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Transcript of "Alumni Club of Great Britain's Virtual Thanksgiving Tea"
Joshua Pines: Morning, this evening or afternoon, I don't know if we have anybody here where it's morning time. But in spite of not getting together in person, it's nice to see some familiar faces. I don't know about you guys, but after the first few months of locked down, I had a little bit of Zoom fatigue, but it's come back with a vengeance and I'm really glad to have my screen filled with Brandeisians. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Josh Pines and along with Maayan, I'm the co-president of the Great Britain alumni club. I'm from the Class of 1996, my wife in the other room is from the Class of 1999. There's at least one other Class of 1996 right here, say hi. Our dog, who's I guess about the Class of 2039 or 41 or something. Before I start let me let her out of this room, hold on one second, there we go. I want to thank all the people who help our committee every year we rely on the committee to help us in many ways and this year was obviously a unique set of circumstances. Many of you are here tonight because of their hard work to make sure that you are aware of the event. (List of names). Thank you so much for those of you who have never been involved next year, hopefully, God willing, we'll be doing this in person, we'll need your help even more and we love people to raise their hands for that sort of stuff, so thank you very much. I want to give a special welcome to Zamira Korff, who's the Senior Vice President of Institutional Advancement, everybody wave and of course to Sharon without whom none of this happens nearly as smoothly as it's happening. Who's the Senior Director of Alumni Relations and our key liaison for our alumni club. As mentioned, it's a disappointment to not be in person, but really glad to see such a nice, big and diverse crowd of people here with us virtually. We are the longest running alumni event in any region, I'll say that again, we're the longest running alumni event in any region. Next year will be our 33rd tea, we have already booked the venue that we went to last year and those of you who joined us know what a special place it is. Hopefully we'll be back there, God and vaccine willing four Hamilton place in Mayfair just off Hyde Park, so mark your calendars as usual the Sunday before Thanksgiving, give or take will be there and hopefully welcoming another stellar Brandeis professor alumnus or Professor Emeritus, as we have in this case. We also have a special guest, which is a trustee Bing Le Wu, it's really a pleasure to have him on board. He's a PhD 1991, his wife as well, a graduate of Brandeis PhD 1994 and it's amazing to have a UK based trustee, so hopefully we'll get the better parking spots and better snacks as a result moving forward. But really glad to have you guys locally, really excited to take you into the fold of the Alumni Club and hopefully get to spend some more time with you, hopefully in person. But even virtually and Bing perhaps you'd like to say a word or two to the group.
Bing Wu: Sure, hi everyone. Josh said also my wife and I graduated from Brandeis about 30 years ago and we moved from New York in 2000, so we've been here for almost 20 years. Actually, today is the first time we participate in Brandeis event here, so we're very excited. I hope we can meet everyone in person very, very soon and that's, I guess everybody is looking forward to.
Mrs. Wu: Hi, nice to be here, I'm very excited to be here.
Joshua Pines: Thank you.
Bing Wu: I also want to take this opportunity to wish everyone to have a safe and wonderful holiday.
Joshua Pines: Thank you so much Bing and thank you so much for joining and for all that you do for Brandeis. Again, having someone local representing not just the entire Brandeis community, but Great Britain alumni communities is a great treatment pleasure. Just before we hand it off to Professor Whitfield, a couple of logistical notes. Once professor Whitfield start talking, will ask that you mute your lines, were using the web conferencing format rather than the webinar format in the hopes and the trust that you will respect that. But also, so we can capture questions in the participants chat or the Q&A chat along the right side. Otherwise, you know, it's a very nice event, let's have on, let's try to learn something and hopefully enjoy ourselves. I will hand it off to Maayan to introduce professor Whitfield, with one last note, he was my academic advisor and I was completely unremarkable in that. So I have no problem with the fact that he almost certainly does not remember me, but Maayan why don't you take it from here.
