March 27, 2026
Paul Buhle
A Blacklist Education is a charming book, wonderfully personal at points, and a frightening one as well. Jane S. Smith did not understand the persecution of her father for reasons familiar to anyone who has studied forms of modern repression. The children of blacklisted screenwriters—a large concern of my own work—rarely knew more than the outline of their parents’ suffering and anxieties, and for good reasons. They were not to talk to their childhood friends and classmates about their own parents’ situations. They were offered mainly small but urgent bits of advice: do not answer to strangers, but if the door is open or people ask on the streets, offer no information about parents or any family members. Also: be aware of the cars parked near the family residence, with one or two men watching, not moving.
Smith was four in 1952, growing up Jewish in New York City. Her father, Saul Schur, a public school teacher, was about to be demoted, if not fired. Education had been central to his life in every sense. He was in Brooklyn, but, like so many, he spent his childhood in the Bronx (a move both uptown and upscale, an irony by later perspectives). A younger brother, more taciturn and studious than his elder sibling, he got through Morris High School to City College, enrolling at an audacious sixteen in 1927. Two years later, the United States entered the Depression.
After years of substitute teaching, Saul joined the Teachers Union and there, from a later government viewpoint, his sin could be found. The union had leaders and activists in the Communist Party—not so strange in 1938, at a time when the Party boasted up to 38,000 members in New York State alone, a high proportion of them Jews of Saul’s generation. It was also an antifascist moment and a New Deal moment, when the struggle of Jews to escape scapegoating and discrimination had everything in common with being on the left.
Saul’s problems began long before the 1950s. The chancellor of Brooklyn College set off a classroom rebellion by inviting a leading official of fascist Italy to speak at the school in the mid-1930s. Smith’s father, who taught at the Samuel Gompers Vocational High School for Boys, had a run in with his school’s dean of discipline, an unabashed supporter of Father Charles Coughlin and the Nazi organization, the German American Bund. Eventually, no surprise, the names of teachers who complained against his misleadership were placed in the state’s files of potential subversives, soon to be known through the Rapp-Coudert Committee’s hearings. Secret interviews, uncorroborated complaints against “subversives,” and much more was, as Smith says, a blueprint for McCarthyism—that is, with an ethnic angle, including the broad suggestion of Jews as untrustworthy, potential disloyalists.
The hammer came down in 1949. The Board of Education went after the Teachers Union. Smith does not say so but an old quarrel between the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and Congress of Industrial Organizations over teacher unionism placed philosopher John Dewey from the late 1930s onward firmly on the side of the AFL conservatives who were eager to rid the classroom, and unionism at large, of suspected Communists.
The Greater New York baby boom, meanwhile, commanded the creation of new schools and everything connected to them. In Cold War America, this meant mandatory Americanism, defined in anti-Communist terms, and, for many, a less official but no less menacing assimilationism, aimed not only at Jews. “Foreignness,” including the use of Yiddish, Spanish, or other non-English languages, was deemed out of place.
A small and painful irony: Saul is seen photographed next to Manhattan Borough President Robert F. Wagner Jr., with his wife Sylvia on the other side. The school district had triumphed with a new building, but the superintendent who sent a congratulatory telegram had, a month earlier, ordered an investigation of subversives, commanding Saul’s appearance in an ongoing anti-Communist probe.
Smith follows every archival lead assiduously, and learns to no surprise that actual Communist activity played no role in subsequent investigations and firings. “Membership” in any of dozens of organizations was deemed sufficient. A fulsome photograph of the New York superintendent of schools, leader of a million students and thousands of teachers, shows a man pensive but determined. He was certain in his belief that all teachers tainted by left-wing connections were active agents of the Soviet Union.
Sidney Hook, a left-wing philosopher of the 1930s, turned sharply rightward and argued in a famous pamphlet (Heresy Yes, Conspiracy No!) that no teacher with a Communist taint should be permitted to teach in any U.S. school, public or private. Leading liberals such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. “exposed” the Communist subversion of Hollywood (by writing scripts for liberal films) and promoted their expulsion: they were disloyal. The blacklisting of film writers, editors, musicians, technicians, and actors added to the enthusiasm for an all-out purge across U.S. society. A student strike at Brooklyn Tech in the early 1950s spread to other schools, foreshadowing the activist 1960s. At the time, it threw more blame upon suspect teachers.
The crusade against “Reds in the Schools” went on for years. Saul’s earlier commendation as “teacher of the year” did him no good. The defection of Bella Dodd, a former leader of the Teachers’ Union, to the Catholic Church and Bishop Fulton Sheen made headlines—and made matters worse. The fix was in, by one means or another. Yet, there were strange details. Town and Village, a neighborhood newspaper for Stuyvesant Village, featured a fine sketch of the living room of the family home in 1953, their home: a triumph of the postwar American life! Two days after the appearance of the newspaper, Saul’s name appeared on “a list,” and before the end of the academic term, he had quit, sparing the family a public trial.
