American Jewish History

Horace Kallen Confronts America is a highly readable, analytically engaged and valuable contribution toward our understanding of the American Jewish thinker who is credited with introducing concepts of group diversity in discourse about the meaning of democracy in America and of modern life in general. Kaufman takes issue with critics who lately have disparaged Kallen's theory of cultural pluralism, claiming that its allegiance to diversity was biased and simplistic, particularly due to its failure to relate to race prejudice as an autonomously powerful and problematic force in America. Kaufman does not deny Kallen's blind spots, but he quite deliberately does not dwell on them. Instead, Kaufman's project is to reframe Kallen's work and legacy, particularly by insisting that he was, despite his avowed hostility to religious structures (or, paradoxically, because of his assertive secularism) a serious religious thinker. [End Page 638]

Some readers might not be fully convinced by this particular assertion. Kallen was as much an intellectual weathervane as he was a theological progenitor, and his views changed significantly over time. The quasi-biological essentialism of his key World War I period, provocatively encapsulated in Kallen's assertion about how men cannot change their grandfathers, was jettisoned in subsequent decades, and by the 1950s he passionately denied having ever given credence to biologically-based ideas such as race. Similarly, idealistic references to the American democratic idea elastically somersaulted in Kallen's work over the decades, and it is hard to presume that he was always talking about the same one thing.

As Kaufman eloquently demonstrates, key ideas and orientations—such as the value of diversity, and also the framing of human identity in group, rather than individual, terms—persisted in Kallen's thought and activities, meaning that a measure of continuity can be found despite the obvious shifts and turnabouts in his ideological pronouncements. Still, rather than making a knockdown case in support of the creative originality of Kallen's theology (or theologies) in his voluminous writings, this study reinforces a view of Kallen as a serious American Jewish thinker, wherein the measure of "seriousness" is not limited to the acuity of Kallen's own prose but also takes into account social considerations and ongoing dynamics in Jewish history.

The book is presented as an "intellectual biography" of Kallen, but most of its chapters are semi-independent essays concentrating on the early, especially influential, period of Kallen's career, when he published "Democracy versus the Melting Pot." These chapters deftly identify the impact of Kallen's lesser-known orientations and interests (e.g. Darwinism, or artistic Modernism) on his presentation of cultural pluralism. There is also an outstanding discussion of Kallen's dramatization of the Book of Job.

On the "American" side of Kallen's status as an American Jewish thinker, relevant contexts sometimes seem underplayed or absent. For instance, how Scopes Trial-type grand public debates about modern life and religion staged in America in the 1920s impinged on Kallen's pronounced secularity, culminating in his 1931 publication of a polemical tract, The Warfare of Religion against Science, is not really explored. Similarly, World War I-era nativist dynamics, in opposition to which Kallen formulated his landmark 1915 essay, are somewhat under-analyzed. Kaufman suggestively shows how Kallen shared some of the assumptions of his nativist antagonists. He dabbled, for instance, with eugenics, opposing, in 1910, intermarriage as a "threat to Jewish racial integrity" (43). I think, however, that there was probably more interplay here than Kaufman allows. Somewhat in contradistinction to [End Page 639] scholars such as John Higham, who grasped nativism as one, ongoing tradition of hatred in America, newer works present Kallen's nativist antagonists as extremely manipulative, well-connected, characters who were essentially inventing a new form of pseudo-scientific racism. One such figure was a University of Wisconsin academic identified with the Progressive movement, Edward Alsworth Ross. As Kaufman forcefully details, Kallen's 1915 essay was largely a sophisticated polemical attack on...