ABSTRACT
The New York intellectuals—the largely Jewish, anti-Stalinist writers and critics that surrounded Partisan Review—vigorously denied that anti-Semitism was at work in the Rosenberg case. The charge of Jewish persecution was poisoned for the anti-Stalinist left when the Communist Party trumpeted the Rosenbergs as victims of American anti-Semitism, while it remained silent as Stalin persecuted and executed Yiddish writers and other Jews in the Soviet Union. American Jewish organizations, on the other hand, noted the trial for its promotion of popular anti-Jewish sentiment. The high-cultural and mass-cultural responses of the American Jewish community thus conflicted with each other, yet both, seeking to defend Jews against the taint of Communism or treason, worked together to minimize the Jewish question as it worked itself out in the Rosenberg case. My essay will address this erasure of the Jewish question in the New York intellectuals' response to the Rosenberg case and consider that erasure as a crucial moment in the treatment of Jewish issues in contemporary cultural theory. For the case not only provides an origin of Stephen Greenblatt's “subversion/containment” model of mass culture that flourished in later American cultural criticism but also illustrates several ways in which the problem of postwar Jewish identity for the New York intellectuals provides a not so absent center of postmodern cultural debates.
