Luke Ford

In Montreal, in the fall of 1933, two Jewish radicals name their son after two dead men. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti die in the electric chair in Massachusetts in 1927. Six years later the Bercovitches fold the two names into one and lay it on a baby. Sacvan. His mother, Bryna, writes; decades on she publishes a memoir she calls “Becoming Revolutionary.” The name the parents give the boy carries a verdict on the country to the south. It says he belongs to the executed, to the workers of the world, to the cause the American state killed in a Dedham courtroom.

The boy grows up to become the foremost American reader of the Puritans.

Sacvan Bercovitch (1933–2014) takes a long road into the New England mind. He studies at the New School and at Reed, earns a degree at Sir George Williams College in Montreal in 1958, finishes a doctorate at Claremont in 1965. He teaches at Brandeis, at the University of California-San Diego, at Princeton, at Columbia. In 1984 Harvard gives him the Powell M. Cabot Professorship in American Literature. The chair belonged to Perry Miller (1905–1963), the scholar who recovered the lost intellectual world of seventeenth-century New England and seated the Puritans at the head of the American imagination. The anarchists’ son takes the place in the shrine.

He builds his career on a single argument. America turns dissent into consensus. In The Puritan Origins of the American Self (1975) and The American Jeremiad (1978) he traces a rhetoric that runs from the Puritan sermon through the Declaration and the Gettysburg Address and out into the national literature. The Puritan jeremiad laments the people’s fall from the errand, and in the lament it renews the errand. The complaint feeds the mission. The preacher who scolds the colony for backsliding has already agreed that the colony has a holy purpose worth backsliding from. In The Office of “The Scarlet Letter” (1991) and The Rites of Assent (1993) Bercovitch carries the argument into Hawthorne and into the liberal culture of the nineteenth century. He shows that the symbol of America holds such reach that it gathers up its own critics and seats them at the table. The man who attacks the country in the country’s name has accepted the terms. He has assented.

The argument earns him enemies on both flanks. The right reads him as a subversive, a founder of the New Americanists who pull down the canon. The left reads him as a consensus historian who launders American exceptionalism. Both sides miss the better joke, which is that Bercovitch supplies his own clearest case. The son named for two hanged anarchists takes Perry Miller’s chair, enters the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1986, collects the Lowell Prize, the Hubbell, the Bode-Pearson, the lifetime awards. His dissent becomes the consensus’s crown. He performs the rite of assent with his career, then writes the book on it.

Here Ernest Becker (1924–1974) does the work. In The Denial of Death (1973) Becker argues that culture exists to let a man feel heroic in the face of his own end. Every society hands its members a hero system, a set of roles and prizes and sacred objects through which a mortal earns the sense that he counts and that some part of him will outlast the body. The hero system answers the terror of death with the promise of significance.

For Bercovitch the hero system is the text. Not the country, not the party, not the radical kitchen of his childhood. The text. He reads for a living, and reading confers on him the significance the revolutionary creed once promised his parents. The seminar room is the church. The close reading is the liturgy. The footnote is the laying on of hands, the touch by which a living scholar reaches a dead writer and an unborn student in one motion. His monument is the Cambridge History of American Literature, eight volumes, twenty years as general editor, a structure raised to stand after the builder lies down. A man who fears death edits an eight-volume history. The volumes keep their place on the shelf when the body goes into the ground.

Bercovitch gives his life to a single sacred word, and his lasting gift to scholarship is a demonstration. The word means a different thing inside each hero system that holds it dear. The word is America.

Run it past the believers and watch it change shape.

A Cuban man works a cafeteria window in Hialeah. He crossed the water in 1962 and built a counter that sells cortaditos to a line of men in guayaberas. For him America is the thing Havana stopped being. America is the deed to the property, the register he owns, the absence of the comandante. “Aquí nadie me quita lo mío,” he says. Here no one takes what is mine.

A Lakota man stands on dry land above Pine Ridge. For him America is the broken treaty, the Black Hills seized after the gold, the word on the parchment the courts affirm and the government ignores. America names the power that promised everything and kept nothing. “They signed it,” he says. “Ask them what their own signature buys.”

A Marine comes home to a town in eastern Ohio with the folded flag from his brother’s coffin. For him America is the oath he swore and the men he carried out. America is not an argument. It is a debt. “You weren’t there,” he says, and the sentence shuts the subject.

A Punjabi engineer raises a company in a rented room in Fremont. He arrived on a student visa with two suitcases and a thesis on compiler design. For him America is the place that lets a man with no name and no cousins raise money on a slide deck. America is the meritocracy, the garage, the term sheet. “Nobody asked who my father was,” he says, and he offers it as the highest praise a country can earn.

A Black church mother in Charleston sits in the second pew of an AME congregation older than the Republic. For her America is the promise still unpaid, the Jordan the people have not crossed. She sings an arrival she has not lived to see. “He may not come when you want Him,” she says, “but He’s always on time.” The America she loves lives in the future tense.

Five lives, one word. Five countries inside the borders of one. Becker accounts for the spread. The sacred object binds the hero system by meaning whatever the system needs it to mean. The Cuban’s America and the Lakota’s America cannot both be true, and each one bears the full weight of a life. To call either man wrong is to ask him to give up the thing that makes his days count against the dark. The word survives the contradiction because the contradiction never reaches consciousness. Each believer hears his own meaning and assumes the others hear the same. That assumption holds the country together. Bercovitch spent fifty years proving the country runs on it.

Late in life he goes home. He puts down the American text and returns to Yiddish. He translates Sholom Aleichem. He takes a Mellon grant for a project on the Ashkenazi Renaissance of 1880 to 1940, the lost world of the murdered millions, the tongue of the Montreal kitchen. The man who showed how America turns its dissenters into communicants spends his last working years among the ghosts his parents fled and mourned.

Becker reads the ending as the tell. What a man returns to when the career is spent shows what he held sacred beneath the official faith. Bercovitch served the American text across five decades and demonstrated that it could hold any meaning a believer carried to it. At the close he goes back to the one hero system that named him before he could speak. Sacco and Vanzetti. The son keeps faith with the dead men after all, in a language almost no one left alive can read.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization…

