On September 12th 2023, Yale University Professor Steven B. Smith read a chapter from his upcoming memoir to a select group of Yale students at the Anderson Mansion at Yale. Reflecting on his life as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, he reminisced of the great scholars and friends he met, many of which shaped his intellectual career.
The U of C & Me
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Steven Smith: Okay, first of all, thank you all for coming tonight. I appreciate this, and I should say I'm overwhelmed by some of these comments as I listen to them. I hardly I think I better leave now before I ruin it with what I'm going to talk about. But I'm really, really overwhelmed and I really appreciate it so much. Yes, I'm going to I'm going to talk tonight, actually, Harrison's question, you know, speak about a teacher. That's important. This is exactly what this paper or this talk is about: my teachers, people who have meant a lot to me. And so that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to it's this comes from a memoir that I have written over the last two summers, and this is an abridged version of one chapter. So I'm going to talk about the University of Chicago. Nobody is from Chicago. That was one of my questions I was going to ask. But you've answered it for me. Nobody's here. So some of the reference points may not be familiar to you. I was hoping there might be somebody there to hear from, but it won't make any difference. I'm going to read, which I apologize for, but there's sort of a lot I'd like to cover. And if I don't read it, I'm going to ramble and I'll take too long.
Steven Smith: The other thing, if it gets boring, tell me. I mean, please, I won't. You won't hurt my feelings. A little bit, maybe, but. But this is from a chapter from my memoir called the U of C, University of Chicago. The U of C first. But before I do, I want to thank very much, Toby and Shmully for their hospitality and opening the house up, inviting me for this their again, their friendship, Shmully's unbelievably kind words. They mean so much to me and thank you. Thank you both for this. I really appreciate it. So a little bit verklempt. But let me, like I say, I'm going to read, so bear with me. I think you'll like it. There's some good stories. I arrived for graduate school in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago in January 1977. I date myself, but so be it. It was a city in which I had spent my childhood but had not been back for several years. No place ever entirely outgrows its beginnings, and this is certainly true of Chicago. It still remained a kind of crude, working class town that was best described in a poem by Carl Sandburg that I remember reading in my youth. Hog butcher for the world, tool maker, Stacker of wheat. Player with railroads and a nation's freight handler. Stormy husky brawling city of big shoulders. Hyde Park was always something of an oasis in the land of the Philistine.
Steven Smith: It was the only successfully integrated neighborhood in a city that remained ruthlessly segregated. Even here, there was an edge. I recall a satirical line that the neighbor, the neighborhood stood together, black and white, shoulder to shoulder, against the poor. Still, the neighborhood was far from safe. In the evenings, you could often hear whistles being blown, which is a way of warding off muggers. South shore, the neighborhood of my childhood, directly south of Hyde Park, had turned into a gang ridden slum by this time. Hyde Park took pride in its record of electing independent aldermen. Independent, that is, of the Democratic machine, with the result that ours was always the last neighborhood in the city to get the streets plowed. I returned to Chicago just after the death of the long standing Mayor, Richard Daley. Daley had been mayor, going all the way back to my childhood, and was considered the last of the big city bosses. He was said to be the mayor that made the city work, a boast that was also said of Mussolini. But to my generation, he was identified with the riots that occurred in the 1968 Democratic Convention. Who started the riots will always be a function of who's telling the story, but it is clear that Daley did nothing to stop it. His loathsome order, shoot to maim, became a watchword for the city. Of course, today the police seem to shoot to kill, so maybe shoot to maim was more humane.
Steven Smith: Didn't realize it then. I was 17 at the time and watched with horror and fascination on the television. At the time, I was filled with indignation. It was what was later dubbed a police riot, although today I would probably see it very differently. The protesters were hardly a peaceful lot. Made all the worse by being egged on by violent nihilists like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. The subsequent murder of the Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, and the Trial of the Chicago Seven, as they were called, both recently turned into TV movies, made Chicago appear a bastion of racism and reaction. Under Daley, the city was controlled by a largely Irish mafia. I heard once that Daley's idea of affirmative action was a committee formed of six Irishmen and a Swede. Daly's successor was a man named Michael Bilandic, who served one term. After a punishing blizzard in 1979, Bilandic was unable to remove the snow and was subsequently voted out of office, showing the importance of attending to basic city services. Bilandic was in turn succeeded by Jane Byrne, the first female mayor of the city, who lasted only one term and who was in turn followed by Harold Washington, the city's first black mayor. Washington was opposed by a Republican candidate named Bernard or Bernie Epton, who ran under the slogan vote for Epton before it's too late.
Steven Smith: No one doubted what the it's referred to. Epton, interestingly, had been a childhood friend of my father from grade school. Epton was, in fact, a decent man from Hyde Park, who had been a liberal Republican on civil rights issues and who sadly soiled his reputation with his racist campaign after the death of Daley. The era of machine politics slowly came to an end. Whether this led to good or bad government of the city remains highly contested. The great political scientist Edward Banfield wrote a controversial book called The Unheavenly City, taking aim at the progressive politics of the 60s and making the case for old style machine politics, using Chicago as a case in point. He believed that many of the so-called problems facing cities were actually made worse by the attempts to improve them. The force of unintended consequences became a major theme in the pushback against the Great Society and its attempt to alleviate poverty, racism, and drugs. Chicago has since become, so, I'm told, a great food town, which I don't doubt. While we live there, it still remained, from my point of view, strictly Midwestern. It had great ribs and barbecue. And of course, there was the famous Chicago deep dish pizza. Pizzeria Uno and later Dewey were the best known, but we always preferred Giordano's, which had a location on the far south side. We would occasionally go to the Berghoff, an historical German restaurant downtown in the loop with my cousins, although Sundays would be reserved for visits to my grandmother, who by this time was living on the north side in an apartment affectionately known to its inhabitants as the Garden of Eden.
Steven Smith: Hyde Park was, and still remains, a proudly culinary wasteland. The main eateries were ribs and bibs, Harold's Chicken Shack, the Medici and a Greek diner called the Agora. But the oldest and most venerable restaurant was Valois on 53rd Street, a cafeteria that bore the motto see your food on the front window. It still remains a mandatory stopping place for politicians, Sunday church goers, and neighborhood types of all sorts. It figured prominently in a Philip Roth short story titled Juice or Gravy: How I Met My Fate in a Cafeteria, and it was also the base of an extraordinary piece of urban sociology titled Slim's Table, Race, Respectability, and Masculinity that grew out of a University of Chicago doctoral dissertation. I'm glad to say that the neighborhood has not changed much in terms of its culinary habits. Years later, when I was invited back to give a lecture at the university, I was taken to a French restaurant that had recently opened up in Hyde Park, and I'm glad to say it was terrible. In addition to these restaurants, it was Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap, known simply as Jimmy's, that was a student and neighborhood hangout on 55th Street. The Eagle on Blackstone Avenue that has since closed, and the Tiki Lounge on 57th under the L tracks.
