Brandeis: Academic Utopia

(June 1, 2015 [but updated])

when I was a hIgh school student In the early 1950s, the New York Post was my political North Star. It was then owned by Dorothy Schiff, the granddaughter of Jacob Schiff, a German-born Jewish businessman and philanthropist. Hard as it is to fathom today, with the Post now part of Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing newspaper empire, the Post was then a liberal paper led by its crusading editor, James Wechsler. Its two other stalwart left-wing commentators were Max Lerner and Murray Kempton.

As a youth, I had read Lerner in PM, followed him to the short-lived New York Star, 1 and then to the Post. There, along with the work of Wechsler and Kempton, I received a good part of my early political education. Several times each week, this “troika” would pen political columns on the events of the day. I read their commentaries religiously, as they provided a compelling counterpoint to a political climate dominated by McCarthyism, political

1. PM and the Star were ultraliberal New York newspapers in the 1940s.

witch hunts, and anti-communist hysteria while the Korean War raged.

Lerner wrote frequently about Brandeis University, where he had been teaching since 1949. It sounded to me, as a left-wing Brooklyn teenager, like an academic Elysium. When my Brandeis acceptance letter arrived in the mail, it seemed the greatest day of my life to that point.2 It felt almost better than the Dodgers winning the pennant in 1947, in Jackie Robinson’s freshman year in the majors.

I also had begun to hear about Brandeis on the sports pages. In its early quest to try to be a truly “American” college, Brandeis had decided to field athletic teams for intercollegiate competition. By 1952, it had a football team, with Benny Friedman, the great Michigan quarterback of the 1920s, as head coach. There was also a Brandeis basketball team at a time when basketball was still a sport in which Jews, like Dolph Schayes and Sid Tanenbaum prime among them, played a significant role. Today Jews hardly figure in the professional basketball scene, although they seem to be making a comeback in baseball.

A World-Class University Is Born

Brandeis University was founded in the landmark year of 1948 (when the state of Israel was established and I became a bar mitzvah) by a group of Jewish businessmen-philanthropists from Boston and New York, most of whom had never attended college. Albert Einstein also was involved at the outset. They shared a vision of establishing a Jewish-sponsored, nonsectarian university. While many religious denominations had established colleges and universities in the United States, including Harvard, the University of Chicago, Wesleyan, Middlebury, Haverford, Georgetown, and scores of others, the American Jewish community had not followed

2. It was the only college I had applied to. I never visited it before enrolling.

suit, and a sentiment existed that it had a moral and patriotic duty to do so.3 Establishing a Jewish-sponsored university also reflected a Jewish concern that Jews had long been deliberately excluded from leading colleges and universities in the United States.

The university was named after Louis Dembitz Brandeis (1856–1941), who was born to an Austro-Hungarian immigrant Jewish family in Louisville, Kentucky, and had been an influential public interest lawyer in Boston as well as a leading Zionist. He was appointed to the United States Supreme Court by President Woodrow Wilson in 1916, and he served until he retired in 1939. Today, Justice Brandeis is widely recognized as one of the most distinguished jurists in American history, along with his colleague and friend, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. He is also viewed by many as the most outstanding Jew in American history.

He was the first Jewish Supreme Court justice, followed in time by Benjamin Cardozo, Felix Frankfurter, Arthur J. Goldberg, Abe Fortas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan. Brandeis’s confirmation hearings in the United States Senate were controversial because of his trust-busting activities and his Jewish identity. President Wilson was required to make extraordinary personal efforts to assure his confirmation.

One of his many famous accomplishments as a lawyer was the so-called “Brandeis brief,” which sought to incorporate social and economic facts and considerations into the resolution of legal disputes, a novel idea at the time (1908). Indeed, it was a “Brandeis brief” filed by the NAACP that played a major role in the groundbreaking 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, which declared racially separate public schools unconstitutional and reversed earlier decisions that had held otherwise.

3. The history of Brandeis has been written several times, including one account, A Host at Last by its chief architect, Abram Leon Sachar, who served as its first president and its chancellor for more than thirty years.

A life-size statue of the justice by sculptor Robert Berks was dedicated on the Brandeis campus in 1956 as part of the Justice Brandeis centennial celebration at the university. I attended the dedication ceremony, which featured a speech by Chief Justice Earl Warren.4 One of the drinking songs that my classmates and I frequently sang together, declares:

Louie Brandeis of old, Your ideals we’ll uphold, For the tale of your life Shows a spirit so bold, And we’re thinking of you, As we’re drinking our brew, As we toast our alma mater, Brandeis U.

