Alan M. Wald, "Bohemian Bolsheviks: Dispatches from the Culture and History of the Left" (Brill, 2025)

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Welcome to the new books network. Welcome back to the new books network. I'm your host, Stephen Doseman. For several decades now, Alan Wald has been thoroughly documenting the history of the literature and cultural output of the American left.

While his numerous books and essays cover a lot of territory, much of his work is united by an interest in commitment, particularly when it comes to radical politics. What does it mean to commit one's life to a radical political cause, one which may not see anything beyond minor and marginal fractions of success in your lifetime? This question has animated his voluminous writing. On this episode, he joined us to discuss his newest book, Bohemian Bolsheviks, Dispatches from the Culture and History of the Left from the Historical Materialism book series, clocking it at over 600 pages.

This volume collects essays, reviews, and reflections published over almost two decades, and offers readers a glimpse into Wald's attempts to map the left's literary intelligentsia, all while raising questions about the tensions and annuities of its many members and fellow travelers. Alan Wald is the H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus at University of Michigan. His numerous books include The New York Intellectuals, The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s, Trinity of Passion, the literary left in the anti-fascist crusade, and American Knight, the literary left in the era of the Cold War.

Alan Wald, welcome to The New Books Network. Thanks, I'm glad to be here. Yeah, I always like to begin episodes by asking guests to introduce themselves real briefly, so for listeners who maybe aren't familiar with you or haven't heard of you, could you maybe just give us a quick introduction to who you are and what your research tends to focus on, what your main areas of interest have been over the last few decades. Okay, I'm a 79-year-old Emeritus Professor.

I was a collegiate professor at the University of Michigan with a chair name for H. Chandler Davis, who some of you might recognize as a blacklisted political prisoner who, a mathematician who wouldn't name names in the 1950s and was far from his job here. My field is essentially a United States literature focusing on the 1930s through the 1950s and its relationship to the old left, that is communist, Trotskyist, socialist and so on. And I primarily do first-hand research that is archives, interviews, manuscripts, things like that and put together narratives of the lives of these people and their works and I hope they reach especially younger people who are looking for a life of political commitment and activism.

Yeah, jumping right off of that, one of the themes running throughout this collection of essays, Big E!M. and Bullshivix, as well as much of your other work, is that question of commitment. I'm curious if we could start off. You talk a bit in one of the more biographical essays, kind of how you came to this topic.

Could you maybe tell us how did you come to see this as maybe a unique concept worthy of this kind of elucidation or sustained study? Right, in my case, it's a lifelong concern. Many people have written about writers on the left, has written one or two books and moved onto other areas. But you can see this is my ninth book I've just published on the topic, so I'm obviously obsessed.

And it seems to go back to childhood where from the earliest I can remember I was concerned about bullying and authoritarianism. Maybe this had to do with incidents in school, particularly during time I lived in New Jersey. Maybe it came from reading or movies. I'm not quite sure.

And I remember that when I was very young, something happened in my rabbi gave me a book called The Fire Eater, which was about a Jewish kid who grew up in a tough neighborhood. It must have been New York or something, and had to fight against anti-Semites, but also protected other people who were being attacked by bullies and anti-Semites. And in this sort of a young person's novel, he ends up joining the military and fighting heroically in World War I. It's an older book, nobody knows it anymore.

Apparently, I read that several times, and it was a strong identification. And I also had an early identification with African Americans that is somewhat mysterious. There were not many African Americans in my neighborhood. There was one African American kid in my elementary school class, also named Alan, so Ivy gave him friends with him.

I have just vague memories of that, but I was immediately interested in things like the Civil Rights Movement and so on. So that was kind of the origin. And then I think that led to reading, which was important to me from a very young age. Again, my father had read to me at night a lot of the classics, Treasure Island, Moby Dick.

So I do remember being intrigued by that Ishmael Quequig friendship and Moby Dick. And I also understood the danger of Captain Ahab, who was a fanatic leading his crew to complete disaster. And at some point a friend gave me, Johnny got his gun. I really know that by Dalton Trumba was a blacklisted communist.

Again, about World War I, which was big to the generation I focus on about somebody who gets his arms and legs shut off in the war. It's his memories from lying in a hospital. And then later on in high school, when I was terribly bored by the assigned reading, like Ivan Ho and Silas Marner, they just didn't do it for me. But my teacher talked to me and suggested I read the works of Richard Wright.

And this was about 11th grade. And I became quite obsessed with Wright. That led to interest in Marxism and existentialism, right from that point. I can also mention my older sister gave me books by Albert K.

Mu and Franz Kafka. And later I would read the philosophical works like Search for a Method and the Ethics of ambiguity by Sartan Simon de Bevar. But when I read the novels, this one I really absorbed the existentialist sensibility. Then I read the philosophical works and it became stronger.

But I have to say that it was primarily the fiction dramatizing these experiences that did it for me. So that seems to be the origins of the interest. And then as I went to college, I became active in SDS and later on in Marxist groups. I began to pursue this even more.

Yeah, developing this a little more, you mentioned some of the kind of theoretical influences that have given way to this interest. You mentioned Marxism. You mentioned a few existentialist writers. You also talk about your interest in post-colonial theory.

At other points you talk a lot about the developing changes around studying gender or race, which the areas that you cover, the mid-century literature, that's kind of your main area, wouldn't have had those other frameworks quite as prominently. But they've been something you've integrated in your own study. I'm wondering if you could speak a bit to some of these other theoretical frameworks that you're trying to pull into your way of approaching these different texts? Yeah, it seems to me, looking back at my own experiences, that I had political involvements and reading experience in terms of fiction poetry and so on.

And I wanted to make sense of them. And then I turned to theory. I don't think it was ever a case where I read some theoretical book in and of itself. It blew me away and put me in a certain direction.

So certainly after reading Richard Wright and reading a lot of other radical writers and being very, very deeply involved in the politics of the 1960s. I should say earlier I was attracted to the beat movement, which doesn't seem very political. But at that time it was a form of rebellion, of non-conformity, of doing something different. And so that probably influenced my going to Antioch College, which was an experimental college.

A lot of radicals there. But the main thing was they had a work study program. So you studied for three months and then you took a job for three months in some part of the country where you could become involved in the city and its political situation. The college itself was rather isolated in southern Ohio.

So I would go to New York City and work in a bookstore and hang out in Greenwich Village or go to Cleveland where I was involved in the SDS project called Economic Research and Action Prize. I had all these experiences going on. And then I was reading, taking philosophy and other things at college and it all came together. I certainly was drawn to post-colonial theory pretty early.

I'm not sure what the year was, but I read Feynone, Rush of the Earth. And then I went on to read several other books about Feynone and books about Feynone. One of my first articles that I published at the Social Journal was about Feynone. And that led to Amical Cabral and other thinkers.

And I followed that scholarship to this day. In fact, just last year I wrote a big article about Adam Schatz's terrific book on Feynone. So that's been an ongoing interest. Yeah, one last kind of introductory question.

I guess I want to get on the table is the question of commitment. Do you see that as a unique problem to those of us on the anti-capitalist left in a way that maybe someone of more centrist or even right-leaning political orientations would maybe not see fit to ask? And the way you've been bringing it up is this question of commitment, a problem unique for those really trying to run against the grain as it were. Yeah, so it's a tough question that you're raising here.

And it's interesting for me because I have studied radicals who became conservatives. And I'm interested in a problem of de-radicalization and apostasy. And I've written a lot about that and I was just involved in a controversy on email with several people who felt offended by something that I wrote. But I have to say that I have to study a lot of conservatives who were that way from the outset.

