Weimar Jewish leftists radicalized because careers did not solve the Jewish problem

Evidence

In his recent study of the predominantly Jewish left-wing literati who wrote for the Berlin journal Die Weltbuhne, Istvan Deak has had to ask similar questions to those that arise in a study of the Frankfurt School. He has correctly noted that the high percentage of Jews on Weimar’s left - the Weltbuhne circle was much larger than the Institut’s, but the same correlation still held - was no mere coincidence. It was due, he wrote, “to a specific development: their recognition of the fact that business, artistic, or scientific careers do not help solve the Jewish problem, and that Weimar Germany had to undergo dire transformation if German anti-Semitism was to end.” 98 However, the members of the Frankfurt School deny ever having had such a recognition. “All of us,” Pollock has written, “up to the last years before Hitler, had no feeling of insecurity originating from our ethnic descent. Unless we were ready to undergo baptism, certain positions in public service and business were closed to us, but that never bothered us. And under the Weimar republic many of these barriers had been moved away.” — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 165

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Jewish class position outside bourgeois-worker conflict drove sons toward leftist movements — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 246; Assimilated Jews’ role-playing bitterness fed radical critique despite claimed non-discrimination — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 166; No degree of conformity made Jews’ social membership secure in Weimar Germany — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 14 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Jewish class position outside bourgeois-worker conflict drove sons toward leftist movements #expands (0.82) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 246
• Assimilated Jews’ role-playing bitterness fed radical critique despite claimed non-discrimination #complicates (0.78) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 166