With respect to the stereotype of the jewish-NYC-leftwing-intellectual, this obituary of one Marshall Berman is about as ideal-type as you can get:
‘In a sweat, melting, shedding clothes and tears, flashing hot and cold.” This was how Marshall Berman described the first time he opened Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, a blue fifty-cent Moscow edition he found at a foreign-language bookstore on New York’s Fifth Avenue in 1959…
A life-long New Yorker, Prof. Berman was a writer, Marxist-humanist philosopher, social critic and distinguished professor of political science at the City College of New York. He died in Manhattan on Sept. 11 at the age of 72, after suffering a heart attack at his favourite diner…
Inside the kitchen cupboards of the Upper West Side apartment where he lived for decades, he stored his staples: books. Inside the bathroom cabinets, he stored his balm: more books.