Steven Smith: I heard later that the classicist David Green, whose translation of Herodotus history, who we still use in directed studies. David Green used to invite someone every day for lunch at Jimmy's, where he would order a hamburger and a martini. Green was from Ireland, but he was very much a U of C type. He published relatively little, but was a prolific translator of Greek tragedy and taught widely in the areas of classical and contemporary literature. Of course, James Joyce. One of my regrets is that I never took a class from Greene where I might have been invited to one of his lunches at Jimmy's. I love the U of C. It took a while, but it was there that I learned to think like a political theorist. Much of what I admired of the place was its sheer quirkiness. This went back to the 1940s and 50s, when it became a bastion for smart Jewish students who could not get into the Ivy League because of the quota system. A wit once described the university of this period as the greatest collection of juvenile neurotics since the Children's Crusade, which I suspect may be true. The list of alumni reads like a virtual who's who of American accomplishments, from people like Mike Nichols and Elaine May to Saul Alinsky and Bernie Sanders. It is revealing that the 2016 presidential primary pitted Bernie Sanders, a New Yorker who went to the UFC against Hillary Clinton, a Chicagoan who attended Wellesley.
Steven Smith: I have no doubt that had Hillary gone to Chicago, she would have been a better candidate, but then she would not have been Hillary Clinton. Chicago always cultivated a more intellectual style than anywhere else. It lived under the shadows of the Ivies, for which it held a kind of proud contempt. This was set by its pioneering president, Robert Maynard Hutchins, who created the famous Great Books program back in the 1930s that was still broadly in effect when I was there as a student and then later as a teacher. As a result, people took texts with a kind of seriousness that I have never seen elsewhere, and this spoke immediately to me. I remember years later, Marty Peretz, the owner of the New Republic magazine, told me a story about the first time he was asked to give a lecture at Chicago. He asked a friend what to expect and was told, it's not Yale, it's not Harvard, it's not Princeton. You're going to have to work. The political science department specialized in tough love. I recall the chair of the department, a quantitative political scientist named Norman Nye, welcoming the incoming students, the incoming class, and then telling us if we expected to get academic jobs, we would be sorely disappointed and that we would all end up teaching high school. Welcome to the university.
Steven Smith: Later, I remember someone saying that the department was composed of two kinds of people German Jews and Eastern European Jews. And you had to decide which team you were playing for. This didn't mean, of course, that everyone in the department was Jewish, but these represented two enduring human types. The Germans were thought to be more genteel and establishment. The Eastern European types to be more hard edged and confrontational. I knew immediately which side I wanted to play for. But it was true. At the U of C, even the goyim spoke some Yiddish. It was characteristic that the university sponsored a yearly latke-hamantash debate, where scholars from different fields were asked to use their scholarly specialty to weigh in on these two Jewish delicacies. Not surprisingly, the latke always won. But the most important teacher, get back to Harrison's question, of my time was to become my dissertation advisor, Joseph Cropsey. Mr. Cropsey, or Joe, as I was later allowed to call him much later, and I became close over the years, but not initially, so he could be intimidating. By the way, at Chicago, professors would always refer to as Mr. Never Professor and certainly never doctor. And students were always referred to as Mr. or Miss before the era of Ms.. This was deemed more Democratic. Cropsey was tall, had a sharp beak like nose, close cropped hair, and spoke in a pronounced New York twang. He had grown up in Cedarhurst or Cedarhurst, as he used to say, one of the five towns on Long Island.
Steven Smith: Each class he would take one book. No historical background. No secondary literature. Just a single text. I remember my first class with him was on Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Cropsey's approach was typically U of C, especially with its rejection of historicism, the belief that every book is a product of its particular time and place. Rather than reading a book for what we could learn about its period, we were taught to read for hidden signs and meanings. This approach had been developed by Cropsey's mentor, Leo Strauss. I never met Strauss. He died in 1973, but his name was legendary and in some quarters infamous, but he would exercise a profound influence over me. Strauss was a German émigré who, after spending a decade at the New School in New York, joined the faculty of Chicago in 1949 and stayed there until his retirement almost 20 years later. He taught and wrote about the great philosophers, from Plato to Machiavelli to Nietzsche, and explored their writings with unrivaled care and attention to detail. When asked what they learned from Strauss, many of his early students would say he taught them how to read. Strauss was perhaps the only true genius who was ever taught in a political science department. I've met many smart people over the years, but political science does not seem to attract the best or the most creative minds.
Steven Smith: Strauss was an exception. He was not trained in political science, but in philosophy. He had been a student of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger back in Germany, but who gravitated toward the history of political philosophy. He uncovered new methods for interpreting classic texts, as well as offering a compelling vision of history as punctuated by crises and disruptions, culminating in the nihilism of the 20th century. It was a dark vision in some respects, but it offered a profound diagnosis of the problems of modernity that others did not or refused to see. There was a strange aura around Strauss during my period, or so it seemed to me. Although his influence was profound, no one ever really seemed to discuss his ideas. There seemed to be a conspiracy of silence around him. It was as if you understood him, there was no reason to discuss his thought, and if you talked about them, it was a sign that you did not understand. Strauss's lecture notes were circulated in mimeographed forms and given to students who were deemed trustworthy. I would occasionally ask Cropsey questions about Strauss, and he would always answer with vagueness or platitudes, which made the cloud of secrecy seem more impenetrable. It is no coincidence that Strauss flourished at the University of Chicago more than most places. Chicago appreciated originality and creativity. The only thing that was not tolerated was the commonplace or the banal.
Steven Smith: I don't know if this still exists. I hope it does. I've often wondered what would have happened had Strauss spent his career here at Yale. But even to ask this question provides its own answer. It is inconceivable that Strauss would have been hired at Harvard or Yale, which even today remain conformist and mainstream. His work was too foreign and, dare I say it, too Jewish to have been accepted at the Ivy League. Ouch. But to return to my narrative. I took a long, a year long sequence of courses from Cropsey on Plato's Theaetetus, sophist and statesman, which became the basis for his book Plato's World, published in 1995. But the most influential course I took was a course on Spinoza's Ethics. This was the first time I had come across Spinoza, and in addition to reading the ethics, I read his theological political treatise as well as Strauss's early book, Spinoza's Critique of Religion. I could not have imagined then that I would go on to write two books on Spinoza. Spinoza Liberalism and Jewish Identity, published in 1997, which won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, by the way, and another book entitled Spinoza's Book of Life, Freedom and Redemption and the ethics that I dedicated to Cropsey, who I called Amicus Spinoza. Other classes I took from him were on Montesquieu's Persian letters and Thucydides. He had a brilliant way of turning a satirical epistolary novel of Montesquieu's, or a history by Thucydides into profound works of political philosophy.
