https://www.wsj.com/articles/well-worth-saving-review-displaced-academics-11586905987?mod=opinion_reviews_pos1
Five of the eight Ivy League universities are now led by self-identifying Jews: Harvard’s president is an observant Jew, sometimes Hillel, sometimes Chabad; Yale’s, a descendant of possibly the most learned rabbinical dynasty; Penn’s, the daughter of a German Orthodox Jew who escaped to America before the carnage; Brown’s, a Quaker convert to Judaism; Princeton’s, a former Catholic who learned as an adult of his German refugee mother’s Jewishness. The overtness, even the ubiquity, of these varied Jewish identities reflects a dramatic 75-year evolution in the status of Jews in American academia. And this shift intertwines with and reflects something broader still: a sea change in the texture of American academic life, a change that has brought with it new challenges to the academy’s current relevance.
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.
