Jack Jacobs, “The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism” (Cambridge UP, 2015)
New Books in Critical Theory
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The Frankfurt School and the Jewish Life Paths of the Critical Theorists
Orkheimer said to his colleagues: Why hadn't there been a successful proletarian revolution in Germany? And why hadn't the German working class, the German proletariat played the kind of role that an early generation of Marxists had anticipated that it would play? I think that that was a very important example and very indicative of what it was at the Institute hoped to do. You say that you reject any attempt to explain critical theory through biography, but that the history of the Frankfurt School cannot fully be told unless Jew attention is paid to their Jewish backgrounds. So you can tell us a bit more about what those life paths of the theorists were and how they were particularly Jewish.
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