So, I mean, this is interesting. It's something I need to correct because I haven't really tried to inhabit their position and see the world through their eyes. Let me say that my sense of what could have been involved right from the start, even before I knew too much, was the idea that a person would use their skills and their resources, whether they're intellectual, artistic, or rhetorical, or even physical skills, on behalf of those people facing discrimination and exploitation. Maybe this did have something to do with the Holocaust that people didn't stand up for, the groups being targeted, the Jews, the gypsies, the communists, so I also had to do the civil rights movement, the feeling that people should stand up and become the allies of the Black activists.

And any of that, so writers on the left, that seemed to me, this was a group of people who were using their talents and skills for these causes. And when I became involved myself in the radical movement, it was actually through association with some of these intellectual types. You may not remember some of these people now, but the leaders of SDS in the early period were like Paul Potter, remarkable guy, died very young, who led the, he was the president of SDS. He led the project in Cleveland, and I was outside, I worked side by side with, with Potter, who was quite subtle and sophisticated.

And then at Antioch College, they brought in another president of SDS named Carl Oglesby, who was a brilliant orator and also writer and teacher. I took many classes with Oglesby and so on. Later on, I would see a figure like Noam Chomsky at Central, so this idea of using your talents on behalf of the press. So many of the people that I mentioned, many of the people that I've worked on in my research, they have moved to the right and become conservative.

That's happened now with a number of people. I know they may have not gone all the way, but they're de-radicalizing. And what's problematic is that many of these people still make the same claim, even as they move to the right, they're still claiming that their politics are in support of an oppressed group, even though we see that their politics are objectively supporting the privileged group, and that some of these people are becoming the very types of apologists for the status quo that they use to scorn. In fact, the more they scorn, these people, the more they become like them later on.

It's sort of a troubling pattern. And so I have written about that generation, especially in the New York intellectuals, student radicals in the 1930s, revolutionaries, and so on, very militant positions, even into World War II. International, like, something like, the Irving Crystal was a socialist internationalist in World War II. We did not support US imperialism and so on.

But then later on, they denounced the student movement and the harshest, most exaggerated terms. And I see that happening today with a lot of people who were one-time Marxist, and so on, all of a sudden they're focused on this idea that there's rampant anti-Semitism on the campuses, that the pro-Palestinian movement is obviously anti-Semitic, and they're slogans of behavior, that they're covering for Hamas, and blah, blah, that kind of stuff. And even those of us who are Jewish who are saying, no, Israel cannot do what it's doing in our name. It's not representing all Jews.

We're seeing as somehow also anti-Semitic and so on. To me, they're clearly assisting a attack by Trump and Netanyahu and so on, on the left, on those who are opposing the general support of the US, support of the genocidal actions in the Middle East. And also, they're using this issue to attack DEI, which stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is sort of the current form of affirmative action of civil rights on the campus, and supporting the deportation of foreign students who want to protest, and so on, all supposedly in the name of fighting Jew hatred. So this is an example of people moving to the right, but still claiming that they're doing something progressive.

They're opposing anti-Semitism, which of course has to be opposed, really anti-Semitism has to be opposed, and so on. So the whole thing is tricky, because some people, some people, who are conservatives, are making this commitment not in the name of defending the privileged and the elite and the social order and so on, but they claim that they're somehow also speaking for the oppressed, and they even present themselves as kind of a minority under persecution. You can see that in some of the memoirs, like Padorex called his Normantadores, the editor of commentary, breaking ranks, like he was the oppositional minority, and Sidi Hook called his autobiography out of step. Again, he's moving to the right as somehow taking a dangerous oppositional position.

Or Christopher Hijian presents himself as a maverick, as he moves to the right, he's suddenly a maverick, an independent thinker, and so on. It's another, it's a kind of convenient off-ramp. So there's really no road map for understanding all of this, why people, the eraticalized, even to the point of apostasy turning completely against the previous convictions, although usually it comes in steps and stages. And I'm not trying to say that I critique all this from some kind of feeling of intellectual superiority or ethical superiority.

In fact, it's the opposite. It's because I'm always insecure about whether or not I understand what's going on and what my own motives might be, that I want to study these people and understand these people to see what they chose to do and what they did right, what they did wrong, where they ended up. I mean, that's my motivation for looking at them. But I think that theoretically, in terms of what we mean by commitment, here's two things that might be helpful.

One is Raymond Williams' work on commitment. He distinguishes between alignment and commitment. That is, we are always aligned. You may think you're neutral and so on, but in fact, you're always in your actions, in your words, you're always affecting things around you.

So to make a commitment means to make a conscious choice. And this is sort of where SART comes into that, because first of all, SART always distinguishes between words and deeds. Commitment isn't words. Commitment is action.

And second of all, the question of choice and SART, you know, choosing your freedom, acting on your freedom. It's really central, taking responsibility for your choices. Are you a complicit bystander? You may say, oh, you're neutral not involved, but you could be a complicit bystander.

And then what do you do about when you make that conscious choice about alignment, rather than just being de facto aligned? And of course, that choice is tricky. You have to think about the reasons why you're making a choice, whether you're being put under pressure to make that choice, because people always telling you, if you want to support this cause of that course, you must do this, you must do that. You must leave the campus and go into the union.

So you must join this group. Go to the revolutionary party or you must support the lesser evil. They're always telling you what you must do. And so it's a struggle to figure out what to do and when.

And I myself, in the course of some 50 years of political activism, have done a lot of different things at different times. I don't do now what I was doing in my 20s and 30s. I'd like to in some cases, but it's not possible. And of course, you make mistakes and you try out things and see whether they work in so on.

So it's pretty, it's a big issue. And I'd like to see more discussion about it. The whole question of de-radicalization and the whole question of what it was involved in commitment beyond the slogans and the rhetoric. Fandu and Casino is the home of Puff and Puff's lots online.

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19 plus and physically located in Ontario. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or the gambling of someone close to you, please contact connectsontario.ca. Yeah. Yeah, jumping off that and moving more towards your main area of focus, which is studying literature.

One thing I appreciate is that you do bring this kind of leftist and Marxist, among other things, this Marxist framework to your study of literature, but you also try and do it in a way that refuses to be reductive. So, for example, at one point, when surveying a series of novels, you write, quote, politics is surely woven into the DNA of these novels, but should we understand the genome as comprised of positions on social issues or in terms of a mentality and structure of feelings? End quote. And against this kind of reductive approach of just running through and looking for how everything lines up to Marxist categories of political economy, you try and bring Marxism in as a way of unpacking the emotional side, what you call the human escape.

I'm wondering if you could speak of it to what you mean by this and how you try and approach literature as a Marxist, among other philosophical positions without reducing it to just these kinds of simplistic flat categories? Yes, you're right. This is essential to my work. It's mostly what I focused on.

I don't see myself as a public intellectual or some big political leader and so on. My main contribution has been in exploring left-wing literature. And the first thing I think we have to understand is that you can relate to this literature in several different ways. I mean, first of all, you can relate to it as a writer.

Somebody produces poetry fiction, drama, and so on. Originally, I did have some illusion that I could be a writer, but that was quickly destroyed when I took a writing class. So how bad it was. You can also just be a reader of literature and be influenced by what you read just from the text itself.

So that's pretty common. Or you can critically engage it as a scholar and researcher. So that's what I do. I don't expect everybody else to do that.

What I do, I hope, makes it more accessible and so on to other people who don't have the time to do that research. And I rely on other people's research for other topics outside the literary left. But the issue that I think I tend to focus on is that in this imaginative work by left-wing writers who are trying to deal with history and politics and choice and everything else, because it's imaginative literature, they can show the ambiguity in human experience. Because human emotions are so central to imaginative work.