Steven Smith: Cropsey had a very distinctive style that, early in my career, I tried to imitate before I realized it was simply not working for me. His classes were always popular, so he taught them in a lecture hall on the ground floor of the political science department. There were always students there with recording equipment to take down every word. Occasionally someone would ask a question during the lectures, but most times not. He always came to class very well dressed, often in a three piece suit, but one that looked like it had been purchased sometime in the 1950s, which it probably had been. He would stand very erect behind the podium with a copy of the book we were studying on the lectern in front of him, but I hardly ever remember him referring to it. He would begin awkwardly by clearing his throat several times, and would then embark on the exploration of a theme, showing how the text we were studying for that day raised the deepest questions of philosophy. Cropsey wrote very little by dominant academic standards, but he had a brilliant speculative mind and a depth that is rare. He also had a droll sense of humor. Once I remember walking home with him and Alan Blum and they were talking about an obituary that a fellow Strauss had named George Anastaplo had written for Strauss. Cropsey remarked that the only thing that kept him going was the fear that George Anastaplo would write his obituary.
Steven Smith: I recall him telling us once in class that aeronautical engineers had declared that the bumblebee should not be able to fly. I suppose this was because of the size of its wingspan in comparison to the body. This was an attempt to illustrate that sometimes things may be true in theory, but are contradicted by practice, which is certainly a useful lesson. Once mandatory student evaluations were distributed in class, he wryly observed the young judging the old. I also remember him telling us that there are two. Of course, there are always two kinds of people - those that turn the cap on the toothpaste tube all the way and those who don't. But I forget what this distinction was intended to illustrate. But whenever I turn the toothpaste cap, even today, I always think of that story. It's a mystery. There were, however, other parts of his personality that I found difficult. He could be harshly judgmental of people he did not appreciate or did not approve. And he also exhibited or could exhibit a puritanical streak that I did not always care for. Years later, I sent him a copy of my book reading Leo Strauss. The book contained a blurb by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, of which I was especially proud. Cropsey phoned me and asked whether I had seen the cover of my book.
Steven Smith: I was alarmed at first. What did I miss? It turned out that he disapproved of the fact that Frankfurt was identified on the back jacket as the author of the bestselling book on bullshit. I believe he refused to pronounce the word. Fortunately, he was humanized by his lovely wife, Lillian. We discovered that Lillian and I were distantly related through some cousin on my father's side from Long Island, and in later years we would visit them in their summer house on Cape Cod after we had moved to New Haven. And when our son Josh was a young child. His memory remains a blessing. The university had always attracted. Are you with me? Is this okay? We're good. Okay. The university had always attracted some of the most original minds. And among one that stands out is, of course, Allan Bloom, who joined the faculty on the Committee on Social Thought in 1979. Bloom had been an early student of Strauss's who had returned to Chicago from the University of Toronto. He had previously been an enormously influential teacher at Cornell, where he taught for several years before leaving due to the student uprisings in 1968. Many of his best students would end up teaching at top universities around the country. By the time he returned to Chicago, however, bloom had still published relatively little. He was the co-author of a book with Harry Jaffa called Shakespeare's Politics, but was best known for a highly influential translation and interpretive essay on Plato's Republic.
Steven Smith: Shortly before arriving at Chicago, he had just published his translation of Rousseau's great educational text, Emil. Some of you are taking the Emil course this semester, which was the theme of his inaugural lecture. This was maybe a decade before he wrote his international bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind, a book maybe some of you have heard of. Yes, yes. I would describe Bloom. Bloom lived in an apartment building called The Cloisters, which was also the home of many Nobel Prize winners, mainly from the economics department. I would describe Bloom as a bohemian. Rousseau was his model. He had expensive tastes and always lived beyond his means. He was gay, but homosexuality was never discussed. He was not a conservative in any conventional sense, but more like someone who had stepped out of a French novel. He loved Flaubert, Stendhal and Celine's voyage to the end of the night. He encouraged his students to think dangerously, and to some degree, live dangerously. Bloom began to teach almost immediately with Nobel Prize winning author Saul Bellow and I attended some of their early classes. He and Bellow taught a class that was essentially by invitation only. Get away with that. His book Love and Friendship, published posthumously, essentially grew out of these classes. I did not know Bellow well until later on. Even then, I didn't know him well. I shouldn't say that I knew him, but not well, and he was not especially welcoming to students.
Steven Smith: I remember once sitting on a chair in the hallway in Foster Hall waiting to see someone, and Bellow peered out of his office. Was I waiting to see him? He asked. I replied that I wasn't. Good, he said, and slammed the door. Bellow's book, Ravelstein, was based on Bloom, and although it was far from his best book, it did capture Bloom's personality, especially after he had become very rich. Bloom is a colorful character, not at all like a typical professor. He wore loud and expensive clothes that stood out on campus. He was a charismatic teacher and always had a group of students, all young men, who took care of his various needs, driving him to appointments. He didn't own a car, doing his shopping, picking up his laundry, and so on. He also had a tyrannical side. He knew right away whether he thought you were worth cultivating, and if you were not, you were out. I knew students who went to U of C just to study with Bloom, and then found themselves immediately barred from his circle. In at least one case, this had tragic consequences. Needless to say, women were excluded. He thought them incapable of serious work. He ridiculed Sappho as a second rater, made fun of Simone de Beauvoir. The only female author that I'm aware of that he wrote about with any understanding was Jane Austen, which was probably because Strauss had said that Austen was a good introduction to the classics.
Steven Smith: A friend of mine, Miriam Galston, who teaches in the law school at George Washington University, was an undergraduate student of Bloom's at Cornell. She told me that Bloom would always take his graduating seniors out for a celebratory lunch. When her time came, Bloom took her to the grocery store to help with his shopping. You couldn't get away with that today, but Bloom was unique. He was an immediate presence on campus. He brought a passel of students with him from Toronto who slavishly aped his manners, his clothes, his way of speaking. He seemed always to talk out of the side of his mouth like a character from an old movie, and especially his non-stop smoking. You hardly ever saw Bloom without a cigarette. Strauss, too, had been a smoker, as were most people of the time. I heard a story that gives an impression of the differences between them. When Strauss arrived at Chicago, he entered his first class to find a sign saying No Smoking. Being a conservative by disposition and therefore inclined to obey the rules, he was clearly torn. Sensing his discomfort, a student got up and took the sign down, thus giving Strauss license to light up. Bloom is virtually the opposite of Strauss in his manners and habits. Strauss was reticent and abstemious, while Bloom was flamboyant and extravagant.
