Learning on the Left: Political Profiles of Brandeis University 9781684580118, 9781684580125

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Learning on the Left

Stephen J. Whitfield

Learning on the Left Political

Profiles of Brandeis

University

Brandeis University Press Waltham, Massachusetts

Brandeis University Press © 2020 Brandeis University Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by Richard Hendel Typeset in Miller and Didot by Passumpsic Publishing For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Brandeis University Press, 415 South Street, Waltham MA 02453, or visit http://www.brandeis.edu/press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-​­in-​­Publication Data available upon request Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-68458-011-8 Ebook ISBN: 978-1-68458-012-5 5 4 3 2 1

To the students I have been fortunate enough to know

Contents 1 i n troduction 1 2 t he origins 7 3 early atmos pherics 33 4 cha mpions of h u ma n ri g h ts 65 5 t wo a m erica nists 98 6 t hink ing a bo ut justice 128 7 f oreign- ​­born ra dica ls 160 8 t wo m a ga zines 192 9 t he sixties 221 10 cha mpions of civ il rig h ts 252 11 ra cia l grieva nce: ja n ua ry 1969 283 12 nativ e-​­born o utl aws 315 13 spasm s of v iolence 345 14 t hink ing a bo ut ca pita l is m 377 15 t he trava il of ref orm 410 16 conclusion 443 ack nowledgm ents 461 n otes 465 i n dex 567

Learning on the Left

1

Introduction In the spring of 1982, historian Morton Keller served as Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at Queen’s College, Oxford. While there, he was given a chance to meet the Patroness of the College, the Queen Mother herself. Upon meeting the visitor from the United States, she inquired where he usually taught. “Brandeis, ma’am,” Keller responded. The Queen Mother sighed: “There are so many new universities today.” 1 At last count, the United States harbors well over four thousand colleges and universities. This book depicts only one of them. It is not an institutional history. No scholarly history of Brandeis exists, nor is this volume bucking to be so regarded. It does not aspire to provide a record of campus activities and issues. Instead, Learning on the Left recounts part of the past of a university that is distinctive, because it hired faculty members and produced students who made a difference in American politics. They became noteworthy as political activists, as political thinkers, and as political writers. They exerted considerable influence in a nation that achieved its independence two centuries before Keller’s encounter with the Queen Mother. Within the boundaries of American politics, this particular university has punched above its weight. That is the thesis of this book. The case presented here is cumulative, so depth must be sacrificed to breadth, though the endnotes can serve to supply a fuller paper trail. Because Brandeis was founded as recently as 1948, any historical account is bound to be 1

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brief. Frederick M. Lawrence, who served as eighth president, liked to point out that more Americans have walked on the moon than have headed Brandeis University. Learning on the Left rarely analyzes the internal policies that presidents and deans and provosts have pursued. Yet it cannot pretend to be comprehensive in the profiles that it presents, a goal that would tax the energy of the author as well as the patience of his readers. All of the figures depicted in Learning on the Left sought to act and think politically. Ideally, that means to temper commitment with realism, earnest passion with sound judgment, the ardor of dedication with the coolness of reason. How convenient that Brand and Eis happen to be the German terms for “fire” and “ice.”2 How effectively these elements were reconciled in the lives and works of faculty and alumni can be judged from the following pages. What unites the figures portrayed in this book is of course their affiliation with the university. But no study of their political salience can be circumscribed to the campus; the careers that they forged afterward (and sometimes before) must be traced to verify the argument of this book. Their lives and their ideas testify to the significance of what these figures did when they were not inhabiting classrooms in Waltham, Massachusetts. The portraits are therefore largely extracurricular, and the implications may well resonate beyond the Brandeis campus. They also constitute a case study of the fate of liberalism, a term that has had a heavy workout in Western thought over the span of a couple of centuries. How might it be defined? In the United States, in the second half of the twentieth century, a keen devotion to the ideal of an open society, as well as protection of disfavored minorities in particular, is what separated liberals from conservatives. The left has tended to favor change over stability, to prefer liberty over authority, to seek remedies in government rather than to cut slack to corporations, and to invest in hopes for a better future more than in reverence for the past. For the first fifteen years or so of Brandeis University, the progressivism of its faculty and students diverged from the national mood of conservatism. For the next decade or so, liberalism was subjected to pressure from a nascent militant left. Animated by greater urgency than liberals, radicals have been more sensitive than others to economic injustice, and their challenge to the limits of postwar liberalism also partakes of the story. Republicans have served on the faculty and could be found in the student body. So have conservatives. But their influence never remotely 2

