The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism: The Menorah Association and American Diversity
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The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism: The Menorah Association and American Diversity
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253223340 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/15/2011 |
| Series: | The Modern Jewish Experience |
| Pages: | 278 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism
The Menorah Association and American Diversity
By Daniel Greene
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2011 Daniel GreeneAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-35614-7
CHAPTER 1
The Harvard Menorah Society and the Menorah Idea
* * *
Harvard students had many extracurricular activities to choose from on Thursday, October 25, 1906. Some turned their attention to the Charles River, where afternoon crew races pitted teams organized by dormitories against each other. Faculty and students in the medical school and psychology department were invited to a lecture on "The Classical Symptoms of Hysteria." At Phillips Brooks House, Francis Greenwood Peabody, dean of the Divinity School, compared university education in Germany and the United States. And, across Harvard Yard that evening, sixteen Jewish students packed into a small dormitory room in Grays Hall to consider whether they should form a Jewish club. Founding clubs was common behavior at Harvard. As Samuel Morison, Harvard class of 1908, later recalled, "Clubs of a new sort sprang up like mushrooms" all over Harvard between the Civil War and World War I. Harvard students could choose to affiliate with a number of political and cultural clubs, including the Harvard Men's League for Women's Suffrage, the Single Tax Club, and the Anarchists Group. French, German, Spanish, and Italian cultural clubs also thrived by 1906.
Although the students who founded this new Jewish club emulated other Harvard students, they were atypical. Jews had a very limited history as students at America's most famous university prior to the twentieth century. More, these young men differed from Harvard's few previous Jewish students, most of whom traced their ancestry back to Germanic lands. Morison had recalled that German Jews "were easily absorbed into the social pattern" at Harvard prior to the turn of the century. But the Jewish students who gathered in the fall of 1906 were different. Most of the students who showed up to the meeting that autumn evening were children of immigrants who had come from Russia or Poland, rather than from Germany; some of the students themselves had immigrated at a young age. Many of them had attended Boston public schools. Now in their late teens and early twenties, they found themselves students at the training ground for the nation's Protestant elite. This transition from households headed by immigrant parents to dormitories on Harvard Yard within one single generation was remarkable for its time. Perhaps they would not be as "easily absorbed" as the few German Jews who had attended Harvard previously.
Founding a Jewish club revealed that easy absorption was no longer the desired goal for some students. These Jewish students, a still small but increasingly noticeable presence at Harvard by 1906, instead began to discuss how to promote Jewish culture within a college environment. They envisioned that their new club would encourage Jewish students at Harvard — and eventually at other campuses as well — to take pride in being Jewish rather than to be so "easily absorbed."
By the time these sixteen students gathered in Grays Hall that October evening, many American Jewish community leaders of the era had expressed deep ambivalence about their presence at Harvard, and more generally about Jewish students' presence at secular colleges and universities. Attending an elite American university, though undoubtedly an impressive accomplishment by this group of young men, demonstrated the possibility of Jewish students' assimilation into the mainstream. Even in the face of persistent antisemitism at Harvard, these students embodied the possibility of an astonishingly rapid integration of a small group of Jews into the American elite. Jewish communal and religious leaders who recognized that college attendance might speed the process of assimilation wondered how Jewish college students would express their Jewish identity over both the short and long term. They began as early as 1906 to ask whether the newfound opportunities enjoyed by Jewish students would incite them to change, or even to abandon, their self-understanding as Jewish.
The founding members of this Jewish club, which by November 1906 would name itself the Harvard Menorah Society, were well aware of their contemporaries' concerns about the continuity of Jewish identity among Jewish college students. They came together to promote a new solution to this very challenge. By the club's second meeting on November 1, 1906, its members announced that the best way to nurture a meaningful Jewish identity was "to foster the study of Jewish History and Culture." This blueprint of using the humanities to encourage students to embrace Jewish identity represented a profound shift for its time. In their quest to redefine themselves as modern Jews, Harvard Menorah Society members chose not to emphasize religion as the cornerstone of Jewish identity. These young men instead embraced Hebraism, which they understood as an identity grounded in scholarly study of Jewish history and culture. Religion was not altogether absent. These young men conceived of religion as one component, although not the required essence, of a broadly fashioned Jewish identity. Rather than viewing the college experience as one in which Jewish students should downplay either private or public identification as Jewish, the Harvard Menorah Society's philosophy rested squarely on the premise that particular cultures, in this case Hebraic culture, should be studied and celebrated.