Maayan Amitai: Okay, well, I was not fortunate enough to have professor Whitfield as my academic advisor. However, I believe, take one class each of my four-year that Brandeis and if I could have taken more promise you, I would have. Sorry, how many years did you teach at Brandeis? Because that's not here, but I think it should be.
Stephen Whitfield: 44.
Maayan Amitai: Forty four years, like out of this world amazing. Professor Whitfield is also a Brandeis alum. He received his PhD at the University in 1972 and then he taught for 40 years before his retirement and was the recipient of the Louis D. Brandeis Prize for excellence in teaching, which is not a surprise to anybody who took his class. He also served as professor In Jerusalem in Paris and Munich. He's authored eight other books, including In Search of American Jewish Culture. Also from the Brandeis University Press and edited a companion to the 20th-Century America. I encourage everybody who has not already caught yourself a copy of this to get yourself a copy as a treat for Thanksgiving, whatever you need. On a personal note, all I can truly say about Professor Whitfield is, in addition to just being the most genuinely amazing person that you might meet. He was the only professor whose classes you would see everybody trying to get into, not because they were in American studies major, or they needed the class, or it was relevant to their career in any kind of way. But just because the lectures were truly a joy, you would sit there and the hour would pass in a second. You wouldn't have taken any notes because you would have been so enthralled in listening to the storytelling, so I'm sure we're in for a big treat now. I'm so happy I get to introduce this man again at Brandeis events, truly an honor, I just wish we could be here in person. But please everybody, this is Professor Whitfield.
Stephen Whitfield: Maayan I'm deeply, deeply touched, embarrassingly, so I don't recognize myself in your account, but I'm very grateful for that generous introduction. Very, very kind of you, Josh, you're right, I don't remember you at all, but I gather you don't hold that against me. I'm really, really, truly grateful to be here, I would like to thank Bing and Way if I may say so for joining us on this occasion, I'd like to pay a special tribute to my former colleague, Antony Polonsky for being here, I cherish his friendship I cherish his colleague-ship when he was teaching at Brandeis.There are many downsides, of course, to what we're all undergoing in terms of the pandemic. Occasionally there is a bit of an upside, and I would be remissed, if I didn't mention one of them, which is that the last time the London alumni club invited me to participate in a Thanksgiving Tea was, I think Sharon may remember about six years ago. It was completely nonstop rain all day. It was unbelievably flood like almost no alike, and to be able to be here through zoom is therefore a bit of a relief. I can tell you it's a beautiful, gorgeous sunny day here in the Boston area. I'm very grateful for the opportunity really to participate in this program. Again, Sharon thank you, Maayan thank you, Josh thank you, for making this possible. The purpose of my remarks is really to try to convey to you something about what I tried to talk about in the book learning on the left, political profiles of Brandeis University. Then perhaps more broadly to try to stimulate a discussion about the place perhaps that Brandeis might have in the evolution, the trajectory of American politics from 1948 until the present day. It's an ambitious assignment. I look forward to your comments and questions, as I try to convey what the book itself seeks to do. Then to suggest to you a larger framework in which that book might somehow be placed. The book has its origins in close to the beginning of the 21st century when I was offering the readings course to a student from the class of 2004, Rachel Abot, on the ways by which the university has been recorded in various books, articles, memoirs. In the course of our readings course of our independent study, I realized how much of a place Brandeis seem to have in publications of various sorts, memoirs, articles, novels. And about ten years ago, I started really doing the research and the writing. The word learning the first word in the title is also a way of hinting at how much I myself learned about a university which as Maayan got me to reveal, I taught for 44 years. Yet there was so much in the way of its history that I didn't know. So much fun that I experienced in learning things that I knew nothing about. I hope I was able to convey in the book something of my own pleasure in learning so much about the university that we all in various ways cherish and appreciate. The book is clearly, as the subtitle indicates, really about only one phase of the experience of the university, and that is its political features. If one were to just offhand, try to come up with what has made Brandeis distinctive. If