Lionel Trilling’s Jewish Problem

Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) was the grand master of America’s “Age of Criticism.” A renowned literary authority who taught for many years at Columbia University, Trilling was an influential member of the grouping that came to be known as the New York Intellectuals, a highly respected voice in public arguments concerning matters social, cultural, and political—and a Jew with (to put it mildly) conflicted views on Jews and Judaism.

While a full biography of Trilling remains to be written, he makes a central appearance in numerous studies of intellectual and political culture in mid-20th-century America as well as in memoirs by his wife Diana Trilling and by many friends, colleagues, students, and sparring partners. There is also a collection of his major essays, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent (edited by Leon Wieseltier, 2000). And now, most recently, both the man and his work speak for themselves in Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling. The volume is edited by Adam Kirsch, an accomplished critic and poet and himself the author of an earlier brief study, Why Trilling Matters (2011).

Life in Culture, a kind of epistolary biography, consists of 270 letters culled from the thousands available. All of them but one were written by Trilling himself; there is none by his interlocutors, though Trilling does frequently quote passages from their letters in the course of grappling with their thoughts. Kirsch helpfully identifies these interlocutors, but the book lacks a glossary, and Kirsch’s own annotations are minimal—a possible obstacle for readers unacquainted with the persons, the issues, or the circumstances being addressed.