The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism

The history of the Frankfurt School cannot be fully told without examining the relationships of Critical Theorists to their Jewish family backgrounds. Jewish matters had significant effects on key figures in the Frankfurt School, including Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal and Herbert Marcuse. At some points, their Jewish family backgrounds clarify their life paths; at others, these backgrounds help to explain why the leaders of the School stressed the significance of antisemitism. In the post-Second World War era, the differing relationships of Critical Theorists to their Jewish origins illuminate their distinctive stances toward Israel. This book investigates how the Jewish backgrounds of major Critical Theorists, and the ways in which they related to their origins, impacted upon their work, the history of the Frankfurt School, and differences that emerged among them over time.

Introduction; 1. Jewish life paths and the Institute of Social Research in the Weimar Republic; 2. The Institute of Social Research and the significance of antisemitism: the exile years; 3. Critical theorists and the state of Israel; 4. Conclusion.

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 was a Fulbright Scholar at Tel Aviv University in 1996–7, and was also a Fulbright Scholar at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute in 2009. Dr Jacobs' work has been translated into French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian and Yiddish.