Collection: The Critical Theorist as Enemy Alien (1942-1945)

Adorno and Horkheimer's Critique of Racial Classification.

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Contents.

Translator’s note.

Adorno: Dreams in America. Three Logs (1942).

• December 30th, 1940. New York.

• February 1st, 1942. Los Angeles.

• May 22nd, 1941. Los Angeles.

Horkheimer: Notes on the Curfew (1942).

On the Racial Classification of Jewish Immigrants (1944).

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… continue to … hold onto what Brecht, in a beautiful poem, calls the refugee’s occupation: hope.

—Adorno to his Parents, 7/27/1942.

Each morning I earn my daily bread

By going to the market where lies are bought.

Full of hope

I take my place among the sellers.

—Brecht, “Hollywood.”¹

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Translator’s Introduction: The Critical Theorist as Enemy Alien.

The first two texts in this post are original translations of Horkheimer’s “Notes on the Curfew”² [“Betrachtungen zum Curfew”] and Adorno’s “Dreams in America. Three Logs”³ [“Träume in Amerika, Drei Protokolle”], both of which appeared, respectively, in the September 1942 West and East Coast issues of AUFBAU, a German-language magazine with a broad liberal orientation that was an important resource and platform for debate for German-Jewish emigres.⁴

In 1942, one of the most pressing topics for discussion was the classification of German-Jewish emigres under the Alien Enemies Act.⁵ Following the events of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, FDR invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. In January 1942, he issued a presidential order requiring the registration of so-called ‘Enemy Aliens’—Japanese, Germans, Italians. Over the next few months, the United States federal government and military formalized a system of racial classifications for operation in wartime administration over the ‘domestic front.’ As the matter was discussed in public hearings before the House of Representatives and behind closed doors in the halls of the White House and the Pentagon, the protocols for managing ‘Enemy Alien’ populations were subject to a series of revisions to designations, provisions, and exclusions that would have immediate ramifications for ‘Enemy Aliens’ living on the West Coast.

At the behest of General John L. Dewitt, head of the Western Defense Command (WDC), FDR expanded the WDC’s powers in mid-February to include the forced relocation and detention of any group(s) deemed potential threats to national security from certain zones of exclusion to be decided, in effect, at WDC discretion. In parallel to the broadening of the WDC’s mandate by the executive, the Tolan Committee was formed in the House of Representatives to assess the need and viability of forced displacement of ‘Enemy Alien’ populations for the purpose of national defense. After hearing testimony, the Committee decided to grant (provisional) exemptions of Italian and German immigrant populations from forced evacuations (though a number of individuals from both were already, or would soon be, relocated and/or detained). From mid-February through mid-March, the WDC rapidly escalated its campaign of issuing and enforcing measures of exclusion aimed at people of Japanese descent—which now extended to American citizens and not just foreign nationals. Mass internment had begun.

On March 24th, 1942, Dewitt introduced a series of new regulations that imposed an 8PM-6AM curfew and travel restrictions of a 5-mile radius from place of residence on Italian and German ‘Enemy Aliens,’ including a number of German-Jewish emigres just arrived on the West Coast. Curfew and travel restrictions were lifted for Italian ‘Enemy Aliens’ in October; they would not be lifted for German ‘Enemy Aliens’ until December 23rd, 1942. For a period of approximately nine months, the members of the ISR’s ‘West Coast Branch’ were subject not only to the same conditions of curfew, travel restrictions, and state surveillance as all of their fellow German ‘Enemy Aliens,’ but were also informed that their fate might depend on whether they were granted exemptions by a racial reclassification as Jewish refugees of Nazi Germany.⁶

Adorno’s letters to his parents throughout 1942 are perhaps the best window into the same frame of mind in which the critical theorists hosted the ISR’s internal Seminar on Needs and drafted the earliest parts of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Together with “Dreams in America” and “Notes on the Curfew,” the letters are a record of a direct confrontation between the critical theorists and the constitution of race as “the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death”⁷—and not just the constitution of ‘their’ Jewishness.

The reason for the depression, aside from the general situation, is the completely uncertain state of affairs here. Officially, we are classed among those who are to be evacuated. On the other hand, there has been much talk of reclassification, but I am rather skeptical. At any rate, the situation is such that one really does not know what to do. To leave here sooner than absolutely necessary would be impractical, nay impossible; on the other hand, being ultimately chased away is a highly unpleasant prospect (we are reckoning with this around May). Then there are also the special terms already in force. From tomorrow onwards, we have to be home no later than 8 each evening, and are not allowed to go more than 5 miles away from the house, which, with the truly monstrous distances here, amounts to being completely locked up. We can no longer go to Hollywood, only just to Beverly Hills, and our wonderful drives, our only source of relaxation, are now a thing of the past. It is particularly inexplicable that these regulations should be most strict against emigrants—the most reliable enemies of Hitler in the whole of America—and the Japanese. We do not have the ‘out with us’ mentality, no more here than anywhere else. The whole thing is all the more grotesque because I have been spending all of these last weeks working like mad for a government agency in Washington, the last few days even at night; I sent out a long report yesterday. It goes without saying that the institute cannot evade the defense commitments, which are of course purely volunteer work. As Max is lying in bed with influenza, I, the ‘enemy alien,’ had to direct all the work assigned to the Los Angeles branch. Gretel helped me truly fantastically with this. In addition to all this, I donated a pint of my oh-so-precious Corsican-Jewish blood 2 weeks ago.

—Adorno to his Parents, 3/26/1942⁸

My dears, we are well, we are keeping our horses’ heads up, we are not at all afraid of planes (I find being treated as an enemy alien much worse!)—and Max and I are well into the schemata for our book (definitely: not about the Jews!). It will be very fine if we are allowed to stay, and as far as the war is concerned, I do actually think that Hitler will be beaten! If only we might live to witness it!

—Adorno to his Parents, 4/19/1942.⁹

My dears, a thousand thanks for your dear letter of the 20th. We have very little to report; Max and I are engrossed in drawing up the schemata for our new study. Besides this, he has also learned to ride a bicycle, so that he can still come to us when we can no longer drive. His car now stands in our garage all day, next to ours.

—Adorno to his Parents, 4/24/1942.¹⁰

Our work revolves, in the widest sense, around the question of ‘enlightenment,’ in that both positive and negative analyses of the guise taken on by enlightenment in modern philosophical thought are to help us to develop in the conceptual medium the insights we presume to have gained regarding the present state of the world and the possibility of a way out. The first main section, which we are beginning to draft now, relates to the philosophical concept of enlightenment and its connection to myth and rule. But please do not speak to anyone of these matters, i.e. our choice of theme, as no one at the institute in New York knows about it for certain, and there would only be petty rivalry otherwise.