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introduction

matched the role that socialists as well as liberals played in the earliest decades of the university, and that liberals have played all the way down to the present. In tracking how a new educational institution affected the nation’s politics, many ways of telling this story are available. Here its structure is thematic. Its span briefly includes the twenty-​­first century. Yet Learning on the Left is also weighted heavily toward the first three postwar decades. That is because an act of more distant historical retrieval is more urgent and more necessary than when memories are fresher and the actuarial tables have yet to take full effect. When Brandeis was tiny, with graduating classes in the low three figures, its faculty in particular took on a larger-​­than-​­life impact that was bound to be reduced as the size of the community grew. But the top-​­heavy chronological emphasis has a further justification. Like virtually all other American campuses, Brandeis became depoliticized by the end of the 1970s. Protests became rarer and less disruptive. Faculty and alumni continued to serve as an index of the vicissitudes of the public culture, but the political profile of the institution became much less odd and less noticeable. No emphatically conservative perspective emerged, but campus discussion of public issues became far less impassioned. Because Learning on the Left mostly belongs to the genres of political and (somewhat less so) intellectual history, entire disciplines that are essential to a liberal arts curriculum are ignored. In 2017 two faculty members arrived in Stockholm to share a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (though Brandeis lacks a medical school). The research of neuroscientists Jeffrey Hall and Michael Rosbash in circadian rhythms has no overt political implications, so such scientists are absent from the pages that follow. So is Roderick MacKinnon ’78, a biochemistry major, who won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2003 “for discoveries concerning channels in cell membranes.” The creative arts are also omitted (with a few exceptions), as are the classics. Yet even such fields as anthropology and economics are largely neglected. The most famous account of faculty-​­student relations at Brandeis is undoubtedly Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life’s Greatest Lesson (1997). Mitch Albom ’79, who majored in sociology, wrote this memoir of his friendship with a former professor, Morris S. Schwartz (1916–95); and the book remained on the best-​­seller lists in both hardcover and paperback for more than seven years.3 The apolitical Albom

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produced five subsequent number 1 best sellers, but any assessment of their impact (in forty-​­two languages) belongs in a very different book. Did Brandeis University decisively shape what its faculty members and alumni have said and done in American political history? How big a difference did Brandeis make in stimulating or encouraging or reinforcing the political ideas and commitments to which the men and women in this book subscribed? No answer can be satisfactory; no stab at generalization can be much more than guesswork. Coincidence cannot be discounted. Some faculty members were only briefly employed at Brandeis. Some arrived with their political views already fully formed. Take the most famous person ever to teach at Brandeis. She once confided to a friend that she would have voted socialist in 1932 (the candidate was Norman Thomas), but for the impediment that her own husband was running for the presidency too.4 His name was Franklin D. Roo­se­velt. Others associated with Brandeis developed their most important ideas only after leaving Brandeis, and then may have significantly revised or even repudiated them. Difficulties of generalization became evident in a 2011 monograph that the firm of Couleurs Livres published in Brussels. The ten intellectuals who were profiled personified the “nouveaux penseurs de la gauche américaine.” Three of these fresh thinkers brandished Brandeis connections: political theorist Michael Walzer ’56, political theorist Susan Moller Okin, and sociologist Richard Sennett. But because John Rawls, born exactly nine decades earlier, could hardly have been called a “new” theorist, and because Charles Taylor is a Canadian, the space allotted on this list to Brandeis looms even larger. And yet the commonalities it might have fostered cannot easily be tabulated. Even when the undergraduate experience can be deemed formative, that phase of life usually lasts no more than four years. Consider, for example, the close friendship of the political theorist Michael J. Sandel ’75 and the journalist Thomas L. Friedman ’75. They happen to have met as classmates in Hebrew School in Minneapolis, where, as seven-​ ­year-​­olds, they co-​­starred in a Purim play, and a little over a decade later linked up at Brandeis.5 It would be foolish to conjecture that, had they matriculated elsewhere, Sandel and Friedman would have occupied different (or lesser) niches in public life. The achievements of these two alumni can hardly be ascribed to their indebtedness to the institution that certified the completion of their degree requirements. On the 4

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introduction

other hand, it cannot be entirely irrelevant that the men and women portrayed in these pages attended Brandeis, or taught there, as opposed to, say, Brigham Young or Texas Christian or Ole Miss. Communists believed that the forces of history could be deciphered, and typically began their analyses by proclaiming that “it cannot be an accident, comrades . . .” Such is the supposition of this book too. Incontestable proof of crucial institutional influence is elusive, but such disproportionate political involvement of Brandeis professors and alumni is suggestive. If so many new universities (as well as older ones) exist today, what distinguishes Brandeis from the others? Is there a way to solve the riddle of singularity? Jewish auspices and atmosphere certainly made Brandeis unique among the secular institutions of higher learning in America. But how Jewish values have actually operated and how they might be applied have been contested from the beginning, and no consensus has ever quite emerged. The quest for the meaning of that legacy is not likely to be fulfilled. The arguments that it has inspired have not ceased, and perhaps that irresoluteness is for the best. The story of Brandeis is embedded within a broader struggle, by which American Jewry fought for the right to be equal while also asserting the freedom to be different. But not everyone portrayed in this book is Jewish, and not everyone who is Jewish displayed interest in the implications of that identity. The Jewish sponsorship of the university has nevertheless been very important; and its Jewish milieu—even if not quite entirely definable—has been recognizable. But to account for the pronounced leftward tilt of the faculty and alumni, a religious explanation should not be overstated. In making the case for the necessity of Brandeis, founding president Abram Leon Sachar (1899–1993) highlighted the eagerness of Jews to join the philanthropic procession that began with the denominational backing of the seminaries of the colonial era. This slant characterizes his own indispensable memoir, A Host at Last (1976), an account that packs far more information into it than any other volume about the institution that he headed for the first two decades. Sachar sought to present its creation as a perpetuation of the colonial tradition, as a replay of the formation of seminaries that were intended to train the Protestant ministry. He wanted Brandeis to be appreciated as an extension of an academic legacy that entwined scholarship and salvation.6 Brandeis was therefore to be a gift, offered to the nation by the most

