ISAIAH'S FLAME: BRANDEIS'S SOCIAL-LIBERAL AND ZIONIST TRADITION

Abstract

Louis Dembitz Brandeis (1856–1941) evolved from a political liberal, committed to free competition, hard money and honest government, to become in his maturity a social liberal chiefly pursuing social justice and free speech. In the Supreme Court (1916–1939) he remained faithful to his liberal and progressive parameters. Since about 1905 he evolved from being a half-assimilated Jew to an identified Jew and a Zionist. His original concept of Zionism was as a mission to achieve higher social goals. However, from about the mid-1920s he intensified his Zionism as a vital goal in itself. His synthesis of Progressivism and Zionism gradually came to be the classic tradition of all major American Zionist and pro-Israel trends.

Notes

Melvin Urofsky's recent Louis D. Brandeis (2009), concentrates on Brandeis's social and legal engagements; for a fuller historical view see Gal, Brandeis of Boston; and cf. Gal, “Louis D. Brandeis and the Progressive Tradition,” 708–9, and Gal, “Melvin I. Urofsky,” 126–8.

As interpreted (in a series of letters) by Brandeis's mother.

Gal, Brandeis of Boston, 1–207; “The Enigma,” 139–62. Conclusion on the position of Brandeis's law firm in ethnic Boston is largely based on Archives of Nutter McClennen and Fish (previously Brandeis, Dunbar and Nutter), Boston. For a formal-administrative history of Brandeis's law firm see Nutter, McClennen and Fish, The First Century.

Gal, “In Search of a New Zion”; “The Mission Motif.”

See the Pittsburgh Program, adopted by the 21st Convention of the Federation of American Zionists in June 1918, in Urofsky, American Zionism: From Herzl to the Holocaust, 255–6. For background: Urofsky, American Zionism, 254–7.

Link, Wilson, 93–471. Hofstadtler, The Age of Reform, 131–271. For philo-Semitism in New England until the end of 20th century's second decade see Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants, 152–209. For an historical sketch of philo-Semitism in the United States see Gal, “The United States and Zionism.” For Brandeis's views: Fraenkel, The Curse of Bigness, 2–207, 262–326. And see note 22 supra.

Brandeis to Frankfurter, 26 February 1927: Urofsky and Levy, Letters, vol. 5, 272–3.

Higham, Strangers in the Land, 264–330. Urofsky and Levy, Letters, vol. 5, 275–7, 280–300, 352–5.

Bernard, “Immigration,” 492–4; Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America, 78–149.

Brandeis to Robert Szold, 19 August 1930: Urofsky and Levy, Letters, vol. 5, 446–9.

Urofsky, A Voice That Spoke for Justice, 260–5.

Urfosky, A Voice That Spoke for Justice, 264.

Discussion and quotation from Mason, Brandeis, 636.

Brandeis to Robert Szold, 4 March 1937: Urofsky and Levy, Letters, vol. 5, 586; and see Brandeis to Szold, 5 October 1936 and editors' discussion: ibid., 582–3. The historian Naomi W. Cohen devoted a monograph to the impact on American Jewry of the attacks in 1929: see Cohen, The Year After the Riots.

Cohen, The Year After the Riots, 42, 159–60.

The term “city on a hill” was initially invoked by Puritan leaders such as John Winthrop and became central to the United States's conception of itself as an exemplary nation.

Gal, Brandeis, ch. 5, “The New Zion”; Brandeis to Felix Frankfurter, 20 September 1929, Urofsky and Levy, Letters, vol. 5, 386; Freund, “Justice Brandeis.”

Urofsky, American Zionism, 377–88; Halpern, A Clash of Heroes, 256–66.

Brandeis to Robert Szold, 19 August 1930: Urofsky and Levy, Letters, vol. 5, 447. For historical background, see Gal, “Brandeis's View,” 211–40.

Mason, Brandeis, 593–7. Brandeis to Julian W. Mack, 29 January 1930: Urofsky and Levy, Letters, vol. 5, 416, and editors' note 1: ibid., 417.

Letters and editors' notes in Urofsky and Levy, Letters, vol. 5, 416ff. Quotation from Brandeis to Robert Szold, 19 August 1930, ibid., 447–8.

Urofsky, Brandeis, 691–720; Gal, “Overview: Envisioning Israel,” 13–37; Sarna, “A Projection of America,” 41–59. For a thoughtful analysis of Brandeis's and John Stuart Mill's idealistic (or romantic) kind of liberalism see Smith, Liberalism and American Constitutional Law, esp. 96–103. For an excellent collection of Brandeis's works that demonstrate his compassionate liberalism see his Business: A Profession, 1971 [1914]. And see the similar social liberalism expressed in his Other Peolple's Money, 1967 [1913], esp. 137–52. And see note 6 infra.

Brandeis to David Ben-Gurion, 25 January 1934: Urofsky and Levy, Letters, vol. 5, 531–2. Background, see Gal, David Ben-Gurion, chs 2–4.

Brandeis to Stephen Samuel Wise, 2 June 1936: Urofsky and Levy, Letters, vol. 5, 571.

Gal, David Ben-Gurion, 30–47, 72–94, 106–26, 140–54, 170–3, 211. Brandeis to Robert Szold, 23 June 1935, and to Stephen S. Wise, 4 September 1936: Urofsky and Levy, Letters, vol. 5, 558–9; 576–7, resp.

Gal, “Brandeis' Social-Zionism,” 202–7.

Quotation, Gal, “Brandeis' Social-Zionism,” 209; discussion, ibid., 207–9.

For the Prophets, see Interview with Brandeis on the Bible (September–October 1941), in The Words of Justice Brandeis, edited by Solomon Goldman, Foreword by Justice William O. Douglas (New York: Henry Schuman, 1953), 36–7. The interviewer, Solomon Goldman, indicates at the end of the statement: “The hour struck 9 A.M. The conversation ended abruptly. When I next came to the Brandeis home, October 7, 1941, in the company of Judge Louis E. Levinthal, it was to attend his funeral service” (see also Reimer and Berenbaum, “Goldman, Solomon,” 713–14). For Dembitz see, for example, letters and editors' pertinent discussions in Urofsky and Levy, Letters, vol. 5, 217–19.

Mason, Brandeis, 638–40.

Weinstein, “Louis Dembitz Brandeis,” 1.

Quotations from Ben-Gurion, “Eulogy,” Ben-Gurion Heritage Institute Archives, Speeches Section, Kiriat Sede Boqer, Israel. For the full text of Ben-Gurion's eulogy see the Appendix of this article.

Goldstein, Brandeis University; Sachar, A Host at Last; Whitfield, Brandeis University.

Aronson, David Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Renaissance, 82–3.