The Frankfurt School on Israel

Co-sponsored by YIVO and the Leo Baeck Institute.

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In the decades following Israel’s establishment, subtle variations appeared in the attitudes of key Jewish members of the Frankfurt School—figures like Max Horkheimer, Leo Lowenthal, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse—toward the Jewish state. In The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives and Antisemitism (Cambridge University Press), author Jack Jacobs presents original research about this group, including little-seen material from YIVO’s collections, and argues that there was an inverse relationship between the group’s knowledge of Judaism and their criticism of the State: the deeper their knowledge, the stronger their critique of Israel. Chaired by Marion Kaplan (NYU).

About the Participants

Jack Jacobs is a professor of political science at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of On Socialists and “the Jewish Question” after Marx (1992), of Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland (2009), and of The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism, which was recently published by Cambridge University Press. He was the editor of Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100 (2001), and is currently editing Jews and the Political Left, which is under contract with Cambridge University Press.

Marion Kaplan is the Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History at NYU. She is a three time National Jewish Book Award winner for The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family and Identity in Imperial Germany (Oxford University Press), Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press), and Gender and Jewish History (with Deborah Dash Moore; Indiana University Press) as well as a finalist for Dominican Haven: The Jewish Refugee Settlement in Sosua (Museum of Jewish Heritage). Her book on the Nazi era also won the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History from the Wiener Library and her Middle Class book also won the American Historical Association Conference Group in Central European History Book Prize. She has edited books on German Jewish history, European women’s history, and German women’s history and has taught German and European history as well as European Jewish history, Jewish women’s history, and German-Jewish history.