This is an unusual study that occupies a slot somewhere between institutional, intellectual and political history. It is premised on what the author describes as a “suggestive” (5) relationship between the establishment of the Jewish-sponsored, nonsectarian Brandeis University shortly after World War II and the numerous strands of political activism and social criticism it helped incubate within its precincts. Brandeis, quite by design and in the shadow, of course, of the Holocaust, was conceived as “both a riposte to bigotry and a refuge from it” (6). It went out of its way, for example, to employ faculty whose radical ideas and/or racial–ethnic heritage made them unwelcome elsewhere. In similar fashion, it expended considerable energy in enrolling and financially supporting talented students from what we would now term “nontraditional backgrounds.” Among these were many African Americans, as well as Jewish Americans who had been all but excluded from the more prestigious universities. It is a remarkable story and Whitfield tells it, for much the most part, exceptionally well by linking it to a grander narrative charting the evolution of postwar American liberalism.

Learning on the Left is structured primarily around chapters comprising deft portraits of a variety of politically oriented Brandeis scholars and students. Some are well known (Eleanor Roosevelt, Herbert Marcuse, Abbie Hoffman); others are less familiar but of undoubted significance within their spheres of intellectual and/or political influence. Among these, to take only a few, would be the human rights activist and Congressman Stephen Solarz, the African American feminist and legal scholar Pauli Murray, and the early proponent of American studies Max Lerner. Whitfield's crisp prose and diligent immersion in archive and secondary research, facilitated by his own distinguished four-decade career as a Brandeis-based Americanist, animate a historical narrative that rarely loses momentum. These attributes also ensure that the book distances itself, to this reviewer's relief at least, from some of the more arid studies that have emerged from the “institutional turn” in recent intellectual history, with its anatomies of department meeting minutes and grant applications.

Alongside such “profiles” Whitfield also analyses key episodes in the history of Brandeis itself that shed light on the importance of the university's self-image in the face of illiberal political currents and crises. So we learn that, despite the “tightening pressures of the Cold War” (24), the university offered its first presidency to the unambiguously socialist political theorist Harold Laski (he turned it down on unrelated grounds). Whitfield also devotes a chapter to the campus psychodrama of January 1969, when a group of black militants occupied Ford Hall in an effort to secure an autonomously run African American studies department. In this instance, liberal tolerance, patience and, most importantly perhaps, refusal to call the cops are shown to have defused the type of situation that had spiralled out of control at other universities.

The author's judgments themselves up until this point seem measured and sound. Whitfield is clearly sympathetic to the kind of majoritarian liberalism that held sway until roughly the late 1960s. At most points thereafter, as the so-called “culture wars” slide increasingly into view, this remains the case. However, several profiles also seem questionable in some of their assertions and contextualizations. The coverage of former Brandeis student Angela Davis, for instance, makes much of her well-documented involvement with the Black Panthers and her flight from the California legal authorities but pays little attention to her later, prescient sociological work on the prison–industrial complex. Whitfield is also too indulgent of one-time faculty member John P. Roche, whose unstinting support for the bloodshed in Vietnam as a Lyndon Johnson adviser gave additional meaning to the term “cold” in Cold War liberalism. More generally, one topic that operates at a surprisingly low frequency in the book is Zionism. The fact that Brandeis alumnus Martin Peretz, as editor of the New Republic, for example, sought a wide range of political views, “except on the subject of Israel” (433–34), is noted without further comment. Neither is there any reference to the Six Day War in 1967 which dramatically altered the terms of the debate as to the shape and meaning of a Jewish state. Surely developments such as this, the subsequent Yom Kippur War and the peace-making efforts of the Carter and Clinton eras made at least a few waves on campus or among alumni of a less neoconservative stripe than Peretz? It's a curious lacuna in a work, finally, of such reach and distinction.