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conspicuous minority in the annals of Christendom. The men and women portrayed in this book, whether as reformers or as radicals, as insiders or as incendiaries, might therefore be understood as pumping life into the lineage of dissidence in the vicinity of the Pilgrims’ pride. But Sachar’s claim was also misleading. For what is so exasperatingly peculiar about the Jews is that they are not merely a religious group. They do not constitute the counterpart of the Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and others who created what would become some of the most admired centers of learning in the world. Jews are also an ethnic group. Though membership can be voluntary (through a process of religious conversion), they have primarily been an ancestral group that has normatively transmitted identity through the mother. The enmity that modern Jews have aroused has not only—or commonly—been motivated by their rejection of the divinity of Christ. Even Jews professing no religious faith have been historically subjected to hostility, and the founders of this liberal arts institution—a university that has never trained or ordained rabbis—were secular. Thus the circumstances that spurred its formation, in the immediate wake of the greatest crime ever committed against the Jewish people, differed sharply from the origins of, say, Dartmouth. The pivotal scholars in Jewish studies in the early years of Brandeis had all been German-​­speaking refugees, and several of their colleagues in other academic departments personified the “Judeo-​ ­Bolshevism” of Nazi vitriol. The impetus for the founding of Brandeis cannot be separated from the problem of anti­semi­tism, which midcentury American Jews generally experienced as social barriers erected on the right, located at entrenched and established bastions of the republic. The liberal atmosphere of the campus was intended to be both a riposte to bigotry and a refuge from it; and a clue to the progressive orientation of the university can be found in the credo that President Jehuda Reinharz PhD ’72 enunciated in defining the mission of the institution—“a Jewish-​­sponsored nonsectarian university, open to all and dedicated to scholarly excellence and education for social responsibility.” In 1977, when members of the first graduating class returned to the campus after a quarter of a century, Newsweek noticed not only the “largely liberal” politics of the faculty and the “strong emphasis on social issues.” The magazine also reported that “an astonishing number of graduates turn out to be activist intellectuals and social critics.” 7 This book can be read as an attempt to validate that observation. 6

2

The Origins American history discloses very few instances of official persecution of Jews, though not until after World War II was the full force of law brought to bear against private acts of discrimination. Not until late in the nation’s history was the persistence of anti­semi­tism in the private sector deemed an official concern. That indifference meant that the founding of Brandeis University inevitably bore the imprint of the experience of social constraints that few Jews of the era could escape. Abram Sachar was right to describe the impulse behind the founding of the university as an expression of gratitude for the liberty and refuge that the United States gave its Jewish minority. Such patriotic appreciation was as understandable as it was genuine. But the scars that anti­semi­tism inflicted—the opportunities blocked, the barriers to ambition erected, the false promises dangled before a tiny and often embattled group—could not be easily healed. And in announcing that at least one university would be immune to religious, racial, and other forms of prejudice in admissions and in hiring, Brandeis was claiming that it would not yield to the bigotry that was then widely believed to be ineradicable— or at least what posterity in some distant era would remedy. The creation of this particular institution of higher learning would highlight the liberalism that promoted the ideal of a more tolerant America, and would serve as a rebuke to discrimination elsewhere. If liberalism meant anything, it meant the enhancement of opportunity, the expansion of rights, and the repudiation of unearned privilege. The 7

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ideology that pervaded the university and that promoted a more open society was therefore inseparable from an opposition to judeophobia. However benign in comparison to the murderous venom that Jewish singularity incited elsewhere, the sting of anti­semi­tism constituted a domestic phenomenon that could not be ignored. It reinforced the determination to found a Jewish-​­sponsored university. The idea was first broached during the decade known as “the tribal Twenties,” when the status of Jews was not unambiguously secure, and when the democratic ideal was tarnished by raw expressions of nativism, racism, and other forms of intolerance. During the 1920s, when many children of Eastern European immigrants began applying to colleges and universities, “the Jewish problem” seemed to become especially acute. The increase in Jewish applicants for admissions—and the tenor and tempo that such students were injecting into campus life—stirred anxiety among the upper crust, who took their dominance of the nation’s educational citadels for granted. The elite assumed that this land was their land. Even a prairie populist like William Jennings Bryan, a three-​­time presidential candidate on the ticket of the Democratic Party, had weighed in on the employment policies of higher education: “No teacher should be allowed on the faculty of any American university unless he is a Christian.”1 Shouldn’t the Jewish community therefore respond to exclusion by sponsoring a nonsectarian college or university? The idea had first been articulated at the dawn of the twentieth century, though not in the United States but instead in Central and Eastern Europe, where severe quotas on the admission of Jewish applicants to universities were imposed. Tsarist Russia raised the most notorious barriers, but at the turn of the century, institutions in Switzerland and in the Second Reich were devising limitations on Jewish applicants as well. In 1902 the Zionist tribune Chaim Weizmann, then based in Geneva, joined the philosopher Martin Buber, then living in Vienna, as well as another Zionist functionary, Berthold Feivel (also spelled Feiwel), then living in Zurich, in publishing a pamphlet entitled Eine jüdische Hochschule (A Jewish University). This Hochschule would be not only a conventional institution of higher learning, but a vocational and technical college as well. The authors wanted to establish it in Palestine; but temporary sites under consideration also included Switzerland and England, with Jewish studies as well as standard academic subjects included in the curriculum. Weizmann in particular contin8