And when emotions are discussed in history and sociology and so on, they might be mentioned in passing, but you don't really get to be thrown into the situation of the main character or actor that you do in most novels, which are mostly about characters and complicated situations. And I think this generally has a broad appeal. If you think of why there's always such a great interest in Jane Austen, who is an anniversary of Jane Austen, so you're seeing her name in the papers all the time, it's because Pride and Prejudice is basically a novel about misperceptions and about the ambiguity of experience. I mean, there's a lot of social satire of the rich in the poppus and so on in Pride and Prejudice.

But it's largely about misplace perceptions of the main character, Elizabeth, who keeps making these mistakes in her evaluation of people because of her prior assumptions. That's what I see and the way she frames things and who she trusts her information about Mr. Darcy or other characters in the novel. And I think that's true about everything in our lives and it's dramatized in most literature that as you always have to have those fundamental assumptions you have about somebody or something repeatedly probed, you know, kind of gooseed and challenged in some way.

And so a novel can be a kind of surrogate educational experience. And in my reading of left wing literature, I do recommend certain novels, especially I've written this trilogy, started with Exiles in a Future Time and then Second Volume is Trinity of Passion and a Third of the Cold War is American Night. It's actually an American night where I focus on some of the most extraordinary works because I kind of think that the left experience is most revealed when it's under the terrible pressure which happened in the 1950s. And I spent a lot of time discussing in-patries the narrows, not her best known work.

I think she regarded it as her major work. It's often misunderstood by sort of an interracial trauma but it's a lot more in there. As a novel novel, I talk about a call between hills in the sea which is about the destruction of the United Electrical Workers Union in Connecticut. There's another novel about lesbians called The Change Links and they're dealing with race situations.

There's another novel called The World Above by Abraham Polonsky which is about Marxist psychologist, a novel by Carlos Moulissant on the Cry In The Dedication which is about the Philippines and a question of violence and revolution. These are all Cold War texts that I find completely fascinating and have educated me. I don't mean to say I haven't learned stuff from TSL yet. I mean I taught TSL weight in my classes and so on and other modernist works, James Joyce and so on.

And I've also read and taught Native American literature and some African literature and so on. But I'm mostly drawn toward a blend of Marxism and modernism which is the term used in literature for experimental literature that doesn't follow traditional forms. It uses a lot of innovation and so on. I think there's some really extraordinary works internationally of this Marxist modernist blend, particularly the Golden Notebook, who's from The Order by Doris Lessing, or The Blind Assassin or Burger's Daughter, Nadine Gordoner, The Real Life of Andra Angel Mehta.

I mean there's a lot of novels out there worldwide that represent the Marxist modernist blend. So I think that that's the main thing I'm trying to get across is the ambiguity of emotions and the situation of a radical trying to deal with commitment and social change. Yeah, continuing along with this, a lot of the essays in Bohemian Bolsheviks and throughout your other work is very much not quite biographies of the authors but very attentive to their own lives and the sorts of worlds that they inhabit. On this note at one point, you write again quoting you, pro-communists and others did write narratives of class struggle.

But also in sometimes simultaneously psychological novels, Family Sagas, Pulp, and Science Fiction, there were more over poetic meditations on death and the loss of collective memory as well as lyrics that contemplated the experience of modernity. Although I'm not an Orthodox Marxist, in many respects my signature method is a very broad notion of historical materialism, one that prioritizes the agency of the writer. I'm wondering if you could explain what author biography is to you when you're dissecting novels, trying to understand literature and what does it mean to prioritize the agency of the writer? Yeah, in terms of dealing with radical and political literature, I mean, there's a couple of ways into it that I've been trying to negotiate.

First of all, there is the problem of over-reductiveness. That would be one of the most important books on the radical novel, is Walter Riles' The Radical Novel. And it's a good book, I don't want to put it down, but it does see everything through the prism of radicalism and the novels are sort of categorized as to how they deal with stripes, how they deal with political conversion, how they deal with the classic themes of American radicalism, race and so on. Not much about gender, because this was written in the 1950s.

It's a kind of foundational book, and I don't want to disrespect it. In fact, I would visit the author who taught at University of Wisconsin and Madison before he died, because I don't respect for him. But it pigeonholes the literature and forces literature which has very different motivations and origins and so on into these little boxes. Now on the other hand, you don't want to completely dismiss the radical commitment of these writers.

And when I was, I guess a graduate student, I read a popular book that came out pretty much doing that. I think it's called Radical Visions in American Dreams. It's a very well-written, interesting book, but the basic argument is that really these people like John Dost-Bassos and so on, they weren't that political, they were writing about old age, they were writing about maybe their love lives, other things, that the politics wasn't that central. And after all, many of them were not like open-cometer's party members and stuff like that.

So that's the other extreme where you've got the radical ideology of someone. I think it's more a question of where the radicalism and Marxism fits into the narrative. And I can't see doing that without the primary research. So yes, that's what I've tried to contribute.

I refer to that trilogy, which is mostly American Communist writers. There's a few in there who are a little bit farther away as being the fact-check version of the left that is I try to accurately explain what the relationship was to the Communist movement, its literary groups, its party membership, and networks, and stuff like that. But I don't reduce everything to that. A couple of good examples are, I think I report this in one of the volumes, I was interviewing the novelist John Sanford, who's a terrific Marxist novelist, very little known.

He wrote a huge amount, including a five-volume work called, The Scenes from the Life of an American Jew, which is just stunning and so on. But he wrote a different kind of novels, and one that I helped reissue. And when I tried to talk to him about where is Marxism in your work, he said, you know, Alan, when I write, there's kind of like an unknown retrieval system and things just come to the fore and they appear on the page. And I can't say that it's because I read Karl Marx.

I mean, I did read Karl Marx, and he was a member of the Communist Party and so on. But it's an emotional, imaginative thing. It doesn't dismiss the politics because maybe you go over it afterwards and craft it and revise it and you make sure you clarify certain matters or say certain things and so on. But it's a blend of all these different factors.

Right now I'm working on a piece about a communist writer named Philip Stevenson, who wrote a famous film in the 40s called The Story of G.I. Joe and so I was blacklisted and then he published four novels about strikes in New Mexico in the 1930s, which were led by Chicano's Native Americans. Mexicans were deported very much like today and so on. And when I see references to this, it's always a social, realist, proletariat, novel, blah, blah, blah.

When I look at Stevenson's papers, I can see that he set out when he was blacklisted, he was going to write a mystery, a mystery, a potboiler that would make a lot of money. And the key to the mystery was something that he witnessed was that during a strike two communists had been kidnapped by vigilantes, brought out to the desert to die, and they were rescued by Native American Indians who used their tracking skills to find them and so on. And then when I brought back and tried to charge the people who kidnapped them, it was referred to as a hoax. And one of the novels is called The Hoaks.

It does sound a bit like Trump, I guess, but anyway. So he set out to write this mystery novel, but as he wrote all these memories of this strike that he witnessed and supported and so on came back and it went age after page and all of a sudden he had a, what was really a six volume work. He only published four volumes of it. So we didn't set out to write this social realist thing.

It may look like that, at some extent, in retrospect. But if you want to see what his origins were, his papers reveal it. And you can also see many other things that go into it, many other fascinations with the Southwest, the culture region and the poetry of all women. Just a lot of other things go into it.

So I think that to get what I call the human scape, you have to do this kind of research. And in my case, where possible, I actually interviewed the writers because some of these guys were living. Stevenson had died. He died in the Soviet Union.

But Sanford I interviewed. I interviewed, if they're not alive, I wouldn't do their widows because it wouldn't do live a little longer. I interviewed, Stevenson's widow, maybe their children. The children often know nothing.

It's kind of amazing for that generation, which was the Cold War. They just didn't tell their kids anything or they lied to them. The children are sometimes an obstacle. Their friends, as you go to their manuscript collections, some of them now are in libraries, not all, but many of them are in libraries.

