Remember Bernard Rosenberg
Walzer, Michael
Bernard Rosenberg, a founding editor of Dissent, died earlier this year after a long illness. The following remarks were delivered at his memorial service in May. first encountered Bernie...
...Bernie had his own earnestness...
...a little different from the NewYork socialists, with whom he made a wonderful, a powerful, combination...
...So I didn't get to know Bernie until I started going to Dissent meetings...
...He taught me that you could be whimsical in politics, but only if you were seriously whimsical or whimsically serious—in any case, you had to be able to make an argument...
...He was a Detroit socialist (a Midwesterner...
...He was a radical egalitarian on cultural matters as well as on economic matters, with an American optimism that didn't diminish though it was often disappointed...
...he was also the American...
...Since Lerner was "the book," Levy and Bernie were "the bookends"— earnestness on one side, skepticism on the other...
...he was the enemy of kitsch in all its forms—an enmity that, I think, a lot of people misunderstand . . . as I misunderstood it in the early days...
...He had an American style or, better, an American Jewish style—the incredible wise-cracking quickness, the story telling,the singing, and an intellectual intensity that was expressed without jargon or pretension...
...I was assigned to Levy's section, in recognition, no doubt, of my own undergraduate earnestness...
...We played with their kids, talked about this and that, got onto the subject of popular culture, and suddenly Bernie and Sarah were singing songs from the Broadway theater...
...Bernie's hatred of kitsch sprang from a sense of the real possibilities of popular culture...
...He went back to Detroit after the riots of the sixties...
...And, then, despite the fact, which we both knew, that King and Reuther were preparing to support Lyndon Johnson in 1964, he insisted on a long discussion about which of them should head the ticket, our ticket...
...Bernie wrote on a remarkable range of subjects in those years, but the article I remember best is the one that I co-authored with him• a very short piece in the Fall 1963 issue ofDissent calling for a third party presidential ticket of Martin Luther King and Walter Reuther...
...I could only stutter that it was his idea...
...He had high standards, very high standards, which he defended fiercely, but, unlike many European critics of kitsch, he was not a cultural snob...
...It had to be King at that moment, and yet Reuther was the older man, with a remarkable record of political struggle, a leading position in the labor movement, and much better social FALL • 1996 • 139 In Memoriam democratic credentials...
...Bernie didn't want to be alone in such a significant project...
...That early group of editors was remarkable in their ability to define a political position . . . and demolish all immediately adjacent positions...
...Manny Geltman, who died last year, did this with an undertone of gentleness...
...So, as soon as he was sure that I was engaged, he turned on me and demanded to know why I was advocating such an absurd political adventure...
...Bernie was born and grew up in Detroit, and had a feeling for and wrote about every aspect of American life: cities, factories, unions, streets, gangs, crime, ethnic and religious communities, culture and the arts...
...My wife reminds me of a summer on the Cape when we visited Bernie and Sarah in their new place in Wellfleet...
...The others were either born in Europe or in those parts of New York that were really parts of Europe, and they lived much of their mental lives in the midst of the Russian Revolution or the German Revolution or among the dissidents of East Europe...
...This required a great deal of analysis and debate...
...he needed a coauthor to argue with...
...I suggested some small changes and signed on...
...But at this moment, remembering Bernie, I feel the full force of a line from a song that he surely knew and liked: "There ought to be a law against necessity...
...They sang for two hours, song after song, and I was surprised and delighted, because I had thought that left-wing intellectuals (and I was trying very hard, very earnestly, to be a left-wing intellectual) were not allowed to like that kind of music...
...Above all, he wrote about American popular culture...
...We will find new combinations, or try to, because we are still committed in the same way as Bernie was, because there still needs to be a left opposition and an egalitarian vision, because comrades grow old and die and renewal is necessary...
...we sent him to Chicago to cover the Democratic convention in 1968: who else among us would know his way so well in cities like those...
...Bernie did it with a wit so sharp that most of the people whose positions he demolished never knew how deeply they'd been cut...
...Well, near-despair, for Bernie's humor was always a sign of life and hope...
...first encountered Bernie Rosenberg in Social Science B at Brandeis, where we read mimeographed chapters of Max Lerner's forthcoming book on American civilization, and Max sat on the stage of the largest lecture hall on campus and talked, with Leonard Levy on one side and Bernie on the other...
...Bernie did the first draft...
...Even his funniest pieces, his mockeries and send-ups of academic sociology, say, were deeply serious: close readings, tough-minded analyses, cries of anger . . . or despair about his academic colleagues...
...Among the early Dissent editors, he was the Americanist...
...140 • DISSENT...
...I sat in those meetings with awe...
Vol. 43 • September 1996 • No. 4