If John J. Mearsheimer is right, his anthropology provides a striking, structural validation of Sacvan Bercovitch (1933–2014), the preeminent cultural historian of American Puritanism. At the same time, it completely flips the meaning of Bercovitch’s most famous concept: the American jeremiad.
Bercovitch argued that America is unique because its national identity is built entirely on a rhetorical and ideological matrix inherited from the New England Puritans. The jeremiad — a political sermon that laments the moral decline of the community while simultaneously reaffirming its sacred, exceptional mission — functions as a powerful ritual of consensus. For Bercovitch, dissent in America does not challenge the status quo; instead, by invoking the “promise of America,” critics are trapped by a rhetoric that binds them closer to the dominant liberal culture.
Mearsheimer’s realism interacts with Bercovitch’s critical framework across several primary concepts.
Bercovitch tracks how the Puritan political sermon successfully joined civic and spiritual selfhood into a single transcendent ideal: “America.” He demonstrates that this rhetoric allows the nation to absorb multi-ethnic immigrant groups under a shared identity of preordained purpose.
If Mearsheimer is right, Bercovitch has mapped the precise engineering of an exceptionally powerful tribal value infusion. Because the human animal has a long childhood, the group must inject its moral code into the individual before his critical faculties develop. The American jeremiad is not merely an interesting literary style; it is a highly evolved instrument of group socialization. It allows a vast, diverse population to function as a tightly bound, highly cooperative tribe. What Bercovitch calls the “rites of assent”—the cultural rituals through which individuals buy into the American myth—are the exact evolutionary mechanisms required to maintain internal cohesion in a competitive world.
Bercovitch’s most subtle insight is that ideological co-optation in the United States is absolute. When an American radical protests against the state, he almost always does so by demanding that the nation live up to its founding ideals of liberty and rights. Bercovitch argues that this form of protest unconsciously reinforces the mainstream liberal framework, ensuring that radical movements end up strengthening the capitalist state rather than subverting it.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology explains why this cage is inescapable. A man cannot easily reason his way out of his early childhood socialization. The moral language infused into him by his society forms the very boundaries of his thought. The American dissenter cannot invent a genuinely post-tribal critique because his mind has been shaped by the group’s survival rhetoric. His protest is not an independent act of pure reason; it is an internal negotiation within the tribe’s pre-established boundaries.
Bercovitch notes that the word “American” is unique because it combines intense nationality with a claim to universalism—the belief that the American model is a world-redeeming promise meant for all mankind. Mearsheimer’s The Great Delusion focuses on this precise trait, reading it as the fatal flaw of liberal states.
Here, Mearsheimer provides the hard structural consequence that Bercovitch avoids. Bercovitch analyzes the universalist myth as a self-perpetuating literary and cultural consensus that keeps domestic peace. Mearsheimer reveals that when this universalist tribe is turned outward into an anarchic international system, the myth becomes a engine of aggressive foreign policy. The American state, convinced that its parochial tribal values are actually universal human rights, seeks to remake other societies in its own image. Mearsheimer’s realism predicts the inevitable collapse of this ambition, showing that foreign populations, bound by their own childhood value infusions, will always reject the imported American script.
Bercovitch highlights how the New England Puritans relied heavily on “typology”—a method of biblical interpretation where they mapped their contemporary migration onto the historical journey of the ancient Israelites. They did not view themselves merely as a religious sect, but as the literal “New Israel” entering a promised wilderness. Bercovitch analyzes this as a brilliant rhetorical invention that fused secular history with sacred destiny.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology provides a functional, realist explanation for this typological maneuver. In an anarchic, unfamiliar, and hostile environment, a migrating group faces immediate existential threats. The primary requirement for survival is absolute internal solidarity and a clear definition of territorial rights. By adopting the identity of ancient Israel, the Puritan leadership deployed a highly effective tool for group cohesion. The typology did not operate as a detached literary style; it served to draw a sharp, unyielding boundary between the in-group and the out-group, justifying territorial acquisition and military mobilization against rival populations under the ultimate sanction of divine mandate.
In The Office of the Scarlet Letter (1991), Bercovitch traces how the early Puritan rhetoric of isolation and spiritual purity evolved smoothly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to endorse commercial enterprise, individual enterprise, and the rise of the industrial marketplace. He shows that the language of spiritual growth was seamlessly transferred to the growth of material wealth.
Mearsheimer’s realism explains this transition as a standard process of state optimization. A group’s cultural narratives always adapt to serve its material survival needs. As the American colonies expanded into a vast continental arena, isolation was no longer a viable strategy for long-term security in a competitive world. The state needed to maximize its material power, which required economic scaling, infrastructure, and wealth accumulation. The rhetorical shift Bercovitch documents is the cultural reflection of this structural transformation. The social animal did not abandon its tribal framework; it simply updated its ideological standard to sanctify the economic growth necessary to outcompete European rivals and project power across the continent.
A core element of Bercovitch’s analysis of the jeremiad is that the sermon relies on a permanent state of crisis. The ministers consistently claimed that the community was on the verge of ruin due to its sins, yet this declaration of crisis never led to despair; instead, it served to re-energize the community’s commitment to its mission. Bercovitch calls this a “rhetoric of controlled anxiety.”
Mearsheimer’s anthropology, paired with alliance theory, strips the psychological mystery from this pattern. The constant invocation of external or internal crisis is a classic strategy used by an elite coalition to maintain its status, manage its reputation, and enforce internal discipline. By keeping the population in a state of controlled anxiety, the ruling elite justifies its authority, silences domestic competitors, and ensures that individual resources remain dedicated to the preservation of the group’s institutions. The jeremiad’s cycle of lamentation and reaffirmation is the structural logic of a coalition maintaining its grip on power under the guise of moral reformation.
If Mearsheimer is right, Bercovitch stands as a master cartographer of the American mind. He correctly saw that American liberalism is not a bloodless collection of abstract rights, but a thick, totalizing, and deeply religious myth designed to enforce conformity. His realist correction is simply that this powerful consensus is not a unique cultural puzzle to be analyzed through literary close reading. It is the ideological armor of a highly competitive, exceptionally successful global tribe using universal language to preserve its own dominance.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

If David Pinsof is right, Bercovitch’s entire framework is an elegant decoding of his own class’s ultimate survival strategy. The American jeremiad is not a deep psychological or cultural neurosis. It is the business model of the secular intelligentsia.

Bercovitch spent his career analyzing why American intellectuals, writers, and reformers are so obsessed with public lamentation. From the seventeenth-century Puritan ministers to nineteenth-century writers like Emerson, down to modern progressive activists, the formula is always identical: “We have strayed from our noble ideals, and we must reform ourselves to fulfill our mission.”

From Pinsof’s perspective, this ritualistic lamentation is a highly strategic tool used to secure elite status. By framing society’s problems as a failure to live up to stated ideals, the intellectual class builds a permanent market for its own intervention. If the problem with America is that it has a bad motive (e.g., raw greed or a desire for dominance), then you need a cop, a boundary, or a structural overhaul. But if the problem is that America has misunderstood its true mission, then you need an interpreter.

The jeremiad is a device that turns every structural, competitive conflict into a moral misunderstanding. The intellectual positions himself as the mandatory guide who gets to tell the public exactly how they have strayed and how they can be redeemed.

Bercovitch’s most famous insight was that in America, radical dissent is actually a form of consensus. When a critic stands up and says, “America is failing its promise of equality,” he is not destroying the myth; he is validating it by invoking the “promise.” Bercovitch argued that this ideological mechanism allows American capitalism to absorb every radical movement, turning rebellion into an affirmation of the status quo.

Pinsof’s logic reveals the raw interest behind this mechanism. The secular university class does not absorb dissent because they love cultural harmony; they absorb dissent to protect their monopoly over the attention economy. If a radical movement completely rejects the system, the university professor becomes obsolete.

By channeling raw, visceral anger into a rhetorical dispute over “American ideals,” the academic elite tames the threat. They take the raw energy of social conflict and translate it into articles, books, and Ph.D. seminars. It is a flawless turf defense: it transforms an existential threat to the hierarchy into a fresh supply of academic capital, ensuring that no matter how angry the public gets, the intellectual class remains in charge of the curriculum.

Bercovitch traveled the world lecturing on the “American consensus,” analyzing how language traps citizens in a loop of self-correction. He wrote with a brilliant, ironic detachment, positioning himself as the ultimate secular observer of this massive ideological trap.

If Pinsof is right, Bercovitch’s brilliant detachment was the ultimate status signal. By mapping the exact boundaries of the ideological hole Americans are stuck in, Bercovitch established himself at the absolute apex of the academic hierarchy. He wasn’t solving the misunderstanding; he was proving that the misunderstanding was so deep, and so total, that only a Harvard professor of the highest order could trace its lineage. He did not aim to dismantle the American ideology because that ideology was the exact machine that paid his salary, granted him tenure, and ensured his name would be remembered as the definitive chronicler of the national mind.

One fall morning in 2003 Carolyn Gold Heilbrun (1926-2003) walks through Manhattan with her friend Mary Ann Caws (b. 1933). She says she feels sad. Caws asks why. Heilbrun answers, “The universe.” Then she goes home. The next morning her family finds her with a plastic bag over her head and the sleeping pills gone. The note runs seven words. “The journey is over. Love to all.”

Her son tells reporters she carried no illness, no diagnosis, no decline anyone could name. She was seventy-seven and in good health. She judged the story finished, so she finished it.

To read that death as despair reads it from the wrong hero system. Heilbrun spent forty years teaching women to seize authorship of their own lives. The death was the last sentence she wrote, and she meant it to scan.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gives us the frame. Man knows he will die. He cannot live inside that knowledge, so he builds a hero system, a scheme of significance that lets him feel he counts in something larger than his body and longer than his years. The hero system tells him what earns honor and what earns shame. It hands him a way to deny the grave by purchasing symbolic immortality. Sacred values are the coins of that economy. A man spends his life chasing the coin his system mints, and he dies defending the conviction that the coin is real.