Steven Smith: He recklessly borrowed money from his students that was never repaid, and was always excessively proud of his George Johnson tea sets. He had an enormous record collection that he later converted to CDs, and he would welcome guests into his apartment wearing silk kimonos. Many years later, after the success of his book The Closing of the American Mind, I was seated next to him at a dinner and was admiring a gold lighter that he had put on the table. He saw me looking at it and said it was the price of a lecture at Johns Hopkins. Easy come, easy go. Bloom was always a wit, and I scarcely recall a conversation where he did not drop a memorable bombshell. He once said to me about Toronto, how can you respect a city you don't fear? Another time, another time I asked him, should I submit an article I was working on to the Strauss-Kahn Journal interpretation, and he said that sending an article interpretation was like writing a letter to yourself. I recall another story I am not sure how I heard, but after the after the publication of the closing of the American Mine, Bloom was invited to go to Japan, and on one evening his hosts took him to a geisha house, which he found acutely embarrassing. While he was there, he heard a voice ask tentatively. Professor Bloom. Apparently it was a former student from Cornell who was being similarly toasted.
Steven Smith: He was, however, a serious man. I remember running to him on campus the day that Reagan was shot. I always will recall the look of shock and horror on his face when I told him the news. But I recently heard a story about Strauss in Bloom that is worth mentioning. Strauss apparently did not always look favorably on Bloom. Whether this was due to his lifestyle or possibly even his homosexuality, although I have no idea whether Strauss would have known of this. But in any case, after Bloom's career took off at Cornell, he began sending some of his best students to Chicago to work with Strauss. Strauss sent him a postcard with a verse from Psalm 118, the stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. I cannot think of a more beautiful tribute. We're good? Okay. There is one other story in which Bloom figured only tangentially, but seemed to me somehow illustrative of the university. I recall attending a lecture by Seth Benedetti sponsored by the committee, a name that probably no one, or only very few people in here will know. Benedetti and Bloom had both been early students of Strauss, and it was generally known that Strauss regarded Benedetti as his greatest protege. This created an aura around him, and in fact he was a brilliant and enigmatic personality. His books were considered by many to be unreadable. Stanley Rosen, another early student of Strauss's, recalls the first time he met Benedetti, who was then discoursing at length, that it was immoral to love another human being.
Steven Smith: Being incredulous, Rosen asked, so what then should we love? To which Benedetti replied in an authoritative tone, Greek vases. Rosen said this was the most sophisticated argument I have ever heard, except that it had one flaw. It was nonsense. Benedetti was a Turkish Jew from Brooklyn. His father had been a professor at Brooklyn College, and was the author of a book about the history of Sephardic Jewry. Seth, the son, taught at NYU and was one of the few students of Strauss's, maybe the only one who was in a classics department. Bloom introduced him with a fulsome tribute, and without a word, Benedetti launched into reading a paper on Plato's Cratylus, one of the most difficult and obscure platonic dialogues. The lecture was given around a large oval shaped table and attended by all the majordomos of the Committee on Social Thought. I happened to be seated directly across from Benedetti, and he had the habit of pausing every few minutes, looking across the table at me and saying, uh huh! As if to confirm whether I was following. What could I do but nod in the affirmative. Of course, neither I nor any one else in the room had the foggiest idea of what he was talking about after the first few sentences. When he had finished reading the paper, there was complete silence.
Steven Smith: Finally, a graduate student asked whether he had plans to publish the paper so that we might be able to read it at our leisure. Benedetti answered with a single word: no. I believe the paper was subsequently published in a posthumous volume of his essays titled The Argument of the Action. I did not meet Benedetti on that occasion, but later I did get to know him and even brought him to Yale for a memorable event. This must have been in the late 90s. I was head of the Directed Studies program, and one of my jobs was to organize symposia connected to the class. One of the themes I chose was the old quarrel between philosophy and poetry, a topic suggested in Plato's Republic. I asked a member of the classics department, a Homer scholar, if she would serve as a defender of poetry. And then I asked Benedetti if he would come to Yale to speak for philosophy, and he accepted. I explained to him that Directed Studies was a freshman program, and while it appealed to some of the best students, they were still in their first year and were only encountering these books for the first time. So please keep this in mind. However, when he got up to speak, he went directly to the blackboard and began writing furiously in Greek and making what seemed to me to be extremely obscure points of classical philology.
Steven Smith: I was convinced that the event was a total catastrophe. But much to my surprise, the students seemed very much intrigued by his infectious obscurity and his style. And there was a lively question and answer period after its presentation. So good for DS. But that was not all. There followed a dinner later at Mory's, where several faculty members joined us. At one point in the evening, the conversation turned to Virgil's Aeneid, and one of the members of the staff admitted that he never felt he understood the work. Benedetti then pronounced with an air of total confidence that this was because of the zero at the center of the book. Everyone was silent until someone finally asked, Professor Benedetti, what do you mean by the zero at the center of the work? Whoever asked this was Benedetti's perfect straight man, because he launched into a lengthy monologue about the number of speeches and various other arcane matters, all intended to prove his theory about the zero. The result left everyone completely stupefied. Years later, I got in touch with a couple of his former students who knew him much better than I, and asked them if they had ever heard him discuss this interpretation of the Aeneid. Each had some general recollection of him talking about this, but apparently there was no written record that could lead us to reconstruct his thought. So it seems as if Benedetti had taken the secret of the Aeneid with him to the grave.
Steven Smith: There were two other people with whom I had a proverbial brush with fame. One was the great classicist Arnaldo Momigliano. Anyone know that name? You're from Italy. You have some Italian? Don't know. He was an Italian Jew who had fled Mussolini's Italy after the racial laws were passed, going first to London and Oxford, and later Chicago. Momigliano was a visitor to the university, who came one quarter every year and would always give a series of public lectures on some topic of classical history, which was his field. He was looked on with awe, and it was said that even the notoriously arrogant Edward Shils deferred to him. I always looked forward to attending Momigliano lectures in the packed room at Ida Noyes Hall. I remember once going over to Regenstein Library late at night to check a source, and saw Momigliano working away at a table. He was one of a kind. The other figure I want to mention was the great Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, who was, alas, a bit forgotten today. Kolakowski had been a dissident Marxist in Warsaw and had lost his position at the university. I had previously read his collection called toward a Marxist humanism, but I don't think I then appreciated his great essay In Praise of Inconsistency, which I have since quoted many times. I highly recommend it in Praise of Inconsistency by Lucia Kolakowski.