The family more than survived. Smith’s mother got a job as food editor at Life magazine, while Saul became a consultant on consumer information to Seventeen and Good Housekeeping. They made a life in New Rochelle, New York. A cultural critic later quipped, mordantly borrowing a phrase from Theodore Adorno, that if poetry could not exist after Auschwitz, there could at least be New Rochelle, standing for a comfortable middle class Jewish life—and there was, though with troubled memories.
Smith wonders now, she says, whether her father had ever actually been a Communist Party member? A question without an answer, for the children of tens of thousands who went underground in their own ways, or surfaced as people who they had, in part, created in order to survive. Very often, especially but not only in Hollywood, they had joined the Communist Party during wartime, when the “Communist Political Association” seemed to be a natural part of the American landscape. Others had never paid dues at all as members of the left fraternal associations, which were consistently three or four times as large as the Communist Party itself. Still others were simply members of Party-led unions, numbering in the hundreds of thousands until the Red Scare.
Operation Mind, a short work of several essays, emerged at the beginning of this past year, just before the Trump administration entered office, anticipating correctly some kind of witch-hunt revival at the University of Michigan. The book was created around a historic document, a 1952 pamphlet by two graduate students at Michigan, Natalie Zemon Davis and Elizabeth Douvan. A brief introduction notes that reminders have never been absent from campus since: the university library is named after the administration who suspended the four students—including Chandler Davis, husband of Natalie Zemon Davis—who declined to testify on their own activities or nonactivities.
The document in question, from 1952, is more than lucid. It reminds readers that the hearings on “Un-Americanism” that began in 1948, directed against a local of the United Auto Workers, commenced over the decades in different forms with the same content. I am most amused with the House Un-American Activities Committee’s attack on Hollywood films, reading class resentment into the dialogue of a film that few remember now, None But the Lonely Heart, said to be the only film script of his work that satisfied its author, Clifford Odets. The pamphlet closes with the hearings then impending in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
In Alan Wald’s chapter, “The Instruction of History,” the renowned scholar of the literary left goes over recent cases of classes canceled and the teachers fired (the list has expanded wildly since the book’s publication), taking special note of how “anti-Zionism,” a criticism of the Israeli state’s systemic apartheid and ongoing genocide of Palestinians, has been lumped with “antisemitism,” quite another kettle of gefilte fish. As Wald says, “Informed individuals know that anti-Zionism means criticizing a political ideology and state, not a people or a religion,” and yet the new lexicon of the right “would make George Orwell blush” (93). Let us quickly put aside Orwell’s own nefarious role in the British Red Scare near the end of his life. Surely, he knew better.
Wald warns, above all, against the “Mad Surrender Disease,” in which college administrators rush to gratify the new blacklisters, all too eager to drop programs and departments, fire untenured teachers, and pledge 1,000% loyalty to the Donald Trump administration’s notion of Americanism (100). In the epilogue, Rebekah Modrak wraps up the booklet with an appeal for action: “Find friends and colleagues to collaborate. Distribute ideas deemed dangerous by those in power” (113).
The epilogue is dated January 2025. What has happened since then? Not everything is bad—the success of the Zohran Mamdani campaign for mayor of New York City proves that—but the bowing of campus administrators to Trumpian demands has been met haphazardly, largely after the fact, and only in a minority of cases with anything resembling courage. We are grateful for what little spunk we see, of course. We can hope to see a lot more.
Paul Buhle
Jane S. Smith, A
Blacklist Education: American History, a Family Mystery, and a Teacher Under
Fire (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2025), 224 pages,
$26.95, hardcover.
Natalie Zemon
Davis and Elizabeth Douvan, Operation Mind: A Brief Documentary Account of the
House Committee on Un-American Activities. And Why It Matters Now (Ann Arbor,
Michigan: Disobedience Press/University of Michigan Press, 2025), 118 pages,
$15, paperback.
Repression on campus is back in a
big way, as readers far beyond the classroom know today. The saga of the Cold
War years, once seemingly distant, now has lessons that we ignore to our peril.
A Blacklist Education is a charming book, wonderfully personal at points, and a frightening one as well. Jane S. Smith did not understand the persecution of her father for reasons familiar to anyone who has studied forms of modern repression. The children of blacklisted screenwriters—a large concern of my own work—rarely knew more than the outline of their parents’ suffering and anxieties, and for good reasons. They were not to talk to their childhood friends and classmates about their own parents’ situations. They were offered mainly small but urgent bits of advice: do not answer to strangers, but if the door is open or people ask on the streets, offer no information about parents or any family members. Also: be aware of the cars parked near the family residence, with one or two men watching, not moving.
