RUTHFULLY YOURS

Laurel Leff has written a sober and fair—but devastating—volume documenting the story’s start, without which its arc is difficult to grasp: the tragedy of hundreds of Jewish scholars and their kin who perished in Hitler’s death camps, in the ghettoes and in the streets, for want of a piece of paper inviting them to an American campus. The book’s title, “Well Worth Saving,” is an unfortunate phrase of the period that was often used to describe these scholars—even by the American philosopher and humanitarian activist Horace Kallen (1882-1974), a Prussian-Polish Jewish émigré who, among other like-minded academics in the 1930s and ’40s, helped to save some of them. In 1919, Kallen had been a founder of the New School for Social Research. He had also, five years earlier, helped to found the New Republic, a magazine of opinion that started life championing Louis Brandeis’s Supreme Court nomination against old-line Protestant opposition. As his history suggests, Kallen found no theoretical obstacle to a deep national character with particularistic threads enriching it.

To sympathetic academics like Kallen, European Jewry and American universities had much to offer each other: The expertise of Jewish scientists and social scientists could only strengthen America’s maturing academy, which in turn could provide these scholars personal safety and academic freedom—and escape from the increasingly life-threatening constrictions of reactive Central European politics. But the opportunity to hire this expertise was very seldom taken, and Ms. Leff, a professor of journalism and Jewish studies at Northeastern University, names the unsympathetic parties who stood in the way: “Faculties who feared competition from foreigners and Jews; administrators who worried about budgets, bureaucracy, and negative publicity; and State Department officials who sought to limit immigration. . . . Ultimately, universities decided which scholars were ‘worth saving’ . . . and the State Department decided whether they were to be saved.”

While individual professors and international relief organizations worked to rescue refugee scholars, “one group,” writes Ms. Leff, “was conspicuously absent from the effort—university administrators.” She makes detailed, well-documented case studies of the genteel anti-Semitism of two Ivy League presidents, Columbia’s Nicholas Murray Butler and Harvard’s James Bryant Conant. Their prejudices kept their institutions relatively free of Jewish refugees, some of whom, often with the help of Columbia or Harvard recommendations, were placed elsewhere—in women’s colleges, art and music schools, or in the expanding academic arena in California.

Not every institution took this “not at my school” line. The New School was spun by its president, Alvin Johnson, into a veritable University for Exiles in Manhattan. (But even he turned away Max Brod, replete with the nachlass of Franz Kafka, which he took with him to Tel Aviv, in Jewish Palestine.) Historically black colleges, which were always interested in expanding their ranks with inventive teachers from the social margins, also welcomed Jews: Ms. Leff slights these venturesome hosts, and the émigrés who prospered in them, with only a six-line endnote, which is a shame.

Because of these and other efforts, a number of Jewish scientists and intellectuals did make it to America, including Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, Herbert Marcuse and Hannah Arendt. So did the children of middle-class Jewish émigrés who followed these luminaries into the academy as it liberalized in the postwar period, and who began to shape its actual operations. Born in Gdansk, Henry Rosovsky graduated from William and Mary, went to the more inclusive Berkeley, and came back in the late ’60s to design Harvard’s core curriculum. Leon Botstein studied with Arendt at Chicago, and then built Bard College into a latter-day Arendtian academy on the Hudson. Penn’s current president, Amy Gutmann, my student at Harvard in the late ’60s, was in the vanguard of the next group of academically minded Jews who took their work even higher into the administrative nexus.

But this most accomplished cohort of Jewish administrators is now presiding over an academy in danger of becoming as overtly insulated as it was during the days of Butler and Conant; an academy suffering from a growing divide in its public life, a bleak and mostly unacknowledged split.

On one hand are the experts who ascend through elite institutions and pass their skills on to their children, perpetuating a new, narrow administrative class—a long way away from the practical, inventive, upwardly attentive spirit that motivated historically black colleges to accept Jewish professors, or poor Jewish émigrés to invest in their children’s education. On the other hand are ideologists who rebel against specialization with radicalisms—from the leftism of Cornel West and Edward Said, which reduces every social encounter to identity and power, to the Western-Christian moralism of the neoconservatives, which seeks to preserve values that disappeared from circulation 50 years ago. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of Americans—left, right and unaffiliated; individualist, mobile and pragmatic—distrust institutional ideologization and specialization of any kind.

Finding ways to meliorate this split is a challenge for the present cohort of university leaders. Fortunately, its members—unlike the antagonists of Ms. Leff’s book—have the experience and creativity, the earnestness and intellectuality, to grapple with their historical moment.

Mr. Peretz was from 1974 to 2011 the editor in chief of the New Republic.