ABSTRACT

In Elias Bickerman’s The Historical Foundations of Postbiblical Judaism, we find: The most important result of the Greek impact on Palestinian Judaism was the formation of a Jewish intelligentsia different from the clergy and not dependent on the sanctuary. The chapter discusses “the” intellectual in American society and what might be called the “intelligentsia.” It examines one of the three different types of “intelligentsia” in part to illustrate a process about America. The chapter focuses, because of the intrinsic fascination of the group, on the New York Jewish intelligentsia, c. 1935-65. In 1912, a group in New York called itself as “The Young Intellectuals” which consisted of Walter Lippmann, Van Wyck Brooks, John Reed from Harvard; Waldo Frank, Sinclair Lewis, Paul Rosenfeld, Archibald MacLeish from Yale; and Edmund Wilson, F. Scott Fitzgerald from Princeton.