Philosopher Horace M. Kallen was honored by B’nai B’rith with the presentation of its second annual Harold M. Weisberg Award. Martin D. Cohn, chairman of B’nai B’rith’s commission on adult Jewish education, presented Dr. Kallen with the award–a $1500 cash prize–that memorializes the founder of B’nai B’rith’s adult study program who died two years ago. Dr. Kallen was cited for his “lifetime of creative contributions to Jewish thought.”
Some 40 prominent Jewish scholars attended the dinner event at the New School for Social Research where Dr. Kallen had taught for 51 years. During the afternoon, the select group participated in a two-session symposium that discussed Dr. Kallen’s celebrated theories of “cultural pluralism”–an innovative concept he had introduced 50 years ago to challenge the American “melting pot” theory–and their effect on contemporary Jewish life.
Dr. Kallen was an associate of philosopher George Santayana, a colleague of educator and historian Charles Beard, a World War I pacifist, a Zionist, when he told the assembled guests, “you counted the members of the Zionist movement on one hand,” and a pragmatist “denounced as a Bolshevik by anti-democrats and as a capitalist by anarchists.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
