Jack Jacobs is a professor of political science at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of On Socialists and 'the Jewish Question' after Marx (1992) and Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland (2009), and the editor of Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100 (2001). Professor Jacobs received his PhD from Columbia University, where he served as assistant professor of political science. He was a Fulbright Scholar at Tel Aviv University in 1996–1997, and was also a Fulbright Scholar at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute in 2009. Professor Jacobs' work has been translated into French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian and Yiddish.
The following exchange will focus on Professor Jacobs’ book The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
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Dear Professor Jacobs,
Your interesting new book tries to shed light on the Jewish background and influences behind the men and ideas of the philosophical movement known as ‘The Frankfurt School’. Seeing that many of our readers are probably unfamiliar with the main writings of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse, I’ll keep my (somewhat inevitable) introductory question simple: who are these thinkers, and how is their Jewishness relevant to their main insights about society?
Yours,
Shmuel.
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Dear Shmuel,
The group of writers best known as the Frankfurt School crystallized within the Institute of Social Research in Weimar Germany. The Institute, created in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1923, originally devoted itself primarily to matters having to do with labor, socialism, or economics, and had Marxist roots. When, however, Max Horkheimer became the Institute's director, in 1931, he altered the Institute's focus – without by any means altogether jettisoning Marxist ideas – proclaiming that the Institute would henceforth organize research around “the big picture”. Horkheimer insisted that philosophical theory and empirical approaches ought to permeate one another. He hoped and intended that the members of the Institute could help grapple with the large problems confronting their society by bringing to bear insights derived from sociological, historical, psychological, and other perspectives as well as from philosophical points of view. The approach advocated by Horkheimer and endorsed by his circle – an approach which insisted, among other matters, that one could not and should not paint detailed pictures of what a future, better, society would look like – was eventually coined Critical Theory.
The question of why the proletariat in countries like Germany had not played the role that Marxists had earlier anticipated that it would play was a recurring concern for those attracted to the Frankfurt School. Work done under the auspices of the Institute by Erich Fromm suggested that many members of the German working class had an authoritarian character structure, and would be unlikely to resist a seizure of power by Nazis or other right-wingers. In 1935, the Institute published a large volume on authority and the family, to which Horkheimer, Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse (the latter of whom only became a formal member of the Institute in 1933) made major contributions. Horkheimer's piece in this volume argued, among other things, that much could be gained by studying the cultural side of this issue in modern society.
By the time that the Institute’s volume on authority and the family appeared in print, most of the Frankfurt School’s leading figures had already left Germany, the country in which they had been born and raised. Horkheimer, Fromm, Marcuse, and their colleagues Friedrich Pollock and Leo Lowenthal all sought refuge in the US. Theodor W. Adorno moved to the US in 1938, and was, in 1940, made a full member of the Institute for the first time. During the course of the Second World War, Horkheimer and Adorno co-wrote a major book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, which described the ways in which the development of Western civilization had involved a reversion from enlightenment to mythology, and which explored both how and why the dialectic with which they were concerned had led to disaster, such that humankind “instead of entering into a truly human state, is sinking into renewed barbarism”. This book famously contained an analysis of “the culture industry” – that is, of businesses creating products such as Hollywood movies, popular radio shows, and mass circulation magazines – and attempted to demonstrate ways in which the products of these businesses integrate people into existing society and thereby undermine the possibility of radical change.
In the post-World War Two era, Horkheimer and Adorno returned to Germany and became very prominent academic leaders and public intellectuals. Marcuse, who continued to live in the US, similarly, became an exceptionally well-known figure with the rise of the New Left. The writings of these and other members of the Frankfurt School are not merely still in print, but still generate a great deal of interest in scholarly and intellectual circles, in any number of fields.
Professor Jack Jacobs
My new book is intended to demonstrate that Jewish matters impacted on key members of the Horkheimer circle throughout their lives. It ought to be noted, first of all, that literally all of the members of the Institute active in Frankfurt on a full-time basis in the period which began when Horkheimer became director and which ended when these men fled Germany were of Jewish origin. The full-time members of the Institute in the period immediately preceding the end of the Weimar Republic all arrived at the Institute via Jewish roads and had an elective affinity for others like themselves.
In the exile years, moreover, the Jewish family backgrounds of Horkheimer and Adorno explicitly help to explain their research agenda. Dialectic of Enlightenment ends with a sophisticated, multi-factored, chapter on antisemitism, and uses modern antisemitism as a key example by which to explain the history and course of civilization itself. Adorno was only partially of Jewish origin, and had not had a Jewish consciousness in the inter-War years. His experiences in Nazi Germany, and events in the 1930s and 1940s, however, led him to alter his sense of himself. Adorno's impact on Horkheimer, which increased dramatically after Adorno became a member of the Institute, and Horkheimer's own background, led Horkheimer to a new and deeper understanding of the origins and significance of Jew-hatred. It is by no means coincidental that Horkheimer worked for the American Jewish Committee during the Second World War.
By the end of his life, Horkheimer, for one, repeatedly suggested that Critical Theory itself had Jewish roots. He insisted during those years that “caution in dealing with the name of God” and the prohibition against graven images were both direct ancestors of the Frankfurt School's approach. In sum: the Jewish background of key members of the Frankfurt School impacted either the course of their lives or the contents of their ideas, or both, not only in the Weimar Republic and in the exile period, but also in the post-War decades.
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