The coin Heilbrun minted has a name. She called it the plot, and she taught women to refuse the plots the culture had stamped for them. Fiction about women, she argued, fixed on a girl whose fate hung unsettled, while the men got the questing, destiny-making hero. Two endings waited for the heroine, marriage or death, and both closed the book. So she made a curse word of closure. Closure was the passive life. Closure was contentment as a sedative. In Writing a Woman’s Life (1988) she told women that adventure starts at the moment they stop hoping for the thing to be over, settled, swept clear. The hero does not reach closure. The hero keeps the road open.

This is the heart of her system, and it explains a death that looks, from outside, like the one act she preached against. She did not fear endings. She feared imposed endings. The marriage plot writes the woman. Old age writes the body. Decline composes a final chapter no one chose, the slow loss Becker keeps pointing at, the animal truth under every hero system, that the body fails and soils and rots and drags the proud self down with it. Heilbrun called that chapter the miserable endgame. Her solution holds the logic of her whole life. If the body means to write the last page, seize the pen first. Authored closure is not the enemy. Authored closure is the throne. The pen, not the plot.

Hold the word completion up to the light and watch it change color in each hand that takes it.

In Heilbrun’s hand, completion means the ending she composed instead of the ending that composed her. The chosen death is the final proof that the self, not the body and not the culture, holds the pen. Becker would recognize the move at once. The hero system makes its last stand against creatureliness at the exact spot where creatureliness wins. She refused to be a character. She insisted on staying the author through the final line.

Now put the same word in the hand of an Orthodox Jew, which is the world Heilbrun left behind. She described her parents as humanistic Jews, and she walked from the synagogue into the secular academy and never looked back. In the world she left, the body is not hers to spend. It is borrowed. The soul returns when He calls it home and not one hour before. Completion there means the commandment kept, the deathbed Shema, the endurance held to the appointed time. To name your own hour is to steal what belongs to Him and to call the theft freedom. The pen she prized is, in that hand, a thing no man owns. Same word. Opposite content. The exit she chose is the one exit her grandparents’ world forbids without exception.

Hand the word to a Stoic and it warms again, because here she finds an ancestor. Seneca (c. 4 BC-AD 65) and Cato the Younger (95-46 BC) taught that the wise man keeps an open door. The chosen death proves that the tyrant, the disease, the slow ruin, none of them owns him. Completion means the rational exit taken on one’s own terms while the mind stays clear. Heilbrun’s hero system did not spring from nothing. It descends from this. Strip the feminism and her logic is old Roman, the citizen who walks out of the banquet before the host can throw him out.

Hand it to a hospice chaplain and the color goes cold. For the chaplain a good death is received, not authored. Completion means surrender, presence, reconciliation, the hand held at the end. The point of the last mile is the company on it. The chaplain hears “the journey is over” and grieves that she walked that mile alone by design, having built a life and a craft around the conviction that the self should never need company to finish a sentence.

Hand it to Diane Coleman (b. 1953), who founded a movement of disabled people against assisted death, and the word turns dangerous. Praise a healthy woman of seventy-seven for erasing herself and call it her freedom, and a message travels straight to the wheelchair and the nursing home and the ledger. If the self-chosen death of the able is heroism, the continued life of the dependent starts to look like a failure of nerve, or worse, a cost. Completion-by-choice becomes an expectation pressed on the people society would rather not fund. The sharp part is that Coleman and Heilbrun both stand inside the same feminism. One woman’s autonomy is the other woman’s death sentence dressed as a right.

Hand it, last, to a woman who cleans the apartments. Heilbrun authored her life from a high floor on the Upper West Side, with a country house upstate and a summer place in Alford and a fresh home bought at sixty-eight for the sole purpose of being alone in it. A room of one’s own, and then several more rooms. Her son recalled that she stopped giving dinner parties and had her groceries delivered, since squeezing oranges at Fairway wasted time she meant to spend writing. Time was the luxury. The authored plot runs on it. For the woman who delivers those groceries, completion might mean the last child raised and the rent made one more month, not a chapter she got to compose at leisure. The status detail does the argument. Authorship is a commodity, and Heilbrun could afford the whole inventory.

So her hero system stood on a foundation few could rent, and she knew the cost of standing on it inside the academy. She published fifteen mystery novels as Amanda Cross and hid the name for years, because the scholars’ hero system coded detective fiction as unserious, a thing a serious mind would not stoop to. She split herself to protect the half that earned the academy’s coin. A fan unmasked her through copyright records. The immortality project leaves a paper trail. Then came the long fight at Columbia, where she became the first woman tenured in the English department in 1972 and spent the years after, by her account, kept off the committees that ran the place, ridiculed, ignored. A former dean read her charge of ongoing bias and called it “rubbish.” She remembered Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) choosing his disciples among the young men and holding the young women at a distance, while Jacques Barzun (1907-2012) became, in time, a friend. She built for other women the hero system the men had denied her, and she taught a generation to want the quest.

Then she walked one mile with Caws, said the universe made her sad, went home, and closed the book on her terms.

Read the seven words of her note from inside her system and they read as a triumph, the author’s signature on a finished work. Read them from the synagogue and they read as a theft from Him. Read them from the Stoic’s porch and they read as the open door used well. Read them from the chaplain’s chair and they read as a hand let go too soon. Read them from the wheelchair and they read as a warning to everyone whose life costs more than it earns. Read them from the kitchen where the oranges get squeezed and they read as a luxury good. Becker’s point sits under all six readings. There is no view from nowhere. Each of us reads the note from inside the scheme that lets us feel we count, and the word completion will keep changing color for as long as there are different ways to deny the grave.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization…

If John J. Mearsheimer is right, his anthropology subverts the feminist literary criticism and social theories of Carolyn Gold Heilbrun whose work operates on the central premise that gender roles and identities are artificial, restrictive social constructs that individual reason can dismantle.
In Toward a Recognition of Androgyny, she argued for a modification of conventional masculine and feminine traits, treating gender fluidity as a liberating path toward greater human rationality and peace. In Writing a Woman’s Life, she claimed that women can actively “reinvent” their narratives and gain autonomy by consciously stepping outside the cultural scripts written for them by a patriarchal society. Mearsheimer’s realism upends Heilbrun’s emancipatory project in several ways.
Heilbrun treats a woman’s life narrative as something that can be self-consciously redesigned through critical reflection and new literary models. If Mearsheimer is right, this capacity for individual self-authoring is an illusion. Because humans have a long childhood characterized by intense socialization, the family and surrounding society impose an overwhelming value infusion on the individual long before her critical faculties develop. By the time a woman is mature enough to read feminist critique or attempt to rewrite her life, her foundational moral code, behavioral constraints, and social attachments are already fixed. The individual does not rewrite her cultural script; the cultural script has already manufactured the individual.
Heilbrun viewed rigid gender roles as unnecessary historical aberrations—artificial barriers that could be dissolved through the adoption of an androgynous ideal. Mearsheimer’s anthropology implies that these social arrangements are not arbitrary constraints that can be rationalized away; they are structures designed for group survival. Throughout human history, societies have specialized roles to protect the long childhood of human offspring and to maximize collective cohesion against rival groups. What Heilbrun diagnoses as a patriarchal distortion of human potential is the standard operating setup of the social animal under conditions of anarchic competition. A society that abandons these functional, cohesive structures in favor of individualized, fluid identity projects risks fracturing the very unit that ensures its security.
Heilbrun spent her career fighting to institutionalize feminist criticism and expand opportunities for women in the academy, treating the university as a space that should be governed by universal principles of equality and merit. Mearsheimer’s model, paired with David Pinsof’s alliance theory, suggests a far more calculated function for the feminist academic movement. The push to “decentralize” the traditional canon and establish gender studies was not a neutral triumph of objective reason; it was a highly sophisticated strategy deployed by an elite intellectual coalition. By organizing around a shared moral creed, Heilbrun and her allies successfully claimed institutional power, rewarded loyal partners, managed reputations, and policed boundaries against their status rivals in the traditional academic establishment.
In her later works, including The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty (1997), Heilbrun argued that as a woman enters her sixties, she finally escapes the reproductive and domestic demands of society. Heilbrun treated old age as a revolutionary threshold where a woman can discard her lifelong social programming, achieve an unconditioned autonomy, and live entirely for herself.
Mearsheimer’s realism shows that this late-stage liberation is an anthropological fiction. A man or woman is a profoundly social being from the start to the finish of life. The intense value infusion received during childhood is not a temporary skin that can be shed in old age; it is the permanent architecture of the mind. When an older woman attempts to step outside the conventions of her society, she does not enter a post-tribal space of pure individual reason. She simply remains dependent on the broader state structure that ensures her safety and material survival, mistaking the security provided by her group for absolute personal independence.
Heilbrun wrote extensively about the unique value of female friendship and exclusive women’s networks, treating them as egalitarian sanctuaries free from the aggressive, competitive, and hierarchical logic of male-dominated institutions. She viewed these groups as models for a more peaceful, non-combative human future.
Mearsheimer’s worldview, supplemented by Pinsof’s alliance theory, strips the romanticism from these arrangements. Exclusive networks—whether male or female—are not escapes from politics; they are primary political instruments. Humans form groups to cooperate internally so they can compete more effectively externally. The women’s groups Heilbrun championed operate on the exact same structural logic as any other tribe: they use intense socialization to enforce internal conformity, punish members who break ranks, and mobilize collective power to claim resources and status from rival groups. The language of mutual support and egalitarian peace is the ideological standard used to bind the coalition together.
Heilbrun’s entire career as a critic and professor rested on the liberal belief that by rewriting literary scripts—such as the feminist detective fiction she wrote under the pseudonym Amanda Cross—she could gradually re-engineer human behavior and reduce societal conflict. She trusted that exposure to alternative narratives would expand individual reason and empathy, leading to a more rational world order.
Mearsheimer’s ranking of human faculties reveals why this pedagogical project has a built-in breaking point. Reason is the least important of the three sources of preference. A collection of progressive novels cannot override the primal, unreflective survival instincts that emerge when groups face real scarcity or existential competition. Heilbrun’s belief that narrative could civilize the species ignores the permanent reality of structural anarchy. When the baseline security of a society is threatened, the sophisticated literary models Heilbrun designed are instantly overridden by the raw solidarity required for the group to survive.
If Mearsheimer is right, Heilbrun’s faith in the liberating potential of literature and the individual intellect overestimates the power of independent reason. Women, like men, remain social animals whose primary environment is the protective vehicle of the group, and they cannot simply think their way out of the deep socialization that ensures collective survival.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