one thinks about, is there a niche that Brandeis occupies that no other institution of higher learning in the United States occupies. Of course, the first thing that would come to mind was the combination of it being under Jewish communal sponsorship, while at the same time being resolutely nonsectarian. What I also discovered in my research was the extent to which one might think about it in political terms. Not necessarily the political ethos of the political atmosphere on the campus. So much as the people who came to the university to teach, the people who came to the University to learn. In their subsequent careers carved out important places in American civic life. The book itself looks at a group of people from 1948 until the present, who, whether they were activists, whether they were thinkers, whether they were writers, made a difference in the development of American politics. The oddity, you might even say the paradox of this book, because it covers 72 years. The paradox is these are about people who did not necessarily know one another, who's only connection to one another is, if they were undergraduates, they might have been Brandeis for four years before moving on. If they were faculty members, they may have been at Brandeis even less than four years. They are political importance, if they were faculty members may have stemmed from something they had done before teaching at Brandeis. Or their significance may have stemmed from something that they did after they left Brandeis. I'm confident that the book is therefore open to all source of objections because of the choices that were made with regard to the people who were involved. They are not necessarily of great importance to the educational history of the university. All though many of them were so much as what they did as thinkers, as activists, as writers, either before, during or after their time at the university. The other oddity about the book which I need to state at the outset, is it's making a claim that the political profile of the university itself made it distinctive, made it something that was really special in the history of American higher education. At the same time that, that particular profile was very distinctively on the left. The left is used as a term, as a definition. As broadly as I could do it without running into the problem of it being too ambiguous to be useful. By left, I mean liberal or progressive, or the various forums of radicalism that had been adopted in America in the post-war era down to our own day. The character of the university in terms of that singularity and that distinctiveness, so the argument in the book goes, was more pronounced in roughly the first quarter of a century of its history, than it would be later. The book itself is weighted heavily toward the early years. For the sake of convenience, it would start in 1948, the year that the university was founded. For the sake of convenience, you might want to say that the distinctive period ends in 1975. This is for convenience only because in that year, two people graduated, who went on to have important Careers. One of them was Michael Sandel, who was the senior speaker that year at Brandeis commencement. Would go on to receive a Rhodes scholarship and attend University of Oxford, and would become, so is the argument of the book, would become the most popular Professor in the world. A strong statement, there is in fact no such person. It would be impossible to come up with enough criteria to figure out the most popular Professor in the world. If there were one, Michael Sandel would be at the top of the list for various reasons that are enunciated in the book. Also that year, his best friend, Thomas L. Friedman, graduated from Brandeis 1975. He would win a marshal scholarship again to Oxford University, and would become a syndicated columnist for the New York Times, would become the most widely popular and possibly influential political columnist in the world. Both of them graduate that same year, 1975, then you went and other is children, they re-matched at Brandeis. Tom Friedman remains in the news not only because of his perch at the New York Times, it was he who came up with the phrase Green New Deal, which of course is an issue now in American politics. I'm not in any way arguing that Brandeis in any way loses its educational significance. I'm not in any way arguing that Brandeis loses its value as a liberal arts institution, in saying that the book in all sorts of ways stops after 1975. There are any number of exceptions, including down in current faculty to Anita Hill. It is a way of saying that in political terms, the peculiar features of Brandeis University occurred roughly from 1948 until roughly 1975. That gives the book a certain historical emphasis, or perhaps over emphasis. Does not claim to treat all eras, all decades in that sense evenly. What made Brandeis distinctive then in political terms? Two figures who were treated in the book, Michael Walzer of the