A Light in Dark Times

Judith Friedlander reconstructs the history of the New School in the context of ongoing debates over academic freedom, intellectual dissidents, and democratic education. She tells a dramatic story of academic, political, and financial struggle through brief sketches of New School administrators, faculty members, trustees, and students.

Judith Friedlander served from 1993 to 2000 as dean of the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science at the New School for Social Research, where she held the Walter A. Eberstadt Chair of Anthropology. She also served as dean and professor at SUNY Purchase and Hunter College (CUNY), from which she retired in 2017. Her books include Being Indian in Hueyapan and Vilna on the Seine.

Thomas Bender, University Professor of the Humanities at New York University (emeritus):
Judith Friedlander’s history of the New School is at once deeply researched and a delight to read. She traces the New School’s growth and captures the intellectual, scholarly, and political motivations of the individuals who shaped it: the founders, John Dewey and Charles Beard, who saw higher education as linked to public life; its longtime president Alvin Johnson, who rescued scholars from Europe in the Nazi era; and Jonathan Fanton, who brought Eastern European scholars to the New School as communism collapsed. The book is also a story of institutional integrity and the advancement of scholarship and democracy. Her book, remarkable in its range and the liveliness of its prose, offers an outstanding history of a special institution.

Michael Rosenthal, author of Nicholas Miraculous: The Amazing Career of the Redoubtable Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler:
The New School bloomed over the course of the twentieth century into a resonant, influential cultural institution for both the city and the country, gathering for its faculty distinguished scholars, writers, and artists from all over the world. Judith Friedlander has written a compelling account of its origins, its struggles, its triumphs, and particularly the vital role it played in attracting German émigré professors seeking to escape the Nazis. A rich and textured history.

Vartan Gregorian, president, Carnegie Corporation of New York:
Judith Friedlander’s A Light in Dark Times is a major, well-researched work which explores the emergence, evolution, and contribution of the New School as a catalyst of ideas. The book highlights the university’s role in educating generations of students, as well as serving as a home for noted scholars and intellectuals. Friedlander’s work does justice to the New School’s legacy and reminds us that throughout history ideas and ideals matter and that democracy and excellence are not mutually exclusive. This is a must-read.

Alice Kessler-Harris, R. Gordon Hoxie Professor Emerita of American History, Columbia University:
Friedlander's book expertly reveals how the New School emerged and gracefully interlaces the institutional story with the lives of the individuals who fostered the school’s development. The work raises questions about the defense of academic freedom; the complexities of rescuing refugees from political and religious persecution; and the tensions of an institution that, on the one hand, adhered to principles of free intellectual exchanges and, on the other, relied on its faculty to recruit colleagues who promoted discordant issues and methods.

Eva Hoffman, author of Exit Into History: A Journey Through the New Eastern Europe and Appassionata:
In this fascinating and compellingly readable narrative, Judith Friedlander tells the multilayered story of an institution founded in moral passion and dedicated to the nurture of intellectual life in its most humane and democratic forms. Full of vivid personalities and international drama, A Light in Dark Times is an engrossing history of an exceptional university, an inspiring account of free thought rescued from the twentieth century’s most repressive regimes—and a book that speaks eloquently to our own turbulent times.