Was William Phillips Jewish?

Was William Phillips Jewish?

Was William Phillips, the just-deceased co-founder and long-time co-editor of the Partisan Review, Jewish? Since Phillips was a central figure of the New York Intellectuals and the non-Marxist Left, one would naturally assume he was, yet his very WASP-y name leaves one unsure. Strangely enough, the New York Times’ obituary, written by Joseph Berger, keeps placing Phillips in distinctly Jewish environments and attributing typically Jewish characteristics to him, without saying explicitly that he was Jewish.

Thus Berger writes:

“… Mr. Phillips, a bohemian son of Eastern European immigrants, was a Marxist when he and [Philip] Rahv founded the magazine in 1934 in a Greenwich Village loft.”
“Mr. Phillips was a kind-hearted man who revealed his resentments with a dry, sometimes Yiddish-flavored wit.”
“William Phillips was born Nov. 14, 1907 in East Harlem. His father, who changed the family name from Litvinsky, was a failed lawyer from Odessa whom his son once described as ‘a luftmensch,’ literally ‘a person of air.’”
“‘I learned early to cut out, to turn into myself, as though what was going on was a psychodrama in which I was a suffering spectator, a victim,’ Mr. Phillips wrote in his memoir, ‘A Partisan View’ (Stein & Day, 1983).”
“‘Growing up poor in the heavily Jewish East Bronx, he attended City College, where he studied with the legendary philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen and also encountered T. S. Eliot’s essay collection ‘The Sacred Wood,’ which, he said, sent him ‘swimming in the exotic waters of modernism.’”
“While taking graduate courses in literature at New York University, he met Edna Greenblatt, whom he married in 1933 and whose salary as a high school teacher helped support them in rougher years.”
“The atmosphere [of the Partisan Review circle] was so ‘pervasively Jewish,’ [philosopher William] Barrett wrote, that he tended to forget he was ‘not a Jew after all.’”

So, his parents were from the Ukraine and were named Litvinsky, he had a Yiddish-flavored wit, he described his father as a “luftmensch” (a common Jewish expression), he grew up in the heavily Jewish East Bronx, he attended City College (famous for its largely Jewish student body), he was a Marxist during the 1930s, he saw himself as a “suffering spectator, a victim,” his wife had a Jewish name, and the social environment of his magazine was pervasively Jewish. All the specifics of Phillips’s background and personality are Jewish, yet the Times, bizarrely, refrains from identifying him as actually being Jewish. Is this merely an oversight, or does it reflect some new perversity of taste at the endlessly perverse New York Times?
Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 14, 2002 02:49 PM | Send

Comments

Ah, but to the NYT the word “Jewish,” or the name of any culture or ethnicity, just represents a doorway into a public museum into or out of which any liberal can freely walk. When inside our free and equal new man can view and enjoy the dead stuffed corpses of cultures past, and of course anyone is free to do so (or not) equally. Liberal multiculturism is the practice of taxidermy on every actual culture, and of what import is the doorway when describing a museum?

Posted by: Matt on September 14, 2002 3:23 PM

This item from the Phillips obituary is not relevant to the current post, but it gives an interesting picture of the relationship between the Stalinist and anti-Stalinist left, so here it is:

“The McCarthy era presented a difficult test, which Lillian Hellman said Mr. Phillips failed by not defending her and other writers when they were attacked by the the House Un-American Activities Committee. Mr. Phillips countered that Partisan Review did oppose McCarthyism in several editorials, but argued that Hellman and others did not deserve a defense because they were silent when countless Soviet intellectuals were arrested and tortured by Stalin.”

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on September 14, 2002 8:41 PM

Since it is the NYT we are talking about, it could be distortion or mere sloppiness.

Still, the Timesmen, largely Jewish journalists on a largely Jewish paper, are well aware how disproportionately Jewish the American Left is. As most Americans are neither Leftists nor Jewish, they may prefer not to remind the rest of us of the connection, given the havoc Leftism in its assorted guises has wrought in America. Those who are sympathetic and in-the-know will get all the information they need from the references Mr. Auster cites. HRS

Posted by: Howard Sutherland on September 23, 2002 1:48 PM