You read the little magazines that are going to be hard to find, especially the reviews, the letters column, any kind of reference and so on. You try to find the minutes of the organizations they belong to. You try to put together this composite picture of who their network was, who their friends were. A big problem in biography is name recognition.

If someone like, who was I just reading about? Well, Steinbeck, for example. He had one or two intercomputers with Hemingway. That's like seen as this big, important influence.

But Steinbeck did a lot of little people in the left wing movement, particular a man named Cecil McKitty. There's almost nothing upon it. A lot of his material came from Cecil McKitty. It did not come from Hemingway.

But people kind of focus on name recognition, big name people. They miss all the lesser-known people of networks. Sometimes it's even their brother or sister who might have been politically committed in a way and they use their experiences in their writing and so on. So I think the problem with a lot of Marxism today is it is too theory-oriented.

That seems to be, you know, the market was for a while. It's changed now, I guess, the market will thin being a theory superstar. But theory is great, but it has to be done the way Marx did it, which isn't measured against a lot of empirical research and corrected as your empirical research tells you it must be corrected. You have to follow that empirical research where it goes.

It doesn't always go where you want it to go, but you have to accept that to complete the complete humanscape in which these writers lived and wrote. Yeah, another question along these lines. I like that you brought up how one writer turned to detective novels as his form of expression. Similarly, you write extensively on both race and gender and have a lot of essays in this book that cover those topics.

But one thing that stood out to me is in one of the essays on the increased focus on gender and literary studies. You write of these changes, quote, our chief targets were not only the absence of women, sexual nonconformists and people of color, but also the one-sided characterization of the communist movement, the over fixation on the 1930s. The failure to give serious consideration to mass and popular culture, including the substantial impact of left writers on science fiction, detective fiction and children's literature, the neglect of narrative, formalist and genre theory in treating fiction and poetry, the uses and abuses of modernism and naturalism as categories, the need for increased regional, transnational, and comparative approaches and more. End quote.

I'm wondering if you could speak to how even in topics like gender and race they have really forced a much broader kind of rethinking about literature and literary studies and what you are doing as a scholar of literature in ways that I think would not be immediately obvious to someone asking, you know, if you say I do research on gender and literature, they would not think about detective novels, for example, or genre fiction or looking at, you know, formalist or realist forms of narrative, for example. I'm wondering if you could speak a bit to how gender has really opened up a lot more than what one would immediately assume. Yeah, again, I don't approach any of this from being some kind of a high level gender theorist and so on. It's, again, the empirical research.

When people began asking, especially in the late 1960s and 70s, there had been a lot of recovery of African-American writers and some of Latino and Asian-American writers too, but African-American writers was kind of the big thing in terms of recovery. People began wondering about women writers as well. You know, all these books, like the books that depict the left, like Daniel Aaron's famous book, Writers on the Left, aren't a lot of women in it, but weren't there a lot of women writers? I mean, that's, you know, and I began recovering women and the feminist press began a whole series and they published Agnes Fedley and people were stunned, you know, the quality and importance of daughter of Earth.

They went out to publish a number of other books, Tilly Olson and so on. And of course, this search discovered women writers and what they wrote about it, what being a woman radical meant, you know, opened the door to, it was kind of a prototype for looking at the political presence and other kinds of texts where it did dare not speak its name. Obviously, Cold War radical books could not speak openly about being a communist. Well, this starts earlier.

I mean, we have the classic example, you know, for whom to be a whole soul by Ernest Hemboy. The main character Robert Jordan was a Communist Party member up until the galaxy of the novel and then the public says, no, no, you can't have him be a party member. He's got to be some kind of, you know, liberal fellow traveler. So they changed that reference, but nothing else in the novel, just that reference to whether or not he was a party member.

So he says something like, well, this is it, Robert Jordan was by the way of a college professor based on Robert Merriman. He left everything else the same. So you have to, in looking at that book, you have to understand that originally it was about a party member and then the publishers changed it. So in Cold War, the people, the writers themselves knew they couldn't very often identify people as actual communists.

And so the politics themselves had to be muted. The search for recovering women writers and then recovering a kind of the gay presence in radical literature because, of course, a large number of writers who were gay and lesbian were bisexual and yet they couldn't write about it openly. In fact, many of them published novels that appear to be homophobic. I mean, you think of William Rollins, Rollins's The Shadow Before, one of the famous guest onious right novels, the characters, they appear to be homophobic, but Rollins was gay.

And so this kind of search to uncover new texts, new perspectives and new methodology for recovering as material is all sort of comes from this search for especially black and women writers on the left. Yeah, moving along from that and kind of heading into a different direction and kind of turning back to your commitment as a theme. And at another point, you are talking about different writers and intellectuals and their presence as a party member or as you just mentioned, sometimes just a fellow traveler. And you kind of bring up an interesting tension that I've often wondered about but haven't seen anyone really tackle.

You write a quote, such a disposition fostered early on a deep going suspicion of those left and right driven by longing for wholeness that can result in submission and debasement before charismatic cult leaders, ideological obsessions, nationalist illusions and craft fought conspiracy beliefs inspired by a heterogeneous syllabus of thinkers and role models. I found that any totalizing idealism radiated danger signals. At the same time, I never thought of myself as a contrarian, maverick or even an independent. Although my scholarship and literature has always operated according to my own lights, my preference has been to collaborate in socialist political projects in a disciplined matter with others as long as authoritarianism was not tolerated.

End quote. I'm wondering if you could speak a bit to this tension because I do see it frequently remarked upon when looking back at a certain writer, intellectual or activist, refusing kind of any sort of formal commitment instead remaining sort of a Lou fella traveler is often seen in retrospect as being perhaps too smart to be part of the daily grind or being submitting yourself to that larger institution. And certainly in some cases that does prove in retrospect to have been a good move. But it also means that we seem to as a culture not really have a language for figuring out how to maybe not celebrate but encourage in certain cases submitting yourself to this larger group or institution and really just being part of the daily grind that party life often involves.

I'm wondering if you could speak a bit to that. Yeah, that quote you're good at picking out these quotes is interesting to me because you can see how I go back and forth between what I'm studying and my own personal life, which I hope other people do too that is between what they read and think about the literal left and learning from it. Because the only way to honor these people who are now long gone is to learn from their experiences, not simply celebrate them. I know everybody wants to, you know, four mothers and four mothers and so on.

But you have to look at them critically if you're going to honor them. And they did make the terrible mistakes as even though they were all mostly good people. So on this question of the totality of a commitment, I just reviewed several new biographies. I'm sorry, they're autobiographies of radicals who lifelong radicals, people in the 60s were still radicals today.

This will appear in the journal against the current under the title Lions and Winter because these are all people in their 70s and 80s. One of them, Walden Bello, who was a Filipino activist, very famous, talks about being for 15 years a member of the Filipino Communist Party. Mostly he was living in the US because he was banned from the Philippines, teaching at Berkeley. And he says, frankly, that he was completely dominated by the party.

He just followed every order. He never doubted blah, blah, blah, blah. At the end of the 15 years, he realized that the leader, a famous Filipino communist named Sisson, S-S-O-N, had orchestrated the murder of 2,000 members of the party claiming they were somehow agents, some kind of, you know, deep state penetration or whatever. He was like stunned and horrified.

But you know, this takes a paragraph in the book. He doesn't explain, well, how in the world for 15 years did he go along with this? And why was he so blinded? Didn't he know about the earlier experiences of communists in the 30s and 40s where they too were blind?

He just doesn't explore it. So I raised that question. How is it possible he doesn't go into this in depth? The second one of the autobiographies that I reviewed is by David Roddiger, who's a very famous Marxist historian of whiteness.

He wrote the book, Wages of whiteness and so on. And he defends himself as a fellow traveler. He says that he didn't want to join a party, although he wasn't some radical groups, particularly he's a member of the surrealist group. But he just wanted to be a non-party activist and there should be a place for him too.