(At the time I was a Brandeis student, the national drinking age was eighteen rather than twenty-one, as it is as I write.)

Brandeis opened its doors to its first freshman class in September 1948. It was composed largely of a feisty and adventurous group of young Boston and New York Jews. Some were late-returning World War II veterans, attending college under the G.I. Bill of Rights, which included college tuition paid for by the federal government.

Initially, the school was very small, with fewer than 150 students and 15 faculty members. Though its beginning was not auspicious, Brandeis has evolved over more than fifty years to be a major center of research and higher learning, with over 3,500 undergraduate students, 2,000 graduate students, and a large and prestigious faculty.

4. Chief Justice Warren is fondly remembered for having written the Brown ruling and less fondly recalled for his 1942 decision, as governor of California, to intern thousands of Americans of Japanese descent. Dick Millman, a 1957 Brandeis graduate who became a lawyer in Washington, D.C., took my picture once at a cocktail party in which I appear to be shaking my finger in Justice Warren’s face. See Bernard Schwartz, Super Chief, Earl Warren and His Supreme Court: A Judicial Biography (New York: New York University Press, 1983).

A few of the early faculty members were refugee scholars who had escaped from war-torn Europe. During the early years, more of such teachers gravitated there, giving it a decidedly Old World flavor. Yet it also had new and up and coming faculty who were well known and on the cutting edge in their fields. Prime among them was Leonard Bernstein, then a young musical prodigy from the Boston Jewish community, who gave the university an early claim to musical renown.

As previously mentioned, one of the school’s first faculty members was my favorite columnist, Max Lerner. Although a practicing journalist and author, Max had earlier also taught at other colleges, including Sarah Lawrence and Columbia. In the late 1930s, he edited the massive Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, a standard reference work in the field.5 In addition to his extraordinary academic credentials, he also had a major following on a national level in the left, liberal, and Jewish communities; his presence at Brandeis gave the fledgling university a certain cachet. Max was born near the beginning of the twentieth century (December 20, 1902; he was about the same age as my father) in Minsk in the Russian Empire; his family emigrated to the U.S. in 1907. His father was a Jewish dairyman who drove his horse-drawn milk wagon around the city of New Haven, Connecticut, selling milk from a vat, as well as cheese and eggs. He was sort of a Jewish American Tevye, the dairyman of Sholem Aleichem and Fiddler on the Roof fame.6 Max would later describe to me how, as a boy, he had accompanied his father on his daily delivery rounds.

5. Max Lerner was author and editor of a wide range of books, including Ideas Are Weapons: The History and Uses of Ideas (1939); It Is Later Than You Think: The Need for a Militant Democracy (1939); Ideas for the Ice Age: Studies in a Revolutionary Era (1941); Public Journal: Marginal Notes on Wartime America (1945); America as a Civilization: Life and Thought in the United States Today (1957); The Portable Veblen by Thorstein Veblen and Max Lerner (1958); Nine Scorpions in a Bottle: Great Judges and Cases of the Supreme Court (1958).

6. Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye stories are collected in his book Tevye’s Daughters and were the basis for the musical Fiddler on the Roof.

Before Brandeis, Brooklyn College

While Brandeis was being founded and attracting such remarkable talent, I was in my early high school years and did little thinking about going to college away from home—or about my future at all, for that matter. But my time on Tilden Topics and the summers of 1951 and 1952, which I spent working as a waiter at Camp Onibar—where I met lots of students attending the University of Pennsylvania, Dickinson, Randolph-Macon, Princeton, Brown, and other colleges—lifted my sights, hopes, and dreams.

Having my interests awakened by Max Lerner’s columns about Brandeis, and with the encouragement from some of my high school teachers and my parents, I decided to apply there. While my grades were fairly mediocre, except in English and social studies, my position as editor of Tilden Topics helped. I recall my interview in 1952 at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan with a young Brandeis admissions officer named Phil Driscoll. But I do not recall what was said. Presumably my grades, extracurricular activities such as Topics, as well as my interview were sufficient to result in my admission for the term beginning September 1953. This was a new school whose future, and accreditation, were far from assured, so its applicant pool must have been small. Also, since I was a “Depression baby,” I was competing with a limited number of contemporaries and peers.

I was scheduled to graduate from high school in January 1953, so I had to decide how to spend the period from February until the end of the school year. My solution was to enroll at Brooklyn College, which admitted a freshman class twice each year. As a publicly sponsored school, Brooklyn College charged no tuition, an idea that regrettably has long since passed in most places in this country.7

7. Brooklyn College is part of the City University of New York (CUNY), which was founded in 1847 to provide the children of immigrants and the poor with a free higher education by Townsend Harris, president of the city’s board of education. It was first known as The Free Academy of the City of New York.

