“A Postscript to the Rosenberg Case": Jewishness, Anticommunism, and the Articulation of Masculine Cold War Liberalism

As writers for magazines like Commentary and as members of the anti-communist American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF), Jewish intellectuals were some of the leading advocates of a newly muscular and highly masculine Cold War liberalism in the postwar years. Eliot Cohen, the editor of Commentary from 1945 until to 1959, reported to leaders of the American Jewish Committee in 1952 that the ACCF was “full of Jewish names.” “Almost every important Jewish writer, scientist, scholar, and university figure or intellectual,” he boasted, was “not merely non-communist but openly anti-communist.”

Underlying Cohen’s celebration of Jewish anti-communism was anxiety about Jewish identity in Cold War America. He and the other Jewish intellectuals were deeply concerned about the stereotype of the “radical Jew.” That stereotype had roots in the Jewish labor movement and Eastern European immigrant experience at the turn of the century but persisted in the postwar period, even as many Jews moved to the suburbs and exchanged urban radicalism for middle class respectability. The arrest and trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the early 1950s only exacerbated such concerns. That the Rosenberg case occurred not only at the height of McCarthyism but in the midst of a “lavender scare” that targeted homosexuals and alleged sexual perverts, and that Jews had long been stereotyped in Western culture as weak, unmanned, and effeminate, is something scholars have not yet explored.

This paper analyzes the intersection of gender, anti-communism, and Jewishness in postwar America. By examining the response of the Jewish New York intellectuals to the Rosenberg case and anti-communism, and their role as leading proponents of a distinctly masculine Cold War liberalism, this paper highlights unease over constructions of Jewish masculinity that complicates the notion that Jews easily synthesized their Jewish identities with the demands of citizenship in Cold War America.