Steven Smith: Kolakowski went on to teach at several universities, although principally at Oxford, where he wrote his great three volume study, Main Currents of Marxism. He had received an offer to join the Yale Philosophy Department, but someone told me, I have no idea whether it's true that he came to Chicago because it was the only place where he could get the kind of Polish food he knew growing up in Warsaw. When he arrived at the university in 1980, the solidarity movement in Gdansk had just begun, and I remember attending his first class. The room was packed mainly because people wanted to hear him speak about the situation in Poland. He was an extraordinary presence and I will always remember his gaunt frame, his cape and his clear Lucite cane. The course I took with Kulikovsky was on Descartes and Pascal. Richard Rorty's book philosophy and the Mirror of Nature had recently been published, and it was the centerpiece of the class. I remember one incident vividly. After reading the discussion of dreams and descartes's meditations, a student asked Professor Kolakowski, how do I know I'm not dreaming? And without missing a beat, Kolakowski replied in his Polish Oxonian accent. And who is asking? It was, for me, a hilarious moment and showed Kolakowski's humorous side. Of all the people I met during this period of my life, I wish I had been able to know Kolakowski better. He was a subtle ironist who was serious about philosophy but did not take himself too seriously.
Steven Smith: His great book, Metaphysical Horror, begins with the best opening sentence of any philosophy book I have ever read. A modern philosopher, he wrote, who has never once suspected himself being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading. I couldn't agree more, and is something I suspect that very few philosophers ever stopped to consider. I should probably use this moment to say something about my dissertation. A very short moment. For reasons that would be too tedious to relate, I chose for my subject the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. Althusser was a highly controversial figure in France and abroad. He was a professor of philosophy at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, and was known for his cryptic or, as one critic put it, Sibylline prose. I never had the opportunity to meet him, but I did write him and have letters from him in my files. The dissertation, later my first book, was submitted in June 1981. But an odd event occurred not long before I submitted the work. And let me just ask you, is the name Althusser? Does it mean anything? Does anyone know the name? Okay. It's forgotten. In November 1980, Althusser murdered his wife, Hélène Rytmann, in their apartment at the École. All of a sudden, the philosopher, who was little known outside of France, was being written about in Time, Newsweek and other mass circulation periodicals.
Steven Smith: This was a tragedy for Mrs. Althusser, but it was an embarrassment for me. I remember being in a record store on 57th Street in Hyde Park and running into Alan Bloom, who came over to me to gloat that the subject of my dissertation had become a murderer. Apart from Cropsey, the two other members of my- I had two other members of my dissertation committee who are worth a mention. One was a man named Adam Jaworski, who had been a student of Kolakowski's in Warsaw. The difference was that Jaworski remained a Marxist or a kind of semi Marxist, while Kolakowski's thought had taken a sharp turn to the right. He had seen close up the dangers of Marxian totalitarianism, and although he remained too much of a skeptic to embrace religion, he wrote sensitively on religious topics. I once heard that on a trip to Israel, he asked his hosts to take him to Mayor Shearim because it reminded him of the Warsaw of his youth. I once observed to Cropsey that it was curious how different were the paths taken by Kolakowski and Jaworski, and I will always remember his answer. He shrugged his shoulders and said to me, some people learn from their experience. My other dissertation advisor was an English political theorist named Brian Barry, who I only mentioned because he still has some cred around here, who had recently joined the department.
Steven Smith: Brian had come from Oxford, where he had made his reputation as an acerbic critic. He was, in fact, better at criticism than articulating his own views, which I often found somewhat pedestrian. He was a working class Englishman with strong socialist views and, as they say, did not tolerate fools easily. He also had a cruel streak. I remember once when someone was presenting a paper to the department, he ostentatiously took out of a comic book out of his bag and pretended to read it. I've always wanted to do that. Brian was a bearded, heavyset, somewhat oafish man, but who had a powerful intellect even though he had no understanding of straussianism. He once wrote, and I quote him to spend one's life rolling the classics around the tongue like old brandy is advocated by Leo Strauss and his disciples, hardly seems likely to advance the sum of human knowledge. If he believed that Strauss, a German Jewish exile deeply scarred by the rise of Hitlerism, thought of the classics just as old Brandy, he clearly misunderstood what Strauss was about. Still, he was a good adviser and truth to tell, he read my dissertation, chapter by chapter, more closely than Cropsey. We met several times in his apartment to discuss it. He was also the editor of the philosophy journal ethics, and would occasionally give me books to review that were my first publications. So I regard him with a kind of fondness.
Steven Smith: I'm very close to finishing up. The dissertation, which thankfully was not my best work, had the virtue of being completed and virtually record time almost as a series of all nighters. Chicago was notorious for the ten year dissertation, a reputation that the university had struggled to overcome. And mine was completed in I think two years, making me something of a model for the department. The problem was that, having finished, I now needed to think about a job. Where was I to go? The department chairs, warning that we would all end up teaching high school, came back to haunt me, and the department at that time did very little to help prepare their students for the job market. The attitude was very much sink or swim. The only person who gave me any practical advice to speak of was Bernard or Bernie Silberman. Bernie was an odd duck, a working class Jewish kid from Detroit who had boxed in the Golden Gloves. He had the broken nose to show for it. He'd gone to Wayne State and become a specialist in Japanese politics. I would often go to breakfast in the vast dining hall in the Reynolds Club, and Bernie and his friend Harry Hartunian. By the way, the same name, although spelled slightly differently, is the character played by Jackie Mason and Steve Martin's great film The Jerk. He and Harry would often be there and I would join them.
Steven Smith: I enjoyed their conversation. That was always refreshingly sardonic. Bernie gave me one piece of invaluable advice that over the years I have passed on to many others. When asked whether you can do anything, Bernie advised lie like a rug. Can you teach a course in which you have absolutely no background? Yes. Would you be willing to share an office? Love to? I think Bernie gave up on serious scholarship, but later taught courses in the college with titles like losers, to hell with the enlightenment and still Another springtime for Hitler and Germany. Only at the U of C. Fortunately, in my last two years in Chicago, I became a lecturer teaching on the Common Core. I was what was called a Yom Kippur appointment, meaning if they hadn't filled the teaching slots by Yom Kippur, I would get the job. I was hired initially by Leon Kass to teach a section of the course called Human Being and Citizen, something like DS. It was co-taught with and my partner was a young assistant professor from the French department. We taught Homer's Iliad, Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, Shakespeare's Henry the Fourth, Tolstoy's War and Peace, among many others. It was a deep dive into some books that I did not really know, and was scarcely prepared to teach. It was typical of a well-known U of C joke when someone is asked whether they have read a particular book, the answer is read it.
