Nathan Glazer - Early Life

Early Life

Glazer grew up in East Harlem and the East Bronx in New York City. His parents, working class Polish immigrants, spoke Yiddish in the home, and his father was a sewing machine operator. His older brother, Joe, would eventually become an acclaimed folk musician who specialized in labor and radical themed songs. Glazer attended public school as a child and eventually the City College of New York. At the time, the early 1940s, CCNY was known as a hotbed of radicalism, and Glazer fell in with a number of other young Marxists who were hostile to Soviet-style communism. Glazer, Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, and Irving Kristol would meet in an alcove of the CCNY cafeteria and "spen their days feverishly trying to understand how the socialist ideal of political and economic justice had ended in Joseph Stalin’s murderous tyranny."

As Glazer would later recall, "one of the characteristics of group was a notion of its universal competence...culture, politics, whatever was happening we shot our mouths off on...It was a model created by the arrogance that if you’re a Marxist you can understand anything and it was a model that even as we gave up our Marxism we nevertheless stuck with." Looking back years later Irving Kristol would remark that "even at City, was never much of a radical."