class of 1956, political philosopher Martin parrots, class of 1959, later Editor in Chief, publisher of The New Republic. Each have separately said that what made Brandeis distinctive in the 1950s, when they were both undergraduates. What made Brandeis distinctive is that the sixties came to Brandeis in the 1950s. So what was peculiar about Brandeis in, let's say 1948 to roughly the early 1960s could be put in the following terms. And that is in the very era when colleges and universities throughout the United States were often described as places of political passivity. As places where there was extraordinary indifference to the, some of the larger issues of politics internationally. Where international visitors were often shocked by the degree to which undergraduates in the 1950s preferred to accept the often narrow terms by which success and failure were defined. And satisfaction in life would be determined. Brandeis was different in the degree to which it's students were dissenting from the broader assumptions of American politics. The degree to which any number of Brandeis students in that era of roughly the 1950s found the narrowness of the two-party system to be something that needed to be overcome and challenged. And therefore, the attitudes that were often expressed in the 1950s on-campus. Whether it be opposition to the shadow of nuclear war, whether it be dissatisfaction with racial inequality, whether it be the sense that the energies of the American labor movement were being dissipated? Those particular attitudes that happened at Brandeis in the 1950s, then became much more common n American collegiate and university life in the 1960s. So I want to be careful here in not overstating the case. There were certainly by the end of the '50s and the beginning of the '60s, there were other pockets of dissidence and of opposition. Berkeley of course, being the most famous. But also Madison, Wisconsin, Ann Arbor, Michigan to a degree, City College of New York. These were also places that in some ways shared, at least for important pockets of the student body, shared the atmosphere that was conveyed at Brandeis. And then what basically happens is the combination of the civil rights movement taking place primarily in the south, beginning in 1960. Then with the escalation of the Vietnam War, the anti-Vietnam War movement. Then by the end of the 1960s with the emergence of feminism, there comes to be a more, a broader atmosphere on an American campus life. And in American civic life comes to be a broader movement toward the left, toward opposition to what had been commonplace in American civic life in the 1950s. So, in a sense, other institutions in American life in the 1960s catch up with where Brandeis was in the 1950s. There's a chapter in my book about Brandeis students who go south in the 1950s to fight for voting rights and to oppose the legal discriminations we call Jim Crow. Then the degree to which the 1960s takes its coloration. So largely from opposition to the growing Internet, military and political intervention in Indo-China. And all of this gives the 1960s a coloration and a texture that could be found, let's say in embryo in Brandeis in the 1950s. And then this begins to lose some of its power by the early to mid 1970s. You might say that the obvious change could take place in that traumatic year of 1968 with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. To the iconic figures of the dissidence of the 1960s. And then with the election by a very narrow margin in the popular vote of Richard Nixon in November of 1968. And with both the combination of the escalation of the war in Vietnam, combined with the installation of a volunteer army, the end of military conscription, which takes away some of the energy of the anti-war movement itself. And leading by, let's say again, roughly the mid 1970s. Coming then to a kind of deep politicization of much of American campus life, a movement increasingly toward the center and toward the right. And with that, in other words, something might be said about the transformations that are occurring both on the campus and off. That could be said to end the peculiarity of the way by which American, excuse me, the way politics among faculty and students at Brandeis becomes a, becomes de-radicalized. And there becomes, in other words, a movement toward either liberalism, progressivism and its various guises. But something of the end of the, what has to be called an extremism of the late 1960s. Some of which involve turns toward, toward violence. So the story then at least as a way it is told in my book. The story then largely ends by the middle of the 1970s. Precisely because the argument of the book that there was something peculiar about Brandeis in terms of its radicalism. And it's leftism that no longer becomes very pronounced and very, very observable, but the story you might say comes to a certain end, at least the way I was trying to tell it. The story comes to an end, not by Brandeis