These Jewish students conceived of themselves as inheritors of both Jewish and American traditions. Indeed, Harvard Menorah Society members drew their inspiration for Hebraism from both scholarly study of the Jewish humanities and from the tenets of American Pragmatism, the philosophy closely linked to Harvard professor William James. In 1906, James was advising a dissertation in philosophy by Horace Kallen, who championed the Harvard Menorah Society from its very beginnings and remained the group's intellectual guide through the next fifty years. Kallen drew on both Hebraism and Pragmatism in his early speeches and publications. A close reading of Kallen's works on Hebraism during this early period reveals that the seeds of the theory that in 1924 he would name "cultural pluralism" already were present. Moreover, the early evolution of his thinking regarding the role of particular cultural groups in a political democracy depended in large part on his association with the Menorah Society and its desire to promote Jewish culture. What emerged for Kallen and for his cohort in the Menorah Society during these early years was a notion that Hebraism could provide the solution to the dilemma of how to be two things — Jewish and American — at once.
Jewish Students at American Colleges
American universities expanded rapidly as eastern European Jewish immigrants flooded into the United States around the turn of the twentieth century. Between 1881 and 1924, when the U.S. Congress passed restrictive immigration laws, more than two million Jewish immigrants entered the United States. During this span, the Jewish population in America increased from 250,000 (less than 1 percent of the total U.S. population) to nearly four million (more than 3 percent of the total U.S. population). Beginning a decade before and continuing for two decades after this spike in immigration, or roughly between 1870 and 1944, the number of colleges in the United States increased fivefold, and student enrollment tripled. In 1900, one of every forty-two college-age youths in the United States was enrolled in a higher educational institution; by 1934, that number soared to one of every fifteen. The boom in college attendance was both enabled by and helped to foster America's modernization; many young Jewish men and women would take great advantage of this rapid expansion in American higher education almost from the moment it began.
During the first decades of the twentieth century, Jewish immigrants attended colleges in significant numbers, and the children of immigrants enrolled at an even higher rate than their parents. Between 1900 and 1909, 19 percent of college-age Jews in the United States attended higher educational institutions; by the mid-1920s, even as the number of Jews entering the country slowed due to Congress's restrictive measures on immigration, the percentage of college-age Jews enrolled increased to 42 percent. During an era when most college students attended schools close to home, university expansion was particularly pronounced in the northeastern United States, where Jewish immigrants concentrated most heavily.
Increased Jewish college enrollment was not unique to the United States. During the 1930s, according to historian Yuri Sleskine, "one-third of all Soviet Jews of college age (19 to 24 years old) were college students," about six to eight times the rate among the Soviet population as a whole. Jewish students also were overrepresented in central Europe. By the 1890s, Jews made up close to half the student body at the German university of Prague and nearly one-third of all students at the University of Vienna. Indeed, so many Jews attended European universities that "Albert Einstein is said to have remarked that it was as though the Israelites had spent the past two millennia of the exile preparing for their university entrance exams."
The vast increase in Jewish college attendance in the United States, which followed the European trend by about twenty years, meant increased access to institutions that formerly were populated almost entirely by Christians. Indeed, until the turn of the twentieth century in America, most universities were unmistakably Protestant. "The intellectual and moral climate was heavily tinged with Calvinism," sociologist Stephen Steinberg writes, "and the main purpose of college education was understood to be the cultivation of mental and moral discipline." Activities at many colleges included compulsory chapel services. Harvard was an exception, having abolished compulsory chapel attendance in 1886. Chapel remained compulsory at Yale until the 1925-26 academic year. At Princeton, juniors and seniors were excused from chapel in 1935, but freshmen and sophomores' presence was required for another thirty years.
Until the 1870s, Harvard remained unmistakably Protestant, like its peers. Harvard underwent a shift, however, during Charles W. Eliot's forty-year presidency, from 1869 until 1909. Eliot, born in 1834 and raised in a well-off Boston family, graduated from Harvard in 1853. In 1858, he became an assistant professor of mathematics and chemistry. Following short stints studying abroad and teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Eliot took the helm as Harvard's president. Eliot was without peer in higher education. He transformed Harvard from a small college with professional schools to a modern research university. "But to say that he was the most renowned figure in American higher education," as Jerome Karabel writes, "is to vastly understate his importance, for his influence went well beyond the academy." Eliot's impact on American society both within and beyond the academy was so great that Theodore Roosevelt dubbed him the "First Citizen of the Republic."
As president of Harvard, Eliot led the modernizing trend in education in universities, promoting the scientific study of religions, rather than requiring students to enroll in courses on moral philosophy. Other schools followed. Educational reformers did not reject religion altogether; indeed, many still hoped that scientific consideration of religion would stimulate religious commitment among college students. Despite these efforts, a number of college students, including Jewish students, became increasingly indifferent to expressions or even study of religion.