If David Pinsof is right, Heilbrun’s entire academic and literary project was built on a masterful deployment of the misunderstanding myth to capture institutional power for a new coalition.
In Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (1973), Heilbrun argued that civilization was destroying itself through excessive, polarized masculinity, as evidenced by the Vietnam War. Her solution was a move toward androgyny—the fluid blending of masculine and feminine traits. She framed gender polarization as a historical mistake, a cultural misunderstanding that could be cured by a revolution in consciousness.
From Pinsof’s perspective, sexual dimorphism and gendered behaviors are not an arbitrary cultural whoopsie or a conceptual error. They are evolved, highly strategic configurations driven by reproductive competition, resource acquisition, and coalitional survival.
By framing these deeply rooted biological and social structures as a mere “misunderstanding” that could be corrected by literary analysis, Heilbrun achieved a massive status lift. She positioned the feminist literary scholar not just as an analyst of books, but as an essential civilizational savior who holds the blueprint to end war and violence.
In Writing a Woman’s Life (1988), Heilbrun argued that women had been trapped for centuries because they lacked the proper narratives to imagine independent lives outside of marriage and domesticity. She claimed that the patriarchy maintained control by depriving women of text, and that by writing new biographies and analyzing hidden narratives, women could achieve liberation.
Pinsof’s logic reveals the strategic utility of this argument. Women do not make choices about career, family, and status because they are hypnotized by a bad script or because they lack an adequate library. They make choices based on the actual incentives, trade-offs, and competitive constraints of their immediate environments.
By inventing the idea that women are paralyzed by a lack of narrative, Heilbrun created a vast market for her own profession. If liberation requires the curation, decoding, and writing of complex texts, then society desperately needs university professors and literary critics to guide them. The “lack of narrative” is an intellectual fiction that transforms a raw struggle over domestic and economic resources into an academic curation project.
For decades, Heilbrun kept her identity as mystery writer Amanda Cross a strict secret until copyright records exposed her. She stated that she hid her popular fiction because Columbia’s traditionalist, male-dominated English department would have used her commercial writing to deny her tenure, viewing it as insufficiently serious.
Under Pinsof’s frame, this secrecy was a flawless exercise in elite resource acquisition. Heilbrun understood the zero-sum nature of academic warfare perfectly. She knew her colleagues were competitors fighting for limited tenure slots and institutional authority.
By adopting a pseudonym, she successfully extracted capital from two completely different markets simultaneously: she gained mass popularity and financial profit from the public as Amanda Cross, while maintaining the pure, high-status, anti-commercial credentials required to win the tenure fight at Columbia as Dr. Heilbrun. She did not change the rules of the academic hierarchy; she played them with expert strategic duplicity
In 1992, Heilbrun abruptly retired from Columbia University, declaring that she was doing so to protest the department’s institutional discrimination and hatred toward women. She framed her departure as a moral sacrifice, a public protest against a structural failure of equity and fairness.
Pinsof’s essay shows that partisan conflict within an institution is a fight over the coercive apparatus of that institution — who gets hired, who gets funded, and whose ideology controls the curriculum. Heilbrun’s public retirement was not a retreat; it was a high-stakes tactical strike.
By leveraging her immense cultural capital and using the language of moral martyrdom, she successfully infamized her departmental rivals in the national press. It was a dirty fight wrapped in the language of justice. She used her retirement to permanently brand her opponents as backward bigots, ensuring that even in her absence, her progressive coalition would hold the moral high ground and eventual control over the department’s future.

Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928) grows up behind the counter of her father’s pharmacy in the northeast Bronx, and the first thing she learns about herself she learns from the other children. They have a word for her, and the word comes with a stone behind it. She is the one whose people killed their God. She walks home past the row houses where the December windows fill with small lit tableaux, the plaster infant in the straw, the ox, the kneeling kings. The neighbors love these figures. The figures glow in the cold. The girl carries home the knowledge that she belongs to the people who refuse to bow to the made thing, who keep a fence around this exact glow.

That refusal becomes her life. Read the essays and the stories and you find one commandment under all of them, the second one, the one against the graven image. Ozick writes against idolatry the way other writers write for love or money. It is her subject, her fear, and her accusation, and she turns it most often against herself.

To see why the prohibition rules her, borrow the frame of Ernest Becker (1924-1974). In The Denial of Death Becker argues that a culture is a scheme for outliving death. Man knows he will die and cannot bear the knowledge, so he builds a system of heroism, a set of cosmic stakes, and earns a place in something that will not die. The warrior dies for the flag. The scientist adds his name to the permanent record. The mother lives on in the child. Each culture hands its members a different ladder out of the grave, and the climbing feels like the most serious thing a man can do, because it is. Becker calls the ladder the immortality project. He adds a darker claim in Escape from Evil. Men kill to feed the project. The other tribe carries death, so the other tribe must die, and the killing buys a little more life for the killer’s god and the killer’s name.

Now set Ozick’s commandment beside Becker’s argument, and something turns over. Becker says every culture makes an idol. The hero system is a graven image of meaning, a thing built by human hands and then worshipped as though it came down from the sky. The flag, the record, the nation, the masterpiece, the self crowned as its own author. Ozick’s tradition names this and forbids it. Hers is the hero system built to diagnose the hero system. The Jew, in her telling, is the man who knows that the made thing kills, that the idol is death wearing the mask of life, and who lives under a Law that forbids him to crown himself or his works. She reads Becker before Becker, and from the inside.

The trouble is that she wants to be an artist, and the artist makes idols for a living.