So those are two interesting contradictory narratives. I don't think that David goes into that question of what it means to be kind of a fellow traveler and a positive and negative consequences. And I also note that he was a member of the surrealist group, which I always thought was kind of a small, kind of like a political sect, to some extent, if you've read some of their writing. So this question is out there.

It's just not being navigated very carefully. And I think part of the problem is that, you know, Lenin had this idea that if you're going to be a revolutionary, you should give the whole of your life, the whole of your life to the cause. And if you become involved in an organization, there's definitely pressure on you to be loyalty, the organization and so on. And you're pressured to kind of hand your super ego over to the leadership of the group because you trust them.

When you join them, you trust them. They have a good analysis of the war in Vietnam, black liberation, blah, blah, blah. And you can't keep questioning everything and a lot of things going on and you want to be active. So you kind of trust their judgment.

The trust turns into a habit. And in many cases, the leaders of these groups evolve. People don't stay the same. People who are leaders of groups often become kind of megalomaniacs that deluded about their wisdom and seeing the future and so on.

So you have to have a way of retaining your critical consciousness. You want to be loyal, but the loyalty should be to the cause. And actually, Raymond Williams says this, I believe somewhere he says very clearly, when you're committed, you don't commit yourself to an ideology. You commit yourself to a vision, to values, to ethics, you know, to a cause.

And that means that you have to have some kind of distance from the ideology being promoted by your comrades in your party, your group, your social movement and so on. And for me, I think that part of the way I've been able to do this is to do the existentialism. I mean, you know, Orthodox Marxists don't like existentialists. Then some of the Orthodox Marxists, I'd very much merge Novak, wrote a whole book against Marxism versus existentialism.

Although he did admire Jean-Paul Sartre, he wrote this book and so on. But I've always felt that existentialism was a way of keeping my independence so that I didn't become totally enveloped by Marxism. I could see Marxism as something that should open up the world. And as all its complexities and not shut me into some kind of narrow vision involving dialectical laws and the certainty of the triumph of the proletariat and all that kind of stuff, I mean, there's a lot of terrific stuff in Marxism, but those people who interpret it in terms of positivism, that it's like a science and you can predict the future and so on.

I think they're misrepresenting them. What's valuable in Marxism? So this question of being part of a movement, but not, you know, being subsumed by it, I think is important for the new generation who are trying to create a new kind of millennial socialism that builds upon the achievements of the past, but doesn't replicate their mistakes. Yeah, kind of speaking of those committed versus fellow travelers, one figure or kind of region of Marxism that comes up a lot in your writing is Trotsky and Trotskyism.

What I found interesting, especially reading New York intellectuals, is you cover a lot of people who were drawn to Trotskyism, not necessarily activists or union members, but often fellow writers, philosophers, public intellectuals and figures who we might not normally associate with kind of your standard Trotskyist at least today. I'm wondering if you have any insight as to why Trotskyism has kind of had such an alert among intellectuals over the last century? What is it about Trotsky that kind of pulls them in? Yeah, so remember in New York intellectuals, I'm dealing with, I call the anti-Stalinist left, which is a kind of dissident communism, although also a very left-wing revolutionary socialism.

It's much broader than Trotskyism. I never reduce all of these people to Trotskyism, and many of them were connected with Trotskyism for a short time or sometimes it was a very dissident odd kind of Trotskyism. Like, for example, Irving Kristall, he wrote a famous essay in a New York Times magazine called Memoirs of Trotskyist. So, everybody thought, oh, he was a Trotskyist and we became concerned.

But actually, he was belonged to a sect within a sect within a sect. He was a follower of Philip Sherman, who was a member of the Shackmanite Group briefly, or mostly in a socialist party. They were anti-Bolshevik. So, you know, if you're anti-Bolshevik, you're anti-Tronsky, actually.

And he was that for much longer than he was a Trotskyist. So, they have odd interconnections. But Trotskyism did play a central role in that. He just don't reduce it to Trotskyism.

There wasn't any anti-Stalinist left. Maybe you could say Trotskyism was kind of at the center, but there was much more than just the center. And what appealed to Trotskyism was that it was a way of critiquing the terrible things happening in the Soviet Union from a Marxist point of view. I mean, historical materialism point of view.

What happened in the Soviet Union was not the result of some evil guy called Stalin. It was the result of being the Soviet Union being attempted revolutions surrounded by adversaries and with a largely agricultural base, mostly a peasant's low educational quality and many factors went into the fact that there was a political degeneration in Stalin was at the head of that. But he was more a symptom than a cause. So, it was a kind of Marxist approach to explain what had gone wrong.

So, you could retain the ideals of the Russian revolution and even the ideals of the idealistic interpretation of Lenin. I personally have more complicated view of Lenin, but there was an idealistic idea that he stood for, that if he returned to the road of Lenin, he would correct everything that went wrong in the Soviet Union. So, it stood for that kind of way of still being revolutionary, still being a supporter of the revolution in 1917, which was a necessary revolution considering how awful the Tsarist regime was. But at the same time having a Marxist critique of everything that went wrong and a kind of an explanation.

And the explanation that Trotsky gave in its general terms is, I think, relevant to understanding what's happening with revolutions today that start off promising and end deteriorate because they're isolated, because they often occur in largely non-industrial settings and with not much education and resources and so on. That's one of the reasons it keeps reoccurring. And the most impressive resurgence of Trotskyism, I thought, was in the journal New Left Review, especially in the late 1960s through the 70s. Many of the people on the editorial board were either members of a Trotskyist group called the International Marxist Group, headed by Terrik Ali, or there were fellow travelers, I believe you could say that Terry Anderson was sort of a fellow traveler.

It's not the same now, but that was an impressive example of Trotskyism coming back. I would say that now I think it's not that relevant. I mean, you could learn. There's lots to learn reading a genius like Trotsky was a genius.

He might have been a fanatic too, but he was a genius. So a lot to learn from it, but I think that the idea of a Trotskyist movement now, I think that that there was an attempt to rebuild one and I was somewhat involved in that in the 60s. I wasn't an orthodox Trotskyist, but I did work with Trotskyist groups and was a member of a Trotskyist group, that that failed. And now we need to have something new that incorporates some of the ideas, but goes in a new kind of direction, which I wish I knew, but hopefully the younger generation will come up with the answer.

Yeah, kind of jumping off of that a little bit, but going in another direction. As I was reading your work, I found it interesting that you do a lot of working through archives of old outlets. The Partisan Review plays kind of a central role in a lot of the people you study, but to that we could add the socialist worker, the masses, etc. And I was kind of wondering, as I was working through your work, what sort of place there might be for these sorts of literary intellectual outlets from a left perspective today?

I know you said you read Jacob and pretty frequently, we could also add outlets like the Drift N plus one, or maybe even the New York Review books or the New Left Review, but I'm wondering if the left today kind of exists in a way where there is a room for kind of a centralized literary intellectual outlet platform for not just journalism covering the day to day of strikes and such, but kind of these more literary articles, maybe even fiction or poetry. Do you see any outlets performing like a similar function today, or is there maybe not the same kind of need or space on the on the contemporary left for these sorts of outlets? Yeah, well, the situation is changed dramatically because of social media. And I mean, I noticed when I was teaching, a big change was going on.

Students were not interested in reading law and novels, like the red and the black and stuff like that. And they wanted more and more media brought into the classes, PowerPoint presentations and things like that. And then of course, we have the whole rise of first Facebook, which I guess young people don't even use Facebook anymore, but Facebook and X and blue sky and all the ways of getting out of signal and slack and Instagram and blogging and so on. And so this obviously been kind of a revolution and media.

