It's never too late to learn (especially about Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis)
By Jules Bernstein ’57
I am a graduate of Brandeis University, Class of 1957, who is approaching his 50th Reunion in May 2007. What got me to Brandeis University as a freshman in 1953 deserves retelling. I was born and grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., and by 1952, while in high school, I was an avid reader of The New York Post. Unlike today, it was then a decidedly liberal newspaper. And during what was the height of the political hysteria engendered by Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy, the Post’s three principal columnists, Jimmy Wechsler, Murray Kempton, and Max Lerner, were busily defending America’s freedoms against the pervasive reactionary onslaught.
As for Max, however, he would occasionally turn from politics and describe in his column what was happening at the 4-year-old Jewish-sponsored university in Waltham, Mass., called Brandeis, where he was an early member of the faculty.
To me, at 17, Max made Brandeis sound like the college of my dreams, a virtual intellectual Valhalla where knowledge and truth were pursued for their own sake, and a new and unique community of scholars and students was being created. At that time, my high school peers were mostly heading for the then-free public education at Brooklyn College, or to the world of work, but somehow with my summer earnings as a waiter in the Poconos, some help from my family, and some Brandeis financial aid and work opportunities on campus, I saw my way clear to apply and be admitted to Brandeis as a member of the Class of 1957.
I will not recount how much the next four years meant to me, or how important they were insofar as my personal and intellectual growth and development were concerned. Rather, I prefer to focus on something about which I learned almost nothing while at Brandeis and which I only came to know – much to my satisfaction and pleasure some 50 years later – and that concerns the life and work of Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis.
There may be a number of reasons why the University in the ’50s did little to educate its students about Louis Brandeis’s remarkable and inspiring life, notwithstanding that he was the University’s namesake. Among these factors was probably the fact that with the large number of influential refugee scholars on the Brandeis faculty then, the Marcuses, Bronsteins, Lewisohns, Glatzers, et al., our focus was more international than national. But even Max Lerner, who wrote and taught us about “America as a Civilization,” and turned out to be one of my mentors (he presciently urged me to move on to law school), had written a book entitled “The Mind and Faith of Justice Holmes,” while the then-principal Brandeis biographer, Alpheus Thomas Mason, who had written “Brandeis: A Free Man’s Life,” was at Princeton.
Another factor may have been that the generation of our teachers, having lived through many years while Louis Brandeis was alive (he died in 1941), was well aware of his iconic contribution to American and Jewish life, and did not see him yet as a subject of academic study. Finally, Louis Brandeis was so incredibly modest and self-effacing during his lifetime that he did not attract the attention and recognition that he richly deserved. Indeed, it seems to me now that the only time that Louis Brandeis’s life and legacy came alive on the Brandeis campus while I was there was on a cold November day in 1956 when the University celebrated the 100th anniversary of his birth, and Robert Berke’s statue of Justice Brandeis that now stands at the center of the campus was unveiled. A swarm of notables, including Chief Justice Earl Warren, were in attendance.
I do not know how much attention or recognition Louis Brandeis achieved at the University during the ensuing 50 years after my graduation. But I do know that it was not until October 2005 that he came more fully onto my radar screen. This was true notwithstanding having attended law school, and then practiced labor law in Washington, D.C., for more than 45 years. And even then, my focus upon Brandeis turned out to have been somewhat accidental. In October 2005, Judge John Roberts was facing his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee to succeed the late William Rehnquist as chief justice.
I was awakened very early one morning by my normal arthritic pain and proceeded to our family room, where in my early-morning stupor I noticed, on a bookshelf, a book entitled “Brandeis and Frankfurter,” by Leonard Baker. I had been presented with the book years earlier by my daughter, Beth, since Leonard was the father of a school friend of hers, but I had never read it. This time, remembering that Brandeis had a bitter four-month confirmation hearing after being nominated to the Supreme Court by President Woodrow Wilson in 1916, I opened the book and began to read. Several uninterrupted hours later I stopped, utterly stunned by what I had read and learned, with the clear conviction that I needed to know much more, if not everything possible, about this extraordinary human being. In the next few weeks I devoured Mason’s biography, as well as the works on Brandeis by Philippa Strum ’59, P’98 and Mel Urofsky, as well as others.
One of the people at Brandeis I have come to know in recent years is Nate Lubofsky ’58, the associate director of leadership gifts in the Brandeis Office of Development and Alumni Relations. During Nate’s occasional trips to Washington, he and I usually meet for lunch. This time we met at a small restaurant close to my office that had been known for years as Cozy Corner, but had been sold, so that while renamed Eli’s, I had recently dubbed it “Kosher Korner.” Over lunch I excitedly told Nate about my recent discovery of Louis Brandeis. When I was through, Nate responded by telling me that he was having dinner that evening with Frank Gilbert, Louis Brandeis’s grandson. I was amazed! I let Nate know how much I wanted to meet Frank, who called me the next day to propose that we get together. We met for lunch soon thereafter.
Frank is a lawyer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and he is also a veritable treasure house of information and anecdotes about “grandfather,” with whom Frank spent an enormous amount of time as a child, especially at the family’s summer retreat at Chatham, Mass. Frank was also in attendance at the 1956 birthday celebration on campus.
After all of my reading, I had come to the conclusion that the public was woefully ignorant of Frank’s grandfather’s contribution to American life and its political culture and that there ought to be a documentary made about the life of Louis Brandeis. To my surprise, Frank told me that such a documentary was being produced by Stuart Productions of Concord, Mass., under the sponsorship of Savings Bank Life Insurance (SBLI), which Louis Brandeis had virtually “invented” in 1907, in order to provide working people with a reasonably priced alternative to the inflated prices being charged by insurance companies. Frank also told me that the University of Louisville Law School, which Brandeis had supported during his life as a native Louisville, Kentuckian, was celebrating his 150th birthday on Nov. 13, 2006, and that Frank would be attending.
At that point my concern turned to what Brandeis University would be doing for the occasion. I contacted my friends at the University, including President Jehuda Reinharz, with whom I had worked in connection with my having chaired a committee of supporters of the University’s Transitional Year and Posse programs.
My concern and interest resulted in an appointment to a committee headed by President Reinharz that was planning a year-long Jubilee celebrating Louis Brandeis’s 150th birthday. I also learned at that time that Cambridge (Mass.) District Judge Jonathan Brant ’68 had planned a symposium on Brandeis’s legacy at the Brandeis Alumni Making a Difference leadership retreat in October 2006, which I attended. The Jubilee will commence with a birthday celebration on Nov. 13 and include a number of events, including the premiere of the Brandeis documentary.
Further, I was pleased to learn that the University recently established a Louis D. Brandeis Legacy Fund for Social Justice which, among other things, is sponsoring a new biography of Justice Brandeis to be written by Jonathan Sarna, the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis, and distributed to all incoming freshmen in the years to come. Also, a Louis Brandeis scrapbook is being prepared by the University.
Hopefully, the celebration of Louis Brandeis’s 150th birthday will serve to assure that the life and work of this extraordinary American will be fully studied and appreciated on the Brandeis campus and beyond in the coming years, so that Brandeis students will not have to wait 50 years – as I did – to become familiar with his incredible legacy.