President Eliot's tolerance of religious difference on campus allowed for diversity in the student body that Harvard had never experienced. During his tenure at Harvard, the Jewish student population, which previously had been all but nonexistent, became quite noticeable. It might be hard to overestimate how shocking the presence of so many Jewish students must have been at Harvard in 1906. Consider that sixteen Jewish students attended the October 1906 inaugural meeting of the Harvard Menorah Society; then, compare that with the fact that, when Harvard celebrated its 250th anniversary in 1886, it counted perhaps twelve Jewish students among its all-time total alumni.
Both the boom in Jewish students' attendance at universities and the general phenomenon of university expansion in the United States can be well demonstrated in Eliot's own history as a Harvard student and, eventually, as its leader. When Eliot graduated from Harvard in 1854, there were, according to his recollection, no Jewish students in the population of 320 undergraduates. By the time President Eliot retired, 60 of Harvard's 2,200 undergraduates were Jewish. Only ten years later, in 1916, almost four hundred Jewish students composed 10 percent of Harvard's total student body. By the early 1920s, the Jewish population at Harvard would rise to more than 20 percent of the total student body.
The increase in the Jewish student population at Harvard and other elite schools prior to the 1920s was made possible in part by the changing nature of college admission policies. Before the 1910s, competition to enroll at even the most elite colleges was not especially intense. Schools guaranteed admission to high school graduates who stood before the president (or some other representative) and passed an entrance examination. Admissions officers and college applications did not yet exist. Tuition cost, although difficult for many families to afford, was not as prohibitive an obstacle to higher education as it would become later in the century.
These relatively open admissions procedures allowed Jewish students to enroll at some of the nation's most elite schools. By the 1910s, however, some administrators began to worry about what came to be known as a "Jewish invasion" of American universities. As we see in greater detail in chapter 2, administrators and faculty at both Columbia and Harvard, where the increase in Jewish student population was most pronounced, realized that admissions policies based solely on scholastic performance would yield a student population in which Jews were disproportionately represented. Because of this so-called invasion, the less quantifiable concept of a high school graduate's "character" became a factor in admission. This new system of admissions, inaugurated by Ivy League schools and adopted rapidly elsewhere, categorically rejected the premise that academic achievements alone merited admission. A "modernized" college entrance system featured face-to-face interviews with applicants, application forms with questions about family background, and an increased value placed on extracurricular activities — all measures designed to limit the Jewish student population.
Jewish students' attendance at elite schools was a "problem" not only for administrators who controlled admissions. Their unprecedented access to colleges also fostered anxiety within Jewish communities. Rabbis and Jewish educators feared that college students might ignore or forget all that was particular to Jewish religion and culture as they integrated into their new environments. As Jewish college attendance soared, Jewish authorities established committees within existing organizations to combat the perceived assimilative power of higher educational institutions. In 1906, the same year as the founding of the Harvard Menorah Society, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC) formed a Department of Synagog [sic] and School Extension, which hoped to win "the allegiance of Jewish college men and women for the cause of Judaism." Also in 1906, the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), the governing body of Reform rabbis in America, established the Committee on Religious Work in Universities. The "duty" of the CCAR committee was "to secure [Jewish college students'] loyalty, while they are in a Christian environment, and their co-operation after they return to their homes." CCAR annual reports of this era reveal that some Reform rabbis were particularly concerned about compulsory chapel attendance. Yet many rabbis did not want to appear to insult other religious traditions by publicly declaring that Jews should not attend chapel. The CCAR committee therefore determined to have rabbis visit college campuses regularly and to welcome students in local synagogues. Jewish students' loyalty to Judaism was best secured, these rabbis argued, through the "elevating influence of worship."
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: "Kultur Klux Klan or Cultural Pluralism" 1
1 The Harvard Menorah Society and the Menorah Idea 14
2 The Intercollegiate Menorah Association and the "Jewish Invasion" of American Colleges 35
3 Cultural Pluralism and Its Critics 63
4 Jewish Studies in an American Setting 91
5 A Pluralist History and Culture 115
6 Pluralism in Fiction 150
Epilogue: "The Promise of the Menorah Idea" 177
Notes 187
Bibliography 231
Index 251
What People are Saying About This
Greene makes visible the Jewish strand of a larger American story, an intervention that will help readers to better understand how and why the concept of cultural pluralism came about in the way it did. . . . It adds in important ways to the conversation about racial and ethnic differences and the way they have been understood in American culture.
Greene lucidly exposes one of the central tensions in American Jewish history—between the desire for acceptance and the commitment to difference—and shows how this tension . . . took on a new life in the minds of these highly self-conscious and intellectual Jewish men. . . . He does a wonderful job mediating between the broader American context and the more specific contexts of his actors.