It was a thirty-minute bus ride from my home to the campus, which was located in the middle-class, tree-lined Midwood neighborhood. I viewed a semester at Brooklyn College as sort of a college prep course before I would leave for Brandeis in the fall. I would not turn eighteen until May, and I thought four or five months on the campus of Brooklyn College might provide me with some learning skills and substantive knowledge, from which I would profit later at Brandeis.

My experience at Brooklyn College was both helpful and revealing. As a school of commuter students, to me it lacked cohesiveness and a sense of community. People seemed to come and go, attend class, take their exams, and engage in what seemed a rather passive existence, although many worked in addition to going to school. I do not recall making any but the most casual of friends. The faculty members seemed relatively uninspired and bored, and they transmitted no excitement to their students about the learning process or anything else. Perhaps because I knew I wasn’t staying, the size of Brooklyn College (thousands of students), and the fact that it was a commuter school, I did not find my introduction to higher education particularly welcoming or rewarding. One course I do recall was “Speech,” in which the students, including me, endeavored to rid ourselves of our Brooklyn accents.

And So It Begins: My Life at Brandeis

As I did from 1951 through 1956, I spent the summer before college working as a waiter at Camp Onibar.8 Then I returned home and packed, and my parents drove me to Brandeis for freshman orientation week. I had never seen the Brandeis campus, and though I’d spent the past semester at Brooklyn College and had been away from home every summer since 1947, I really did not know what to

8. See infra, “A Tale of Two Camps.”

expect. However, I recall my confidence level as being fairly decent. Frankly, I doubt that my parents had ever stepped foot on a college campus before, so this brief visit was new to them too.

When I enrolled at Brandeis, the student body consisted of about eight hundred students. Most were Jewish (about 75–80 percent) and from either the Boston or New York metropolitan areas. By the time of my enrollment in September 1953, Brandeis had already held two graduations, the classes of 1952 and 1953, and its third class of students (those who had entered in September 1950) would complete their degrees in June 1954. So my class of 1957 would be the sixth to graduate.

I was assigned to a dorm called Ridgewood A, which resembled a grouping of two-story garden apartments or a motel on a hillside at the edge of campus. It still stands today, although it has been enlarged and renovated. My room was on the second floor, a double that I shared with my roommate, Sam Coleman, a Black student from Waterbury, Connecticut. Of the sixteen or so residents, about six were freshmen, and the others were upperclassmen. The dorm was all-male, and indeed, women students could not enter. They lived in the Castle9 and in Smith Hall.

On my first day at Brandeis, one of the dorm’s upperclassmen, Mark Samuels, volunteered to take several freshmen on a campus tour. What I remember is him pointing to a student who had just walked by and saying to us in hushed, reverential tones, “That’s Mike Walzer” as if he were Mahatma Gandhi. I brashly asked whether Walzer was the quarterback of the Brandeis football team that was then in training for the fall season.10 Mark explained that Walzer

9. The Castle had been built in 1928 in the style of a Norman castle for the Middlesex College of Medicine and Surgery, which occupied the property on which Brandeis is still located. It recently was partly torn down.

10. I had just met the fullback, Phil Goldstein, who had been high school “all-city” in New York and who ruled the dorm, declaring that we lowly freshmen had better “shut up” while he was studying in the dorm lounge or else! As it turned out, Phil

was not the quarterback but rather a leading student intellectual, loved and trusted by all, who as a freshman during the preceding year had received straight As. “He’s our leader,” Mark said.

Mike Walzer and I became friends and comrades at Brandeis. He married a member of my class, Judy Borodovko, and went on, after teaching at Harvard, to an appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer had done much of their work. He has been there since 1980 and has written many books,11 mostly in philosophy and politics.

My Brandeis freshman class of close to three hundred students had a few days of orientation with faculty, staff, and students, and we then dove into our studies. We ate three meals a day together on campus in the cafeteria in the Castle, talking, discussing, gossiping, and always learning. And was there a lot to learn!

Two brief vignettes of Brandeis in the 1950s, published elsewhere, provide some insight into the school in the early years. The first is by Sandy Lakoff, class of ’53, who is Max Lerner’s biographer:12

Brandeis in the early years was, as the British political scientist Gordon K. Lewis perceptively noted, a kind of Oxford of the mind! Discoveries and encounters crowded the inner land-

preceded me at the University of Chicago Law School and became a leading trial lawyer in Phoenix, Arizona.