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ued to champion the idea, which was realized a generation later, in 1925, when the Hebrew University conducted a dedication ceremony on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem. Albert Einstein, based in Berlin, joined the first board of governors (as did Freud).2 Fleeing Nazi persecution, Buber began teaching at the Hebrew University in 1938. In the United States, philosemitism initiated the impetus for the idea of a Jewish university; the proponent was a gentile, the noted psychologist G. Stanley Hall. In the era of World War I, he envisioned “a new school of the prophets” to promote a spirit of internationalism. The year 1917 was hardly a propitious year to activate such a spirit. But Hall also argued that Jewish culture could best be preserved through the formation of a Jewish university. It would be a “monument of the Jewish race, of its past and future, a repository of its learning, and a conservator of its loftiest spirit.” Hall, who served as president of Clark University, did not envision his proposed institution as an alternative to the existing examples of secular higher education, but as a university that should simply be available to Jewish youth. In 1923 the socialist novelist Upton Sinclair advocated a university “open . . . to seekers of knowledge of all races,” an institution that would not “flatter the race conceit of Anglo-​­Saxon colleges.” Such a university, stocked with Jewish instructors, would “make the most wonderful faculty of the world,” he predicted. In that same year, Rabbi Louis I. Newman published A Jewish University in America?, a monograph that included responses to the editorial published on this subject a year earlier in the Jewish Tribune.3 Newman himself had earned degrees from Brown, Berkeley, and Columbia. But he envisioned benefits for Jewish undergraduates in an institution that their community sponsored and supported. Such an institution must be secular, he insisted; and its curriculum had to be “ ‘universal,’ liberal and free.”4 The fiercest opposition to this proposal came from other Jews, who feared that a kind of educational ghetto would compromise their egalitarian claims. A university without barriers to Jewish applicants would give existing institutions an alibi for policies of discrimination. Were Newman’s concept implemented, so went the argument, such a university would end up “perpetuating Jewish separatism.”5 Louis Marshall weighed in as well. As a civil rights attorney who came so close to dominating the Jewish community that it was said to be living “under Marshall law,” he objected to the idea of a Jewish-​­sponsored university. The

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whole point of the melting pot, he opined early in 1924, was to promote “mutual understanding” and “the elimination of prejudices.” Jewish students “who have had the opportunity of mingling with non-​­Jews,” Marshall added, “and especially with the older American stock, know what it means to touch shoulders with their fellow students.” The community should therefore repudiate the notion that a university “would be a glorified ghetto.”6 But Marshall also conceded that the melting pot was only an ideal, which kept colliding with the actualities of prejudice. Three years later he acknowledged that Jewish undergraduates “are treated unkindly and uncharitably, sometimes brutally, and always with reserve, by their classmates.” Such mistreatment amounted to “barbarism.” 7 Marshall was particularly concerned about Harvard, and urged it not to limit the number of Jewish undergraduates. He asked that they be judged solely by standards of “character and scholarship,”8 even as Marshall continued to oppose a Jewish-​­sponsored university. The consequences, he predicted in 1928, would be “not only unfortunate.” Such an enterprise was also “absolutely unnecessary,” marking a retreat into a paro­ chialism that tarnished the goal of equal opportunity. Jewish youth would be reduced to “a self-​­created alien” whose matriculation in such a haven would thus justify the exclusion that the American academy had too often adopted.9 Such emphatic opposition was so reverberant that a span of exactly two decades transpired before Brandeis could be created. Its name was first summoned into being in 1923, the same year that Newman’s pamphlet appeared, when Justice Louis D. Brandeis engaged in an hour-​­long conversation in his apartment in Washington with Abraham H. Sakier “about a certain Jewish matter.” In a letter to the jurist, Sakier later described himself as a graduate of Columbia College, “American-​­born, thirty-​­five years of age, a son of one of the first four pioneers in Palestine, trained as a newspaper man, teacher, writer, [and] organizer. I have spent years in doing Zionist publicity, propaganda and fund-​­raising. But my chief interest is in education,” he asserted; and he wanted to help mobilize “the necessary sentiment and the very large financial resources for an American strictly secular first-​ ­class university whose faculty and student body shall be predominantly Jewish.” To Justice Brandeis, it was superfluous for Sakier “to point out the increasing difficulties which Jewish scholars and teachers find 10