Steven Smith: I haven't even taught it. I really am coming to the end. I was also applying for various academic jobs at this time and even got a number of interviews. I went up to Smith College in Northampton, mass for a one year position. My host, a lovely man named Leo Weinstein, had been a student of Strauss's at Chicago. Leo had hardly published anything, but was a legendary teacher at Smith, and he took me to see the house on campus where the movie Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was filmed. I did not get the job. I had an even greater disappointment when I was interviewed at the New School. I had a completely unrealistic and romantic picture of the new school, as a place of the great European exiles that had made up most of the faculty in Strauss's day. I was also excited about the possibility of living in New York, but the place I visited was sadly diminished. It was a pitiful lot who made up the faculty. The only serious person still teaching there was a scholar of constitutional law named Jacob Ladinsky. I had an interview with one of the older political theorists in the department named Saul Padover. Padover was an old school lefty whose heroes were Karl Marx and Thomas Jefferson. I liked him immediately. I remember him asking me in a halting voice whether I knew Edward Shils at Chicago.
Steven Smith: I said that I had met Shils, a formidable member of the committee, but did not really know him. The conversation continued for a few minutes, and then he asked again whether I knew Edward Shils. It was a sad moment, and I heard that he had passed away not long after. Again, I did not get the job. It was in the spring of 1981, I believe, that I was interviewed for a position at the University of Texas in Austin. It was the best job for which I was being considered. I went down for an interview. It seemed to go well, but I never heard back. Once again, I believe I had failed and was prepared to teach again after Yom Kippur for a third year in the core. I remember sitting in our apartment one afternoon, and I got a call from the chair of the department at UT offering me a one year position. I told him that I already had a one year position and not wish to relocate to Texas just for another one, but that I would be very open to a tenure letter appointment, which is what I thought the position had been advertised as. About an hour later, I received a call back offering me a tenure letter appointment. I thought I was dreaming. I ran out of the apartment to go tell Susan, who worked at the Oriental Institute, the fact that I was being lowballed did not really matter. At least at that point. It seemed hard to believe. I didn't really care, but I was on my way. Thank you. Very much.
Steven Smith: So there were a few teachers I don't know.
Harrison Muth: All right. Well, I think we have time for a short Q&A if anybody has any questions. We have two mics, we can pass around. That's fine.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I just want to go back to maybe the somewhere in the first third of your talk where you described the distinction between the University of Chicago and the Ivies, and you used the word conformist. Yeah. Can you elaborate a little bit more? I know we're on camera, but with with a a commitment to not release the tape for an extended period of time. Can you speak a little bit about.
Steven Smith: Cannot be released until after my passing.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Okay. Okay. Well, God willing, that will be in a very, very long, long time. So I'm interested actually in the extent to which if then Chicago was kind of a radical place, how much has that been exacerbated today, with the universities in general becoming more and more and more conformist? And I say that in the literal sense with what's going on in society and Yale in particular.
Steven Smith: I this is a question. Thanks for that, Shmully. It's a question I thought about. And frankly, I don't have the answer because I have- the times I've been I'm just back when I when I'm invited to go back for a short visit. I don't have a sense of where the U of C is today, but I do think there was definitely a sense that the- then I mean, I'm talking about when I was there, the 70s, that the Ivies represented and still represent to some degree the mainstream. We are constantly looking over our shoulders at what the other guys are doing and the I and the other Ivies and trying to kind of keep up with the Joneses. And there's there's very much that kind of attitude. Whereas at Chicago, they didn't really care. They didn't care. I mean, they were interested in people who were interesting and they had a great nose for talent. It was not they were not always good at keeping the their most talented people. And a lot of the people I mentioned left the university, but they were very good at spotting talent, developing it, and they didn't really care whether the person was doing mainstream work or, you know, this is something we constantly are focusing on today.
Steven Smith: You know, how many they didn't exist at the time, how many Google citations their work was generating completely. Those kinds of considerations were off the table. And I think I mean, it was a peculiarity of the U of C, which I, which I suspect sort of exists still, but probably not to the same degree that it just had a quirky nature that was excellent. It took ideas with a, as I said, it took ideas with a seriousness that I have not encountered anywhere else. And that, to me, was the kind of difference between Chicago and the people who went to Harvard, Princeton, Yale. And of course, you know, listen, don't get me wrong, I love Yale. I've been here a long time. It's, to a large degree, made me what I am. And I'm deeply, deeply grateful to that. But I have to be honest, too. It's not just straightforward. You know, there are problems as well. And that I some of these reflections have caused me to think about about some of these differences, which are troubling to me, frankly.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I'm going to double. Oh, sorry. I must double down on this just for one second. If you want to turn the camera off, we can. What does it say about the future of the academy? As far as and the most recent, I would say five years of pressure and social academic pressure coming in from the top and the way the universities are conforming to the mores of society.
Steven Smith: Well, you raised the question, which is in fact the last chapter of my memoir, which is called Then and Now. You know, I'm very aware of the dangers. As the great philosopher Tony Soprano said there's no- the worst conversation is about the way things used to be. You know, the lowest form of conversation, he said, is the way things used to be. So I'm not going to I don't want to engage in just nostalgia. And, you know, things are so bad now. They were great then. They certainly had their problems. However, I am very concerned about. I'm not competent to speak about the university. I can talk a little bit about my own little unit within it. I do think it's currents are to me very troubling. And the way in which a whole range of contemporary issues now seem to dominate the way in which scholarship is done. You know, it's not enough any longer to be a scholar. That's what we were trained for. That's what I loved about Chicago. You were trained to be a scholar. Where your ideas ended up politically? It was like ten steps down the, you know, the pole. You didn't care. You were a scholar first. And today I feel very often it's your political identity and your political position that is the determining factor. And whether you're a scholar or not is something that, you know, I'm afraid I fear is becoming less and less important. This is maybe false. I don't know. It's just a sense of my. I don't want to be too negative, but, you know.
Harrison Muth: Another mic here for you.
Leland Stange: So I'm curious.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Speak up please.
Leland Stange: Thank you very much. That was brilliant. One of the best papers read out loud. I mean, the intricacies of university life is actually, I think, something a lot of people want to hear more about and never get to hear a lot about. I'm curious. After you wrote on the murderer in the dissertation, Althusser, how did you choose your next intellectual, you know, passion or target? And so when when you did get that job at, at UT Austin, I mean, what did you present yourself as? What sort of scholar?