11. Mike Walzer’s many books include: Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War and Citizenship (1970); Political Action: A Practical Guide to Movement Politics (1971); Regicide and Revolution; Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI (1974); The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (1976); Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (1977); Radical Principles: Reflections of an Unreconstructed Democrat (1980); Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (1983); Exodus and Revolution (1985); What It Means to Be an American (1992); Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (1994); and On Toleration (1997).

12. In From the Beginning: A Picture History of the First Four Decades of Brandeis University, ed. Susan Pasternack (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 1988).

scape. There were lectures by distinguished visitors: Buber, Maritain, and Tillich on religion, Justices Douglas and Frankfurter on the Constitution, David Ben-Gurion on the founding of Israel, Robert Maynard Hutchins on the sorry state of American culture. A poetry series meant weekends with W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas. Leonard Bernstein mesmerized us with Mahler and led the thrilling American premiere of The Threepenny Opera and his own Trouble in Tahiti. In Gen Ed S (for seniors), Max Lerner invited creative men and women (also known as “role models”), including Margaret Mead, Archibald MacLeish, Leo Szilard, Alfred Kinsey, Agnes De Mille, and Norbert Wiener, to tell us of their turning points and torments. (A week later a faculty panel “dissected” the previous week’s guest and each other, to our shameless delight.)

We social science majors were especially privileged. American history came to us live each week from Columbia in the person of Henry Steele Commager, a bulldog who could not only stand on his hind legs and talk but give spellbinding lectures without notes for two hours straight. We read Max Weber with Lew Coser, Freud with Philip Rieff, Kant with Aron Gurwitsch, Nietzsche with Frank Manuel, Burckhardt on the Renaissance with David Berkowitz, and studied civil liberties with Leonard Levy, the power elite with C. Wright Mills, psychology with Abe Maslow and Jim Klee, and Marx with practically everyone. . . .

It was a special place at a special time and we were lucky to have been there when we were.

The second is by a friend, Jeremy Larner, class of 1958, who was also a cousin of my later friend and comrade Debbie Meier. Jeremy later won an Academy Award for the screenplay of The Candidate, with Robert Redford:13

13. In From the Beginning.

In 1954, I came to Brandeis as a green seventeen-year-old from the Midwest, speaking with such a drawl that New Yorkers walked away before I could finish a sentence. A few years later, I’d become snotty enough to stand up at a Gen Ed session and ask the leader of Britain’s Labour Party in what sense he still believed in socialism. There was an air of unreality about Brandeis in the ’50s, but also a climate in which wildly individualistic teachers and students could feel that what they learned and believed in mattered. I remember a seminar where a student with a beautiful voice read the three-page story “Araby.” The argument that followed lasted ninety minutes, as three professors who were among the most compelling critics of their time violently debated the merits of the story, the value of James Joyce, the nature of realistic fiction, and the history of the West. We learned that disagreement was a style of taking people seriously, and that all tastes and values implied social and historical assumptions. Imagine my shock to graduate Brandeis and find that polite company did not generally accept these premises. Life continued to surprise me, and in some ways I remained a green Midwestern boy. The difference was that, after Brandeis, when disturbing events happened in the world, we could no longer call the whole community into a commons lounge and, young and old, green and ripe, fight it out together.

Brandeis and the History of Ideas

One of the areas of study that Brandeis was noted for, even during its first decade, was “the history of ideas,” a.k.a. intellectual history. Truthfully, the idea that ideas had a history of their own, and that history was not solely related to events, had not occurred to me before I arrived at Brandeis. That ideas influenced events, I understood. But that ideas had a life and a history of their own that could be studied was news to me. I remember being a green,

eighteen-year-old freshman and hearing a senior in my dorm talking about his course entitled “A History of Political Theory in the West” and wondering to myself why “the West” (which I then thought meant the western part of the United States) would have its own political theory distinct from the East.

I learned soon enough about intellectual history once my European history class with the great Frank Manuel14 began. He lectured to the entire three-hundred-member freshman class three times a week from a stage, swinging his one remaining leg over the table on which he was perched. We imagined that he had lost his other leg in the Spanish Civil War, but we never asked.15 He had been a thirtyfour-year-old intelligence officer in the U.S. Army in World War II. He died at age ninety-two, in 2003.

In the second semester of my freshman year, I took social psychology with Philip Rieff,16 who spoke in such extraordinary academic jargon that I brought a huge tape recorder I owned to class to record his lectures. Afterward, I would define the terms, decode the jargon, and analyze the lectures in my dorm room. Rieff and I became friends, and I later took a seminar with him in which I wrote a paper on Pavlovian Soviet science.

