Thu, May 11
06:30PM
Thu, May 11
06:30PM

lecture

Horace M. Kallen’s Frontiers of Hope (1929): A Journey to Palestine and Eastern Europe between the World Wars – In-Person Event & Livestreamed on Zoom

Horace M. Kallen (1882-1974) is best known for his contributions to American multiculturalism, chief among them, the concept of “cultural pluralism.” This lecture by Esther Schor, National Endowment for the Humanities Scholar in Residence 2022-23, however, explores Kallen’s early dream of being a foreign correspondent—a dream dashed by the US Department of State, which repeatedly denied him a passport on (mistaken) suspicion of communist agitation. Finally permitted to travel abroad in 1926, Kallen spent a year assessing the prospects for Jews in Palestine, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia.  Frontiers of Hope combines gritty journalism, lyrical descriptions of place, and philosophical meditations on idealism and disillusionment. In trains, cafes, slums, rural collectives, and meeting-halls, Kallen probed the self-understanding of Zionists, Bundists, Communists, and Fascists, documenting how they tested their faith against the realities of unpredictable political power and economic hardship.

A light reception will follow the program.

About the Speaker
ESTHER SCHOR, John J. F. Sherrerd ’52 University Professor and Professor of English at Princeton, is a scholar, biographer, poet, and essayist. Her 2006 biography Emma Lazarus won the National Jewish Book Award.  Her poems include The Hills of Holland and Strange Nursery: New and Selected Poems; with poets Meena Alexander and Rita Dove, she is also the co-author of Poems for Sarra, a bilingual collection about the Venetian intellectual Sarra Copia Sullam. Her scholarship includes Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria and The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Her most recent book is Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language, a cultural history/memoir of the Esperanto movement.  In 2022, she was awarded an NEH/Center for Jewish History Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship to support her research on a biography of the philosopher Horace M. Kallen. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey, and London.


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