Steven Smith: I could yeah, I mean, I'll get to that in just, just one moment. I do want to say, you know, just also thinking a little bit about Shmully, of course, you know, people like, I mean, Bloom is a difficult case. It's kind of one of a kind in a certain way. Like he wasn't like a professor in any ordinary sense. And he was a very problematic person. He was cruel. He was tyrannical. He talked about the Greeks, but he had more in common with a Persian despot. You know, his love of luxury. You know his court, the court around him. It was obnoxious. And yet it didn't matter that, you know, in a certain sense, you know, it was tolerated because there was something about him. Yeah. He was a person of ideas. And there were other people in the memoir I didn't talk about tonight. I just, you know, how much can you do? I don't want to tax your patience longer than anyone. But one of the funnier contrasts was between Alan Bloom and a man whose name may be familiar to some of you here, Leon Kass. You know. Do you know Leon? Leon Kass. Leon was another kind of straussian, deeply conservative. He's now actually, he's quite up in age, but he's energetic and he's the provost of Shalem University in Jerusalem. But Leon and Alan were like oil and water. I mean, they were just such different. And they lived in the same building.
Steven Smith: They lived in this building, the cloisters. And, you know, Leon and his wife Amy taught, you know, this course called love about courtship and marriage, you know, and their idea was that, you know, they were training students for kind of bourgeois life of marriage and they treating traditional virtues. Bloom was teaching this completely, you know, love and friendship, which also had a very powerful erotic component to it, you know, with kind of dangerous dimensions. You know, they were totally different. And it was, you know, a lovely contrast to watch, you know, but you saw people with real personalities, you know, real personalities. In many ways, this is what I more than anything else, I kind of lament that the universities should be about people with big personalities and great, because that's what you know, that's the expression of their ideas, their personalities. I see all these great people who write these dreary articles. They're yes, they have personality, but their personalities just reflect the grimness of what they write. So that's what I miss. That's what I miss. This question is sort of belongs to another chapter of the book. But to make a long story short, yes, I went to Texas. I had written this dissertation on Althusser. They say that the best dissertation is a done dissertation, and better if it gets you a job. It did that. It did both of those things. I finished it, it got me a job.
Steven Smith: And very quickly I ran out of interest in. It is no longer of any interest to me, and I won't go into the whole backstory of this, but I had studied Hegel at considerable length and had even considered doing dissertation on Hegel. I had written about Hegel at length earlier on, and I was looking for a second project, that's how, which is my Hegel book, Hegel's Critique of Liberalism, which is still one of my best selling books, actually. It still manages to pull in a few royalties, even though it's been written a long time ago. So I was looking for something, and I decided to go back to Hegel. I was bored with it. By the time I was doing the I was bored with anything. I had anything more to say about him. But by the time I finished later on, a few years later, I was really ready to kind of go back and reapply myself. And that's how I did my second book, and that's what got me tenure at Yale, was the second book. It was the Hegel book. It was very well received. I won't go into it. I won't brag about it. But yeah, that pushed me over the over the top. Actually, there's a story about Bloom which I tell in another chapter, which is related to this, because one of Bloom's students had taught in the department and did not get tenure.
Steven Smith: And this was considered you know, they thought Yale was very hostile to Straussians. This was a big, big deal at the time. So when I got the job offer here, I sort of don't go. You know, it's a dead end job. It's a dead end job. There's no future to it. But I had come here for my interview. I, like many of you who came here, I kind of just kind of fell in love with the place, you know? And I decided, well, maybe I won't get tenure. Probably won't. But who knows? Maybe you only get one chance to play in the major leagues. How do I know? Am I going to turn it down to stay in Triple-A ball in Texas? No, I'm going to come here. And despite the warnings, I managed to get there. And I remember going to a conference back in Chicago with Bloom, that had been run by Bloom. And I was a little apprehensive because I thought, oh, God, maybe Bloom, he's going to, you know, he's going to he's kind of had a kind of coruscating sarcasm. I thought maybe he would dislike the fact that his student didn't get tenure here, and I did. But in fact, quite the opposite. It was like one of us had made it, you know. And I felt very relieved. And I always felt very good about that. So that kind of went a little beyond what you ask. But one thing leads to another.
Sahar Tartak: Thanks so much, professor. It's really animating the way you write about these people, and it kind of uplifts the intellectual side of things as opposed to making it boring. I'm sort of curious about the rigorously intellectual, very Jewish sort of pocket that you describe at UChicago that I think these pockets of, like, this exact thing comes up and like spurts in American history, like City College in the 20th century, different, but like, similar in its own way. I wonder if you think that there's anything like that today, or if it's just gone. Maybe everybody's dispersed... Something else. And if it is gone, why you think it's gone?
Steven Smith: That's a great question, and I wish I had a good answer to it, which I don't at the moment. I don't want to be negative about it, because one thing is, we don't know. Let's face it. I mean, I'm giving my view of things. It's just my perspective. It's very biased. What else could it be? It's just my view. In the world I'm talking about is you just mentioned it was kind of unique both to a moment and to a place. And we can't expect this will happen at all times in all places. It won't, but it doesn't mean it's not going to happen. You know, other pockets of excellence and other pockets of, you know, originality and a certain kind of creativity won't exist. And if teaching means anything, it means trying to encourage people to be that person, you know, be that thing. So maybe you will be that person, you know, to create something, you know, like this, something very special. It was a moment, though. I think it captured a moment. A little hard to say why. I think it kind of goes back in many ways to the roots of I talked about the Hutchins. I talked in a fuller account of this at more length. The Hutchins College and also, you know, in a different sense, you know, in a peculiar sense, Chicago was benefited precisely because of the quota restrictions that the Ivies. Means all the smart, at least the smart Jewish kids, were coming to Chicago while all of the prep school boarding students were coming, you know, to Yale.
Steven Smith: It was full of what they were. A colleague of mine, well, he's not in political science, but in other words, who had been here way back when, in the early 60s, said it was very well thought at the time that Yale had a first rate faculty and second rate students, because all the students were just these, you know, kids, you know, I don't know, you know, just rich kids from prep schools. They didn't have any intellectual ambition. You know, there were always some, of course, but the faculty was excellent, but the students were not that great. And Chicago benefited from this. Now, that's a kind of peculiarity of the, you know, the moment in a way. And that moment doesn't exist any longer. It's more kind of spread out now, more egalitarian in a way, egalitarianized. So it's harder to make these kind of little pockets of eccentricity that kind of have their own hothouse environment. And it was very much a kind of hothouse environment. Yale has some of that, I think DS, which is only, mind you, a one year program, but I think it cultivates that spirit. That's why I've always taught on it, because I think it cultivates that spirit of kind of weird, you know, intellectual kids and, you know, people who like it, you know. That's very crucial. And I think that's great, but it's hard to create a whole culture of this. And, you know, like I say, it may it may emerge somewhere else. Who knows? Thank you.