She knows this from her own youth. As a young woman she does not worship God so much as she worships Henry James (1843-1916). She writes her master’s thesis on him. She reads him the way the devout read scripture, and she gives him years, and she becomes, by her own later account, an old man’s sensibility before she has lived a young woman’s life. In the essay she later calls “The Lesson of the Master” she sets down the cost. She had made a priest of herself in the temple of art, and the god she served was a man who had made his own renunciations, and she copied the renunciations without the life that earned them. She had committed the sin. She had bowed to the made thing, and the made thing was a novel, and the novelist was a man.

Her clearest confession comes dressed as a story. In “The Pagan Rabbi” a brilliant scholar of the Law, Isaac Kornfeld, hangs himself from a tree by the water, and he hangs himself with his own prayer shawl. He has fallen in love with the spirit of the tree, a creature of the green world, Pan’s world, the world of nature worshipped for its own sake. He has left the Word for the Image. He has chosen the living tree over the dry Law, the creature over the Creator, and the choice kills him. Ozick writes the story as a warning, and the warning points at the writer who wrote it. To make a character breathe is to take up the work of the one who breathes life into clay. The novelist works the same trade as the idol maker. He shapes a figure from nothing and asks the world to love it. Ozick spends a career inside this trade while believing the trade is forbidden, and the belief gives her work its heat. She is the pagan rabbi. She knows the tree is beautiful. She knows the shawl is for prayer and not for hanging.

Here the frame opens onto its largest claim. A sacred word does not carry one charge. It carries the charge its hero system needs it to carry, and the same word can save one man and damn another. Watch the word idol travel.

In a stadium in Seoul a girl of nineteen lifts a lightstick with forty thousand others, and the lights move together as one, and when the dancer she loves walks to the front of the stage she cannot get her breath. She has saved for the ticket for a year. She runs an account that tracks his schedule and defends his name. Her word for him is idol, and the word holds no shame in it. It holds devotion, belonging, a reason to wake early, a place in a crowd that loves the same face. The idol gives her the thing Becker says a hero system must give. He lifts her out of the small life and into a large one. Tell her the word names a sin and she will not follow the sentence.

In a temple in Tamil Nadu a priest bathes the stone in milk and honey before dawn. He has performed the rite that calls the divine into the image, and for him the image holds the god the way a hearth holds fire. The deity wakes, eats, dresses, sleeps. When a visitor from a missionary tradition calls the practice idolatry the priest hears an insult laid across the holiest hour of his day. The word that organizes Ozick’s reverence organizes his shame, and he rejects the word. The stone, for him, never stood between the worshipper and God. The stone is where God consents to be met.

In a study lined with bound volumes a cleric of a purifying school speaks of shirk, the setting of any partner beside the One. He shares Ozick’s horror of the image and carries it past where she dares. Where she fears the idol in a novel he fears the idol in a shrine, a tomb, a saint’s grave loud with petitioners, and men of his persuasion have leveled such tombs to the ground. The same fence around the same God, and on his side of it the bulldozer. Ozick guards the commandment with an essay. He guards it with rubble. The shared word measures the distance between two heroisms more than it joins them.

In a white room in Chelsea a curator stands before a large canvas and speaks to a collector in a low voice. “He’s the real thing,” he says. “A monster. An idol.” In his mouth the word climbs to the highest praise the trade can offer. The idol is the artist who will outlast the season, whose name the museum will keep, whose work the market will not let die. This hero system runs on the worship Ozick forbids. It crowns the maker. It hangs the made thing on a white wall under a soft light and asks the room to fall silent before it. The curator and the rabbi use one word and kneel in opposite directions.

In a seminar room a theorist of the old left writes commodity fetishism on the board. The idol he hunts is the price tag that hides the worker, the brand that men love as though it loved them back, the thing that drinks up the labor poured into it and shows the buyer a bright and shining face. He has no God to defend, and yet he keeps the prophet’s quarrel with the idol, the charge that men bow to the work of their own hands and forget their own hands made it. Strip the theology and the structure remains. The idol is the human power that escapes its makers and rules them.

Five rooms, one word, five charges. The girl with the lightstick and the priest with the milk give the idol their love. The cleric and the prophet of the left give it their hatred, and they hate it for opposite reasons, the one because it insults God and the other because it hides the worker. The curator gives it his money and calls the gift reverence. Ozick stands among them with the second commandment in her hand and watches the word she has built her life on mean its reverse three feet away. The frame holds. A sacred value lives inside the hero system that keeps it, and outside that system it turns to something else, sometimes to its opposite.

The stakes rise past argument when Ozick turns to the murdered. In The Shawl a mother watches a guard throw her infant against the electric fence, and the story runs a few pages, and Ozick has written of her unease at making such a story at all. To make the death beautiful is to make an idol of it. To shape the camps into a fine sad object for a reader to admire is to do the dead a second wrong. She wants memory and refuses monument. The covenant remembers the way she trusts. It keeps the name and forbids the statue. She writes the murder and then distrusts the writing, and the distrust is the Jewish part of her, the fence she will not climb even when her own gift carries her toward it.

Becker might not let her stand clear of the charge. Your covenant, he might say, is an immortality project like the rest. The Word is your bid for permanence. Torah outlasts the body, the name in the long chain of names outlasts the grave, and your books make a second bid on top of the first, since you, who fear the idol, will leave a shelf of idols behind you with your name down the spines. She might not deny it. She might answer that the difference sits in one place and one place only. Every other hero system lets the man become the god. It crowns the maker, the nation, the genius, the self that would be its own father, the self that bows to its own face in the work. Hers forbids the crowning. It hands the permanence to Him and leaves the man a servant who may build but may not worship what he builds. The idol is the self mistaken for the eternal. Ozick spends her life making things that tempt her to that mistake, and naming the mistake, and making the next thing anyway.

She is the pagan rabbi and she knows it. The tree is beautiful. The shawl is for prayer. She writes the warning, signs her name, and the signature is the idol and the confession at once.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization…