Despite his erudition, Rieff would occasionally show a lighter side. I recall that in the midst of one lecture, he was reminded of,

14. Frank Edward Manuel wrote The Politics of Modern Spain (1938); The New World of Henri Saint-Simon (1956); The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (1959); Shapes of Philosophical History (1965); The Prophets of Paris: Turgot, Condorcet, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Comte (1965); A Portrait of Isaac Newton (1968); The Religion of Isaac Newton (1974); Utopian Thought in the Western World: Scenes from the End, with Fritzie P. Manuel (1979); The Last Days of World War II in Europe; The Broken Staff: Judaism Through Christian Eyes (1982); The Changing of the Gods (1983); The Age of Reason (1984); and A Requiem for Karl Marx (1987). Manuel edited The Enlightenment (1965).

15. Not long ago I read Manuel’s excellent A Requiem for Karl Marx.

16. Philip Rieff wrote Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959); Fellow Teachers (1973); and the introduction to General Psychological Theory by Sigmund Freud. Rieff edited Freud’s Sexuality and the Psychology of Love and Studies in Parapsychology.

and sang, an old left-wing labor song of the 1920s attributed to the Needle Workers Industrial Union, a communist-leaning rival of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union. It went:

The cloakmakers’ union is a no-good union, It’s a company union for the bosses. The old cloakmakers and the socialist fakers For the workers are making double crosses. Dave Dubinsky, Morris Hillquit, and Norman Thomas To the workers always making a false promise. They preach socialism, but they practice fascism While they save capitalism for the bosses. Hooha!

While Rieff was at Brandeis, he was married to a beautiful and brilliant Harvard graduate student whom he had met when he was teaching earlier at the University of Chicago. Her name was Susan Sontag. She was about nineteen, more than ten years Rieff’s junior. They had a young baby son, “Digger,” who grew up to be the writer David Rieff. Philip Rieff and Sontag later divorced, and she went on to a distinguished career as a novelist and critic.

Great Minds of the Twentieth Century

In addition to Max Lerner, Frank Manuel, and Philip Rieff, I was privileged to learn from some of the other great minds of the twentieth century, scholars such as Irving Howe, Lewis A. Coser, and Herbert Marcuse.17

17. A masterful description of the early Brandeis University faculty is contained in retired Brandeis faculty member Stephen J. Whitfield’s Learning on the Left: Political Profiles of Brandeis University (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2020).

IRVING HOWE

My arrival at Brandeis in September 1953 coincided with the appointment of Irving Howe (originally “Horenstein”) to the Brandeis faculty. Over the next forty years, Irving became my teacher, mentor, and friend, up until his death in 1993.18

Irving’s life has been memorialized in two biographies. The first, by Edward Alexander, titled Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew, was published in 1998. When I read a review of the book, I was astonished to learn that it was written by the same Eddie Alexander who had been the sports editor of Tilden Topics when I was the editor in chief. Indeed, Eddie may have succeeded me after I graduated. (Since Eddie’s picture appeared on the book’s back cover, there was no question that he was the same person I knew from my high school days.)

I devoured the book and then called Eddie, who was then a professor of English at the University of Washington. I had not spoken with him since high school, but he remembered me and told me what was evident from the book: that he had been a close friend of Irving’s for many years. Their friendship had begun in 1972, when Irving sent Eddie an unsolicited response to an essay Eddie had written about Chaim Grade’s short story “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner,” which appeared in Irving’s Treasury of Yiddish Stories. Eddie said that his last letter from Irving was dated

18. Among Irving Howe’s many books are A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (1954); Beyond the New Left (1970); Politics and the Novel (1970); The World of the Blue-Collar Worker (1972); The Seventies: Problems and Proposals (1972); The Critical Point: On Literature and Culture (1973); The American Communist Party: A Critical History (1974); Yiddish Stories, Old and New (1974); Voices from the Yiddish: Essays, Memoirs, Diaries (1975); William Faulkner: A Critical Study (1975); Essential Works of Socialism (1976); World of Our Fathers (1976); Leon Trotsky (1978); Celebrations and Attacks: Thirty Years of Literary and Cultural Commentary (1979); A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (1982); Thomas Hardy (1985); Socialism and America (1985); The American Newness: Culture and Politics in the Age of Emerson (1986); Selected Writings, 1950–1990 (1990); and A Critic’s Notebook (1994).