looking like other places, but increasingly other places looking like Brandeis. So institutions that we associate with the Ivy league, which were strikingly conservative, strikingly Republican in the 1950s and early 1960s take on the political character of the way Brandeis always was by becoming increasingly liberal, increasingly supportive of the policies, and candidates of the democratic party. So that the most conservative Ivy League institutions of the 1950s, like Princeton and Dartmouth and Yale, become essentially mirrors that resembled Brandeis politics. And certainly the most competitive, the most prestigious of American institutions of higher learning. From that moment on become, I believe, largely reproductions of what Brandeis had been from the very beginning. So to sort of conclude this particular trajectory, one could say that Brandeis loses its political distinctiveness. By the 1960s, late '60s, 1970s, becomes much like in political terms. Other prestigious competitive institutions of higher learning. Even as those very institutions, Brandeis included, comes to be seen often as a kind of force of resistance to other larger trends in American political life. So that the election of Richard Nixon inaugurates a period of republican ascendancy, of conservative ascendancy. The same thing obviously happened between the election of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain. So that there comes to be a conflict, or at least tension between institutions of higher learning in the United States, which become overwhelmingly liberal and the broader political framework within which they operate, which are increasingly conservative or if you prefer to say the center and even liberal politics moves increasingly toward the right. The continuity here, the stability here is that Brandeis always retains its leftist tincture, it's leftist coloration. We might even say almost regardless of what happens within the broader political framework and that this is the story that in various ways I try to tell in the book. Now Sharon, I think the baton is being passed to you in order to get a sense of what responses and questions there might be.
Sharon Rosenberg: Absolutely. Thank you very much, Steve. Now we have some time for some questions. If you have a question, if you can just drop a note in the chat, just say I have a question and then I'll call on you so that you can ask your question. Also, if you'd like to share a memory from your time at Brandeis that was sparked that Steve said certainly feel free to share that as well. Who wants to ask the first question or share the first memory? We know Brandeis alumni aren't shy and we know there's always questions.
Stephen Whitfield: I just wanted to add one feature while people are perhaps composing their thought, which is to say the book also is confined largely to American domestic politics. There's almost nothing in there about foreign policy, but there are doses of statecraft and there's also one transatlantic connection, which was again, something that was very interesting for me to research. That is the two brothers who fought it out for leadership of the Labour Party in Britain, grew up part of their lives in the Boston area. That is, David and Ed Miliband grew up, part of their boyhood lives in Boston because their father, Ralph Miliband, who was in his era, probably the leading Marxist, political sociologist in the English-speaking world. He was among the faculty members at Brandeis, so there is at least an Anglo-American connection that is a bit of an anomaly in a book that's otherwise devoted essentially to within the American borders.
Sharon Rosenberg: Thank you. I see we have two in the chat. First, Debbie has memory and a question and then Antony. Debbie, go ahead please.
Debbie Ginsburg: Actually Barry's. My name but he's going to try this.
Sharon Rosenberg: Sorry, Barry go for it.
Barry Ginsburg: Thanks Sharon and thanks Steve, I really enjoyed it. The memory is, it's interesting how you pick that date 1975. I arrived at Brandeis at 1980 and there was almost a palpable sense of disappointment amongst a significant percentage of the student body that Brandeis didn't quite seem political enough. Reaganism had come, if you remember, in 1980, Jack Abramoff was president of the National College Republicans. There were very few domestic issues that people were interested, divestment from South Africa who was really the big issue and so it was really amazing how quickly it changed. I remember when Abbie Hoffman came back in 1980, when he reappeared at Brandeis, so many students were so happy because there was this historical spark of what happened 10, 20, 25 years ago. My question is, is that just cultural or do you think that's somewhat linked to perhaps the changes in the faculty? Because we had those names of those liberal scholars in the early years, and then by the 80s they were, if you will, politically more middle of the road. Do you think that had some influence on that?