If John J. Mearsheimer is right, his anthropology provides a striking, unexpected validation of Cynthia Ozick, specifically her theological defense of Jewish particularism and her fierce critique of Western aestheticism. Yet, it simultaneously strips her work of its transcendent, divinely commanded authority, reducing her theological vision to a highly functional evolutionary survival device.
Ozick operates as a deeply theological essayist and fiction writer. In landmark collections like Art & Ardor (1983) and stories like The Pagan Rabbi, she draws a sharp, unyielding line between the Jewish tradition—rooted in history, memory, the commandment, and the collective covenant—and what she terms the “pagan” or “Hellenistic” impulse, which prioritizes individual aesthetic beauty, nature worship, and universalist literary imagination. For Ozick, being Jewish is an act of rigorous, conscious resistance against the seductive, atomizing allure of Western culture.
Mearsheimer’s thesis interacts with Ozick’s worldview on several fronts.
Ozick argues that a Jew cannot separate himself from the historical memory and moral commandments of his people without losing his identity. She views the Torah and Jewish law as a totalizing blueprint for a collective life. If Mearsheimer is right, Ozick’s description of this inescapable inheritance is anatomically correct. The long human childhood requires an intense value infusion from the surrounding society before an individual’s critical faculties ever mature. What Ozick frames as a sacred, historical covenant binding generations together is the exact sociological mechanism Mearsheimer describes: a highly effective, rigorous system of early socialization designed to seal group loyalty and preserve the collective unit.
While Mearsheimer’s anthropology explains the immense holding power of Ozick’s tradition, it undermines her belief in its transcendent origin. Ozick presents the rejection of paganism as a continuous, demanding exercise of human moral choice and intellectual fidelity to God’s law. Mearsheimer’s hierarchy of preferences places individual reason last, far behind socialization and innate sentiments. A man does not remain loyal to the covenant because he has rationally weighed the options and chosen holiness over pagan nature worship; he remains loyal because his initial group socialization fixed his moral framework in childhood. The “pagan rabbi” in Ozick’s famous story who falls in love with a nature spirit is not experiencing a philosophical lapse of reason; he is a social animal attempting to slip out of his tribe’s survival vehicle—a move that Mearsheimer’s model predicts will fail or result in social destruction.
Ozick is famously skeptical of the religion of art. She argues that literature becomes an idol when it is treated as a self-contained, sovereign universe capable of generating its own moral light, a direct critique of the Romantic “lamp” championed by critics like M. H. Abrams. Ozick demands that literature serve a moral and historical purpose. Mearsheimer, along with David Pinsof’s alliance theory, confirms Ozick’s suspicion but alters the diagnosis. Art and high aestheticism are indeed idols, or rather, they are ideological camouflage. The universalist, aesthetic realm that liberal intellectuals worship is not a neutral zone of creative freedom; it is a sophisticated cultural badge used by a competing elite coalition to claim status and moral superiority over traditional, cohesive groups. Ozick correctly identifies that Western aestheticism aims to dissolve the distinct boundaries of her group, but realism reveals that this is a standard maneuver in the game of tribal competition.
In her famous essay Who Owns Anne Frank?, Ozick voiced profound outrage over how Anne Frank’s diary was systematically sentimentalized and universalized by Western liberals to preach a bland, abstract message about the generalized goodness of the human spirit. Ozick insisted that this universalization was a erasure of the specific, targeted destruction of the Jewish people. Mearsheimer’s critique of liberal universalism explains this exact friction. Liberalism downplays the tribal nature of human beings, treating individuals as atomistic rights-bearers and projecting its own ideals onto foreign realities. The liberal attempt to transform Anne Frank into a bloodless symbol for all humanity is the precise mechanism Mearsheimer predicts: a powerful dominant culture using universal language to rewrite the hard, particularist realities of group conflict.
Ozick makes a sharp distinction in her criticism between “liturgical” literature—writing that serves the collective memory, history, and survival of a specific people—and “pagan” literature, which exists purely for individualistic, aesthetic pleasure. She argues that true Jewish writing must be liturgical, prioritizing the community’s historical narrative over private artistic experimentation.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology, paired with alliance theory, shows that Ozick has correctly identified the primary function of language. Human narrative did not evolve to allow lone individuals to express their unique inner light; it evolved as a tool to coordinate behavior, signal group loyalty, and enforce compliance within a coalition. What Ozick calls “liturgical” literature is simply narrative operating in its native, evolutionary state: binding the tribe together to ensure survival in a competitive world. The “pagan” literature she rejects is an evolutionary aberration—a luxury product of stable, secure societies that mistakenly believe they can survive without strict group boundaries.
Ozick places the Concept of the Commandment (the mitzvah) at the center of human morality. She argues that true righteousness is not an innate sentiment or a product of individual reason, but an act of disciplined obedience to a historic, external law. For Ozick, morality is a yoke that a man must consciously choose to carry.
Mearsheimer’s hierarchy of human preferences upends this theological voluntarism. Because reason and conscious individual choice arrive late and rank last, a man does not carry the yoke of the commandment because he continuously decides to do so. He carries it because the value infusion of his long childhood socialization has wired his brain to accept the group’s rules as absolute. Ozick’s vision of a highly conscious, intellectually driven moral fidelity masks a hard biological necessity: the long childhood ensures that the group can stamp its survival rules onto the individual before he ever gains the critical faculties to rebel.
Ozick has frequently condemned Jewish intellectuals who abandon their particularist heritage to embrace universalist political creeds, human rights campaigns, or cosmopolitan artistic movements. She views these figures as tragic moral failures who have been seduced by the false gods of Western secularism, trading their historical birthright for a hollow assimilation.
Mearsheimer’s realism offers a structural explanation for this behavior that strips away Ozick’s theological outrage. These cosmopolitan intellectuals are not suffering from a personal moral collapse; they are executing a standard tribal migration. In an anarchic, status-driven arena, individual survival and prestige often require an actor to join the most powerful dominant coalition available. The universalist Western intelligentsia is itself a formidable tribe that uses the language of global human rights to claim elite status and police its own boundaries. The intellectuals Ozick laments have simply calculated that their survival and status prospects are better served by joining the universalist coalition than by remaining within a smaller, particularist unit.
If Mearsheimer is right, Ozick emerges as a remarkably clear-eyed observer of human boundaries, one who recognized that universalist narratives are threats to group survival long before political realists codified the charge. Her tragedy, under a realist reading, is that the distinct, holy boundaries she spends her life defending are not commanded by Him from above, but are the permanent, protective walls built by an endangered tribe to survive in an anarchic world.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

Cynthia Ozick presents a complex challenge for the misunderstanding myth. She is a fierce defender of high culture, the sacred nature of the text, and the central role of the Jewish literary tradition. She rejects the soft, therapeutic view of literature that claims art exists simply to make us nice or to foster vague human warmth. In her essay Moral Necessity, she argues that literature must possess a fierce, demanding moral gravity.
If David Pinsof is right, Ozick’s high-minded defense of the literary imagination is not a noble stand against cultural decay. It is the defensive strategy of a premium brand protecting its market monopoly.
Ozick frequently writes about the distinction between the “holy” and the “profane” in literature. She treats the act of writing and deep reading as a high, almost liturgical calling. For Ozick, a culture that abandons tough, complex narrative in favor of quick entertainment is losing its soul and its capacity for deep truth.
Pinsof might say that by framing literature as a sacred liturgy that requires deep reverence and immense intellectual labor, Ozick creates an elite caste system. If literature is easy, anyone can do it, and the cultural critic has no value. If literature is a demanding, sacred mystery, then you need a highly specialized priesthood to interpret it. Ozick’s insistence on the “holy” nature of the text is a tool to secure status. It allows the high-culture intellectual to look down on popular culture not merely as a different taste preference, but as a profane moral failure. The rigor she demands is a barrier to entry that keeps the masses out and keeps the value of her own cultural capital high.
Ozick has argued that the imagination is inherently moral because it allows us to conceive of the “other.” She writes that the capacity to imagine what it is like to be someone else is the very engine of human morality. This is a classic, sophisticated version of the misunderstanding myth: we do bad things because we fail to imagine each other properly, and literature fixes this gap.
Pinsof might say that the imagination is not a moral tool; it is a weapon. Humans do not lack the capacity to imagine their rivals; they use their imagination to invent sophisticated strategies to defeat them. When Ozick frames the imagination as an instrument of empathy, she is providing a cover story for her own class. Intellectuals survive by selling the idea that their specific skill—manipulating words and ideas—is the key to human goodness. Pinsof’s logic shows that we do not commit cruelty because we suffer from a failure of imagination. We commit cruelty because we want resources, status, and power over our rivals. Ozick’s “moral imagination” is an elegant story that hides these ugly motives behind a screen of literary beauty.
A major theme in Ozick’s work is the war against idolatry. She defines an idol as anything that is static, visible, and worshipped for its own sake, whereas the true Jewish literary tradition is driven by the invisible, demanding “Idea.” She warns that modern culture is constantly falling back into the pagan worship of physical icons, celebrity, and material success.
Pinsof might say this is a direct, zero-sum turf war over what constitutes status. The “idols” Ozick attacks—material wealth, political power, physical beauty, and mass popularity—are the main currencies of her rivals in the social hierarchy. The businessman, the politician, and the pop culture star win in those arenas. The intellectual cannot compete there.
By declaring that material and popular success are mere “idolatry” and that the invisible “Idea” is the only thing of true value, Ozick attempts to devalue her competitors’ currency while inflating her own. It is a highly savvy maneuver: if the invisible Idea is supreme, then the writer who handles those ideas sits at the top of the human hierarchy, looking down on the billionaires and celebrities as primitive idol-worshippers stuck in a deep misunderstanding.

The shop sits on a Brooklyn corner in the 1930s. Sawdust on the floor, the smell of blood and brine, a scale on the counter. Beny Chametzky came from Volhynia in 1913, learned the trade, and bought the place. Anna came from Lublin and ran a sewing machine in a sweater factory. They speak Yiddish at the table. The older son, Leslie, ships out with the infantry, lands in North Africa, falls into German hands, and comes home through Sicily. The younger son, Jules Chametzky (1928–2021), watches the meat go out the door and the language stay in the house. He learns young that a people can be cut down and a tongue can go silent, and that somebody has to keep the account.

Ernest Becker (1924–1974) argues that every culture hands its members a hero system, a scheme that lets a man feel he counts against death. The hero system tells him how to earn cosmic significance, how to leave a mark the grave cannot take back. Religions promise this through the soul. Nations promise it through the flag and the line of descent. Becker’s claim is that the terror of dying drives the whole enterprise, and that men will kill and die to keep their immortality project intact. Chametzky builds his on letters. He builds it on the canon.

