Science, Jews, and secular culture1996
studies in mid-twentieth-century American intellectual history
by David A. Hollinger
This remarkable group of essays describes the "culture wars" that consolidated a new, secular ethos in mid-twentieth-century American academia and generated the fresh energies needed for a wide range of scientific and cultural enterprises. Focusing on the decades from the 1930s through the 1960s, David Hollinger discusses the scientists, social scientists, philosophers, and historians who fought the Christian biases that had kept Jews from fully participating in American intellectual life.
Today social critics take for granted the comparatively open outlook developed by these men (and men they were, mostly), and charge that their cosmopolitanism was not sufficiently multicultural.
Yet Hollinger shows that the liberal cosmopolitans of the midcentury generation defined themselves against...