Horkheimer wanted the anti-Semitism studies consolidated into an ambitious published textbook

Evidence

The Berkeley project was the only uninterrupted link between the first and second phases of the anti-Semitism project, and the only continuously maintained long-term study. In December 1944, when the rump of the Institute in New York was still busy analysing the study on workers and the outlines of the continuation of the anti-Semitism project were still quite unclear, Horkheimer wrote to Adorno: As far as the Institute is concerned, I would prefer to be commissioned by the Committee to extend the long manuscript of the first project'the four-volume report on the first year of the project, Studies in Anti-Semitisminto a textbook on anti-Semitism the size of Myrdal’s work on the blacks. A great many material and tactical problems would thereby be solved.’ This showed the need which was being felt to produce a publishable consensus concerning the overall structure of the various individual projects and thought processes. It was a need for a text which would correspond to Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s image of the Institute, which stressed theory, while at the same time providing evidence, through the text’s educational and enlightening nature, of the Institute’s solidarity with the war effort and with the problem of coping with the post-war challenges facing a country that was fighting fascism. But the real theoretical work would only be continued afterwards. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1602

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the general pattern of the Frankfurt School pivoting from raw research to publishable theory synthesis — echoes its treatment of ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’ as the flagship theoretical product.