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in becoming connected with American universities, or the increasing discrimination being exercised against Jewish boys and girls who wish to enter them. I feel that such a university as I have in mind is destined to be the contribution of my generation to our country.” Sakier regarded Brandeis as “the greatest Jew in the history of this country,” and asked for the jurist’s “permission to use your name” in establishing a “Brandeis University.”10 His response is not extant, but he undoubtedly declined the honor. In a follow-​­up letter, Sakier acknowledged Justice Brandeis’s “unwillingness to allow your name to be linked with a money-​­raising effort.” But Sakier was undeterred in hoping to form a committee to secure the funding for such an enterprise, which he called a “Brandeis University Association,” later to be called an “Association for a Hebrew University in the United States.” Though nothing came of this initiative, Sakier’s prophetic powers warrant praise as remarkably accurate: “I am certain that a Hebrew secular university in America is inevitable within the not distant future, whether I or someone else has the honor of being the active force in its creation. And I am equally certain that once it is in existence, Jewish opinion will demand that it receive your name.”11 And speaking of names, how eerie was the similarity of Abraham H. Sakier’s to that of the first president. Born in New York City, Abram L. Sachar was raised in St. Louis and took his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Washington University. In 1923 (the same year of Rabbi Newman’s A Jewish University in America?), Sachar earned the first doctorate in history that Cambridge University ever awarded.12 Cultivating a specialty in British parliamentary history, he began teaching in the Department of History of the University of Illinois that fall. The fit was awkward. Shortly before his arrival, a Jewish undergraduate had proposed, in a letter published in the student newspaper the Daily Illini, the opening of the campus libraries and tennis courts on Sunday. Two days later the dean of men, Thomas Arkle Clark, huffed: “This is a Christian country established upon Christian traditions and Christian principles, and this is an Institution backed very largely by Christian communities who believed in these things.” The university therefore bore a responsibility to uphold those principles, “even when they may be opposed by foreigners or by those who would like to wipe out all our Christian traditions.” But this public university

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depended upon the support of taxpayers; and when one of them, Julius Rosenwald of Sears, Roebuck, threatened to recommend that the state legislature cut appropriations to the University of Illinois, Dean Clark walked back his remarks. Claiming that they had been misinterpreted, he had only wished to explain the rationale for the Sunday regulations. Not yet married, Sachar needed to find a rooming house in ­Champaign-​­Urbana; but one landlady refused, citing discomfort in renting to a tenant who denied the Resurrection. The classroom was more congenial, however; and Sachar quickly became a spectacularly popular teacher of European history. In 1930 his synoptic History of the Jews appeared, under the imprint of Alfred A. Knopf. Sachar had resigned from his teaching post a year earlier, however, to devote himself full-​­time to the Hillel Foundation of B’nai B’rith. Hillel’s first chapter had been established at the University of Illinois. In 1933 Sachar became the foundation’s national director, until his retirement in 1947, when he moved to Sherman Oaks, California.13 During those interwar decades, however, a long shadow of discrimination continued to be cast upon the hiring and admissions policies of the nation’s stellar colleges and universities. Ivy League institutions in particular erected higher barriers than ever before. Their purpose was “the cultivation of the graces of gentility,” with “scholarship .  .  . made subordinate to genteel dissipation,” Thorstein Veblen observed in 1918.14 Of course discrimination against Jews was hardly unique to academic life in the Northeast, nor were such practices peculiarly American. Germany’s most famous philosopher, Martin Heidegger, complained in 1929, for instance, about the Verjudung (Judaization) of academic life in the Weimar Republic.15 But the United States was almost by definition supposed to corrode obstructions to upward mobility, and the interwar period tested those pretensions. Early in his career, for example, Franklin D. Roo­se­velt (Harvard ’04) had described himself as a member of the “Aryan races,” and had joined other alumni in favoring a quota system at Harvard College, where Jews were overrepresented. He wanted no variation from their portion of the general populace. Harvard’s president, A. Lawrence Lowell, who was a nativist, explained that “where Jews become numerous, they drive off other people.” Instead of joining the remaining body of undergraduates, he added, Jews exhibit “clannishness,” 16 which was presumably a preexisting condition that could not be remedied. 12

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The prestige that Harvard enjoyed signaled the legitimacy of admissions quotas in other precincts of the academy, a policy that could be furthered by asking applicants, as Harvard did, whether the family name had ever been changed.17 In posting “No Trespassing” signs, the patricians who dominated the Ivy League failed to make the liberal criterion of individual merit and talent a maximal academic value; and graduate schools reduced the chances that Jews might pursue academic careers. As early as May 1918, when the Association of New England Deans met, representatives from such institutions as Tufts, Brown, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (mit) concurred in their realization that the influx of Jewish applicants and students was adversely altering the character of these universities. Dean Frederick S. Jones of Yale remarked that Jews were about to “overrun us. . . . A few years ago every single scholarship of any value was won by a Jew.” He explained that “we could not allow that to go on. We must put a ban on the Jews.” Later, a worried Jones asked Yale’s director of admissions about the composition of an incoming freshman class: “How many Jews among them? And are there any coons?” By 1922 Jews were winning so many scholarships at Harvard that Lowell introduced other criteria besides academic excellence and lineage—“approved character and promise.”18 On behalf of a social elite, such academic officials wanted the Ivy League to remain a league of their own by commonly asking on application forms for the mother’s maiden name and her place of birth, for the candidate’s religious preference, and for a photograph. Answers to such questions did not necessarily satisfy Columbia, which tried to keep undesirables at bay by conducting a personal interview. In 1935 the future polymath Isaac Asimov showed up for an interview, knowing that its purpose “was to see if I were too Jewish to give at least the appearance of a gentleman.” He quickly surmised that his application would be rejected. It was; and the interviewer advised him to apply instead to Seth Low Junior College, which the candidate had never heard of. It was located in Brooklyn, with a student body that Asimov discovered was overwhelmingly Jewish. By that year, the Jewish quota at Columbia had become so stringent that, despite the excellent grades and scientific promise of Richard Feynman, his application was rejected too.19 He had to try his luck elsewhere. Feynman would eventually win a Nobel Prize, while becoming perhaps the most admired physicist of the second half of the century.

