How Jewish Studies Became a Tool of Adversarial Culture

When I began teaching Yiddish literature at McGill University in 1969, I did not yet know that a group of young professors had just founded the Association for Jewish Studies. But the following year, I, along with my McGill colleague, the philosophy professor Harry Bracken, attended the second AJS conference at Brandeis University, where most of its founders were clustered. Harry had hired David Hartman, who came to Montreal as rabbi of a local synagogue, to teach a course on Maimonides, and Harry’s being a Gentile made it easier for us to persuade the university to introduce these two positions, and to get local Jewish-federation support for the required seed money—$10,000 per appointment for three years after which the university would pick up the position if students had shown an interest. On this basis, our program soon added appointments in Bible, Talmud, Jewish history, Hebrew language and literature, and education (to help train teachers for the Canadian Jewish day schools). AJS grew correspondingly: the Protestant orientation of higher education was broadening, and Jewish studies was part of that expansion.

Although the AJS founders had not been able to persuade their teachers to join them in establishing this new organization, every conference honored one of those scholars: Salo Baron, Harry Wolfson, Alexander Altmann. . . . We respected the institutions that had trained us and aspired to improve the schools that hired us by adding the missing Jewish component to the study of our common civilization. When I joined the board, I was surprised by how eager my colleagues were to become part of the American Council of Learned Societies. They wanted to be held to the highest academic standards. We discussed requiring knowledge of Hebrew as a condition of membership but concluded it would be too hard to monitor, though you surely could not aspire to teach classics without knowledge of Latin or Greek.

The introduction of Jewish studies coincided with the rise of what Lionel Trilling called the adversary culture, which was centered at the universities with the intention of transforming the country. The historian Paul Hollander associated the term with “a discernible and durable reservoir of discontent,” and a tendency to find the United States and its government at fault in every conflict in which it is engaged. Its adherents, including postmodernists, radical feminists, Afro-centrist blacks, and Marxists of various persuasions became the “tenured radicals” of the humanities and social sciences with rapidly growing influence over the next 60 years.