April 30, 1993, five days before Irving died. In the preface to his book, Eddie wrote the following about Irving:19

I always felt that I was learning something by listening to Howe’s voice, a kind of life-wisdom that went beyond political differences. Once, shortly after his father had died late in 1977, I was in New York to visit my own ailing father, hospitalized not far from Irving’s apartment on 83rd Street. “Come over,” he said on the phone, “and let’s talk about life and death—no politics.”

Although most respectful of Irving’s views, Eddie’s book is nevertheless a critical biography, since Eddie disagreed with Irving on many matters.

I was surprised again early in 2003, when I read a review in the Washington Post of a book titled Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent by Gerald Sorin, professor of history and director of Jewish Studies at SUNY New Paltz. Apparently, Sorin began his biography of Irving before the publication of Eddie’s. It covers much of the same ground but is far more sympathetic to Irving.

Finally, Irving himself wrote a political autobiography, A Margin of Hope. Since his life has been pretty well covered, I need not repeat it here. I will say that it was clearly an extraordinary and remarkable life, and in many ways it had a significant impact upon my own.

Irving was invited to teach at Brandeis after having an unusual and rather remarkable job interview in early 1953. As Sorin describes it:20

19. Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), xii.

20. Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 95.

He was interviewed by a faculty committee which included Simon Rawidowicz, a historian of Jewish thought; Ludwig Lewisohn, formerly a Freudian critic and in the 1950s a student and proponent of Jewish nationalism; and Joseph Cheskis, who taught French and had a thick Yiddish accent. The early spring afternoon was apparently not going very well for Howe until he mentioned in passing that he was working with the Yiddish poet Eliezer Greenberg on an anthology of Yiddish stories in English translation. Smiles broke out, as did Yiddish, which everyone spoke for the rest of the session. “Is there another professor of English in the country,” Howe asked later, “who can say that his first job interview was conducted in Yiddish?”

I did not take a course with Irving my freshman year, but I found that he, Lew Coser (a faculty member who taught sociology and became a favorite teacher of mine), Bernie Rosenberg (another sociologist), and several other faculty members were planning to publish a democratic socialist anti-Stalinist magazine to be known as Dissent. 21 Upon the publication of its first issue in 1953, I met Irving and Lew, along with a few other Brandeis students, including Michael Walzer. I was so enthused by talking with them and reading Dissent that I succeeded in selling some two hundred subscriptions on campus (without receiving any commission). This feat was enough to guarantee my status with Irving and the rest of the Dissent crowd on campus and elsewhere.

One of my marketing secrets had to do with my campus job serving meals to the students who were required by illness to spend time at the university’s infirmary. While I was delivering food trays

21. The origins of Dissent are described in detail in the Sorin book on pages 103–132. When Irving Howe died in 1993, Mike Walzer took over as editor. Dissent has since reached its sixty-seventh anniversary of what Irving described as the “steady work of critical left-wing political thought.”

to the sick, I was also busily selling them subscriptions to Dissent. My job as infirmary waiter, which I can remember performing for at least two years, was an interesting and unique way to get to know many students on campus. And my Camp Onibar waiting skills served me well.

LEWIS A. COSER

Lew Coser22 (originally “Cohen”) was also one of my most influential teachers. Lew was another German Jewish intellectual refugee whose field was sociology. Lew had met Irving Howe earlier as a democratic socialist comrade in arms and had urged Irving to look for a job at Brandeis, where Lew already was teaching. Together they wrote a searing history of the American Communist Party in 1962, and both were deeply involved in launching Dissent. It was partly because of my rapport with Lew and other members of the Sociology and Anthropology Departments that I chose sociology as my major.

Lew was my advisor on my senior honors thesis, which, not surprisingly, I titled “The Jew as Radical: The Marginal, Marginal Man.” In it I studied the period 1880–1920 and traced the history of Jewish radicals in Russia and Poland and their personal reinvention after migrating from Europe to the United States. My particular focus was on how they addressed conflicts between their radical and revolutionary political postures and ideology, on the one hand, and their Jewish origins, on the other hand. (This problem continues to plague Jewish radicals to this day.)

22. As author, editor, and co-editor, Lewis A. Coser published at least twenty-five books, including Ideas in Historical and Social Context (1956); The Functions of Social Conflict (1956); Continuities in the Study of Social Conflict (1968); Men of Ideas: A Sociologist’s View (1970); Masters of Sociological Thought (1977); Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing (1982); A Handful of Thistles: Collected Papers in Moral Conviction (1988); and Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Their Experiences (1989). He co-wrote two books with Irving Howe: American Communist Party: A Critical History (1962) and The New Conservatives: A Critique from the Left (1974).