Stephen Whitfield: Yeah, Barry. Thanks very much, that's a great question and there's no way I can really do justice to it because there are so many factors that were clearly involved. If you can find it for the moment, just to Brandeis, an events to which the book devote some attention, which occurred in 1970, that is exactly a decade before you arrived. There was a bank robbery in Brighton that involved two Brandeis students and it ended in a horrific killing of a guard, which was probably the peak moment in which the radicalism that it turned to violence really exposed the consequences of that. Almost certainly had an effect on moving Brandeis away from the extremism that had erupted by the late 1960s. It's also almost certainly the case, that the students who apply to Brandeis who were somewhat younger, obviously when they were applying, were applying within an atmosphere in which they were no longer threatened, if they were male, no longer threatened with conscription. By the time you arrived, of course, the war in Vietnam was already over for half a decade and the issues that were the most pressing, the most immediate, that might have at one point activated political energies didn't seem to be nearly as salient and nearly as urgent. The civil rights movement, which put things in very clear binary terms of good and evil and right and wrong, had itself gone into number of different directions among which violence and the promotion of violence was one of them. Even something that was once as morally simple as the fight for racial equality and racial justice no longer have the same capacity to arouse mass activity. So that all those factors probably entered into it, even within the larger framework that you're describing, that one might think about by 1980 in 80-84, when the issues we're no longer nearly as immediate and in which clearly the political atmosphere was no longer quite as amenable to campus protest. What happened at Brandeis was what by then was happening at many, many other places, which is to say still a broader commitment to progressive and liberal values and ideals. But far greater difficulty in mounting the protests that had animated the Civil Rights Movement, animated the anti-war movement, would continue to be animating the feminist movement. But the atmosphere had clearly changed and what you're describing is something that I can certainly remember at the time, which is to say in terms of political activism, Brandeis by then was largely living on its reputation. It was not a place in which those activities were especially pronounced, although you do mention, of course, the anti-apartheid struggle, which was one of the, certainly one of the exceptions. Antony.
Anthony Polonsky: But it's wonderful to see you in this way and thank you again for this very stimulating presentation. I also have, I have a question, but I also have a number of memories which were sparked off by what you said. Firstly, I was a colleague with Ralph Miliband at the London School of Economics and as a student in South Africa in the late 1950s, the main division among students in student politics at the University of the Witwatersrand where I studied from 1958-1960, was between the liberals and the Marxist internists and these two issues Mill abandoned importance of Marxism-Leninism, in other words, communism. Although they were also Trotsky on its own because the Trotsky art then the question of Marxism-Leninism and communism at Brandeis from 1948, at least till the 1960s, is one which I'd like you to say something about how strong was this, how influential and how far was it really destroyed by McCarthyism?
Stephen Whitfield: Yes. Brandeis was saved largely from the threat of McCarthyism. For I think, two reasons, we're talking, of course, Anthony, About the 1950s now.
Anthony Polonsky: Yes.
Stephen Whitfield: Number one, there were almost certainly no actual communists on the faculty. Now, of course, that did not necessarily stop McCarthyism or McCarthy. But although there were leftists, there were ex-communists, there were ex-trotskyst. There was nobody who was an obvious way, a kind of bellwether for McCarthyism attacks. So that although the faculty was heavily to the left, it was not a faculty that was still subscribing to Marxism Leninism, there was no real exception. There was one case involving an historian Re Ginger, who had been a communist, who when the McCarthyism Massachusetts legislative committee investigating communism wanted to investigate him. When Re Ginger was the editor of, Oddly enough, the business history review at Harvard and Re Ginger declines to say whether or not he was a communist. Which is almost certainly a signal that of course he was a communist. He was fired and a couple of years later was hired by Brandeis. By then I'm pretty sure he was not a communist. But he was the closest that I can come up with to somebody who actually had a record that could have been exploited by McCarthy or by McCarthyism. The other factor that may be involved and this is again speculative, is that because Brandeis was so conspicuously sponsored by the Jewish community, the risk of being accused of antisemitism on McCarthy's part may have dissuaded him from doing any investigations of Brandeis. There's no way of knowing this for sure, Mccarthy himself was almost certainly not an anti-Semite himself, although the movement could easily have exploited anti-Jewish sentiments, oddly enough, the Jewish sponsorship may well spared Brandeis as it did not spare other institutions from that. Beyond that, I'll just say very briefly Anthony, that clearly a figure like Herbert Marcuse, who was the only member of the Brandeis faculty ever to have been denounced by name, by a pope, Pope Paul the sixth. That is Herbert Marcuse and the late Sigmund Freud were blamed by the Pope for promoting the sexual revolution of the 1960. Marcuse certainly had sympathies toward communism. He had been briefly a communist in the early years of the Weimar Republic and he was probably the figure and most associated on the Brandeis faculty with defending communist activities, including the Soviet invasion of Hungary in November of 1956. But by and large, these were people who were on the left but had not actually crossed the line into actual RD membership or party support.
