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| Louis D. Brandeis (NYPL) |
“The Jewish Problem, Then and Now: Rethinking Louis Brandeis’s Liberalism”
A Symposium sponsored by the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law at the Harvard Law School. September 16, 4:00 pm - 8:00 pm
2025 marks the 110th anniversary of Louis Brandeis’s famous essay, “The Jewish Problem – How to Solve It.” 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 and James Loeffler, Felix Posen Professor of Modern Jewish History, Johns Hopkins University. With William Forbath (Univ. of Texas, Austin), Amalia Kessler (Stanford), Linda Kinstler (Harvard), Shaul Magid (Harvard), Eric Nelson (Harvard), Simon Rabinovitch (Northeastern), and Laura Weinrib (Harvard)
4pm
Welcome from 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
Moderator: Eric Nelson
