In a 1944 study of New York City’s public colleges, it was noted that while the intellectual level of the students at City was remarkably high, it was also unfortunately true that the students “frequently feel ill at ease in a social situation and cannot engage in a conversation in other than argumentative fashion.” That sentence speaks volumes to my memories of conversation at City College, at a time when many of the girls—we’d only just been fully admitted to the school in 1951—could and did (and here I include myself) argue just as belligerently as the boys. Meeting up at the lunch table in the cafeteria, where a discussion was usually in progress, we were all, girls and boys alike, immediately enlisted as sparring partners in what always felt like an ideological competition, although it was often impossible to identify the ideology. No matter. Whatever the subject, you took a position and you argued it; that was really all that mattered.
What the 1944 study could not acknowledge was that argumentation did not represent a social failing among working-class Jews—it was a time-honored idiom; it was a way of life. For instance, if my mother ran into Mrs. Bluestein on the corner and Mrs. B said she’d heard it was going to rain, my mother would not say, “Why do you think that, the sun is shining,” but more likely, “That’s ridiculous, the sun is shining.” “That’s ridiculous” is inscribed in a quintessential Jewish activity, Talmudic studies—the perusal of Judaic law as laid down in the Torah. What Talmudists do, in actuality, is dispute one another’s interpretations of the Law point by hairsplitting point, and I mean dispute.
As the generations of immigrant Jews followed one on another, with each one becoming more secular than the last, the convention of impassioned argumentation transferred itself from shtetl religiosity to political modernity. It was during the radicalized 1930s that City College became famous for the depth and maturity of its students’ overheated debating skills, as practiced among a small but significant number of its students who, in response to the highly political atmosphere brought on by the Great Depression—every day, throughout the city, a rally, a meeting, a demonstration, and everywhere picket lines—developed radical debate very nearly to the level of Talmudic studies, except its rallying cry was rather more like “Down with the rabbis, up with the socialists!”