And so where the kind of work that I do and the kind of text that I value fit in is tricky to say. One thing that is problematic for me is a lot of the news and discussion people get now are from these podcasts, so a offense to your doing a podcast. It's a one person every but a lot of these shows involve hot takes. And I see this on the news every night.

I do watch a lot of the shows around nine at 10 o'clock on MSNBC and CNN hot takes are problematic. You know, that's quite different from a well researched thought out presentation, which usually involves a long book. In terms of articles, I do follow Jacobin. I think Jacobin is quite excellent.

It does have a lot of what you say. I mean, it's kind of amazing. They get these articles that we refer historically to anti-fascism, to struggles in other countries. I mean, it covers the world and as a wide range of stuff.

But of course, an article appears on Jacobin. First of all, it's it's relatively short. I don't think they have footnotes. I write for document occasionally and I notice they always edit my stuff and simplify it and shorten it.

You know, I think they told me no footnotes. So that limits it. And also, it doesn't stay up very long. I have a friend, Ben Paul Thissard who's written some brilliant stuff recently on Jewish anti-Zionism, which has gone up on Jacobin.

And like by the time I tell somebody is up there, it's been taken down. You can find it if you Google and search for people don't always have time for that. And another thing is this question of views. I was involved in a discussion about some book reviews that appeared and somebody was saying, well, this website, I think it's truth out, gets millions of people viewing.

A view isn't reading. So you can't really tell whether somebody's read it, read it carefully. And I myself don't read something as carefully online as I do want to journal. I have to say, this is probably a generational thing.

I often have to print out stuff online. So it's pretty complicated in terms of how to address this. I also say that I focus so much on the fiction and poetry in German of my period, 1932, late 1950s. I don't follow much of what contemporary writing.

So I mean, I know about N plus one and some of these other journals and I've looked at some issues, but I don't really read them regularly. I do follow a new left reviews still. I do read, I love TLS for even though there are a lot of reactionary writers for it. I love these, their book reviews are critical, as opposed to just praising.

So I read every issue of TLS. And I do follow New York Review books and a lot of the review books, but I don't read every article. And I get a lot of the radical journals. I still read the cent in new politics, places like that.

So but I'm probably not, I'm certainly not typical of the younger generation. Yeah, you mentioned a couple articles on Zionism and anti-Zionism. And I also wanted to ask about that because you have, you've participated in some activism around this issue yourself, but you also have written about it. And one part I found particularly interesting, you write of kind of this younger generation.

You write quote, the reality is that the younger generation of Jews has lived its entire life hearing about the past persecution of Jews, but witnessing the current Jewish privilege state as an occupier through Jewish voice for peace and open Hillell. They are showing less and less of a desire to conform to a Zionist party line that plays down the authentic anti-Semitism of the alt-right and then uses the term disemir opponents of Israeli state policy. Unlike some of their elders, the young radicals know that if ethnic cleansing is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. They more quickly appreciate that the undeniable oppression experienced by Jews in other places of the world and other times in history cannot justify Israeli state repression of Palestinians today.

End quote. I wanted to ask, I'm sure you've worked with a number of these kids. We're talked with some of them. We're seeing people kind of have this turn.

It's something that I admittedly struggle to wrap my head around. I just don't feel a super strong connection to my Dutch slash Swiss heritage, where even if I found out, you know, about things these countries were doing, I just wouldn't have a difficult time turning around and saying don't do that in my name. We're disowning that part of myself. And yet we see a lot of people.

It really is kind of a significant step in either their lives, and then it kind of becomes a big symbolic show that the movement is then kind of showing up. Like, I think Jewish voice for peace is a really kind of important way of saying, you know, not all Jews feel this way, for example. But I'm wondering if you could speak based on your interest in the kind of emotional interlife, the human scape, the questions of commitment, what you're seeing that maybe leads people to kind of have these breaks and turns, you know, against what they were taught growing up versus what they see going on. Yeah, I think it certainly seems to me that a person who's not Jewish would have a hard time understanding how much time and energy and space is being devoted to these debates between Jews or among Jews.

I mean, my wife was not Jewish and she's African-American. She thinks it's like a family quarrel and she's not in on it, even though she has some, her own views and opinions, but the intensity and nastiness of these arguments is estranged her and she doesn't really know how to relate to it. And there's a number of different elements here. First of all, there are generational differences.

And you sent me the piece by Corey Robin where he talks about some of his background. He's younger than I am and it's somewhat different from mine. As Corey talks about growing up a desitous family and how he was also apparently not that radical because he was opposed to the student union at Yale students organizing graduate and to a union and then how he changed and so on. And he has changed.

I mean, he's a terrific spokesperson for the anti-Zionist position and he's been arrested and he's not just a talker. He's also an activist. But I come from a somewhat, I see this from a somewhat older generation. I was born in 46 and I grew up well aware of the Holocaust.

I mean, this idea that anti-Zionists don't care about the Holocaust, that's ridiculous. I mean, we heard about it day and night and of course, my great-grandfather and many other relatives were killed in the Holocaust. So we grew up knowing well about it. But it didn't have that nationalist fervor.

I mean, my family was pro-Israel. They took me to Israel before I was Marmot's friend and so on. But it wasn't like, you should go there. You should join the IDF.

You should make Aliyah. And so it was anything like that. It was like, there were a lot of Jews there and they seemed to be having conflicts with their neighbors and so on. And when I took me there, I said to my father, this looks like Jim Crow.

I mean, the Arabs are living differently and being treated differently. We went to a kabootz and the Arabs did all the grunt work and they left before dinner. They were not part of the kabootz and so on. I could see that something wasn't right and he didn't disagree.

He was still pro-Israel. We weren't as heavily indoctrinated in the Zionism. It was more sympathy for the Israeli cause. We all read Exodus and stuff like that.

But after the 67 war, things changed in the Jewish community. And Zionism came in and indoctrinated way. And suddenly, you know, Israel was the-it's a proud, powerful country so supposedly surrounded by all these terrible enemies. Although Israel, as you know, was the only nuclear armed state there with the most militarized army.

And after 1967, it was completely supported by the United States. So I mean, it's not like these other countries could overrun it. That's ridiculous. And so we have this other generation of which Cory and the younger activists are part of.

They were very much brainwashed and told all these idealistic things about the Israeli army is the most moral in the world and Israel is the only democracy and so on. And then as the facts came out, I think especially because of the, maybe the blockade of Gaza or the people who have had different experiences, they went there, they heard what was going on. It didn't make sense. And it kind of came together that none of this is true, that, you know, that they had been lied to, that Israel is not a democracy.

It's closer to an apartheid state. Now, when you make these comparisons, you're not saying one to one exactly like South Africa, blah, blah, blah, because of course, in South Africa, the whites who were this tiny minority in Israel is pretty much 50-50 divided between the Arab Palestinian population and the Jewish population. But it's still apartheid. It's still discriminatory.

And yes, within the green line, it is within the official Israeli state, the discrimination is not as bad as it is in the West Bank and certainly Gaza. But it's still there, it is still bad. There are 50 laws, but discriminatory laws against the Palestinians. You know, they can't buy certain kinds of land.

I mean, imagine if there were laws in the United States where Jews couldn't buy certain land, you know, people would be very upset. So they began to see that none of this was true. And then of course, the behavior of the Israeli state since the war with Gaza began in October, on October 7th, 2023, when Hamas attacked, broke through the prison walls, so to speak, and attacked and killed hundreds of civilians, including children, and so on, and an Israel retaliated in this massive way, violating human rights a thousand times beyond the violations of the Hamas, which were violations of human rights. That's created a whole new perspective.

So a lot of these younger Jews are angry. They feel what they were really lied to, and maybe lied to by their parents and their rabbis and so on. They're not necessarily rejecting Judaism. I think for a lot of people in my generation who rejected Zionism, it was because we were very much into socialism and atheism.

