The term “cultural pluralism” has been the subject of controversy for roughly a century. Introduced by Jewish intellectual Horace Kallen into the public lexicon through numerous speeches, essays and books, cultural pluralism has had a long and vexed life, as Americans have struggled to understand how notions of peoplehood have intersected or conflicted with democracy in the United States. Yet, these struggles have frequently been abstract and philosophical. Intellectuals have minutely examined Kallen's complicated and changing writings on cultural pluralism while doing less to consider not only his biography, but the lives of the Jewish men and women who embraced his understanding of cultural pluralism. As one of the founders of the Menorah Society at Harvard University, which ultimately became the International Menorah Association (IMA), as well as the influential Menorah Journal, Kallen spoke to the very real and immediate concerns of a generation of Jewish men and women attending college in the United States in the first three decades of the twentieth century.
Daniel Greene's monograph, The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism, offers readers a valuable discussion of those generational concerns. Greene's first two chapters give an excellent snapshot of Jewish life on college campuses in the early twentieth century. On the one hand, he notes, young American Jews attending college and seeking employment during these years faced suspicion of their true “American” nature, reflected perhaps best in the quotas that emerged at Harvard and elsewhere in the 1920s. Perhaps even more importantly, however, Jews who attended college during these same years were offered so many opportunities to become a part of a secular intellectual and social world that many Jews feared that there would be nothing to entice them to remain within the Jewish community. Greene describes how Kallen and the members of the IMA attempted to reformulate “Jewishness” for this new secular age. The concept of “Hebraism” was key in this reformulation: “Hebraism” was a vision of Jewish identity founded upon exploration of Jewish history, language, literature, and art, rather than religion. Influenced by the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement in Germany, Kallen and members of the IMA offered a highly intellectual refashioning of Jewish identity that bypassed what they saw as the stale pieties of the Jewish religious life in the United States and instead celebrated Jewish culture and history. That vision of “Hebraism” would have significant repercussions in Jewish life in the twentieth century.
Greene's third chapter centers on Kallen's concept of cultural pluralism itself, as well as its critics. Kallen imagined America as a federation of different ethnic groups, each free to pursue its own civilization in ways that would ultimately contribute to the larger nation. Likening the nation to an orchestra, Kallen suggested that each ethnic group should be able to play its own instrument, striving to play in harmony, rather than in unison, with all other players. This vision of cultural pluralism was created in opposition to Israel Zangwill's popular vision of the “melting pot,” which Kallen found undemocratic because it did not consider the possibility of ethnic or racial groups maintaining their own cultural heritages. Kallen nonetheless faced some substantial criticism among both contemporary Jews and non-Jews, including John Dewey, who believed that Kallen had focused too much on the inherited nature of culture (Kallen famously stated in 1915 that “men may change their clothes, their politics, their wives, their religions, their philosophies…they cannot change their grandfathers”) and not enough on the need to preserve culture through institutional efforts (78). By the 1920s, Kallen had come to agree with these critics and to devote his energies (as well as those of the IMA) to strengthening Jewish culture on college campuses.
The final three chapters of Greene's book are devoted precisely to the IMA's efforts to strengthen Jewish culture on campus, as well as the Menorah Journal's efforts to engage with the broader intellectual culture of the United States, using the concepts of Hebraism and cultural pluralism as a guide. Greene makes clear that Kallen and his allies were too devoted to intellectual life and to top-down management to be able to maintain the Menorah Association as a successful student group on most campuses. Jewish fraternities and the Hillel Foundation were more flexible national organizations that better accommodated Jewish students' desires to engage in social and religious pursuits, not just intellectual ones. Instead, then, by the 1920s, both the IMA and the Menorah Journal became focused on strengthening Hebraism on college campuses and on emphasizing the ideal of cultural pluralism among American intellectuals. The IMA worked to encourage college campuses to hire faculty members who would teach Jewish history and culture. Although the IMA's efforts seem to have been mostly unsuccessful in the short run, Greene traces the blossoming of academic Jewish Studies programs in the United States to the IMA. By the 1960s, he argues, “the seeds planted by the IMA's interwar initiatives began to bear fruit” (113).
In addition to IMA efforts to build Jewish Studies on campuses, writers and editors for the Menorah Journal also sought to construct a new Jewish historiography and Jewish culture that would highlight Hebraism and the cultural pluralist ideal. Efforts to encourage Jewish history resulted in subtle and important analyses by historians like Salo W. Baron and Cecil Roth who would ultimately reorient the field of Jewish Studies. However, the Menorah Journal's advocacy of Hebraism alienated its editors from Jewish religious leaders, especially in the Reform movement. Conflicts with Reform rabbis throughout the 1920s over the journal's caustic style and attacks on religious leadership permanently damaged Menorah Journal's reputation. Perhaps more long-lasting and successful was the Menorah Journal's initial championing of writers who would go on to become major figures in American Jewish letters. Anzia Yezierska, Lionel Trilling, and Ludwig Lewisohn were among those featured in the pages of the Menorah Journal, and their formulations of the possibilities of Hebraism fundamentally shaped American Jewish culture.
On the whole, Daniel Greene's work is an insightful, balanced, and thought-provoking discussion of the Menorah ideal in the United States. The book could have done more to probe some of the intriguing dynamics that it indicates along the way. For example, Greene notes briefly the gender dimensions of the Menorah ideal. Greene explains in the beginning of his book that he will focus on male writers and that the Menorah ideal was significantly gendered as a masculine ideal, even though there were a number of women who took part in the movement. Although Greene offers an occasional intriguing analysis of the significance of gender in the lives of these young men in contrast with traditional Jewish gender roles, he does not go much further. This is a bit of a disappointment, since the book's cover image—a remarkable photograph of eleven women and ten men from the Menorah Societies Conference at Brown University in 1927—begs for a closer exploration of women and gender in the pursuit of cultural pluralism. Similarly, Greene's early discussion of the college life of the Menorah Society members highlights the impact of their class status on their philosophy; the Menorah cohort sought to identify itself with more “dignified” German ancestors while leveling attacks on “Yids”—more recent, uncouth, and religious Eastern European Jews. Yet, in the end, Greene disappointingly does not return to his early insights into class and gender to help analyze the successes and the shortcomings of the Menorah ideal.
On the whole, however, Greene's text has done a great service by placing the social lives of Jews like Horace Kallen back into our consideration of a crucial term in American intellectual life. Grasping the Jewish origins of “cultural pluralism” allows us to better ground its abstract claims, and to understand its flaws as well as its possibilities.