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At Yale College, for example, Elliott Cohen ’18 had compiled so strong a record in the study of English that he won a fellowship for graduate work. But he also picked up unmistakable clues that a Jew would have little future in an academic field that was reserved for gentlemen. (Going into journalism instead, Cohen became the editor of the Menorah Journal; and in 1945 he founded Commentary.)20 At Columbia, Clifton Fadiman ’25 was advised not to bother applying to the university’s graduate program in English; and the explanation was blunt: “We have room for only one Jew, and we have chosen Mr. Trilling.” In 1939, when this first-​­round draft pick smashed precedent to become the first Jew permanently hired in Columbia’s Department of English, a senior colleague warned Lionel Trilling against the impulse to interpret the promotion as “a wedge to open the English department to more Jews.” (“Kip” Fadiman made the same vocational choice as Cohen: journalism. Reviewing books for the New Yorker, Fadiman also helped to shape “middle-​­brow” culture at the Book-​­of-​­the-​­Month Club.) Stanley Kunitz’s parents had come from Eastern Europe; and his mother contributed to the Yiddish daily, the Forverts. Though he graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1926, a professor discouraged him from pursuing an academic career, because, Kunitz recalled, “our Anglo-​­Saxon students would resent being taught English literature by a Jew.” In 1959, while teaching at Brandeis, Kunitz would win a Pulitzer Prize for his Selected Poems.21 Needing only three years to graduate from Harvard College, while also winning a Phi Beta Kappa key, J. Robert Oppenheimer applied to a physics laboratory at the University of Cambridge in 1925. “Oppenheimer is a Jew,” his Harvard mentor warned Cambridge, while adding reassuringly, “but entirely without the usual qualifications of his race.” A philosopher who did pass muster was the metaphysician Paul Weiss, a graduate of the City College of New York (ccny). In 1946 he began teaching at Yale, and soon became a tenured full professor there, the first Jew holding that rank in the history of that undergraduate college. Though highly praised by Alfred North Whitehead, Weiss had to blunt the warning of another of his endorsers. It was difficult for “men . . . like Weiss [who] have been brought out of the lowliest social conditions to know how to behave in a society of genuine equality where it is not necessary to assert oneself.”22 In a routine satirizing show business, a starlet (Elaine May) professes to know Bertrand Russell but then as14

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sures the talk-​­show host (Mike Nichols): “He’s not like your usual philosopher. I mean, he’s not pushy.” Even a field like Semitics could be infected with the disparagement of Jews, whose ancestry was stigmatized. Consider the case of Cyrus H. Gordon, who earned all of his degrees (including a doctorate) from the University of Pennsylvania before the age of twenty-​­two. A prodigy, he was recommended in 1936 for a job requiring Hebrew, Arabic, and Akkadian at the University of Toronto. Fluent not only in Hebrew and Arabic, Gordon could even speak Syrian and Iraqi dialects, and was also “entirely at home in Aramaic and Syriac,” according to a recommender. Four years later he would publish a standard Ugaritic grammar, and during World War  II conducted cryptanalysis of messages that were encoded or enciphered in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian. Gordon also formed and trained a Near Eastern and Middle Eastern intelligence unit, and spent the last two years of the war in Iran. Named for Cyrus the Great, he got to the great archeological site at Pasargadae—where the tomb of Cyrus is located. In 1957 Gordon created the Department of Mediterranean Studies at Brandeis. He had managed to brush off an early job recommendation, which noted that though Gordon “is of Hebraic origin, it is not too obvious”—whatever that may mean.23 Anti­semi­tism was hardly confined to the Ivy League. M. Carey Thomas served as president of Bryn Mawr College from 1894 until 1922, when very few Jews were admitted to study there. They were, she generalized, “a most terrible set of people.” Though she also expressed the “hope that we shall never have a Jew on our Bryn Mawr College faculty,” a brief exception was made for the physiologist Jacques Loeb, who later won a Nobel Prize. But her rationales were based entirely on snobbery; for example, “Jews do not play cricket.”24 A few others did teach at distinguished universities—the anthropologist Franz Boas at Columbia, and Loeb as well as the sociologist Louis Wirth at the University of Chicago—as did Semiticists. But bigotry was so pervasive that in 1942, the sociologist Talcott Parsons observed that “Jewish representation in the academic field .  .  . is entirely negligible.”25 No wonder, then, that Upton Sinclair had imagined the value of a Jewish faculty with a university of their own. In 1936 the dean of Northwestern University’s law school told a Yale law professor that to try to hire his candidate at Evanston would be quite pointless, an “idle gesture.” He served as the editor-​­in-​­chief of the Yale Law Journal. But he was

