African Congress sent a letter to Evelyn Waugh. They had, they told him solemnly, read his novel Black …
It is very difficult to write about someone much celebrated, much admired, much mourned. I will content myself with this small anecdote. A good friend was visiting one day when the mail came, bringing a letter from Irving in which …
I want to talk about the world of my father—the world that I knew best, that is Irving Howe as father and grandfather. I knew my father in many ways, but I will leave it to others to talk about …
I first met Irving in Princeton in 1949 when we were both still in our twenties. We met through the group or network that nearly twenty years later he christened the “New York Intellectuals.” He was already moving to the …
In the midst of last year’s New York primary, Bill Clinton brought his stump speech to Wall Street. The Street was not impressed. “The problem with the past twelve years,” Clinton told a noontime rally in the financial district, “is …
When I got the telephone call with the news of Irving’s death I was writing an article for Dissent, an article he commissioned but never saw. And the first contact I ever had with him was a reply to another …
