Hello, you've made it to the back of the book, your new favorite arts and culture podcast.

I'm your host, Christopher Scalia, a senior fellow at the

American Enterprise Institute, and author of the still new book, 13 novels Conservatives Will

Love, but probably haven't read. More about that later. I'm delighted to be joined this

episode by Ronnie A. Grinberg. She's an associate professor of history and core faculty member in the Schusterman Center for Judaic and Israel Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She's also the author of Right Like a Man, Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals, published last year by Princeton University Press.

She's here to talk to me today about that excellent book. Ronnie, thank you for joining me at the back of the book.

Thank you for having me. It's a real honor to be here.

Congratulations on the book. As I said, I enjoyed it. It was informative and wonderfully accessible. I really enjoyed reading it.

I really appreciate hearing that and the compliment. So thank you very much.

You're welcome. All right. And one of the things I like about it is that its subtitle made it really

easy for me to come up with the first two questions. The subtitle is Jewish masculinity and the New York

intellectuals. So let's start with the New York intellectuals. Who were they? What is this group you're

writing about? So the New York intellectuals were a group of writers and critics

in the middle of the 20th century. I always like to tell my students that at the time they were actually

quite well known. They sort of bridged what we would think of now, I guess, as the world of academia, though they were intellectuals first

and kind of came to academia second. But they were in America in a period where there was sort of

a broad, I guess, shared public culture to some extent, not to say that there weren't, you know,

I don't know, different areas where you could be in American

culture. But they spoke broadly to a general public. And they were celebrated in these years

as some of the most important writers and critics in the country who edited and wrote for

a series of little journals or journals of public opinion, I guess,

is the more appropriate term.

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