"No More Nice Girls, No More 'Lady Critics': Feminism, Jewishness, and Upending the Gendered Truisms of the New York Intellectuals" with Ronnie Grinberg

This talk explores how masculinity and Jewishness intersected to shape the New York Intellectuals, a prominent group of mostly male and Jewish writers and critics at mid-century. This group (including its scant female members) defined the intellectual vocation as inherently masculine. They regularly dismissed women writers as mere “lady” critics or novelists, unable, in the words of Norman Mailer, “to get tough enough to go with the boys.” Beginning in the 1970s, feminist writers, many of them Jewish, challenged the axiom that the intellectual vocation was by definition masculine, and rejected its corollary: that a woman needed to write like a man to be taken seriously.

Ronnie Grinberg is Associate Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma and coeditor of the Journal of Women’s History. She is the author of Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals (Princeton University Press, 2024; paperback 2026), which was longlisted for a National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) award, was a finalist in two categories for the National Jewish Book Award, and received honorable mention for the Saul Viener Book Prize from the American Jewish Historical Society Academic Council. The book received wide critical acclaim in venues including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Times Literary Supplement. She is currently co-editing a volume on an American Jewish intellectual tradition, to be published by Rutgers University Press, and is working on a new project that examines the intersection of secular Jewishness and second wave feminism.