Celia Gurevitch Jewish Community Library

Louis D. Brandeis was born 152 years ago today, on November 13, 1856. Here is his very short biography from the “This day … in Jewish history” blog,

Southern born, Harvard educated; Brandeis pursued a successful legal career as a champion of the underdog. He was an ally and confidant of President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson appointed Brandeis to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1916. This was a milestone in American history and Jewish history. Brandeis was the first Jew named to the high court. He was also the first of whole group of minorities who would eventually take their place on the court including African-American and women. The Brandeis nomination was contested by anti-Semites and the American business community. Brandeis served on the bench until 1939. Brandeis was also a committed Zionist and a leader of the movement in the United States. He passed away in 1941.

For further reading I would like to refer to the two books we have on this man pivotal to American Jewry’s history.

Alfred Lief wrote “Brandeis; the personal history of an American ideal” in 1936, five years before Brandeis passed away. Its 500 pages contain these chapters:

Before the curtain
The beginnings of a lawyer
Conservatism and first doubts
Public works
The tactics of attack
His “greatest achievement ”
Enemies are born, not made
Free to fight the new haven
The tilt with Taft
A national figure in 1910
Girding against the trusts
Politics: La Follette and Wilson
Preoccupations of a publicist
Washington and the house of Morgan
Liberal or conservative
Zionism … and new work
The nomination fight (1)
The nomination fight (2)
First years on the bench
The states, the nation, and depression
Experiments toward the future

Philippa Strum’s “Louis D. Brandeis, justice for the people” was published in 1984. The publisher, Harvard University Press, described the book with these words,

This lively account of Brandeis’s life and legacy, based on ten years of research in sources not available to previous biographers, reveals much that is new and gives fuller context to personal and historical events. The most significant revelations have to do with his intellectual development. That Brandeis opposed political and economic “bigness” and excessive concentration of wealth is well known. What was not known prior to Strum’s research is how far Brandeis carried his beliefs, becoming committed to the goals of worker participation–the sharing of profits and decision making by workers in “manageable”-sized firms. So it happened that the man who was sometimes dismissed as an outmoded horse-and-buggy liberal championed a cause too radical even for the New Deal braintrusters who were quick to follow his advice in other areas

Strum charts Brandeis’s development as a kind of industrial-era Jeffersonian deeply influenced by the classical ideals of Periclean Athens. She shows that this was the source not only of his vision of a democracy based on a human-scaled polis, but also of his sudden emergence, in his late fifties, as the leading American Zionist: he had come to regard Palestine as the locus of a new Athens. And later, on the Supreme Court, this Athenian conception of human potential took justice Brandeis beyond even Justice Holmes in the determined use of judicial power to protect civil liberties and democracy in an industrialized society.