—Adorno to his Parents, 5/2/1942.¹¹

First of all regarding the question of the holidays: persistent rumours were going around here that the curfew was almost certainly to be lifted on 3 June. This did not happen, however, and nothing further was heard about the matter. It is still unclear whether we can stay or not. The evacuation regulation that applies to us has not been revoked, but no further measures have yet been taken, although the evacuation of the Japanese from Zone 1, to which we are also assigned, has been completed. As far as the curfew is concerned, it seems that it is being enforced more strictly now; e.g. the other night Brecht received a visit from the FBI at 1⁄2 past 9 to see if they were at home; and the same thing with the Reichenbachs. On the other hand, it seems that Max’s old secretary (Mendelssohn), who has been in the country for barely three years, is being granted a permit to move here. The logical conclusion from this would be that at least no evacuation is planned, but evidently there is such an absence of any clear policy that even such conclusions cannot be drawn with any confidence. It is naturally possible that the situation could change for the worse or for the better from one day to the next. If the latter were to be the case, then we would of course gladly give you the green light to come here as quickly as possible. On the other hand, however, I would not like to be responsible for your sitting around in rather uncertain expectation in New York, which is probably unbearably hot now, and spoiling your holidays. A further problem here is the threat of petrol rationing, which, with the incredible distances and the lack of any decent means of transport (except car), can lead to complete isolation. Under these circumstances, I do not think that I can reasonably expect you to wait any longer for a change in the situation here. Should it change, however, I would telegraph you immediately, and perhaps we could still find a way after all. […] Did you receive the Benjamin memorial issue [viz., Walter Benjamin. Zum Gedächtnis.] and the Studies? Max and I have given instructions several times for both of these to be sent. If you do not have them, you can simply ask Leo [viz., Löwenthal] to give them to you. Please let me know if you are given the correct ‘big’ version of the Benjamin issue, which is over 160 pages long. Incidentally, the essay ‘Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung’ is identical to the English one entitled The End of Reason. What counts for us is the German version, so you do not need to read the English one. […] As far as the war is concerned, I am genuinely beginning gradually to gain somewhat more hope. You can imagine what fantasies I had following the bombardment of Cologne and Essen.¹² I am sniffing about intensely with regard to changes in the wind and silver linings.

—Adorno to his Parents, 6/5/1942.¹³

As far as the alien situation is concerned, there has been no significant change, though it does seem fairly certain now that there will not be any evacuation. The other evening we were checked in a friendly manner by an official, to see if we were at home like good law-abiding citizens, but even this was carried out in the most friendly manner. Otherwise, we have very little to report. We now see a few more people than previously, as both Pollock and Steuermann have set up their summer residences here. As a novelty we have established a little seminar, whose participants (aside from the four institute members) are Brecht, Eisler, Steuermann, Prof. Reichenbach, Günther Stern [aka Günther Anders], Ludwig Marcuse and Ralph Nürnberg. Our work is progressing well, and we are also working on a new memorandum for Washington, which in turn is confidential.

—Adorno to his Parents, 7/2/1942.¹⁴

Our life continues unchanged. We are outside a good deal, and you can rest assured that we are keeping our reproduction in mind. It is very difficult to take a genuine holiday, as we cannot leave here without permission from the FBI, and to be granted this permission one requires a medical certificate.

—Adorno to his Parents, 7/16/1942.¹⁵

My dears, this is simply to let you know that we are well and that our life is taking its customarily quiet course. It seems—touch wood—that we will not be evacuated, and that only certain people will be removed from here on account of procedures particular to each case. This once more lends a more positive complexion to the prospect of your coming here, which makes us very happy.

—Adorno to his Parents, 8/23/1942.¹⁶

We are very well, except that the weather is like Amorbach in October, so Giraffe has had to interrupt her daily swimming routine, which had done her such good. I have almost finished the rough draft of ‘Massenkultur,’ and at the same time come up with a national-economic (!!) theory in order to bring Marx’s doctrine of impoverishment up to date [viz., “Reflections on Class Theory”]. Otherwise nothing new, we work mostly in the garden, go to bed with the chickens and meet with a small and, as Else would say, ‘select’ circle of people, aside from the institute Eduard, Eisler, Schönberg, Brecht, Norah Andreae, that’s about all. —Pray that the Russians can stand firm, then everything could still turn out well, so to speak.

—Adorno to his Parents, 9/1/1942.¹⁷

I have now completed the rough draft for my long text ‘Das Schema der Massenkultur,’ the longest I have written since the Wagner. While Gretel is writing it out so that we can then produce the final version, I am writing a series of theses on the theory of class, and also undertaking certain historical studies in connection with these. I would be interested to know if my contribution for Aufbau (‘Träume in Amerika’) has appeared yet, or only been announced. If I were you, incidentally, I would overcome your entirely understandable aversion against the paper in this case, as this contribution is an extremely personal matter that should directly concern you too. You should also read Max’s essay ‘Betrachtung zum Curfew’, which was in the West Coast issue. […] We meanwhile have the new aliens regulations, which state quite clearly that there is not to be any evacuation. This should also be of no little significance for your decisions, especially as the current curfew regulations do not apply to you on account of your age. Taking into account the dangers of aerial warfare, I think it is safer here than in New York.

—Adorno to his Parents, 9/9/1942.¹⁸

I am stretching out my head into the air and sniffing, and as I at least inherited a portion of your sanguinism, it seems to me that the world no longer looks so desperate. The baffling inability of the Germans to exploit their immeasurable advantages (it was much the same with Hannibal) should gradually become so palpable that the Allies’ greater resources start to count, and the ghastly tide will turn. As I think that the Germans’ victories were due less to their own strength than to the weaknesses of the others, they could certainly be deprived of their sting, and there are signs to suggest that the Germans are really not quite what they are cracked up to be. This all still sounds rather frivolous, but I cannot abandon my conviction, which has persisted for the last three years, that this war will be won by the greater capital power, which naturally cannot be expressed in terms of financial capital. […] Just think: Mé Salomon¹⁹ and Arthur Weinberg²⁰ have supposedly been deported to Poland; old Herr Salomon evidently died beforehand. Thinking of these things makes one even more grateful for the way our fate has turned out than one already is.

—Adorno to his Parents, 9/27/1942.²¹

There is little to report; we are continuing work on our sacred text, and are also involved in a fair number of research projects besides that. […] The increase in social activity is a result of the impending petrol rationing, which we are all awaiting with bated breath. Together with the curfew, which has been lifted for the Italians but not for us, the distances and transport conditions mean that the rationing would result in a barely imaginable isolation.

—Adorno to his Parents, 10/30/1942.²²

As Ryan Crawford (2023) has recently argued, the tendency in the reception of ‘first generation’ critical theory in the “philosemitic […] tradition of ascribing positive characteristics to Jewish identity” often involves “a set of practices which frequently reproduce the antisemitic practice of ‘unmasking’ individuals and groups as Jews, no matter their protests, and which accord outsized influence to non-elective ethnic and/or racial identities in the determination of life and character.”²³ Through a close reading of Felix Weil’s letters to Martin Jay over the manuscript for Dialectical Imagination (1973), Crawford shows that Weil’s objections to the “repeated identification of Institute members according to their supposed Jewishness” in Jay’s account of the origins of the Frankfurt School exhibit a consistent critique of a “peculiar logic of identity, based as it is on religious or non-elective forms of identity-based inheritance, as Weil makes clear by referring to the self-evident absurdities resulting from similar determinations during the time of the Third Reich.”²⁴ To the extent the formation of the Frankfurt School is retroactively grounded in a ‘supposed Jewishness’ that binds the critical theorists together a priori, the effort to do justice to their experience of racial prejudice not only trivializes their confrontation with the ascriptive process of racialization—both as exiles from Nazi Germany and emigres in the United States—but also occludes their critical redeployment of race in theoretical reflection as an emancipatory category from the point of view of its abolition, not its affirmation.²⁵ As Adorno and Horkheimer conclude Thesis VI in “Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment”:

A radical change would depend on whether the ruled, in face of absolute madness, could master themselves and hold the madness back. Only the liberation of thought from power, the abolition of violence, could realize the idea which has been unrealized until now: that the Jew is a human being. This would be a step away from the anti-Semitic society, which drives both Jews and others into sickness, and toward the human one. Such a step would fulfill the fascist lie by contradicting it: the Jewish question would indeed prove the turning-point of history. By conquering the sickness of the mind which flourishes on the rich soil of self-assertion unhampered by reflection, humanity would cease to be the universal antirace and become the species which, as nature, is more than mere nature, in that it is aware of its own image. The individual and social emancipation from domination is the countermovement to false projection, and no longer would Jews seek, by resembling it, to appease the evil senselessly visited on them as on all the persecuted, whether animals or human beings.²⁶

