If you, like me, believed that Jewish scholars were largely embraced by the American academy during the 1930s and ’40s, that is because you, like me, are familiar with the people whose biographies buoy this triumphant narrative—people like Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein, and Herbert Marcuse. All arrived in the United States during this period; all were accepted here and went on to leave indelible marks upon their fields.
According to Leff, a professor of journalism and associate director of Northwestern University’s Jewish Studies Program, it is our preoccupation with such figures that is to blame for our skewed picture of this history. For reasons of patriotism, the historical literature on this period in US history has “tended to concentrate on famous, or at least successful, refugees and fixate on what the United States gained and Germany lost in pushing them into exile.” These stories paint a flattering picture of the United States as a beacon of intellectual tolerance, and they have the added bonus of being simpler to tell. “Those who succeeded can be identified relatively easily, and their accomplishments can be summarized, synthesized, and analyzed,” Leff writes. “Not so for the many more whose lives flowed in disparate and often invisible directions.”
When we focus on the extraordinary, we are apt to forget that they are just that: exceptions to ordinary experience. It is true that a group of European Jewish thinkers were accepted into the American academy during World War II, that many of them became assimilated, and that some even found celebrity. Equally true, however, is that the majority of Jewish professors seeking asylum in the United States were denied entry. If we step away from the Arendts, the Einsteins, and the Marcuses, as Well Worth Saving does, a different and darker picture of our past begins to emerge—one that punctures the pervasive “myth,” as Leff calls it, “of a welcoming American academy.”
To do so, the book “shifts the focus from those who arrived in the United States to those who did not,” recounting the story of Jewish intellectual migration from the perspective of those who struggled or failed to emigrate. A history-slash-multiple-biography, Well Worth Saving follows the lives of eight academics still stuck in Europe at the end of the 1930s: besides Kohn, zoologist Leonore Brecher, jurist Max Fleischmann, Russianist Michael Gorlin, historian Hedwig Hintze, musicologist Mieczyslaw Kolinski, physicist Marie Anna Schirmann, and historian Käthe Spiegel. All were dismissed from European universities for being Jewish or “non-Aryan” and urgently sought to come to the United States. As the book unfolds, we learn what became of them, and in the process we see just how hostile the academy was to Jewish refugees.