To put a writer in an anthology is to confer a small immortality. The editor stands at the gate. He decides whose sentences students read in 2050 and whose go to the landfill. Chametzky spends his life at that gate, and he spends it widening the opening. His essay broadens the canon to take in the regional, the ethnic, the racial, the sexual. He writes the first book-length study of Abraham Cahan (1860–1951), the Yiddish editor and novelist of the immigrant Lower East Side, and titles it From the Ghetto. He co-edits Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology. He gathers his encounters with the great Jewish writers into Out of Brownsville. In his own account of the early years, the work means letting in Jewish, Black, and women writers, fresh currents against the dam of the New Criticism.

The shape of the work repeats the shape of the wound. A boy from a Yiddish house, his kin in the path of the German erasure, grows up to run the ledger of who survives in print. The anthology is a Yizkor book at scale, the memorial roster a congregation reads for its dead, widened to a national literature. His immortality project answers the death he fears most, the erasure of his own kind.

The word he loves carries other freight in other houses.

In a study hall not far from where Beny kept the shop, a young man in a black hat bends over a folio. For him the canon closed long ago. The text came down at Sinai and the sages built a fence around it. To broaden it is no project, it is a breach. His work is transmission, word for word, the same page his grandfather swayed over. Where Chametzky opens the gate, the yeshiva man guards it shut, and both believe they serve permanence.

Across the river a professor of the old school keeps a list of the hundred books a free man should read. To him Chametzky’s broadening reads as dilution, the slow drowning of Homer and Milton under the minor and the local. The same act Chametzky calls justice the traditionalist calls vandalism. One word, canon. The traditionalist mourns the books pushed off the raft. Chametzky mourns the writers never let aboard.

On the other side of the world a Maori carver works a beam for a meeting house. His ancestors live in the whakapapa, the genealogy chanted aloud, and in the figures cut into wood. He keeps no canon of printed books. To him the written page might be the thief that lets a people forget what it once held in the mouth. Chametzky’s whole apparatus, the press, the anthology, the footnote, looks to the carver like the instrument of forgetting.

In a glass office a founder hears the word canon and reaches for “legacy.” The old code runs slow. The canon is technical debt. Permanence comes through the next release, not the preserved text. He builds his immortality on disruption, on the thing that erases what came before. The founder and Chametzky both chase a name that outlasts the body. They disagree on whether the past is the treasure or the obstacle.

January 1954. A witness names Chametzky before the federal board that hunts subversives. The local papers run it. The president of the University of Minnesota convenes a committee. Chametzky sits across from them with his graduate work, his teachers Leo Marx (1919–2022) and Henry Nash Smith (1906–1986), his half-built life as a scholar, and a question on the table about his loyalties.

He had drawn his line already. He joined the American Labor Party, the NAACP, the youth groups. He did not join the Communist Party. Three things kept him out. He rejected its line on the Jewish and Zionist question. He rejected social realism as the measure of a book. And he rejected the Stalinist habit of settling an argument by destroying the man who lost it. Then came the hanging of Rudolf Slánský (1901–1952), the Czech Communist, a Jew, strung up by his own party. For Chametzky the rope around Slánský settled it. The Communist immortality project, the workers’ paradise that licensed any corpse, fed on Jews no less than on anyone else, and called it history.

The committee clears him later that year. He keeps his place. He has watched a rival hero system, the state’s loyalty apparatus, decide whether a man is surplus, and he has seen what another one does to its own when it judges them so.

Out of that refusal grows the second word he holds sacred. Solidarity. He is a union man before he is a professor, a member of the electrical workers in his Brooklyn years. At the University of Massachusetts he builds the faculty union and serves as its third president. He pulls the Amherst faculty and the smaller, angrier Boston faculty back into one body and writes the rules for their quarrels. He quotes Lenin (1870–1924) on what a union is, a defensive arm raised to take a blow. Then he adds his own clause. You need the arm so that you do not just barely survive, but live with dignity. Survival alone falls short. A man owes himself a life with a floor under it, and the floor gets built by men standing together.

The word travels badly.

In a monastery the monks keep silence and sing the hours. Their solidarity is the communion of saints, the living and the dead in one choir, each man dying to his own will so the body might pray as one. They stand together by sitting still and saying nothing of themselves. Chametzky’s solidarity speaks up, files the grievance, signs the contract. The monk’s empties the self. Both answer death. One by the contract, one by the Rule.

In the mountains a Pashtun elder reads solidarity as the blood tie and its debts, melmastia and badal, the hospitality a man owes his guest and the revenge he owes his line. The bond runs through kin and honor. A union of strangers who happen to share a payscale might strike him as no bond at all.

To the young officer at the academy solidarity is the man on his left and the man on his right. Unit cohesion. No one left on the field. He will die for the three men in his fire team and could not tell you their politics. Chametzky’s solidarity sets labor against capital. The officer’s sets flesh against fear under fire. Same word, different field, each built to hold a line.

In a hill town a Sicilian widow keeps the older meaning, the one that runs against his. Solidarity is silence. You owe the family your mouth shut. You never speak to the state. Chametzky’s solidarity is the open contract, the named member, the voice raised in the hall. Hers is the sealed lip, the refusal to sit on any record at all. The same word names the thing he does and the thing he most refuses.

His third word puzzles the others as much. Dignity, the floor under the man. The dueling aristocrat hears dignity and reaches for his sword, since for him it climbs, a height defended against insult, not a floor secured by contract. The Stoic hears it and looks inward, to the citadel no master can enter, and finds the floor beside the point, since the wise man keeps his dignity in chains. The Confucian elder hears it as face, the right order of ranks, each man dignified by filling his station. Chametzky alone hears, in dignity, a thing you bargain for and win in a room with a contract on the table.

He dies in Amherst in 2021, married more than fifty years to the writer Anne Halley (1928–2004), his name on the Massachusetts Review he started with a memo in 1958. The shop in Brownsville is gone. The Yiddish at his parents’ table is gone with the world that spoke it. What he built to answer that loss still stands on a shelf, the anthology with its widened roster, the names he would not let the landfill take. He spent his life at a gate deciding who survives in print, the same work, in the end, as the union man deciding who survives with dignity and the boy deciding whom to read into the next century. The hero system he chose let a butcher’s son confer immortality on others while he was still alive to sign the page. Whether the canon he widened holds, or narrows again, or breaks apart, the next century decides. He took his stand at the gate and held it.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization…