The occlusion of their repeated argument that the category of race can only be considered emancipatory from the point of view of its abolition seems to account in large part for the operative assumption in ongoing debates in secondary literature about whether the concept of race in the ISR’s 1940s work on anti-Semitism and prejudice is ‘essentialist’ or ‘functionalist’—or even “critical functionalist.”²⁷ In more recent scholarship, Eva-Maria Ziege’s groundbreaking studies of the ISR’s 1944 “Labor Study” (Antisemitism among American Labor), which differentiates the Marxian theory of class antagonism according to racialized group- and attitude-formation in blue collar labor, have shown that the ISR’s studies in anti-Semitism and prejudice in the early 1940s were premised on the “working hypothesis” of a particular historical interdependence between the philosemitic essentialization of Jewish identity and its anti-Semitic functionalization in social domination: “while antisemitism could be understood only through society, society at that particular time in history could henceforth be understood only through antisemitism.”²⁸ This dynamic conception of the historical configuration in the constitution of “Jewishness” also accounts for the fact that anti-Semitism came to play a different role in the critical theory of the late 1940s than it had earlier that decade, since, “[a]ccording to the ISR, after World War II antisemitism could no longer be regarded as the key to a theory of society because its social function had changed.”²⁹

As Adorno formulates the gesture in the letter that prefaces his draft of the third text collected below, “On the Racial Classification of Jewish Immigrants” (1945), the critical theorists’ theorization of anti-Semitism in the 1940s was an elaborate Eiertanz—literally, ‘egg-dance,’ or ‘dancing on eggshells’—to avoid the twin fallacies of the naive assimilationists and “fanatical Zionists.” This is the same neither/nor with which Adorno and Horkheimer conclude Thesis VII of their “Elements”:

Those who fall within the terms of the decree as Jews have to be identified by means of elaborate questionnaires, now that the antagonistic religions which once differentiated them have been successfully remodeled and assimilated as cultural heritage under the leveling pressure of late-industrial society. The Jewish masses themselves are no more immune to ticket thinking than the most hostile youth organization. In this sense fascist anti-Semitism is obliged to invent its own object. Paranoia no longer pursues its goal on the basis of the individual case history of the persecutor; having become a vital component of society it must locate that goal within the delusive context of wars and economic cycles before the psychologically predisposed “national comrades” can support themselves on it, both inwardly and outwardly, as patients.³⁰

The hope in collecting these texts is not only to do justice to the critical theorists’ confrontation with the American apparatus of racialization as an integral moment of their theoretical work, but also to undercut the ongoing weaponization of the ISR’s research on anti-Semitism and racial prejudice for the sake of Zionist ideology. Adorno and Horkheimer write in Thesis V of “Elements”:

The mere existence of the other is a provocation. Everyone else “gets in the way” and must be shown their limits—the limits of limitless horror. No one who seeks shelter shall find it; those who express what everyone craves—peace, homeland, freedom—will be denied it, just as nomads and traveling players have always been refused rights of domicile. Whatever someone fears, that is done to him. Even the last resting place shall be none. The despoiling of graveyards is not an excess of anti-Semitism; it is anti-Semitism itself. Those evicted compulsively arouse the lust to evict them even here. The marks left on them by violence endlessly inflame violence.³¹

Unless today’s ‘critical theory’ can recognize “Zionism is an anti-Semitism,” it will only have been an apologetic repetition of the same context of delusion the totalizing countermovement of 1940s critical theory mobilized every available science of psyche and society against.

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Adorno: Dreams in America. Three Logs (1942).

December 30th, 1940. New York.

Just before waking, I was witness to the scene—probably from a painting of Delacroix’—captured in Baudelaire’s poem, “Don Juan aux Enfers.” But rather than Stygian night, broad daylight, over an American folk-festival on the water. There stood a large, white sign—for a steamboat station—bearing the bright red inscription “ALABAMT.” Don Juan’s barque had a long, slender smokestack—a “ferry boat” (“Ferry Boat Serenade”). Unlike Baudelaire’s, this hero did not remain silent. In Spanish costume—black and violet—he spoke incessantly, hawking loudly like a salesman. I thought to myself: an unemployed actor. But he was not satisfied with such fierce gestures and speeches, and began to thrash Charon—who was as difficult to make out as ever—without mercy. He declared that he was American, refused to put up with any of this, and would not be locked up in a box. This was met with tremendous applause, as if he were a champion of some kind. He then stepped before the audience, which was separated from him by a cordon. I shuddered. Though finding the whole affair ridiculous, but was anxious, above all, of him turning the crowd against us. As he approached us, A. made an appreciative remark for such a skilled performance. Don Juan’s answer, which was not friendly, I have since forgotten. At this point, we began to inquire about the fate of the characters from Carmen in the afterlife. A. asked: “Micaela—does she seem well?” Angrily, Don Juan answered: “Bad.” “But surely,” I urged him, “Carmen is doing well.” “No” was all he said, but his anger appeared to be subsiding. Just then, the eight o-clock horn blew from the Hudson, and I awoke.

February 1st, 1942. Los Angeles.

On the Untermainkai [Waterfront] in Frankfurt I was caught up in the march of an Arab army. I beseeched King All Feisal, and he granted my passage. I entered a beautiful house. Following some unclear proceedings, I was escorted to another floor, to President Roosevelt, who had a small, private office there. He welcomed me in, warmly. But, as one speaks to children, he told me I needn’t pay such rapt attention the whole time and that I should feel free to take a book. Before I’d even noticed, all sorts of visitors had arrived. The last to appear was a tall, sunburnt man, and Roosevelt introduced us. The man was [William S.] Knudsen.³² The President explained that this was now a matter of defense, and that he had to ask me to leave the room. But also that I must absolutely come back to visit him again sometime. On a small scrap of paper that had already been written on, he scribbled down his name, address, and telephone number. —The elevator brought me not to the exit on the ground floor, but to the basement. That was where the greatest danger lay. If I remained in the elevator shaft, the lift would crush me; if I tried to save myself by climbing onto the elevated platform surrounding it—which I could barely reach—I would be caught in the cables and cords. Someone advised me to try another elevated platform, who knows where. I said something about crocodiles, but followed the advice. Then the crocodiles arrived. They had the heads of extremely beautiful women. One coaxed me on. Being eaten doesn’t hurt. To make it easier on me, she promised me all the most wonderful things beforehand.

May 22nd, 1941. Los Angeles.

We walked—Agathe, my mother, and I—along an elevated path of reddish sandstone, familiar to me from Amorbach. But we found ourselves on the American West Coast. To our left, in the distance, lay the Pacific Ocean. At one point, the footpath seemed to become steeper, or to not go any further. I struck out looking for a better path to the right, through rocks and bushes. After a few steps, I arrived at a large plateau. I thought to myself, now I’ve found the way. But soon I discovered vegetation everywhere, covering all the steepest drop offs, and there was no possibility of reaching the plain, stretching inland, which I’d mistaken for an extension of the plateau. On it, I saw groups of people with apparatuses—geometers, perhaps—arranged in intervals with disquieting regularity. I looked for the trail back to the first path, and found it. As I came upon my mother and Agathe, a laughing, Negro couple crossed our path—he in wide, checked trousers; she in a gray sporting outfit. We walked on. Soon after, we encountered a Negro child. We must be near a settlement, I said. There were some huts or caves, made of sand or cut into the mountain. Through one of them led a gateway. We stepped through, and, overcome with happiness, found ourselves on the square before Bamberg palace—in the Miltenberg Schnatterloch.³³

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Horkheimer: Notes on the Curfew (1942).