Anthony Polonsky: Thank you.
Sharon Rosenberg: We got three more questions here. So going in order, Jeanne then Kim and then Josh.
Jeanne Samson Katz: Hello. I'm going to first of all do a memory. I was an undergraduate from 1968- 72 and I'm fairly ashamed to say I was a friend of Kathy Powers and Susan Saxe although I wasn't involved in killing any policeman and also clearly I was there during the whole period which was quite traumatic. My question relates to the politics department. I was a major in politics and the politics department appeared to be populated primarily by fairly right-wing academics and our understanding at that time was that was, that was a deliberate decision by the powers that be at Brandeis and I wondered if you'd like to shed any light on that. Thank you.
Stephen Whitfield: Yes.
Jeanne Samson Katz: I don't need to give you any more names you know very well.
Stephen Whitfield: Yeah, I was thinking of two different people actually.
Jeanne Samson Katz: Okay, go on.
Stephen Whitfield: That is my own mentor when I got my doctorate at Brandeis in 72 was John Roche, who had served as a special consultant to President Johnson in the White House. When the war was in fact being escalated. John Roche, in the early 1960s, had served as the chairman of the Americans for democratic action, a liberal activist group associated with people like Arthur Schlesinger junior, John Kenneth Galbraith, the Reverend Reinhold Niebuhr. Roche always claimed that he was a liberal. Always claimed that it was liberalism itself that had changed. Whereas he had maintained his liberal anti-communist convictions, which compelled him to support the Vietnam War and he always claimed that he took seriously President Kennedy's inaugural address that we will pay any price for the defense of freedom, which Roche claimed required defending the regime in South Vietnam, in Saigon from Viet Cong and North Vietnam, it's a complicated position. My own feelings saw John Roche extremely fond, even as I could not remotely share his political views. The other person whom I thought you might have been thinking of was Milton Sachs, who was one of the rare people in American academic life who actually knew something about Vietnam through World War II and had taught in Vietnamese universities. Sachs was always claimed a democratic socialist. But to be a democratic socialist meant also to be anti-communist. I frankly do not know the actual politics of Roy Macrinus, who was a specialist in comparative politics. Bob Hart, I believe could be classified as a liberal. In terms of his own views; somebody who is largely supportive of American foreign policy. Whatever that may mean. But I don't really associate the politics department with conventional, conservative and certainly not right-wing views as such although I grant that it's somewhat debatable. I should add that in writing the book, I had intended to have a chapter on conservatives at Brandeis. But I couldn't find enough evidence. I couldn't in research find enough material. If I had done an actual chapter, it would have looked very padded. So it's actually dropped from the book itself. But your communist is very good.
Jeanne Samsom Katz: Thank you.
Sharon Rosernberg: Thanks, Steve. I'm Kim and Tom.
Kimberly Myers: Thank you for the talk. That was really fascinating.
Stephen Whitfield: Thanks.
Kimberly Myers: If you were to write a sequel, 1975 to the present day, who would be on your shortlist of alumni or faculty to be featured in it?
Stephen Whitfield: Now, Kim, are you asking about political things?
Kimberly Myers: Yes.
