Lionel Trilling’s Jewish “Reverberation” of February 1944

Abstract

In February 1944, the Contemporary Jewish Record published the responses of eleven young Jewish intellectuals under forty to questions about their identity as Jews. The most “visceral” and rancorous response, rationalizing his “ minimal” Jewish involvement, came from Lionel Trilling. The fact that Trilling, nearing age forty, responded at all and responded so viscerally seemed out of character. Trilling in his writing and persona was known as gracious, reserved, balanced. He had barely addressed Jewish concerns since 1931. As the author of acclaimed works on Matthew Arnold and E.M. Forster and close to becoming the first tenured Jew in Columbia’s English department, he seemed to have transcended anxieties as a Jew he had expressed earlier in his writing. This essay will try to explain the disparity between what Trilling seemed to be in 1944 and how he responded. To do so, it will analyze the long-fuse to Trilling’s 1944 outburst and then the outburst itself. It will judge Trilling and like-minded Jewish contemporaries within the three cultural-historical contexts of the mid to late 1920s, the 1930s, and the early to mid 1940s. In these contexts, Trilling and the Zionist writer Ludwig Lewisohn were adversaries. Their prolonged, ultimately nasty feud will be signified.