German emigrants on the West coast fall under the Enemy Aliens Act. You must be home by eight o’clock in the evening and must not travel more than five miles from your house, even during the day. The territory of Los Angeles extends so far that this stipulation means the city proper is now off-limits to many. At the very end of their flight towards the sea, where the East dawns again in the farthest West, they are, so to speak, banished once more. Whoever has money, a profession, and prospects in life can overcome the handicap more easily. The lonely elder who knows himself a failure, however, feels the inconvenience as though it were misfortune eternal in the confines of the small room where he waits in vain.

The non-Jewish Germans are not as isolated. The fascists among them, towards whom the act is aimed, endure it as a small evil; their homeland is ‘over there.’ The anti-fascists, who left their people as fighters: their defeat might one day become victory. Over there, they weren’t already part of an involuntary minority, marked out in advance as ‘the Others.’ The concepts of admission and dismissal, of homeland and foreign land, do not remind them of a thousand years of persecution; the concern for acceptance into a new community does not bear the spasmodic features of an old pain. They have less homesickness and hatred for Germany, and fit in more calmly.

The Jews are—already, and increasingly—an endangered minority in the new land. The faith for which they have resisted dissolution throughout history is also the target of persecution today. But, for most, it has lost its force. Their expulsion appears to them as a senseless misfortune, the dominion of their enemies as German character flaw. They revere the features of those to whom they owe their entry to this country—receptiveness, all-embracing tolerance, compassion for the persecuted—as if these were part of the latter’s nature, and feel deeply hurt when they have to experience firsthand that this ‘nature’ is subject to history. They fear change. For the gentile member of society, however, change is not so threatening; for that nature with which he can feel as one, such generous characteristics are not indispensable; he still has a people from which no prejudice can separate him. Even if his Volk became völkisch, the common man would belong to it still.

But the Jews depend solely on justice, on the permanent and unconditional realization of democracy. Their lives depend on the realization of human rights. They have a necessary goal: the institution of a society in whose products everyone has full share; of a society in which no one is politically or economically excluded from the happiness of others by the course of the economy, by birth, or by law. For the Jews, history is, in every moment, disastrous, because every injustice affects them personally. They are the minority behind which stands no power of their own, but solely the universality of law, as recognized by the constitutions of democratic states. In nineteenth-century Europe, the Jews were focused on realizing political justice; in the present, they are focused on realizing economic justice. By the force of their fate, they stand for its opposite: the idea. Even when they were prepared to deny it and surrender themselves to one of the powers of earth, that power, having renounced justice, ultimately chose the Jews as its favorite victims. The Jew who blinds himself and preaches injustice, even out of the injustice he once suffered, betrays himself. Sweeping judgments, pandering to the public consciousness, belong, in essence, to the armory of the Volk. Through its very form, the speech so easy to follow and swallow appeals to power and violence; it does not seek truth, which was only ever an annoyance, but rather the consent of prevailing opinion. And from this, power and violence are ever ready to break loose.

The lonely emigrant is overcome by the horror that still lingers on the horizon for others. Even in this country—which, unlike France, grants a dignified existence to actual members of enemy states and still promises the refugee citizenship today—he cannot forget the hell into which the earth has transformed all around him. The earth grows smaller; this continent, an island in a sea of horror. The lonely one, who saw the world sink backwards from its seeming linear progress, loses the participation in history without which he, as a Jew, cannot live. As he perceives only the grimaces human beings turn towards one another in their mutilation, his own gaze becomes wild and unapproachable. He seethes with illusions of retribution, with proposals in imitation of ruling states, with furious impotence. Segregation ends in disintegration if the isolated one does not stand in secret accord with humanity, which is precisely what is suppressed along with living interaction with others. Such an accord, which was once enclosed within the concept of truth, formed the source of Judaism’s strength when it preserved such force behind the barriers of the ghetto, and the oppressors’ sense that this is so has always fed their mortal hatred. They know their unity is false, for unity can only be founded on knowledge.³⁴ In the German Volksgemeinschaft, the means of communication are used to separate every German patriot from every other. But the yellow star of the outcasts, in defiance, awakens that memory of humanity the master race must suffocate within itself. In the particular lot of the Jews, the universal is revealed.³⁵

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On the Racial Classification of Jewish Immigrants (1944/45).

Editor’s Note.

The text below is a composite of two different versions: the first, the earliest English-language draft Adorno sends Horkheimer in a letter of August 21st, 1944;³⁶ the second, a translation of Horkheimer’s final draft, published in German translation under the title “Zur Klassifikation jüdischer Einwanderer (1945)” for Horkheimer’s Gesammelte Schriften, Band 5 (1987).³⁷ As with nearly every official (or unofficial) ISR communiqué from their time in the United States, there are undoubtedly other variants of the text consistent with their typical practice of collective authorship and editing—Löwenthal, for instance, contributed revisions of his own to the questionnaire response sometime in mid-September.³⁸ The editors of the Gesammelte Schriften introduce the text with the following remark:

In late 1943, the American Immigration and Naturalization Service [INS] declared that the word “Hebrew” would no longer be used for the classification of immigrants. This designation of race was to be substituted by country of origin or more general categories, such as “White Race.” Jewish and non-Jewish parties raised concerns about this change: precise information on the number of Jewish immigrants was a necessity. This began a dispute over whether the dissemination of such statistics would promote anti-Semitism rather than combat it; and whether this racial classification had not in fact become outdated under the conditions of National Socialism and should thereby be replaced by another. In July, 1944, Max Weinreich and Jacob Lestchinsky sent a circular letter on behalf of the Yiddish Scientific Institute [YIVO] in New York to a large number of recipients in science and politics, including Horkheimer himself, with the following questionnaire attached […]³⁹

The ISR’s answer to the questionnaire should not only be read, Adorno writes in his letter containing the first draft (the relevant section is quoted in full below), as an Eiertanz to avoid the twin fallacies of naive assimilationists and “fanatical Zionists,” but as a distinctive critical approach to the politics of racial classification in America. Their answer should be interpreted in the context of a long-running and ongoing debate over actual or possible uses and abuses of the racial classification “Hebrew” in the U.S. immigration and naturalization process that reached a flashpoint in 1942. The AJC, for instance, objected to the classification as early as 1930, calling it an “inquisition,”⁴⁰ and in the years that followed the INS decision to drop the term in 1943 American sociologists continued to debate whether a substitute for “Hebrew” and comparable racial classifications were necessary for research into trends in U.S. immigration.⁴¹ The ISR’s studies in anti-Semitism and prejudice should be interpreted in this context as well. In a letter dated March 29th, 1943, Adorno writes to his parents about the Eiertanz of the ISR’s anti-Semitism project in response to his parents’ concern that such efforts might reinforce the problem of racial classification:

I agree entirely [...] that abolishing the racial distinction would be the only right thing to do, and God knows our study espouses no less. But: the others do not want to. And at a time when millions of Jews are being murdered, it would not be so appropriate to reproach those people for isolating themselves. The problem lies with the Christians. I hope with all my heart that we really can do something—however modest—to help.⁴²

---

Letter—Adorno: Dancing on Eggshells (August 1944).

