The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism: The Menorah Association and American Diversity by Daniel Greene (review)

In the fall of 1906, a group of Jewish students at Harvard formed a club. Known as the Harvard Menorah Society (HMS), this group was not religious in nature, nor was it political. It was not a Zionist organization, though most of its members were proud Zionists. It was not socialist, though that was the ideology of many Jewish intellectuals of the time. It was not Yiddishist, though that was the language of so many of its members’ co-religionists, if not the members themselves. Instead, the Harvard Menorah Society represented the latest, most sophisticated attempt for educated Jews in the United States to be simultaneously Jewish and American.

In his excellent book, The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism: The Menorah Association and American Diversity, Daniel Greene tells the story of that group, which spread from Harvard to campuses across the country and became the Intercollegiate Menorah Association in 1913 and produced a magazine, The Menorah Journal, the most important intellectual Jewish publication of its day. But beyond that, Greene tells the tale of the birth and development of cultural pluralism, the idea that undergirded the Menorah Association. Cultural pluralism, emerging out of a small Jewish student movement, would shape the way Americans understood their diverse nation, and provide the intellectual basis for modern multiculturalism.

To Greene, cultural pluralism represented a twin effort. First, it sought to develop a more tolerant American society that would allow many cultures to coexist and flourish. At the same time, the Menorah Association advocated for a cultural Jewish identity—which they called Hebraism—as opposed to a religious or political one, and thus one that would fit more easily within the American framework.

As an intellectual historian, one of Greene’s chief contributions is methodological. The men who developed the idea of cultural pluralism did not simply write about it as an abstract principle. They lived it. Greene considers cultural pluralism a “lived experience” that cannot be divorced from its creators and the context of its creation.

Among the Jewish students who attended Harvard in 1906, several studied under philosopher William James, a father of philosophical pragmatism. For Pragmatists, truth emerged from action and experimentation rather than from rigid principles. From this came Jamesian pluralism—the notion that truths are multiple, that the universe itself thrives on diversity. Greene rightly points to pragmatism as a key source for cultural pluralism. The experiential nature of the philosophy coalesces perfectly with Greene’s notion of cultural pluralism as lived experience.

The book contains a colorful cast of characters who lived cultural pluralism. Mostly the descendants of eastern European Jews who escaped the sweatshops of their co-religionists, they looked for inspiration to Wissenschaft des Judentums (the science of Judaism), the nineteenth-century German movement. Their experiences interacting with non-Jewish peers and professors shaped their goals for the Menorah Association.

Putting their ideas into practice like good Pragmatists, they organized lectures, occasionally plays, and eventually the Menorah Journal. They also encouraged universities to offer academic courses in Jewish studies. Their high-brow Hebraism, inspired by Ahad Ha’am’s cultural Zionism, promoted the “Jewish humanities.” Ha’am saw Jewish culture, emanating from Palestine, as equal to other great world civilizations; the members of the Menorah Association believed American Jews could contribute their own unique culture to the United States.

Three figures loomed largest: the philosopher Horace Kallen, and the editors Henry Hurwitz and Elliot Cohen. Kallen, who coined the term “cultural pluralism” in 1924, had been a graduate student present at the first HMS meeting in 1906. He took inspiration from his mentor James and envisioned an organic, dynamic Hebraism that would lay the foundation for cultural pluralism. Hurwitz, an undergrad also in attendance at that first meeting, went on to lead the Menorah Association and become the editor-in-chief of the Menorah Journal for most of its existence. Cohen, a Yale alumnus born...