HERBERT MARCUSE

It was not until my junior and senior years that I studied with Herbert Marcuse.23 The first course of his I took was History of Political Theory. And as a senior I enrolled in his Twentieth-Century Political History seminar, which dealt mostly with World War I, the Russian Revolution, the postwar period, and the rise of Hitler. As a young German Jewish intellectual, Marcuse had lived through most of these events. He taught at the acclaimed Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, of which Amos Elon wrote in his The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743–1933:24

Frankfurt was another great center of Weimar learning. Its university, founded after the war, was the only German university where republican professors were not outnumbered by conservatives pining for the old order; its charter outlawed all racial and religious discrimination. At its famed Institute of Social Research, German and European sociology flourished. The institute was generously endowed by Hermann, a Jewish grain merchant who after making a fortune in Argentina had

23. Herbert Marcuse was a prolific and highly influential writer and is often described as the intellectual father of the “New Left” of the 1960s. Among his works are Reason and Revolution: An Introduction to the Dialectical Thinking of Hegel and Marx (1941); Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955); Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (1958); Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (1960); One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of an Advanced Industrial Society (1964); Liberation from the Affluent Society (1964); Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics and Utopia (1970); Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972); The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (1978); Revolution or Reform (1981); From Luther to Popper (1983); Soviet Marxism (1985); Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity (1987); and Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (1989). In 1965, Marcuse wrote an article titled “Repressive Tolerance” and dedicated it to his students at Brandeis University. There are several presentations by Marcuse on YouTube.

24. The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743–1933 (New York: Picador, 2002), 362–363. See Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (New York: Verso, 2016).

returned to his native Frankfurt. [Berthold] Brecht mocked Weil’s generosity with an acid-tongued, typically doctrinaire epitaph: “A rich old man (Weil, the speculator in wheat) dies, disturbed at the poverty in the world; in his will he leaves a large sum to set up an institute which will do research on the source of this poverty, which is, of course, himself.”

The institute’s leading luminaries were Karl Mannheim, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, and Walter Benjamin. Gershom Scholem described the group as one of Germany’s most remarkable and influential “Jewish sects.” Horkheimer, the father of Critical Theory, regarded assimilation and progressive social criticism as the two main aspects of Jewish emancipation. Later, reflecting on his colleagues, who had been scattered far and wide by the rise of Nazism, Horkheimer mused that they had all been possessed by a superhuman but, under the circumstances, tragic faith in the perfectibility of man.

Marcuse’s lectures were pure perfection. He came to class and proceeded to speak for fifty minutes, sometimes allowing time for questions. The lectures, delivered entirely without notes, seemed flawless and immediately publishable. Marcuse had an accent reflecting that German was his first language, but his knowledge and use of English were impeccable.

As Max Horkheimer suggested, Marcuse did appear to believe in the perfectibility of man, and his written works, such as Eros and Civilization, in which he sought a reconciliation of Marx and Freud, reflect such thinking. I, too, seriously entertained such views as an impressionable college student. If only man could be released from the fetters of culture, religion, capitalism, etc., and was rendered free to fully develop his faculties and potential, and if Eros, the love instinct, was thereby unleashed, heaven on earth would be achieved. Sounds like John Lennon all over again!

Today, this strikes me as hopeless romanticism. That Marcuse could have entertained it after the Holocaust seems remarkable in retrospect, if not downright naive. But I still remember Marcuse as an important influence.

Unlike Marcuse, I do not believe that our democratic system is a manipulated hoax in which the economic powers that be decide to what extent human progress, freedom, and equality (which to me are integral parts of a whole) will be achieved. Control of the means of production, the economy, the government, the police, the military, and the mass media can go only so far in forestalling and inhibiting the force of the people worldwide who seek a better and freer life. Indeed, the idea of the inevitability of this movement does sound neo-Marxian and dialectical. Perhaps the differences reside in the worldwide ups and downs of this movement, as well as the fact that the instruments of change are not merely the working class, as Marx and Engels proposed, but all of the seven-plus billion people on the planet.

Progress, as we have seen in the twentieth century, is tortuous, difficult, enervating, and sometimes overwhelming, with enormous setbacks suffered repeatedly. (Indeed, one of the usually unrecognized major historic struggles of man has been and continues to be against nature and disease—witness malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS in Africa, and now Trump, the 2020 pandemic, and climate change.) But even the despots who run China know that unless they can feed, clothe, educate, and otherwise satisfy the human needs of 1.3 billion Chinese (almost as many as the 1.6 billion people who were on the earth in 1900)—and provide them with hope for a better future (including the right to determine the size of their families and their religion), as well as their freedoms of speech, expression, and self-organization into independent unions—the leaders ultimately will be swept into the proverbial dustbin of history. Sadly, there are still many who see China as on the right side of history, but I am not one of them.