[Excerpt from: Adorno to Horkheimer, 8/21/1944.]⁴³

Dear Max: Here is the draft of the letter to the Jewish Forum, in true “Kondolenzbrief” style,⁴⁴ and the draft of an answer to the questions of the Yiddish Research Institute. The latter should be treated somewhat cautiously. They are apparently fanatical Zionists and their questions are a kind of a nationalist Jewish trap. I have tried a little Eiertanz [dance-on-eggshells]⁴⁵ in order to avoid the fallacies of both naive assimilation and Jewish Nationalism. Since they plan, however, to publish the answers it might be good to communicate with the AJC [American Jewish Committee] before you send the answer away. I have the distinct feeling that this whole business is very hot. As far as the Men of Good Will [viz., the Yiddish Scientific Institute in New York (YIVO)] are concerned, their material is so utterly formalistic that it may hide the most sinister purposes. The passage of their letter marked by pencil sounds particularly unpleasant. I should not give our signature unless we have very definite and concrete reasons to do-so.

On the Classification of Jewish Immigrants (1944).

(1) Do you think it is important to collect accurate data on Jewish immigration to this country, or do you see any reason not to collect such data?

[Adorno] ad 1) It certainly is important to have exact data on the immigration of Jews into this country. This, however, is a matter with which Jewish organizations rather than the immigration officers should be concerned. The names of immigrants would certainly be in most cases a sufficient basis for any interested Jewish organization to approach Jewish immigrants in order to obtain any information and it is probably not too difficult to obtain a list of those names. I do not think, however, that it is appropriate to have a special item on the immigration questionnaire asking whether an immigrant belongs to the “Hebrew” race. The main reason is that German experience teaches that the term “Hebrew” (by its very difference from Jew) lends itself particularly easily to antisemitic manipulation.

[Horkheimer] ad 1) Certainly, it is important to have precise data on the immigration of Jews to this country. However, this data should not refer to Jews as a “race.” The “race”-concept is scientifically dubious and can be all too easily distorted for the purposes of propaganda. On the other hand, immigration statistics by national group, in addition to those by citizenship and country of origin, would yield valuable information, provided that the nationality of any individual surveyed under the census is given by the respondents themselves. The criteria invoked by the Attorney General—“the spoken language and homeland of the applicant and his or her ancestors”—cannot be considered suitable, particularly with regard to Jews. All of those methods which are used to determine a person’s nationality but are not based on self-determination must ultimately lead to the application of Nazi-criteria for the “racial” classification of human beings. Instead of being methods of statistical survey, they degenerate into instruments of segregation and discrimination.

(2) If you do not agree with the decision of the Immigration and Naturalization Service to eliminate the term ‘Hebrew’ from the classification of immigrants, would you simply recommend a return to the previous procedure with respect to Jews, or, if not, what change would you suggest?

[Adorno] ad 2) The decision of the Immigration and Naturalization Service to abolish the term Hebrew from the classification of immigrants seems to me sensible. The term is particularly ill defined and may frighten just those people who got away from Nazi persecution—an effect which could not possibly be advocated because of any consideration of Jewish pride. An immigrant is either proud of being a Jew or not, but he can and should not be forced to any confession with regard to his own feelings. It is exactly this pressure making for subsumption under labels and categories by which Nazi terrorism works and it is a symbol of freedom that nobody should be treated any longer as being of that and that group rather than as an individual. However, any Jewish immigrant who is conscious of his Jewishness should also have the freedom to express this feeling. He should be forced as little to take a hush-hush attitude as a national Jewish one. In other words, each Jewish immigrant should have the right to add to his legal nationality the word “Jew.”

[Horkheimer] ad 2) Though I agree with the decision of the Immigration and Naturalization Service decision to drop the word “Hebrew,” I would recommend adding another question to the application forms that pertains to the nationality of the immigrant in distinction to his or her citizenship. This question should not, however, be obligatory for them to answer. No immigrant can nor should be forced to confess how they feel about this. It would be a true symbol of freedom if every human being were treated as an individual rather than as an involuntary member of this or that group. But any immigrant who might wish to declare themselves, for statistical or other reasons, a member of a particular national group should have the freedom to do so. Every Jewish immigrant ought to have the right to make a declaration of his or her membership to the Jewish group. Any immigrant of Jewish descent who feels they belong to another national group ought to be able to enjoy the same privilege. No immigrant should be compelled to accept the label of membership to a national group they do not feel they belong to, nor should they be forced to conceal their feeling of solidarity with any national group they might believe they belong to, whether by virtue of tradition, culture, language, education, personal history, religious heritage, or by whatever other ties that might be important to them.

(3) Do you think the classification of immigrants by ‘race’ is appropriate? If not, what other term would you suggest?

[Adorno] ad 3) The classification of immigrants according to race seems to me incompatible with the spirit of the American Constitution. I should suggest to ask simply for the nationality of the immigrant in a strictly legal sense. If he has lost his nationality because of fascist persecution this should be taken down and should under no circumstances be held against him with regard to his status as a prospective American citizen. Incidentally, the abolition of asking for any race would automatically solve the complicated problems which you pointed out with regard to the term Hebrew. I do not believe that the abolition of the question concerning the Hebrew race foster the invention of fantastic numbers of Jewish immigrants. Such inventions took place precisely under the old system (the Fascist West Coast agitator Phelps, for example, spoke about millions of alien refugees flooding this country, around 1940). These figures could be as easily refuted by the sum total of immigrants as by any specific information about their race or religion. The whole approach of counting the Jews in any way of life has proved to be particularly pernicious.

[Horkheimer] ad 3) The classification of immigrants by “race” seems incompatible with the spirit of the American Constitution. It does not stand up to scientific criticism. In both social-scientific and natural-scientific terms, it is devoid of all meaning, and cannot be adequately defined in the legal sense either. This applies to all “races” listed in the immigration statistics—not just the “Hebrew” race. The question about “race” ought to be deleted without substitution. Of course, the immigrant must declare his or her citizenship. If they have lost their citizenship due to national or political persecution, this should be noted and precautions should be taken to ensure that facts of this kind cannot be used against them with respect to their status as a future American citizen. In addition, the immigrant should be asked to which national group, if any, he or she belongs solely according to the judgment of his or her own conscience. The question of how to prevent anti-Semites from inventing fantastical figures for Jewish immigration has no bearing on the problems of statistical classification. Even under the older classification of race, such numbers were invented as indiscriminately and globally as they have been in all times. (The West Coast agitator Phelps spoke as early as 1940 of this country being flooded with millions of refugees.) If it were possible to refute such mythical figures with rational argumentation and factual evidence, it would be enough to refer to the total number of immigrants admitted into this country. But as long as the anti-Semites support their fairy-tale figures on the assertion that Jews hide their Judaism [Judentum], statistics will not be of any help—unless they are collected in the style of the Nazis, according to which “racial ancestry” must be established given an arbitrarily fixed number of generations.

The statistical concept of “figures and facts” is completely irrelevant to the functioning of the anti-Semitic system of argumentation. On the other hand, in order to combat anti-Semitic propaganda, it is necessary to know which, if any, rationally explicable facts it may be based on, and what objective data it might be possible to marshal. In this context, it is crucial to have relevant statistical data about the situation of the Jews. Nevertheless, it does not follow from that it is necessary or desirable to count the number of Jews in all areas of life and in all fields of activity. The tendency to include the term “Jew” in every single statistical table reflects a nationalist attitude that carries “racial” connotations with it. This should be abandoned—because it creates the atmosphere of the discrimination, exclusion, and labeling of groups by nationality in which anti-Semitic propaganda must flourish.

1. Adorno to his Parents, 7/27/1942. In: Theodor W. Adorno, Letters to his Parents. 1939-1951, Edited by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, Translated by Wieland Hoban (Polity, 2006), 106. Translation of Brecht quoted from: Ibid., Footnote No. 4.