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Jewish, so he was recommended in vain. Abe Fortas would later join the Supreme Court, and scholars would designate his brief tenure on the bench as “near great.”26 Even those lucky enough to get an academic job had to scrape off the detritus of negative stereotypes. In 1931 a mathematician at the University of Chicago described a candidate as “one of the few men of Jewish decent [sic] who does not get on your nerves and really behaves like a gentile to a satisfactory degree.” This characterization was intended to be a recommendation.27 So was the letter sent to the University of Wisconsin, where Abraham Maslow wanted to do graduate work in psychology in 1932. “Although he is a Jew,” his teacher wrote, “I can assure you that he does not have any of the objectionable characteristics for which the race is famous.” Maslow would go on to found the Department of Psychology at Brandeis; and at the end of the twentieth century, when the American Psychological Association rank-​­ordered the most eminent figures in that field, he came in tenth. Behind him were Erik H. Erikson (number 12), William James (number 14), and Carl Gustav Jung (number 23).28 In the interwar period in particular, virtues like initiative and ambition might seem “pushy” when Jews exhibited such traits, or “uppity” when blacks showed determination and drive. A great scholar with bitter experience of prejudice, who never got a chance to teach at a “white” university, expressed his concern in 1947. “Only the Jews among us, as a class, carefully select and support talent and genius among the young,” W. E. B. Du Bois asserted. But academic policies were imperiling that ethnic proclivity, he feared, and “jealousy of the gifted Jew . . . is closing doors of opportunity.”29 A year after that observation, Brandeis University was founded; but history was to play a trick on this particular remedy for academic anti­ semi­tism. In the earlier decades of the century, Jewish boys walking through certain neighborhoods were likely to be pelted with rocks. After World War II, Jewish boys (and, with increasing frequency, girls) were pelted with scholarships and fellowships. Bigotry was starting to disappear throughout the nation. Such victories over prejudice might be symbolic, like the selection in 1945 of Bess Myerson as Miss America, a woman who had been raised in a Yiddish-​­speaking home in the Sholom Aleichem Cooperative Houses in the Bronx. The impediments that were overcome might be also legal, as when restrictive real estate covenants were invalidated in Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948. That case was 16

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decided only a year after novelist Laura Z. Hobson published her best-​ s­ elling exposé of such genteel anti­semi­tism, Gentleman’s Agreement. It was adapted that year into an Oscar-​­winning film. Also in 1947, a presidential commission released To Secure These Rights, which favored the abolition of religious and racial discrimination. Such practices could no longer be squared with democratic principles.30 Though odd vestiges of academic anti­ semi­ tism remained, they seemed anachronistic, and certainly nothing to be proud of, or worth defending. As late as 1961, Emory Dental School asked applicants to categorize themselves as Caucasian, Jew, or Other—evidently the better to locate candidates who needed to be rejected. At the medical school of Northwestern University, an eminent neurosurgeon named Loyal Davis vowed that, so long as he served on its faculty, no Jew would ever be granted tenure there. (In 1952 his daughter, Nancy Davis, married Ronald Reagan.)31 But the progressive momentum that had been inaugurated with the New Deal could not be stopped. Democratic ideals were being reconfigured as a realization that diversity could be a source of strength, rather than a sign of divisiveness. How minorities would be treated in postwar America would increasingly determine how power and liberty would be reconciled. Immediately after the defeat of the Third Reich, a university that would draw attention to the role of Jews in forging a more just society might well contribute to the progressivism that had been gathering force for at least a decade and a half. In the immediate wake of revelations of the scale of the Final Solution, which was the historical terminus of judeophobia, discrimination against Jews was rapidly vanishing. But the wounds could not be quickly healed. They were exemplified by the initial role that Albert Einstein played in the creation of Brandeis University. Growing up as a Jew in Munich, he had experienced hostility; and after graduating from the Swiss Federal Polytechnic, he recalled that no academic post in “the German-​­speaking countries” could be found because of “the anti­semi­tism .  .  . which is as unpleasant as it is a hindrance.” A full appreciation of the relevance of his Jewish identity came to Einstein, however, only after moving to Berlin, where he personified both the humane leftist politics and the scientific distinction of the Weimar Republic. Scrutiny of the universe was not supposed to respect national boundaries, and no one exemplified cosmopolitanism more fully. Einstein had relinquished his Ger-

learning on the left

man citizenship as early as 1896, and was stateless until 1901, when he became Swiss. He became German again in 1914, because foreigners were ineligible to join Prussia’s Akademie der Wissenschaften. Two decades later, the new regime fired Professor Einstein as the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, confiscated his property, and expatriated him (as was his wish). In 1940 this pronounced internationalist became an American citizen.32 Having arrived at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1933, Einstein quickly realized how institutions like Prince­ton promulgated a quota system to suppress the proportion of Jewish undergraduates. By March 1935, Einstein was writing to Justice Brandeis about the need to respond to bigotry by forming a Jewish-​­sponsored institution of higher learning. The “ever-​­increasing negative attitude” that American gentiles harbored would “push us out from the more desirable intellectual fields unless we succeed in obtaining a certain independence.” Einstein’s own Jewish identity was of course resolutely secular; and the “adherence to a narrow-​­minded ritual education” that he associated with New York’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary and with Yeshiva College meant that Yeshiva University (its name after 1945) offered no satisfactory solution.33 A new university had to be secular, unaffiliated with any religious denomination or with rabbinical studies, Einstein argued, so that “many of our gifted youth” could get “the cultural and professional education they are longing for” but are “denied” “under present circumstances.” As the most illustrious of the refugees from the Third Reich, Einstein would later remark that American Jews, unlike their German co-​­religionists, “still retain a healthy national feeling; it has not yet been destroyed by the process of atomization and dispersion.” Hence he believed that the American Jewish community would be “extraordinarily ready for self-​­sacrifice and practically creative,”34 the very qualities required for the formation of such a university. Extending his reach beyond his iconic status as the most famous scientist in the world, Einstein also sought to apply exalted and even antiwar ideals to the messy and intractable complications of politics. Sympathetic to pacifism and sensitive to the injustices that power inflicts upon the helpless, Einstein was horrified by the devastation that physics had unleashed and the threat that nuclear fission continued to represent. His reaction to the news of the bombing of Hiroshima was monosyllabic: “Oy vey.”35 The final decade of his life—he died in 18

