Stephen J. Whitfield, Learning on the Left: Political Profiles of Brandeis University

Abstract

Named after Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, Brandeis University was founded in 1948 as the first Jewish-sponsored nonsectarian University in North America. In his new book, Learning on the Left: Political Profiles of Brandeis University, Stephen J. Whitfield discusses and analyzes the university’s place in the creation of American liberalism and radicalism from the end of World War II through the early 1970s. Brandeis was unique because of the liberalism and radicalism of its faculty. As Whitfield recounts, this liberalism of the philosophers, writers, and public intellectuals who comprised a large part of the Brandeis faculty often went against the grain of mainstream American politics during the McCarthyism of the early 1950s. While most of the Brandeis faculty were liberals, many on the faculty were also socialists and radicals of various kinds. Under the astute leadership of Brandeis’s first president, Abram L. Sachar, Brandeis recruited an outstanding faculty...