Stephen Whitfield: Jack Abraham Marc was mentioned earlier, a conservative and a Republican who created one of the great scandals in modern American history. He's actually in the book. You pose an interesting question here for which I don't really have an adequate answer. It's possible that there will be alumni who play a role equivalent to Tom Friedman and Michael Sandel and earlier figures that may not be old enough, yet to have that kind of impact. We've had people who've been ambassadors like Daniel Shapiro. We've had people in certain levels above the very top in the American government. We've had people who have written important books, particularly about the American political economy, who write for places like the Wall Street Journal. But the question you raise is the intriguing one, which is to say, there really has been a change in which Brandeis singularity has not been sustained in political terms. It seems to me that's the unavoidable phenomenon for which there may not be a fully adequate answer that I can't claim that I've given you an adequate answer.
Kimberly Myers: Thank you.
Tom Myers: I guess just as a follow-up to that, is it also the case that great political thinking has been dead for the past four or five years.
Stephen Whitfield: I don't think that that's the case. I can't claim to have kept up with all the nuances of political thought. But there's certainly, in terms of standard works in liberalism, in radicalism that had been done on both sides of the Atlantic. There's certainly been all sorts of genuinely important books. Certainly, we are living now, I believe in an age, I can speak only now for America, of really great political journalism, investigative journalism and polemical journalism. But I wouldn't be able to claim that there's somebody who was actually merged, who would be comparable to the rather staggeringly, important figures of Sandel and Freedman. I would have to acknowledge that.
Tom Myers: Thank you.
Kimberly Myers: Thank you.
Sharon Rosernberg: Thanks, Steve. Okay, one more question, Josh.
Joshua Pines: Thanks, Sharon, and thanks so much, professor would feel it was great. I had a question in putting the book together and I think in your beginning remarks; you alluded to some of this. Did you find any people or anecdotes that really surprised you that stood out that you didn't expect positive or negative, just really caught you off guard?
Stephen Whitfield: Yeah. The biggest surprise to me was a man named John Van Heijenoort, whom I had never heard of until I started the research. He taught mathematical logic at Brandeis, in the Department of Philosophy; not exactly the sort of thing where you'd have a high political profile. But before he had an apolitical career and a very distinguished one in mathematical logic. He had been a secretary to Leon Trotsky. To be a secretary to Leon Trotsky when he was in exile in the 1930s, as Antony Pulaski well knows, was also to be a body guard to Leon Trotsky. Several body guards to Leon Trotsky had already been assassinated by the Soviet secret police. John Van Heijenoort survived and joined Trotsky in Mexico, in the suburb of Coyoacan, outside of Mexico City. He was not on duty that day that a Stalinist assassin managed to get into Trotsky's study and kill him. But John Van Heijenoort, always said that he would have spotted the phony accent of the assassin had he been on duty that day. The next day Trotsky was supposed to have a meeting with a young American novelist whose name was Saul Bellow. Bellow, saw Trotsky only as a corpse. But before Trotsky was killed, Trotsky had an affair with the woman who was to become the most famous female painter in history, Frida Kahlo. John Van Heijenoort, also had an affair with Frida Kahlo. This is the code of fascinating stuff that can be found, if I may say so, in the book and something that I learned about Josh, only to answer your question, only by something that is called research, something that I would never have had any idea of before I started. I would say that was really the biggest surprise and it's an argument for the pleasures, the satisfactions of historical research, some of which was conducted at Brandeis, of course, in the pages of the justice and other places on the archives. But it was the sort of thing that I would say, genuinely illuminating.
Joshua Pines: Fantastic. Thank you for sharing that.
Sharon Rosernberg: Thank you very much, Steve. Thanks to all you for joining us tonight. We're going to go into breakout rooms in a moment for a little bit. We're also going to leave the main room open, if anyone has any other questions or wants to chat with Steve for a bit, that will be an option. Before we head into the breakout rooms, we'd like to honor another tradition that we do with this event every year; we're going to try for a virtual version of our group photo.