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1955—was haunted by the huge discrepancy between the doomsday of atomic warfare and the fragility of political wisdom, even as his own desire to work outside of the boundaries of quantum mechanics resulted in conceptual failure and in isolation from what other physicists pursued. Unmatched fame enabled Einstein to defy the culture of the Cold War, but the political atmosphere helped shape his sense of embattlement. Late in 1949, Max Lerner tried to solicit a statement from him against the danger that a hydrogen bomb might pose to the planet; but Einstein demurred, disclaiming competence (a “purely technical question”). Nevertheless, J. Edgar Hoover decided to put the Nobel laureate under the surveillance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Its file on him eventually ran to eighteen hundred pages.36 His politics so incensed John Rankin, a Mississippi Democrat, that in 1950 a tabloid headline screamed the Congressman’s recommendation: “Einstein Red Faker, Should Be Deported.”37 Such midcentury instances of heightened anti-​­Communism did not really marginalize Einstein, however; and at the millennium, Time magazine would put him on its cover as the “Person of the Century.” Meanwhile, interest deepened in building a Jewish-​­sponsored university that would forbid any discrimination against Jews, either in admissions or in hiring. The catalyst was Rabbi Israel Goldstein of New York’s Congregation B’nai Jeshurun. In 1946 he had just finished serving as president of the Synagogue Council of America and as president of the Zionist Organization of America. He was therefore able to devote eight months to the founding of a nonsectarian institution that the Jewish community would sponsor, and he gathered a group of Jewish businessmen and attorneys in New York and Boston to form such a university. Evidently unaware of Sakier’s efforts, but brandishing the support of Rabbi Louis Newman, Goldstein proposed that the university be named for Justice Brandeis, who had died five years earlier.38 Fearful that the struggle to eliminate quotas against Jews in existing universities might not entirely succeed, Goldstein told delegates at the meeting of the National Community Relations Advisory Council in Chicago that Brandeis University might serve as a model of democratic inclusion to be emulated: “The proponents of a Jewish-​­sponsored university . . . do not propose to limit the student body or the faculty to Jews. What is being proposed is a non-​­quota university where the sole criterion for admission to the student body and for faculty should be

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merit.” He hardly expected such an institution to harbor every Jewish student or instructor who had ever experienced or feared the sting of prejudice. But Goldstein did foresee the “moral value” of a school that projected democratic ideals, which older colleges and universities might therefore emulate even when not legally obligated to do so. During a plenary session the next day, the Advisory Council resolved to endorse the project of a university “under Jewish auspices, open to all persons, regardless of race, color or creed.”39 The fears of “ghettoization” that figures like Louis Marshall had expressed had receded. Doubts nevertheless persisted. Writing from his perch at Columbia, Trilling praised the Jewish community for seeking “to bring honor to itself and perpetuate its particular ideas, emotions, and cultural qualities.” He discerned virtue in the “particularism” that the founding of such a university portended. But Trilling also denied that any distinctive Jewish values could be found in the United States; most Jews were simply liberals, and little more than that. With the receding influence of religion in what were once the denominational colleges of the Northeast, he wondered what the point would be of an institution like Brandeis.40 (It bestowed an honorary degree on Tril­ ling in 1974.) The objections from Chaim Weizmann were even stronger. Israel’s future president sensed the diversion of crucial support for the emerging state and for its campus at the Hebrew University in particular. “I was astonished to hear a few months ago that someone wants to establish a Jewish university in America,” he remarked in May 1947. “I raise my voice in warning: Do not waste the strength of the Jewish people. There is no substitute for Zion.”41 Goldstein obviously demurred, and later claimed that his “primary motivation in fathering Brandeis University was a Zionist one, that of creative Jewish survival.”42 The most renowned Zionist ever to remain in the Diaspora nevertheless praised the new endeavor. Einstein’s own early academic career had been nondescript; at the polytechnic from which he had graduated in Zurich, he ranked fourth out of the five students in his class. But because of this prospective refuge from anti­semi­tism, Einstein promised that he “would do anything in my power to help in the creation and guidance of such an institute. It would always be near to my heart.”43 If anyone’s name could have been more lustrous than Brandeis’s, it would have been Einstein’s; and the physicist was invited to accept 20

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such an honor. But he refused. He declared that the new university should be named for “a great Jew who was also a great American.”44 Einstein had reached the United States little more than a dozen years earlier, and was not entirely comfortable in English. At the Institute for Advanced Study, its polyglot director, J. Robert Oppenheimer, held a doctorate from the University of Göttingen; and the two physicists usually conversed in German. Twice Sachar had interviewed Justice Brandeis and had felt “a sense of awe” that only three or four other public figures evoked in him: “I am not easily nonplussed in the presence of the great.”45 Along with the founding trustees, Sachar was delighted when the jurist’s daughter accepted the honor on behalf of her family. “The name Brandeis,” Sachar remarked, would “combine most felicitously the prophetic ideal of moral principle and the America