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.
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.
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.