2. MHA Na [805], S. [165]-[167]; and: Gesammelte Schriften. Band 5: Dialektik der Aufklärung und Schriften 1940-1950. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1987), 351-535.

3. Previously translated in: Theodor W. Adorno, Dream Notes. Edited by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz. Translated by Rodney Livingstone (Polity, 2005). [No. 1] 4-5; [No. 2] 7-9; [No. 3] 6-7.

4. Adorno to his Parents, 9/9/1942: “I would be interested to know if my contribution for Aufbau (‘Träume in Amerika, Drei Protokolle’ [appeared in the New York issue; 10/2/1942]) has appeared yet, or only been announced. If I were you, incidentally, I would overcome your entirely understandable aversion against the paper in this case, as this contribution is an extremely personal matter that should directly concern you too. You should also read Max’s essay ‘Betrachtung[en] zum curfew,’ which was in the West Coast issue. … We meanwhile have the new aliens regulations, which state quite clearly that there is not to be any evacuation. This should also be of no little significance for your decisions, especially as the current curfew regulations do not apply to you on account of your age. Taking into account the dangers of aerial warfare, I think it is safer here than in New York.” In: Letters to his Parents (2006), 109-110.

5. For more on Aufbau’s issues during and on the curfew and travel restrictions after January 1942, see: Anne C. Schenderlein, “The Enemy Alien Classification, 1941–1944.” In: Germany on Their Minds: German Jewish Refugees in the United States and Their Relationships with Germany, 1938-1988 (Berghahn Books, 2020), 53–80. link: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvvb7n7f.7.

6. Cf. Schenderlein (2020), 60-64.

7. Ruth Wilson Gilmore: “Racism is the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” In: Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. (University of California Press, 2007), 247. And: “As the example of racism suggests, institutions are sets of hierarchical relationships (structures) that persist across time (Martinot 2003) undergoing, as we have seen in the case of prisons, periodic reform. Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death. States are institutions made up of sub-institutions that often work at cross-purposes, but that get direction from the prevailing platforms and priorities of the current government. Capital, the wealth of the profit system’s development ability, is also a relation, since it could not exist if workers did not produce goods for less than they’re sold for and buy goods in order to go back to work and make, move, or grow more stuff. As private property, land is also a relationship—to non-owners, to other pieces of land, to mortgagers, and to land that is not privately owned. And the state’s power to organize these various factors of production, or enable them to be disorganized or abandoned outright, is not a thing but rather a capacity—which is to say, based in relationships that also change over time and sometimes become so persistently challenged, from above and below, by those whose opinions and actions matter, that the entire character of the state eventually changes as well.” In: Ibid., 28.

8. Adorno to his Parents, 3/26/1942. In: Letters to his Parents (2005), 87-88.

9. Adorno to his Parents, 4/19/1942. In: Letters to his Parents (2005), 92.

10. Adorno to his Parents, 4/24/1942. In: Letters to his Parents (2005), 92-93.

11. Adorno to his Parents, 5/2/1942. In: Letters to his Parents (2005), 95.

12. [Letters (2005) Editor’s Fn.:] The first genuine mass bombardment by the Royal Air Force took place at the end of May 1942.

13. Adorno to his Parents, 6/5/1942. In: Letters to his Parents (2005), 97-98.

14. Adorno to his Parents, 7/2/1942. In: Letters to his Parents (2005), 101.

15. Adorno to his Parents, 7/16/1942. In: Letters to his Parents (2005), 104.

16. Adorno to his Parents, 8/23/1942. In: Letters to his Parents (2005), 107.

17. Adorno to his Parents, 9/1/1942. In: Letters to his Parents (2005), 108.

18. Adorno to his Parents, 9/9/1942. In: Letters to his Parents (2005), 109-110.

19. [Letters (2005) Ed. Fn.:] “Mé Salomon was the wife of Bernhard Salomon (1855–1942), whose daughter Margot had been a friend of Adorno in his youth.” In: Ibid.

20. [Letters (2005) Ed. Fn.:] “Arthur von Weinberg (1860–1943), a nephew of the paint wholesaler Leopold Cassella, had been a partner in and managing director of the Cassella works, together with his brother Carl von Weinberg, since 1892. Arthur von Weinberg had been on the administrative board of I.G. Farben A.G. since 1926, but had been forced to leave in 1935 due to the Aryanization campaign; in 1938 he gave up all his remaining duties and voluntary work, was forced to sell his entire property to the City of Frankfurt, and moved to live with his daughter, Countess Marie von Spreti, in Bavaria. He was arrested and deported to Theresienstadt in 1942 and died there the following year after an operation, before his planned release, which former colleagues had persuaded Himmler to grant, could take place.” In: Ibid.

21. Adorno to his Parents, 9/27/1942. In: Letters to his Parents (2005), 111-113.

22. Adorno to his Parents, 10/30/1942. In: Letters to his Parents (2005), 114-115.

23. Ryan Crawford (2023): “What Jay then appears to have assumed, ‘perhaps naively,’ as he would later write, was that his search for critical theory’s origins in individual Institute members’ ‘Jewish’ ancestry, implicit classification of those people in terms of ethnic, religious or racial descent, and subsequent identification of those ‘origins’ as a cardinal source for the Institute’s life and work would resonate, instead, with a substantially more philosemitic, but not for that reason any less problematic, tradition of ascribing positive characteristics to Jewish identity. Integral to that tradition is a set of practices which frequently reproduce the antisemitic practice of ‘unmasking’ individuals and groups as Jews, no matter their protests, and which accord outsized influence to non-elective ethnic and/or racial identities in the determination of life and character.” In: “A contest over titles: The canonisation of the Frankfurt School as ‘permanent exiles.’” Radical Philosophy 215 (Autumn 2023), 47. (pdf)

