John Morton Blum

Some years later, after becoming a historian myself, I read A Life with History (2004), Blum?s autobiography. It was a revelation. For one thing, I learned that Blum was Jewish?a fact that, given his name, should have been perfectly obvious yet was somehow obscured by his tweedy aura. (Blum had also thrown everyone off the scent by describing himself over luncheon as a ?pantheistic transcendentalist? in religion, which I took to be some kind of watered-down atheism.) To be sure, Blum?s parents had rejected Jewish observance, his mother turning to the Ethical Culture Society, a secular organization whose teachings were vaguely Jewish. But his heritage remained part of his identity. When in 1957 Yale lured him from MIT with a tenured position (after Hofstadter and Princeton?s R.R. Palmer declined it) he marveled, ?I, only thirty-six years old, by no means a Hofstadter or a Palmer, and a Jew withal ? must have seemed pretty small potatoes.? Love that withal.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=917b1417d1ad09d112989ba3c142d270

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