If John J. Mearsheimer is right, his anthropology undermines the intellectual and political legacy of Jules Chametzky, a pioneer of ethnic studies, a champion of multi-ethnic American literature, and a co-editor of Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology.
Chametzky spent his career arguing that the American literary mainstream is constantly revitalized, integrated, and transformed by the unique voices of marginalized ethnic, racial, and regional writers. Through books like Our Decentralized Literature and his work founding The Massachusetts Review, Chametzky operated on a progressive, pluralistic model: that cultural mediation and literary translation can bridge divisions, allowing minority groups to integrate into a wider democratic culture while retaining their distinct heritage.
Mearsheimer’s realism upends Chametzky’s pluralistic optimism in several ways.
Chametzky’s scholarship on Jewish-American and Black writers treats ethnic identity as a site of rich, ongoing cultural mediation—a process where an individual navigates his immigrant or minority heritage and negotiates his place within the broader American fabric. If Mearsheimer is right, this focus on literary mediation misses the primary force shaping human life. Individuals do not fluidly negotiate their identities through essays and novels; their moral frameworks and group allegiances are largely sealed by intense childhood socialization and innate sentiments long before they can think critically. The deep “value infusion” of the initial tribe anchors the individual. What Chametzky analyzes as a smooth, creative synthesis of cultures is a luxury narrative that can only exist when a dominant group or state provides total security.
By co-editing the Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature and anthologizing Black writers, Chametzky sought to expand the canon to foster mutual understanding and democratic inclusion. Mearsheimer’s anthropology, paired with alliance theory, implies that these canonical projects do not work as tools for universal harmony. Narratives and cultural products evolve to bind coalitions, signal group loyalty, and manage reputations in a competitive arena. Chametzky’s push to decentralize literature was not a neutral aesthetic correction; it was a highly sophisticated move by an elite intellectual coalition designed to claim moral and institutional authority within the university system. The anthology functions as a badge of tribal alignment for the academic left, rather than a bridge to post-tribal coexistence.
Chametzky’s lifelong political and academic work—including his early activism with the NAACP and his labor union leadership—pre-supposed that disparate social groups could build stable, lasting coalitions based on shared progressive ideals, fair practices, and rational consensus. Mearsheimer’s worldview is tragic and static. Because humans are tribal at their core and driven by survival under conditions of scarcity and anarchy, the thin ties of shared literary appreciation or progressive political rhetoric are the first things to snap during a crisis. When real group interests, resources, or safety are threatened, individuals do not fall back on the multi-ethnic synthesis Chametzky curated in The Massachusetts Review. They abandon the cosmopolitan coalition and retreat to their primary, unreflective group identities for protection.
Chametzky wrote about early Jewish-American writers like Abraham Cahan, analyzing their work as a complex, self-conscious psychological negotiation between the old-world ghetto and new-world American modernity. He viewed assimilation as a fluid, literary, and intellectual journey through which individuals wrestled with competing cultural ideals.
Mearsheimer’s realism strips the romance from this process. Assimilation is not a series of individual literary choices; it is a structural capitulation to a more powerful survival vehicle. When an immigrant group arrives in an anarchic or highly competitive environment, individual survival depends on embedding oneself within the dominant, protective social structure. The shift in language, dress, and values that Chametzky tracks in literature is the standard operation of the human animal adapting to a new dominant tribe. The writer’s prose does not drive this process; it merely documents the surface adjustments after the structural reality of power has already forced the realignment.
A core tenet of Chametzky’s critical work is that ethnic and marginalized literature acts as a corrective, purifying force that holds American democracy accountable to its universalist promises. He believed that by introducing the stories of the marginalized into the mainstream, literature could expand the capacity for empathy and reason within the dominant culture.
Mearsheimer’s hierarchy of human preferences reveals why this humanist hope fails. Reason and text-based empathy rank last among the forces that govern human behavior, falling far behind the unreflective survival instincts of the group. A dominant coalition does not alter its structural behavior or yield material power because it reads a moving novel about a minority group. The universalist democratic promises Chametzky looks to are not active moral truths; they are the ideological standard of the ruling coalition. The dominant group will tolerate and even celebrate multi-ethnic literature during times of peace and abundance, but it will discard those empathetic insights instantly the moment its own collective dominance or security is threatened.
Through his decades of work with The Massachusetts Review, Chametzky sought to create an independent cultural space where writers, civil rights activists, and labor leaders could unite their voices to drive political reform. He operated on the liberal assumption that a shared commitment to artistic excellence and social justice could bind disparate groups into a durable political force.
Mearsheimer’s realism exposes the fragility of this setup. A literary magazine cannot manufacture a tribe. Real, binding social units are forged through intense childhood socialization, shared ancestry, or the immediate, mutual reliance required to survive in a hostile world. The coalition Chametzky assembled in print was an elite, intellectual arrangement held together by shared language and status goals. Because it lacked the deep, non-rational value infusions that generate true sacrifice and group loyalty, such a coalition possesses no structural staying power when real political or material conflicts emerge between the constituent groups.
If Mearsheimer is right, Chametzky’s decentralized literature captures the surface ripples of ethnic assimilation during a rare period of domestic stability. It mistakes a temporary cultural truce for a permanent transformation of the human animal, who remains stubbornly tribal from start to finish.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

If David Pinsof is right, this multi-ethnic literary project rests on a false premise. Chametzky treats cultural friction as a big misunderstanding that can be cured by reading immigrant stories.

Pinsof reveals that ethnic groups do not clash because they lack empathy or do not understand each other. They clash because they compete for zero-sum status, resources, and control over the state. A group understands its rivals well. It demonizes them to win. The intellectual tells a nicer story. He claims that the public needs his curated anthologies to overcome bigotry. This claim turns the literary critic into an indispensable social healer.

By expanding the canon to include Black, Jewish, and immigrant writers, Chametzky did not just discover hidden artistic value. He built a new alliance engine for the secular intelligentsia.

An intellectual gains elite status by deciding who belongs in the canon. Books like From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan allow the professor to serve as a high priest for the marginalized. He translates the immigrant experience into academic capital. He uses this capital to justify his authority over the culture. The study of decentralized literature becomes a way to signal progressive moral superiority over the provincial middle class.

Chametzky also worked as a union leader, heading the faculty union at the University of Massachusetts. In the union hall, he engaged in a direct, zero-sum fight over salaries, contracts, and workplace power. Pinsof would argue that this union work reflects how humans operate. It is a rational struggle for resources.

The contradiction lies in the academic work. The intellectual acts like a savvy primate when fighting the administration for a contract, but he turns around and writes essays claiming that society’s deep wounds are just cognitive errors and narrative omissions.

If Pinsof is right, Chametzky’s career is a monument to the survival strategy of the academic class. The professor creates a market for his own intervention. He insists that reading ethnic literature fixes a broken world. In reality, the world functions exactly as natural selection designed it to function, with rival coalitions fighting for dominance. The professor merely designs a sophisticated lens to examine the hole, ensuring that he receives the credit—and the paycheck—for managing the view.

To fully strip away the misunderstanding myth from Jules Chametzky, you have to look at the specific machinery he used to construct his career. Chametzky did not just analyze text; he built institutions like The Massachusetts Review and traveled Europe as a Fulbright professor teaching American Studies.

If Pinsof is right, every one of these high-minded achievements was a tactical maneuver in a zero-sum game of status and power.

Chametzky co-founded The Massachusetts Review in 1959 to create a space where literature, art, and public affairs could converge. The stated mission was to break down institutional barriers, foster deep cultural dialogue, and heal a fragmented society by exposing readers to radical new perspectives.

Pinsof might say that a literary journal is not a bridge; it is a border checkpoint. It is a tool used by a small group of academic elites to decide who is allowed into the intellectual marketplace. Chametzky did not print minority and radical writers to cure public ignorance. He printed them to build a proprietary network of alliances. By acting as the gatekeeper who “discovered” and validated these voices, Chametzky accumulated immense cultural capital. The journal did not heal society’s fragments; it established Chametzky and his peers as the mandatory brokers who get to decide which fragments are considered respectable.

Chametzky spent significant time abroad as a Fulbright professor in countries like Germany, lecturing on American literature and ethnic diversity. The stated goal of the Fulbright program is classic misunderstanding-myth ideology: to promote mutual understanding between the people of the United States and other countries, reducing international friction through educational exchange.

Pinsof might say that Chametzky’s European lectures were not an exercise in international empathy; they were a highly successful export of class ideology. By teaching foreign elites how to interpret American society through the lens of literary multiculturalism, Chametzky was expanding the market share of his own profession. He was telling European academics: “The old, raw, capitalist America is crude, but we—the literary intellectuals—possess the sophisticated tools to understand and fix it.” It was an international alliance-building project designed to validate the moral superiority of the university class over the bourgeois business class, both at home and abroad.

When Chametzky worked to integrate Jewish-American, Black, and immigrant writers into the standard curriculum, it was framed as a noble correction of a historical error. The narrative claimed that the old WASP-dominated canon was a product of narrow-minded bias, and that a wider canon would create a more democratic, empathetic student body.

Pinsof might say that the old canon was not a mistake, and the new canon was not a cure. The old canon was a tool used by an older elite to maintain its status. Chametzky and his generation of progressive, multi-ethnic intellectuals did not dismantle the idea of a dominant hierarchy; they launched a hostile takeover of it. By inventing a new set of literary requirements based on identity and marginalization, they rendered the old guard’s expertise obsolete. You cannot teach the new canon without Chametzky’s anthologies and frameworks. The “inclusive canon” was a highly effective lever used to displace an entrenched academic rival and secure jobs, prestige, and institutional control for a new coalition of professors.