We were secular critics of Zionism. We felt we were Jews by being part of a culture or people, not any kind of worldwide nation or anything like that represented by Israel. That's another myth. But so we didn't feel like we were so lied to and so betrayed as this younger generation.

And this younger generation of Jews who were in Jewish voice for peace and and other radical groups, they're among the most militant. And sometimes they're the hardest reason with them. Sometimes they do the most insensitive things because they're really they're mad. And I don't make a big issue of this because the cause is right.

I mean, you know, a lot of crazy things went on in the 60s about Vietnam. A lot of terrible stupid things were done. But what we remember is that the cause was right. That was a terrible war.

It was an imperialist war. The US had no right to be there. They should have immediate withdrawal. The people who were saying, oh, no, we should negotiate because we have a stake and they were wrong and so on.

I think that's the way it's going to happen to unfold in terms of the present situation that the crazy acts are going to be forgotten and the people who carried on these protests and encampments are going to be seen like the freedom writers and the heroes of the civil rights and also the anti-war movement. So I would say that there are complicated issues that don't get discussed and debated. I mentioned some before in the history of radicalism. Aren't we talking about de-radicalization?

Aren't we talking about party commitment and those kinds of things? Why aren't we talking about what a fellow traveler is and what they contribute? So there are issues here that get obscured by the left because they feel they're in a fight now and they have to fight against the United States support of Israeli State policy. But one of the questions is this question of Hamas.

How do you deal with Hamas? So most people that I know, in fact, probably everybody that I know and I'm on the Academic Advisory Council of Jewish Voice for Peace and I've been on that council for 2016 when I became anti-Zionist. I joined. Most of the people I know realize that Hamas is not a progressive socialist group.

I mean, it is fighting a resistance. It comes out of a brutal, complicated situation. But it is very backward looking. It has a history of repressing its rivals, of doing terrible things.

And it's a behavior on October 7 seems like counterproductive in terms of the results of, you know, I mean, they must have known that Israel is going to retaliate. Either they knew it and are willing to accept this massive retaliation from the Israeli State or else they were completely out of it and underestimated what would happen. Israel at that time was, you know, undergoing a division in its population. People were turning against the Netanyahu government over its undemocratic policies.

The population was splitting apart and the actions of Hamas actually united Israel against them and has helped move it in a further reactionary direction. So a book has just come out called, I want to promote it. It's very good called God's Attach for the Israeli State. I don't think the left should make its major contribution.

I think that using Palestinian sources themselves and I rely a lot on Edward Said and Rashid Khalid, and when you read these articles attacking the left for having simple-minded ideas that all Jews are white European invaders or things like that, that's not what's in these books. I mean, some crank might have said that. But if you read the books by Said and Rashid Khalid, you see that they have a complicated understanding of settler colonialism. They understand it was always a small Jewish presence in the Middle East and in Palestine.

It was always this religious attachment. And you understand that the large number of Jews who came there in the 30s and 40s were refugees running for their lives. They had nowhere else to go because they were shut out of the United States, which is where they wanted to go. So it's complicated.

But they did set up a colonial settler state. They did dispossessed the Palestinian residents of the land. They drove them out, large numbers of them in 1948, and expanded to take over a larger and larger amount of the territory. And now they're carrying out a policy that amounts to genocide by their intentions and their practices and relation to Gaza.

It does look like that they're trying to just wipe out the population based on ethnicity. So there's a reason to be outraged. But when we're outraged, we also have to maintain this critical consciousness about what's going on. And you can support a cause without supporting every single tactic or organization that comes up the representative cause.

And this goes back really to things like Rosa Luxembourg's critique of the Russian Revolution. This is why I'm studying these older things can help. Rosa Luxembourg completely supported the Bolshevik Revolution, but she was highly critical of the strategy and tactics that used by the Bolson-Recardi and Lenin. As you explained why these strategy and tactics said, become to dominate because of this background, where they had to be underground and so on.

But she was still critical of them. And we can say that about radical and revolutionary movements today. You can support the cause. You can support the cause of Irish liberation, but not the tactics of the provost who bombed cafes and so on.

You can support the right of self-defense and even armed struggle in Palestine, but not the violation of human rights and not things that can backfire and cause the loss and provoke the Israeli state. I'm not saying that a mass is personally responsible. The killing is done by the Israeli state, but they helped create a situation that allowed the Israeli state to come and do these horrible things. So I think a generational divide among the Jewish anti-Zionists, which is interesting and hopefully will be productive.

The younger generation feels lied to and are outraged and they're trying to reclaim Judaism as something different from Zionism. Actually, Jewish worshipping talks about Judaism beyond Zionism. I think the older generation like myself, we were secular and we were promoting really socialist internationalism as the answer to Zionism. But we're working together in groups like Jewish Choice or Peace, and I think we'll learn from each other.

Yeah, jumping off that question of generational differences, you had an essay in Bohemian Bolsheviks that I really loved where you talk about the recent reprint of Vivian Gornik's the Romance of American Communism. And you point out that she does a really interesting job of kind of digging into the way it really was in her words, kind of a romance. It was this real emotionally laden commitment for a lot of American communists in the middle of the 20th century. But she also, you point out, wrote the book in her view as a sort of warning to later generations about the way those sorts of emotional commitments towards a vision can lead one into mistakes.

But you point out that this kind of fits into a larger pattern of kind of an older generation looking back, maybe moving as it grows older to a more moderate position, but then kind of condescending towards a younger and newer generation that might have new, more radical ideas that feel somewhat unfamiliar. And there can be kind of this condescension rather than maybe a shepherding or kind of trying to bring them up and educate them. I'm wondering if you could speak up to what you see going on in Gornik's work and how it maybe speaks to again a larger pattern in terms of generational differences. Yeah, now remember Gornik's book was written many decades ago, so it's not speaking to the present situation.

But you're right that just by calling it the Romance of American Communism, she points out this emotional dimension of the experience. And it was, although I don't think it was seen that way, it was seen as a warning to the younger generation that they too could let their emotions get carried away. She was mainly talking about feminism at the end of the book, that it was, she was at understood how the communists let their emotions get out of control and made all these terrible mistakes. And then suddenly in her activity in a feminist woman, which she was covering for the village voice, she found herself acting the same way in terms of some of the debates that were being had in a way that she rose to the fender positions that announced other people.

I mean, she saw the same thing occurring. And so she kind of pulls back. And I don't really know a lot about her political views and activism since then. I mean, I've read it from a amount of rest of this.

She's a great writer. And that book meant a lot to me in terms of clarifying a lot of issues. So that's one aspect of what you're talking about is the is this awareness that these things are reoccurring. Now, the second aspect is the question of, you know, generations look at each other and being condescending and so on.

So this to me is again part of this de-radicalization phenomena. And I sent you the essay that I published on Andrew Hartman's wonderful book called Karl Marxen in America. And I may have mentioned that there's one paragraph and that upset a number of people in the email. It's a paragraph where I was just trying to condense a lot of material in a criticism.

It's not the main point of my review, but very often you'll find when you write published that people fixate on some small thing that you it's the thing that you stuck in a footnote or something where you were just, you know, you didn't have time to elaborate. So I was talking about this problem of the generations not understand each other and an empty radicalization with one paragraph toward the end where I say, or criticizing the one, it's a great book, but I do raise some criticisms. And I say that, de-radicalization is not addressed enough in the book. It's persistent and major problem in a Marxist tradition and a continuity of themes and arguments by X radicals can easily be traced from the Cold War movement of the 1950s to the second thoughts crowd of the late 1980s.

