The crisis of Jewish freedom: The Menorah Association and American pluralism, 1906--1934

This dissertation provides a cultural and intellectual history of the Menorah Association in order to better understand Jewish identity and American pluralism. Ultimately, the dissertation demonstrates the Menorah Association's centrality in shaping the discourse of ethnic and religious self-understanding in a democratic society.; Founded at Harvard in 1906, the Menorah Association advocated for a new Jewish identity, compatible with modern freedoms and also imbued with a rich knowledge of and pride in Jewish heritage. Through college-based Menorah societies and the Menorah Journal, a national magazine of opinion first published in 1915, the Menorah Association called for a renaissance of Jewish history, literature, and culture, placing the onus on college students and young intellectuals to restore meaning to American Jewish life. Menorah leaders rejected the melting-pot metaphor because it advocated homogeneity, and instead they promoted the pluralist vision of Horace M. Kallen, one of the Menorah's founders. The association, which spread to eighty campuses by 1919, relied on the logic of cultural pluralism not only to justify Jews' belonging in American society, but also to claim a space for reinventing particular ethnic traditions.; The first three chapters chronicle campus-based Menorah Association activities both for undergraduates and for faculty, and the second half of the dissertation focuses on the Menorah Journal. Chapter 1 recounts the Menorah Society's founding ideology based on Hebraism and pluralism. Chapter 2 demonstrates how the Menorah Association used campus programs to interest college students in Jewish culture. The third chapter examines the Menorah Association's attempt to bring the German tradition of Wissenschaft des Judentums to a modern setting by integrating Jewish studies programs into American universities. Chapter 4 considers the effort to integrate Jewish history into a world history context. The fifth chapter analyzes the fiction and autobiography published in the Menorah Journal to reveal how contributors personified the ideal of pluralism through Jewish character types. The last chapter focuses on the Menorah Journal editors' solutions to three “modern Jewish problems”: the role of religion in modern Jewish identity, American Jewry's responsibility to their European Jewish brethren, and Zionism.