We’ll look at how five great writers––James Baldwin, Norman Podhoretz, Christopher Hitchens, Alfred Kazin, and E.B. White––describe life in New York. None of the works we’ll read is especially polemical. Rather than exhort or admonish or sneer, they show something important––about black life or Jewish life or poverty or a literary career or being an Oxford scofflaw in love with America. We’ll talk about style, word-choice, sentence structure, paragraph structure, essay structure, and rhetorical technique. Anyone should join who finds most op-ed and political magazine writing nowadays very dull, and believes (rightly) that there’s a better way.
Session 1–(July 23rd)–“I Fought the Law in Bloomberg’s New York” by Christopher Hitchens; “Here is New
York” by E.B. White
Session 2–(July 30th)–“My Negro Problem––and Ours” by Norman Podhoretz; “From the American Scene:
The Harlem Ghetto: Winter 1948” by James Baldwin
Session 3–(August 2nd)–“A Walker in the City” by Alfred Kazin
All sessions will take place on Zoom from 6:30-8:30 PM.
Cole Aronson is a writer living in Jerusalem, Israel. He’s published essays in the Jewish Review of Books, First Things, Tablet, The Point, Public Discourse, and Common Sense (now The Free Press), as well as in the Journal of Analytic Theology. He’s also working on a book-length defense of traditional Judaism. After graduating from Yale College in 2018 with a B.A. in philosophy, he spent four years at Yeshivat Har Etzion in Alon Shevut, Israel. He’s also studying towards an M.A. in philosophy at Hebrew University.
