Staying Afloat in the Melting Pot: Constructing an American Jewish Identity in the Menorah Journal of the 1920s

In the fall of 1925, a piercing attack was directed at the leaders of American Jewry:

[T]here is a restlessness, a confusion, an inner sense of instability about our communal existence that augurs a fundamental unsoundness at its roots. . . . [O]ur buildings in stone rest on no deep and abiding Jewish values. We are a people who desire intensely to live, but can find no rationale for their continued existence. . . . [W]e are a people who have come a long way and are at last lost. ¹

This audacious critique was written in The Menorah Journal by its editor, the young Elliot Cohen, who accused the American Jewish establishment of disingenuous and uninspired leadership. The Journal’s defiant stance during the 1920s, combined with its intellectual innovation, played a unique role in shaping American Jewish identity in the twentieth century.

With its goals of exploring Jewish culture and cultivating a self-critical, modern perspective, the Journal flourished during the twenties, an era suspended between the turbulent years of immigration on the one hand and the drama of the Holocaust and the birth of Israel on the other. In departing from the path set by the Jewish establishment, and in applying a modernist critique to Jewish life, the Menorah Journal enabled American Jews to develop a more complex—and ultimately more viable—ethnic group identity. Though past studies have highlighted the Menorah Journal’s importance as a literary model and its role in the personal and career development of its younger contributors, they have not focused on its role as a bridge between eras in twentieth-century American Jewish society. ²

The Journal was first published in 1915 as the literary vehicle of the Intercollegiate Menorah Association (IMA), a Jewish college society founded at Harvard in 1906 and organized nationally in 1913. Henry Hurwitz, the IMA’s founder, was an immigrant from Eastern Europe who had abandoned traditional Jewish observance. He recognized a need to channel the energies of young, educated American Jews in a manner that would satisfy both their ethnic affiliations and their secular academic environment.

Influenced primarily by prominent non-Jews such as George Santayana and Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot, Hurwitz sought to apply their concepts of liberal higher education to the situation of the modern Jew, forging what he referred to as “the Menorah Ideal.” Though the ideal would wane (along with Hurwitz’s prominence in the community) and the campus chapters of the Menorah movement would be supplanted by the mid-1920s by Jewish fraternities, Zionist groups, and the B’nai Brith-sponsored Hillel Foundation, Hurwitz remained committed to his synthesis of Americanism and Judaism for the rest of his life. ³

The first decades of the century were encouraging for the Lithuanian-born idealist. After nine years of unimpeded growth for the IMA, Hurwitz inaugurated the first issue of the Menorah Journal with the aim of promoting “the study of Jewish history, culture and problems and the advancement of Jewish ideals.” ⁴ Both the IMA and its journal continued to grow (in 1920, there were more than 80 Menorah chapters on college campuses), and by the dawn of the 1920s this marriage of open Jewish identification and Western erudition had become a recognized force among an educated constituency of American Jewry. Even after the campus chapters began their steep decline, the Journal itself held a virtually unchallenged place at the pinnacle of American-Jewish intellectual writing until the 1930s.

The Journal’s success is all the more notable when considered in light of the “de-ethnicization” that prevailed at the time of its birth. As one scholar of the period notes: “To be ‘American’ was to remove the Jewishness—even as late as the postwar [World War II] era.” ⁵ External factors that discouraged strong ethnic identification ranged from virulent nativism to the gentler enticements of economic and social advancement. Strident nativist trends that fed the revived Ku Klux Klan, among other groups, provided a burst of anti-Semitic energy and heightened some Jews...