24. Ryan Crawford (2023): “‘R[egarding] your M[anuscript],’ Weil writes Jay on 16 May 1971, ‘there is one respect in which I dislike it and would like you to change it.’ For what Weil had discovered in the very first chapter of Jay’s manuscript was that he was described there, to his surprise and increasing exasperation, as the son of a ‘German-born Jewish merchant,’ while Friedrich Pollock was called the son of a ‘Jewish businessman,’ Horkheimer the son of a ‘prominent Jewish manufacturer,’ and Henryk Grossman was said to come from a ‘family of Jewish mine-owners.’ And because Weil could not understand the rationale behind such designations, he implored Jay to explain: ‘why do you feel the need of stressing wherever you introduce a new character, that he is or was Jewish?’ For Weil, Jay’s repeated identification of Institute members according to their supposed Jewishness was especially peculiar because, when it came to other Institute members, that same tendency was not applied consistently. Instead, whenever Institute members’ ‘religion (or race?)’ might be characterised as either Christian or Aryan, those markers of identity went unmentioned. ‘Now the question is,’ Weil remarks, ‘whether you understand “Jewish” as a religion or as a race or nationality.’ And concludes: ‘I can’t imagine you, like Hitler, consider it a race.’ For while Löwenthal and Fromm undoubtedly came from ‘Jewish orthodox families,’ according to Weil, ‘all the others were of Jewish-liberal or even baptized Christian origin ... and not one ever was a service-attending Jew,’ while still others were unmistakably ‘Christian by origin.’ Concerning himself, Weil tells Jay he was born Catholic and, like his parents before him, never attended religious services or considered himself Jewish in the least. ‘I, [for instance],’ Weil continues, ‘was not the son of a German-born Jewish merchant, but the son of a German-born merchant who was an atheist.’ For even though Weil’s parents had indeed been born into Orthodox and Reform Jewish families, ‘both refused to join a Jewish congregation after they immigrated into Argentina around 1890.’ Indeed, his parents were either atheists or agnostics, and not only scandalised the local Jewish community of Argentina by not having Weil circumcised, but also made no protest when their son’s name was supplemented by the name of the Catholic saint on whose day he was born; in sum, then, as Weil informed Jay, he ‘grew up creedless, as I wasn’t baptized either.’ ‘Now,’ he continues, ‘can you honestly say that I came from a Jewish family?’ ‘Only,’ he concludes, ‘if you accept the Hitler method of the Jewish grandmother.’ Concerning other Institute members, the situation seemed to Weil no less vexed. In the case of Pollock and Horkheimer, both ‘ceased to be “Jewish” in the religious sense’ as soon as ‘they became adults.’ For this reason, Institute members could hardly be said to have been united by the fact that they were all ‘assimilated Jews,’ as Weil made clear in his very first letter, since Jay uses that term ‘without explaining it’—and despite the fact that it encompasses a vast and by no means homogenous range of people: from baptised Jews to the children of baptised Jews, from avowed atheists to those who considered Judaism no more than a religion and thus regarded themselves as ‘good German[s]’ instead. Not to mention, of course, those who never considered themselves Jews in the first place and were never ‘considered Jews until the Nürnberg Act made them Jews’ on the basis of racist determinations of their ancestry. Regardless of whether Institute members might be more ‘accurately’ described—in Nazi terms, Weil adds—as either Aryan or Jewish, such designations would be in each case inaccurate, since they all ‘felt as plain atheists.’ For this reason, Weil recommended dropping those religious, ethnic and/or racial references, including a note of clarification instead. Should Jay still wish to address the issue, however, he might defer to Weil, raising the question of ‘whether it was true that almost all of the earlier Institut members were of Jewish origin,’ and then quote Weil as saying: “The answer depends upon what you consider ‘Jewish’: before the Nazis branded me and other persons ‘with at least one Jewish grandparent’ as ‘Jews,’ even if they belonged to a Christian religion, I would not have considered myself nor anyone in our group a Jew, and certainly there was not a single one among us who ever attended Jewish religious services—orthodox or liberal—other than as a guest as a wedding. And there were some among us who even Hitler could not have branded as ‘Jews’: for instance, [Institute members and associates] Wittfogel, Korsch, or Massing.” If unsatisfied with this addendum, however, Jay might take up the commonplace according to which ‘it has sometimes been stated that the Institut group “were all Jews,”’ and then conclude, on the basis of his own authority, but no longer deferring to Weil, that in Jay’s own estimation ‘none of them was a Jew.’ ‘Of course, I like the second suggestion much better,’ Weil tells Jay, since the latter would make the point even ‘more authoritative.’ Given their continuing debate about such matters, as well as The Dialectical Imagination’s inclusion of the very “‘Jewish” references’ Weil recommended excluding, the book’s author appears to have been largely unpersuaded by Weil’s arguments. Nonetheless, Weil persisted because he could not understand whether Jay’s attribution of Jewish identity was meant to rest upon notions of descent or ancestry, race or religion, ethnicity or nationality. ‘It seems that for you,’ he tells his correspondent, ‘... “Jewish” simultaneously means the religion, the nationality ... and perhaps also the race,’ with the result, Weil concludes, that ‘if “religion” doesn’t apply’ for the putative Jewishness of any specific individual, then Jewishness can still be assigned because, in such cases, ‘you [mean] the ethnic descent or the race, or vice versa.’ This kind of peculiar logic of identity, based as it is on religious or non-elective forms of identity-based inheritance, creates untold confusions, as Weil makes clear by referring to the self-evident absurdities resulting from similar determinations during the time of the Third Reich. Yet, to Weil’s dismay, Jay’s manuscript consistently employed such categories, as when writing, for instance, about how ‘obvious’ it is that ‘if one seeks a common thread which runs through [Institute members’] individual biographies,’ then that ‘common thread’ is quite clearly their shared birth in Jewish families. For Weil, however, it was by no means ‘obvious’ that their purported Jewishness ever served such a function, which is why he ‘most emphatically stress[es] that the “Jewish” origins of most members of the Institut group was mere coincidence,’ and that Jay’s repeated reference to ‘Jewish families,’ identities and influences is not only ‘misleading’ but ‘convey[s] a totally wrong impression.’ After time and again finding in Jay’s manuscript such attributions of ill-fitting identity assigned to colleagues he knew so well, Weil hazards a guess about the criteria used in words designed to provoke: ‘I was sort of waiting to see you hold, with Hitler,’ he writes Jay, in parentheses, ‘that “a Jew is a person descended from Jews,” while Goering said, repeating the 1880 Mayor of Vienna, Lueger, “I shall tell who is a Jew or not!”’ Aside from Weil’s concerns about such retroactive ascriptions of Jewish identity, what he found perhaps even more galling was Jay’s portrayal of such identities’ influence on the Institute’s life and work. ‘You seem to hold,’ Weil observes, ‘that we became Socialists and Revolutionaries as a consequence of our Jewishness.’ To this, however, Weil can only repeat that ‘with us neither religion nor ethnic origin played any role.’ ‘When our initial group got together to foster revolutionary socialism, nothing was farther from our mind than ideas about Jewish [sic], or any other religion, ancestry, ethnic kinship, skin color, etc., as a common element. We looked for total dedication from scientific conviction.’” In: “A contest over titles: The canonisation of the Frankfurt School as ‘permanent exiles.’” Radical Philosophy 215 (Autumn 2023), 42–43. (pdf)

25. On the ascriptive process of racialization and the emancipatory status of the category of ‘race’ from the perspective of its abolition, see—Chris Chen (2013), “The Limit Point of Capitalist Equality: Notes Toward an Abolitionist Antiracism”: ““Race” has been variously described as an illusion, a social construction, a cultural identity, a biological fiction but social fact, and an evolving complex of social meanings. Throughout this article, “race” appears in quotation marks in order to avoid attributing independent causal properties to objects defined by ascriptive processes. Simply put, “race” is the consequence and not the cause of racial ascription or racialisation processes which justify historically asymmetrical power relationships through reference to phenotypical characteristics and ancestry: “Substituted for racism, race transforms the act of a subject into an attribute of the object.” [Barbara J. Fields, ‘Whiteness, racism, and identity,’ International Labor and Working Class History 60 (Fall 2001), 48-56.] I have also enclosed “race” in quotation marks in order to suggest three overlapping dimensions of the term: as an index of varieties of material inequality, as a bundle of ideologies and processes which create a racially stratified social order, and as an evolving history of struggle against racism and racial domination—a history which has often risked reifying “race” by revaluing imposed identities, or reifying “racelessness” by affirming liberal fictions of atomistically isolated individuality. The intertwining of racial domination with the class relation holds out the hope of systematically dismantling “race” as an indicator of unequal structural relations of power. “Race” can thus be imagined as an emancipatory category not from the point of view of its affirmation, but through its abolition.” In: Endnotes No. 3: Gender, Race, Class and Other Misfortunes (September 2013), link: https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-limit-point-of-capitalist-equality

26. In: Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr; translated by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford University Press, 2002), 165.