Many of us on the left who witnessed the fall of communism in Russia had thought up to then that a totalitarian society might be maintained in perpetuity with the barrel of a rifle, the Naródnyy komissariát vnútrennikh del (NKVD), and other instruments of oppression. However, in the end, the totalitarian Soviet state collapsed under the weight of its own inefficiency, bureaucracy, corruption, and unpopularity. The same will be the fate of the uniquely schizophrenic Chinese brand of communism. Viva Ai Weiwei!

Driving Max Lerner

At the beginning of my senior year, while I was living off campus in Waltham, one of my housemates, Steve Steinberg, called me from campus one afternoon and asked if I were interested in working as Max Lerner’s driver for the school year. Steve was always looking out for his friends!

The opportunity to drive Max from Logan Airport to campus Thursday mornings, to Cambridge after Gen Ed S (General Education for Seniors) on Thursday nights—where he filed his Friday New York Post columns at the Western Union (no laptops or email then)—and back to Logan Airport Friday afternoons was beyond my wildest dreams. So after having taken Social Science II with Max, Larry Fuchs, Bernie Rosenberg, Leonard Levy, and Arno Mayer, where our textbook was the draft manuscript of Max’s America as a Civilization, the idea that I would be driving Max for the entire school year boggled my mind. Indeed, it turned out to be a graduate course in life!

The drives were always eventful and an opportunity to talk about everything! Sometimes Marty Peretz,25 who was in the class of 1959, would come along for the ride, just to spend a little time with

25. Marty Peretz went on to teach at Harvard and served as a mentor to Al Gore, his roommate. He also bought and later published The New Republic.

Max. One day, my ’47 Chevy ran out of gas, and Max had to help push us to the next gas station. In the course of our travels, Max presciently persuaded me that it was the law, rather than an academic career, that I should pursue.

After I graduated, Max invited Marty and me to live in his brownstone on East 84th Street in Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood for several weeks and work on the “Notes for Further Reading” for America as a Civilization. Max would wake us up at about seven in the morning, and for several weeks we worked on the book daily until about eleven at night. Then we would go to the newsstand on Second Avenue for the next day’s New York Times, which we would devour. The air conditioners were not working, and the temperature was in the nineties. Max’s family had left for vacation, and so it was just us happy (and hot) three.

Anyone interested in learning more about this remarkable man should read the wonderful biography of Max by Sandy Lakoff, ’53, titled Max Lerner: Pilgrim in the Promised Land. This vintage Max journal entry written in 1986, when he was eighty-four, which appears in the book, speaks volumes about him:26

If the young dream dreams, the old see visions of what can be. . . . There is a lightness of resolution in becoming old. Things that once seemed impossibly knotty somehow get resolved. It is when you have yourself been sternly tested in relation to events, family, and friends, and they in relation to you that you are surer of them and yourself. Testing is all. . . . At this point life acquires an economy, gets stripped of the inessential. You travel light, discard your accumulated surplus anxiety and rage, get rid of the encumbering baggage of life’s heavy protocols. This becomes a new personal polity, with power, rank,

26. Max Lerner: Pilgrim in the Promised Land (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

and status cut to the bone. You win a new freedom from labels and slogans, even from those of your own intellectual gang. . . . Thus equipped you are somewhat fitter to meet the inevitable batterings that age inflicts on the body, fitter also to respond with a mind more seasoned by adversity. You might even learn to confront Death when he comes offering to be your fellow traveler.

As I update this at eighty-six, in fairly decent health and mind, I cherish Max’s advice, and so I continue to write. The end is still not in sight, the time provides special opportunities, but the uncertainty has its own challenges.

A final Brandeis note: At my graduation in May 1957, at which former President Harry Truman27 spoke, there were about thirty relatives from both sides of my family in attendance. For me it did not seem an especially great occasion, but for them, I was the first member of my family to graduate from college, and it was a truly major landmark and achievement for us all!

For me, I had spent four years opening up my mind to a world of ideas and thought that I did not know existed, which would remain available to me until this very moment. This was an opportunity that every human being ought to have the chance to experience if so inclined.

27. I had campaigned for him in 1948, when I was thirteen, and had heard him speak at Columbia University at a high school journalism conference in 1952. He was the last president not to have a college degree. See Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020).