Chris Brennan: We're a little bit after 9:30. So do you want to be respectful of Professor Smith's time and anybody else?
Steven Smith: I'd like another question before we. One- at least one more. At least one more. Okay. Oh, Ben. He's my DS. He's a DSer.
Ben Beckman: Thanks so much for your talk, Professor Smith. And you speak so much. You know, someone else prefaced your question saying how you write about these people, so animating of them. And I think that one of the great things about reading memoir is that it allows us to animate the writer of the memoir after they are gone. But besides simply personal history, why write a memoir?
Steven Smith: Why write a memoir?
Ben Beckman: And what are you trying to say?
Steven Smith: Right. Good point. I'm writing it for a couple of reasons. I wrote it over. I forget if I mentioned this. I wrote it essentially over the last two summers. And I wrote it why. In the first case, because I'll be honest with you, I feel my mortality more than I used to. And I wanted to have a record of my life. You know, to me, you know, I write things. That's where I felt mortal. So I write. And I also- I mean, let me just. It was fun giving it here. I really enjoyed it. I want to thank. Thank you for listening to me.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: This is Tuesday night.
Steven Smith: Yeah, but it is not going beyond this. I mean, this is not written for publication. No one would be interested. And I make a point. I make a point that in this I'm not setting out my life as a model for someone else. I don't draw some moral lesson from my life. It's just my life. It's written largely for my son. In fact, it's written for my son because I want him to have and his children to have some kind of record of their father and grandfather when I'm no longer here to speak in my own voice. So that's why I wrote it. And of course, it kind of like anything. It kind of takes on a life of its own, you know, and, you know, some parts will be more interesting to him than others. I think probably the opening chapter is about my childhood will be more of interest than, you know, reading about my books and that pretends to care. But I don't think he cares that much about my books. But so that's basically why, you know, that was basically what animated. It was good therapy for me. I learned something.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: You absolutely need to know.
Steven Smith: Okay.
Toby Hecht: Can I just say something? Thinking of what she was saying about in the moment. It was a very specific moment, which is why I think it shouldn't have been open for publication for everybody to read, because I think it highlights a moment in time in America where this confluence of individuals, like coming from a post-war society and a traumatic, you know, dislocation like Leo Strauss and coming and kind of coming to this kind of intellectual like shtetl in a way, and pocketed, you know, which actually, by the way, I studied in high school in Chicago. That's where I was. So I.
Steven Smith: I'm, I was yeah, I.
Toby Hecht: No no West Rogers Park. Very diverse area, but. I think we're just listening to you speak about this. You know, this is something you would read about in a novel. It doesn't almost seem real. This is like, you know, a novel written about a shtetl, almost that but it happened here in America. It's not reminiscent of a European shtetl that no longer exists. It still exists, but it only existed like this for a moment. And I think it's, particularly because it's an American experience, that it is so profound for me. I mean, I think we can all agree that that for me, that's what this was. It sounds almost romantic. And something that even though we can't, we won't experience something like the way you did. I mean, it was just so in-depth and so saturated with these incredible characters that that they're like, when you describe the flamboyance or the serious, the Eastern European and the German. I mean, this is like we know what you're talking about, but we don't know anyone who is from a book about the European shtetls. But it was interesting, and I think that for me personally, I just think it's such an insight into American culture in particularly like the few decades, you know, beyond World War II and how this confluence of people came together. Because they weren't invited into these other communities again, they created their own nucleus where they impacted people like you who impacted people like us. So please reach out to us. Don't just limit it to just beautiful to some but I think to all the people who could benefit from such a beautiful story.
Steven Smith: Well, that is one of my favorite chapters, but I also have a very good one on my years at Branford College, which you might like look a little closer to home here. Yeah.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Maybe you should. Maybe, you know. You put it out as chapters and Tobyis reminding me of Shadows on the Hudson? I think is it is that.
Steven Smith: Shadows singer? Yeah.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Singer.
Steven Smith: Singer's opening.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I think the opening chapter is like everybody getting together in an apartment.
Steven Smith: Okay.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Right. It's kind of like the diverse, like, backgrounds of all these people coming together.
Toby Hecht: Perfect.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: In the apartment. And they're having this conversation. You take it over, you know, maybe 20 years in Chicago, but like this concentration of deep intellect and personality is absolutely a story that I think has to that you describe, like very few writers in the 20th century can travel, by the way, between us because you're a little bit older than me, but watch this. How many people in this room have read The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom? Raise your hand, please. All the way up. All the way. See, now, five out of 30, 20 years ago, you would assume the number would be much higher, right? Yeah, 20 years ago, if I would have asked that question in this room, everybody would have picked up their hand. You didn't go to college and not read as one of your first ten books, The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom. So when we talk about Allan Bloom and, you know. It's like talking about the Civil War, right?
Steven Smith: That's true. You know, the good thing he will, even if he never read The Closing of the American Mind, it's. And, you know,
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: You should know that it exists.
Steven Smith: You should know that it exists. But the other thing is, you can you can go to YouTube and you can find many lectures by Allan- he's a character. Just go go to check his Allan Bloom YouTube. Just you'd be interested in it. You know, you'll get a sense of the character he was.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Yeah, but I'm saying that because I think today we're 20, you know, the generation has turned and album is probably today. He was always controversial and I don't think we knew he was gay until much later. Is that correct? During this time, did people did?
Steven Smith: It's a hard question, but that was like.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: One of the big controversies. He turned out to have been gay. It just made a lot of sense.
Steven Smith: Nobody ever said there was. Nobody cared. You know, he lived. I mean, he lived with another man, you know, but.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: The but the the notion.
Steven Smith: What did you think? It never came up. It wasn't part of his teaching. He never. It was never mentioned. It was just, you know, something he did. It was something he was. But nobody ever cared.
Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I think this book absolutely has to go to it.
Steven Smith: The other thing you could read, Bellow's Ravelstein, which is not his best book by any means, but it does give, especially if you read the first 50 pages. It does give a very vivid and I think in many very accurate depiction of Allan Bloom. A lot of his students didn't like it because they I think because it was actually too accurate, but it really gave a good character characterization of him.