Tuesday, September16, 2025 4 - 8 PM EDT - Zoom & in person
Pound Hall 101, Harvard Univ., Cambridge MA
The Jewish Problem, Then and Now: Rethinking Louis Brandeis’s Liberalism
2025 marks the 110th anniversary of Louis Brandeis’s famous essay “The Jewish Problem – How to Solve It” The Jewish problem; how to solve it : Brandeis, Louis Dembitz, 1856-1941 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Taking as his point of departure the persistence of antisemitism in the twentieth-century world, Brandeis laid out a diagnosis of liberalism’s challenges and a positive vision for its future. His essay also marked a major statement on liberal Zionism and the rationale for American Jewish commitment to reconciling Jewish nationalism and American democracy. A century later, we revisit this text and the broader Brandeisian legacy to think about the contemporary questions of liberalism and Zionism, law and economics, and citizenship and group rights in American law.
Symposium Chairs:
Noah Feldman, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
James Loeffler, Felix Posen Professor of Modern Jewish History, Johns Hopkins University
4pm
Welcome James Loeffler and Noah Feldman
4:15 – 5:30pm William Forbath “Brandeis and his Jewish Socialist Critics & Collaborators on Zionism & Industrial Democracy”
Amalia Kessler “Arbitration and the Jewish Question, 1900-1950”
Simon Rabinovitch Moderator
5:30-6:30pm Shaul Magid “Jewish Nationality, Nationhood, and Diaspora Nationalism: Reading Mordecai Kaplan and Daniel Boyarin through Louis Brandeis”
Laura Weinrib “Free Speech, Group Rights, and Jewish Identity”
Linda Kinstler moderator
6:45-7:45pm
Keynote: “Brandeis’s Jewish Question(s): Global Liberalism Reconsidered” James Loeffler
Response: Noah Feldman Eric Nelson Moderator
in person and on zoom: ZOOM LINK