ABSTRACT
Lionel Trilling’s formal association with the Jewish community lasted from 1925–31, during which time he contributed stories and reviews to the Menorah Journal. The most ambitious literary essay that Trilling composed for the Menorah Journal never appeared there, but is typical of his approach in the numerous short book reviews. Lionel Trilling was so fine a critic that one would not readily wish him to have been other than he was—the most accomplished modern continuator of the moral tradition of Samuel Johnson and Matthew Arnold. Trilling responds with warmth to the Jewish anti-Semite who is Daniel’s mother, but rejects the other Jewish figures as “unanimously noble” and therefore mythical. To recognize how much Trilling’s thought was influenced, if in a troubling way, by the specter of the Holocaust, we need to recall what his criticism shows he values most highly, what moves him to eloquence and passion.