27. Cf. Pierce, A. J. (2022). “‘To conceal domination in production’: Horkheimer and Adorno’s critical functionalist theory of race.” Philosophy & Social Criticism, 49(6), 686-710. https://doi.org/10.1177/01914537211066861 (Original work published 2023)

28. Eva-Maria Ziege (2014): “Especially An American Dilemma, a study of race relations and African Americans in society, became an influential model for the work of the Institute. In 1938–42 the young Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal had been commissioned and lavishly funded by the Carnegie Foundation to direct a comprehensive study on how African Americans were being discriminated against and the implications of their position in society for American democracy as such. Thus the “idea of a textbook à la Myrdal” emerged as a guiding idea of Horkheimer’s for the Institute, aspiring to a comprehensive study on the situation of the Jews in the modern world. The working hypothesis for the early 1940s became that, while antisemitism could be understood only through society, society at that particular time in history could henceforth be understood only through antisemitism.” In: “The Irrationality of the Rational. The Frankfurt School and Its Theory of Society in the 1940s.” Antisemitism and the Constitution of Sociology, Edited by Marcel Stoetzler. (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 279.

29. Eva-Maria Ziege (2014): “According to the ISR, after World War II antisemitism could no longer be regarded as the key to a theory of society because its social function had changed. In the following quote [viz., from Adorno’s “Remarks” (1948)], the Marxism that used to be esoteric becomes exoteric for once: ‘Our hypothesis of what causes anti-semitism is the following: It is due to the total structure of our society or, to put it more sweepingly, to every basically coercive society. This totality manifests itself in numerous aspects, all of which are comprised in it and appear as particular “causes” only to the kind of thinking which, naively following the pattern of natural sciences, forgets that all social facts bear the imprint of the system in which they appear and which can never be explained satisfactorily by atomistic enumeration of various causes.’” In: Ibid., 291.

30. In: Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002), 171.

31. In: Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002), 150.

32. Dream Notes Editorial note: “William Knudsen (1879-1948) was an executive in the automobile industry, working for both Ford and General Motors, where he served as president from 1937 to 1940. In 1940 President Roosevelt invited him to Washington to help with war production. Promoted to the rank of general, he worked as a consultant at the War Department until 1945.” In: Dream Notes (2005), 8. (Footnote No. 5.)

33. Dream Notes Editorial note: “In his childhood, Adorno’s family often spent their holidays in Amorbach, a small town in the forested region of the Odenwald, south-east of Frankfurt. The walk from Amorbach to the neighbouring town of Miltenberg ended in a gate which the children called the Schnatterloch = ‘Chatterhole,’ because it was often so cold it made their teeth chatter.” In: Dream Notes (2005), 7 (Footnote No. 4.)

34. Cf. Horkheimer, “Solidarity” (ca. 1942/44): “Solidarity is grounded on shared knowledge. Due to the necessary inconclusivity of knowing, it seems solidarity is necessarily fleeting. The insights which once bound human beings to one another might prove incorrect. …” At: “Fragments and Texts on Racket Theory.” CTWG (blog) [link] Author’s translation.

35. Cf. Adorno and Horkheimer’s remark at the end of ‘Thesis I’ in “Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment”: “Race is not, as the racial nationalists claim, an immediate, natural peculiarity. Rather, it is a regression to nature as mere violence, to the hidebound particularism which, in the existing order, constitutes precisely the universal. Race today is the self-assertion of the bourgeois individual, integrated into the barbaric collective. The harmonious society to which the liberal Jews declared their allegiance has finally been granted to them in the form of the national community. They believed that only anti-Semitism disfigured this order, which in reality cannot exist without disfiguring human beings. The persecution of the Jews, like any persecution, cannot be separated from that order. Its essence, however it may hide itself at times, is the violence which today is openly revealed.” In: Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002), 138-139.

36. Adorno to Horkheimer, 8/21/1944. In: Briefwechsel, Bd. II (2004), 319-320. English in original. [BW Ed. note to: “the draft of an answer to the questions of the Yiddish Research Institute: …”]

37. “Zur Klassifikation jüdischer Einwanderer (1945).” Translated into German by Hans Günter Holl. In: MHGS, Bd. 5 (1987), 373-376. Author’s translation into English.

38. Leo Löwenthal to Horkheimer, 9/14/1944. In: MHA Na [544]. S. [109] 260r.

39. In: MHGS, Bd. 5 (1987), 373. Author’s translation.

40. On the role of the AJC in disputing the racial classification of “Hebrew,” see Smith (2002): “By far the most pressing, and embarrassing, item on the List of Races or Peoples in the late 1930s was the term “Hebrew.” The American Jewish Committee protested the classification of Hebrew as a race as early as 1930, warning that such “inquisition” into religion by the government was “improper and susceptible of unfortunate abuse.” At that time, the solicitor for the Department of Labor wrote a long memorandum on the legal requirement for including race—and Hebrew as a race—on both immigration and naturalization forms. The department found the American Jewish Committee's complaint groundless and rejected their request. In the following years, as Nazi persecution of Jews in Europe increased, dissatisfaction with the presence of Hebrew on the list widened and deepened.” In: Marian L. Smith, “Race, Nationality, and Reality. INS Administration of Racial Provisions in U.S. Immigration and Nationality Law Since 1898.” Prologue Magazine, Summer 2002, Vol. 34, No. 2. [Link]

41. For a response to Lestchinsky and Weinreich’s research, see: Paul Ucker, “Classifying Jewish Immigrants. [Review] The Classification of Jewish Immigrants and Its Implications: A Survey of Opinion by Nathan Goldberg, Jacob Lestchinsky and Max Weinreich.” In: The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Jan., 1946), 278-280.

For more on the broader problems of racial classification for sociological research into trends in U.S. immigration, see: Hans Zeisel, “The Race Question in American Immigration Statistics.” In: Social Research, Vol. 16, No. 2 (June 1949), 222-229.

42. Adorno to his Parents, 3/29/1943. In: Letters to his Parents (2006), 130-131.

43. Adorno to Horkheimer, 8/21/1944. In: Briefwechsel, Bd. II (2004), 318-321. English in original.

44. Cf. Horkheimer’s letter to I. Rosengarten, 9/12/1944, co-written by Adorno: “Formerly, the juxtaposition of the terms Jew and democracy might have had a somewhat apologetic ring. No one had a stronger interest in invoking basic human laws and the equality of rights than those who were most often deprived of those rights in practice. It was the weak who had to rely upon the fundamental principles of democracy. Often enough, the effect achieved was the opposite of the aim sought. The appeal to democratic ideas was taken as a confession of weakness. It aroused the strong to a sadistic hatred of the weak. The true, ideal “democracy” was thus regarded by the strong a mere ideology of those who needed it most badly. The terrible experience of the last few years have reversed this situation. It has become blatant that racial discrimination in general and antisemitism in particular are truly a mere spearhead of the forces making for the destruction of democracy altogether. Modern antisemitism is a political weapon in the hands of those who wish to transform our industrial culture into a system of fascist oppression. Whoever accuses the Jews today aims straight at humanity itself. The antisemites have invested the Jews with the reality of that democracy which they wish to destroy. Wittingly or unwittingly, the Jews have become the martyrs of civilization. To protect them is no longer an issue involving any particular group interests. To protect the Jews has come to be a symbol of everything mankind stands for. Antisemitic persecution is the stigma of the present world whose injustice enters all its weight upon the Jews. Thus, the Jews have been made what the Nazis always pretended that they were,—the focal point of world history. Their survival is inseparable from the survival of culture itself.” In: A Life in Letters. Selected Correspondence by Max Horkheimer. Edited and translated by Evelyn M. Jacobson and Manfred R. Jacobson (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 223. And: Adorno-Horkheimer Briefwechsel 1927-1969. Band II: 1938-1944. Edited by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz. (Suhrkamp, 2004), 318-319.

45. Editor’s note: German in original—Eiertanz, meaning “egg-dance,” idiomatic for “walking on eggshells.”