Brandeis and the American-Jewish “Intellectual Imagination”

Louis Brandeis, the iconic first Jewish member of the United States Supreme Court, had a uniquely American perspective on the importance of the creation of a Jewish state, not only for the Jewish people but also for America and the world. A latecomer to the issue, he promoted Zionism decades before the Holocaust led many Jews to consider a Jewish state an existential necessity for the very survival of the Jewish people. Brandeis thought of Zionism as the perpetuation of the American idea of freedom, justice and equality.

Brandeis was a major force in a movement that I have described as the New Covenant of Jews who assumed a special responsibility since the nation’s founding to uphold and propagate the America idea. For such Jewish thinkers and leaders, securing the American idea in a dangerous world meant creating a safe refuge for all peoples, especially Jews. His position on Zionism was consistent with his leadership of this New Covenant movement. As I noted in “The New Covenant: Jewish Writers and the American Idea,” Brandeis claimed his “approach to Zionism was through Americanism.” He believed that “By battling for the Zionist cause, the American ideal of democracy, of social justice and of liberty will be given wider expression.” Brandeis’s view of Zionism reflected his deep commitment to classic cultural pluralism and diversity.

Brandeis was born in Louisville, Kentucky in1856, after his parents came to America from Bohemia, but it wasn’t until he entered Harvard that his passion for American democracy blossomed in the light of what he saw as the New England Way of fostering democratic values, institutions and human relationships. Leading projects for reform and social justice, Brandeis by 1896 became known as the “The People’s Attorney” who advanced a modern concept of the “living law” that related people’s lived experience to the law. A noted voice in the progressive cause, Brandeis gained President Woodrow Wilson’s controversial nomination to the Supreme Court in 1916.

Brandeis’s vigorous advocacy of the fusion of Zionism and the American ideology of freedom and democracy speaks directly to concerns and fears expressed today about the future relationship between Israel and America in the aftermath of the horrific massacre of Jews by Hamas terrorists on October 7. Thus, Richard Haass, President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, argued last month on Fareed Zakaria’s CNN show “GPS” that “Israel has lost the intellectual imagination debate in this country.” Asked about the response on campuses to Israel’s war on Gaza, Haass said “The American-Jewish establishment has totally dropped the ball there.” Haass believes they “lost the larger debate,” leaving unanswered the growing impression of Israel as “Goliath more than David.” He thinks leaders “played a kind of inside game” by emphasizing politics and votes “on the Hill for aid” as they “looked the other way at settlement activity.”

Haass and others probably will seek a revivification of the American-Jewish “intellectual imagination” by considering a new Middle-East politics of new policies, positions and alliances. The times clearly require such an approach; but any project of regeneration of the American-Jewish “intellectual imagination” on the issue of Israel should include a renewed understanding of a portion of the history and context of the modern American-Jewish perspective on a Jewish state as articulated, for example, by Brandeis, among others. Brandeis saw a kind of democratic Zionism as an extension of the Jewish contribution and articulation of democracy and freedom in America. He thought of Jewish settlers in Palestine as modern day pioneers in the American mold repeatedly calling them “Jewish Pilgrim Fathers.” Brandeis’s provocative image of Jewish settlers in Palestine during the 1910s and 1920s as comparable to “Jewish Pilgrim Fathers” represents a dramatic and radical expression of the robust creativity and energy of the American-Jewish intellectual imagination.

For Brandeis, Jewish sensibility and American ideology were indispensable to each other. He thought the moral and ethical foundation of Jewish consciousness inhered in the American idea of freedom. Consequently, the moral meaning of the Jewish experience gave authenticity to the American way and energized the American mission to renew history for the world. In turn, the American experience created the vision and the environment in which Jewish energies and creativity and ambition could flourish and thrive.

Brandeis’s conception of Zionism implied a continuation for Jews of the American mission for freedom and equality. For other Jewish leaders at the time, such as Oscar S. Straus, the first Jew to serve in a cabinet position as President Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of commerce and labor (1906-1909), America was the new Zion for Jews. Straus felt that American democracy was deeply rooted in Jewish history, thought and culture from the time of the prophets.

For both Brandeis and Straus, as well as innumerable other adherents of the New Covenant, an ingrained connection persists between America and the Jewish people. Brandeis believed “the twentieth-century ideals of America have been the ideals of the Jew for more than twenty centuries.” He argued that “we have inherited these ideals of democracy and social justice.” He wrote, “I find Jews possessed of those very qualities which we of the twentieth century seek to develop in our struggle for justice and democracy: a deep moral feeling which makes them capable of noble acts; a deep sense of the brotherhood of man; and a high intelligence, the fruit of three thousand years of civilization.”

Brandeis’s sentiments resonate in the words of a New York Times columnist I consider a modern-day member of the New Covenant, Bret Stephens, who states, “Jews have long stood for a set of ideas that, if not radical now, were radical in their time. Among them: monotheism, freedom, general literacy and what Jewish tradition calls ‘argument for the sake of heaven.’  . . . No wonder Jews have inspired so much loathing from every ruler, religion or ideology seeking to keep people in servitude and ignorance.”

From Brandeis’s words to Stephens’s hopes, any project for the renewal of the American-Jewish intellectual imagination over Israel, as Haass suggests, should call for more than power politics between nations. Such an effort also should consider an emphasis on a greater, transcendent dimension of meaning, mission and purpose based on history, culture and ethics. At a moment in history when democracy is in peril in both Israel and the United States, the ideas, values, hopes of the American-Jewish experience should be called into action to advance freedom and democracy.

At a moment in history when democracy is in peril in both Israel and the United States, the ideas, values, hopes of the American-Jewish experience should be called into action to advance freedom and democracy.

Also, an awakening to the vitality of Jewish leadership in protecting and propagating American democracy establishes a place and a space of strength to engage and defeat new forces of antisemitism in America and the world. Centuries of leadership and experience in the struggle for democracy and against authoritarianism construct a powerful arsenal of armed ideas and ideals for a new era of battling old forces of prejudice, discrimination, and hatred of Jews and other vulnerable peoples. Such experience provides the basis for combatting anti-Zionism when it becomes antisemitism while also enabling the fight against fascistic and anti-democratic impulses in both America and Israel.

Brandeis proved the powers of regeneration in the American-Jewish imagination when he helped modernize and advance democracy, freedom and equality in America by calling for “industrial democracy or liberty” through the creation of what he termed “social inventions.” Such a regeneration of consciousness and action remains possible today, but, as in the past, fulfilling the promise of renewal demands leadership, motivation and courage. As Michelle Goldberg, another contemporary figure in the New Covenant and also a columnist for The New York Times, writes, “Before we can fight authoritarianism, we have to fight fatalism.” Almost by definition, the New Covenant and American-Jewish collaboration resist and repel fatalism.

Sam B. Girgus is a retired professor of English and American studies who has taught at Vanderbilt University and the Universities of New Mexico, Alabama and Oregon. A recipient of a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, he has written and published more than ten books on film, modernism and American literature, thought and culture.