You may not remember that. And then to the quote, decent left circle, the Houston Manifesto in 2006, you may not remember that either. This lineage is also evident in a present day post liberals as well as the former SDSers and Democratic Socialist of American members who denounce the nonviolent BDS boycott divestment sanctions movement, Upper Pro Israel and a Columbia University Gaza protesters. And then I end saying their impact cannot be ignored for nothing throws shade like zealots turned apostates.

Now maybe I didn't write this as clearly as I could have when I say their impact cannot be ignored and sell it so I was not talking about every single one of the people involved in these de-radicalizations. I was talking about the zealots among them who then write these terrible things, denouncing their younger generation and misrepresenting them and so on. But some of the people who were resigned from DSA was at two years ago, there were letters in the new republic, 25 people were resigned from DSA and some of the other people resigned in other kinds of public ways. And instead the DSA had been taken over essentially by crazy lunatic Maoists, pro-homasts, whatever, really bad stuff.

They were claiming they weren't de-radicalizing because they had held these views before it was DSA that had changed. I don't know whether you're involved with DSA. I'm not a member, I'm sympathetic. So the issue here is that some of these people that is true had earlier moved away from their most radical positions.

But in a new context, these early positions that were less radical, seem to me more less radical, that is a kind of moving a right, that is to have, let's say in 1990 to be for the two state position on Israel, that was kind of radical and edgy. And people who were for the two state position, like the new Jewish agenda people, and so they were denounced as anti-Semites and traitors and supporting the PLO than the PLO was not a big bogey and so on. But after the turn of the century, and after Oslo turned out to be kind of trick on the Palestinians where they said they were going to support something like a two state, and then in fact, Israel went on and sent half a million settlers into the West Bank and so on, the two states thing became impossible. And so therefore it's kind of a throwback to something that can't really exist.

So to be for the two state position in 1990 is perhaps more left going to be for the two state position in 2022 or 3 and so on. So my argument here is that even people who are clinging to what they thought were radical positions of 15, 20 years ago, when a context changes, they're not so radical. And in fact, a lot of these people by saying these terrible things about the Columbia protesters and characterize them in a way they do are actually helping the Trump administration with this campaign to use full stories about rampant anti-Semitism on the campuses as an excuse to withhold millions of dollars, billions of dollars, and research funds for scientific discovery and to cancel DEI programs and to deport students and shut down middle-aged studies programs and so on. So these kinds of denunciations being so central is actually to me a kind of de-radicalization even if the people who emailed me and their friends of mine, or they were friends of mine, feel that this is an unfair representation.

Again, these people, I can understand why they don't like some of the things that were said and done around the after October 2023, but the main focus should be on stopping the Israeli state from doing what it's doing and allowing the Palestinians to live and have some breathing room to create a new kind of society instead of putting their focus on the left activists who are risking a lot. There's all these websites that name people and call them anti-Semites and there's blacklisted going on and students here in Michigan are being threatened with suspension and so on. These are people under attack for doing the right thing, even if they've done some tactically stupid things on occasion that we wouldn't do or say, they're still basically on the correct side so that the main thing is to defend them and the criticism should appear but they shouldn't be so publicized as these round robin letters and that new republicans. That's my personal take.

Yeah, it's kind of a final question to wrap things up. You have another really interesting essay kind of late in the book where you bring up the tension of maintaining kind of a radical politics but in doing that especially over a sustained period of time you may eventually kind of find yourself as you accrue power or influence maybe moving more towards the center and there is this kind of ongoing tension for people with supposedly radical dispositions trying to find ways to navigate that tension. I'm wondering if given that you've been involved with this for so long like if you have any kind of closing thoughts on how to maintain that marginality that attentiveness to the ways in which capitalism or inequality are really hurting the margins and how they might have radical demands for change while also being able to kind of get close enough to centers of power to actually have some sort of influence or impact how one kind of manages that walks that line. Yeah, I think that probably comes from the essay called reaching for revolution which is a review of a book by two excellent scholars Howard brick and Christopher Phelps is a study of the what's called radicals in America I think is a title from Cambridge University Press.

It's a study of the left from the I think the post-war period to almost the present so it's published a couple years ago so it doesn't really deal with the Palestine movement and their argument is that the left needs both an extreme element to put pressure on people but it also has to be able to make demands that connect to ordinary people we have to do both of those at the same time and of course that's a big issue because sometimes the extreme people are so extreme that they do what seem to be crazy and wild things and alienate people and so on and yet they do get the pressure on people and many times they're proven to be accurate which I'm saying it's out of the situation today even the most extreme students who are out there just you know shouting slogans and offending people are saying ambiguous things their clause is just even if even if their strategy and tactics are or leave something to be desired and so I think that one the best example for me was the 1960s anti-war movement which of course as I point out in this book began I mean the first people to see what was going on Vietnam were pretty far out groups you know groups I would never join like workers world party or whatever but the communist party and the socialist groups they did see what was happening early and as things unfolded there were also new leftists who were very extreme in their analyses I mean some were cheering on the National Liberation Front at Anoye and chanting oh oh Jimin although you know as soon as the situation was over a lot of these people disappeared but at any event the anti-movement itself because we were able to build a democratic structure for the movement these big organizations which we don't really have now the National Peace Action Coalition the new move and so on they had big conferences and I attended a lot of them and people argued and discussed and debated they drew in both the far left as well as just ordinary people and they were able to unite and eventually they came up with slogans that I think really united people and the main slogans had to do with immediate withdrawal but there's a difference between the liberals and the far left was that the liberals seemed to believe the United States had some right to be in Vietnam which was there only there because they're replacing French colonialism they didn't have a right to be in Vietnam but they felt the US had a bit so that there should be negotiations and somehow the US should play a role in shaping the future of this other country and left felt the US should just get out and let the Vietnamese solve their own problems it's not that we thought that the NLF and the Hanoi were going to build a democratic social society we knew that they were trained as Dalism and things are going to be rough but we also knew that the longer the war went on the more the worst these groups would get so the demand for immediate withdrawal and unconditional withdrawal had to be had to be centered and eventually the slogans you know bring the troops home now which meant immediate withdrawal are out now support our troops bring them up those were the slogans that united both the far left analysis that this was imperialism with the mainstream which wasn't really ready to go that far but could see that this war was a lost cause and I think you know that's what we have to do today we need unity in the movement around the Middle East around the demand to stop all US supportive of the Israeli state or boycott economically anything to force it to pull back and make concessions and move toward a new kind of society in the Middle East where everybody Arabs and Jews are guaranteed security and peace but that should be the focus I know people want to show solidarity with the Palestinian resistance things like that but the main thing that's not going to unite the American people the main thing we can unite on now is to get the Israeli state to pull back and allow aid and support to come in and build a Palestinian society and I think the only end result can be a democratic state for all the population the two-state thing I think it's finished so at any event you've got to you know deal with both of these elements I think is what I got of that excellent book Radicals in America yeah that brings us through most of my notes so as a final question I always like to ask what if anything are you working on now do you have any new research projects you're putting together any next book you have on the doc at somewhere well I have a number of book projects that I could do but at my age I'm a hesitant to sort of go and you know when you write a book you have to go into hiding for a year to do that unless there was a certainty of a good publication and I think most of my stuff because it's research based you know again I'm not a public intellectual and I don't do clickbait by writing it probably does be another university publication which may or may not get reviewed in a couple of places and some scholars will be happy so I'm not sure about the book stuff I am doing some essays on different writers that I feel have been neglected I think I mentioned earlier this Philip Stevenson wrote these novels about these strikes in the 1930s so at the moment I'm working on that I am following up on this question of Palestine and Zionism and so on and about anti-Zionism in America so I do have in mind maybe a short book called Letter to a Young Anti-Zionist that I'd I would write if I found a publisher that was willing to back it and make a commitment so we'll see what happens Excellent so in the meantime Alan Wald thank you so much for coming on it was great to be here and nice to meet you and I'll be following your podcast