Smith was four in 1952, growing up Jewish in New York City. Her father, Saul Schur, a public school teacher, was about to be demoted, if not fired. Education had been central to his life in every sense. He was in Brooklyn, but, like so many, he spent his childhood in the Bronx (a move both uptown and upscale, an irony by later perspectives). A younger brother, more taciturn and studious than his elder sibling, he got through Morris High School to City College, enrolling at an audacious sixteen in 1927. Two years later, the United States entered the Depression.
After years of substitute teaching, Saul joined the Teachers Union and there, from a later government viewpoint, his sin could be found. The union had leaders and activists in the Communist Party—not so strange in 1938, at a time when the Party boasted up to 38,000 members in New York State alone, a high proportion of them Jews of Saul’s generation. It was also an antifascist moment and a New Deal moment, when the struggle of Jews to escape scapegoating and discrimination had everything in common with being on the left.
Saul’s problems began long before the 1950s. The chancellor of Brooklyn College set off a classroom rebellion by inviting a leading official of fascist Italy to speak at the school in the mid-1930s. Smith’s father, who taught at the Samuel Gompers Vocational High School for Boys, had a run in with his school’s dean of discipline, an unabashed supporter of Father Charles Coughlin and the Nazi organization, the German American Bund. Eventually, no surprise, the names of teachers who complained against his misleadership were placed in the state’s files of potential subversives, soon to be known through the Rapp-Coudert Committee’s hearings. Secret interviews, uncorroborated complaints against “subversives,” and much more was, as Smith says, a blueprint for McCarthyism—that is, with an ethnic angle, including the broad suggestion of Jews as untrustworthy, potential disloyalists.
The hammer came down in 1949. The Board of Education went after the Teachers Union. Smith does not say so but an old quarrel between the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and Congress of Industrial Organizations over teacher unionism placed philosopher John Dewey from the late 1930s onward firmly on the side of the AFL conservatives who were eager to rid the classroom, and unionism at large, of suspected Communists.
The Greater New York baby boom, meanwhile, commanded the creation of new schools and everything connected to them. In Cold War America, this meant mandatory Americanism, defined in anti-Communist terms, and, for many, a less official but no less menacing assimilationism, aimed not only at Jews. “Foreignness,” including the use of Yiddish, Spanish, or other non-English languages, was deemed out of place.
A small and painful irony: Saul is seen photographed next to Manhattan Borough President Robert F. Wagner Jr., with his wife Sylvia on the other side. The school district had triumphed with a new building, but the superintendent who sent a congratulatory telegram had, a month earlier, ordered an investigation of subversives, commanding Saul’s appearance in an ongoing anti-Communist probe.
Smith follows every archival lead assiduously, and learns to no surprise that actual Communist activity played no role in subsequent investigations and firings. “Membership” in any of dozens of organizations was deemed sufficient. A fulsome photograph of the New York superintendent of schools, leader of a million students and thousands of teachers, shows a man pensive but determined. He was certain in his belief that all teachers tainted by left-wing connections were active agents of the Soviet Union.
Sidney Hook, a left-wing philosopher of the 1930s, turned sharply rightward and argued in a famous pamphlet (Heresy Yes, Conspiracy No!) that no teacher with a Communist taint should be permitted to teach in any U.S. school, public or private. Leading liberals such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. “exposed” the Communist subversion of Hollywood (by writing scripts for liberal films) and promoted their expulsion: they were disloyal. The blacklisting of film writers, editors, musicians, technicians, and actors added to the enthusiasm for an all-out purge across U.S. society. A student strike at Brooklyn Tech in the early 1950s spread to other schools, foreshadowing the activist 1960s. At the time, it threw more blame upon suspect teachers.
The crusade against “Reds in the Schools” went on for years. Saul’s earlier commendation as “teacher of the year” did him no good. The defection of Bella Dodd, a former leader of the Teachers’ Union, to the Catholic Church and Bishop Fulton Sheen made headlines—and made matters worse. The fix was in, by one means or another. Yet, there were strange details. Town and Village, a neighborhood newspaper for Stuyvesant Village, featured a fine sketch of the living room of the family home in 1953, their home: a triumph of the postwar American life! Two days after the appearance of the newspaper, Saul’s name appeared on “a list,” and before the end of the academic term, he had quit, sparing the family a public trial.
The family more than survived. Smith’s mother got a job as food editor at Life magazine, while Saul became a consultant on consumer information to Seventeen and Good Housekeeping. They made a life in New Rochelle, New York. A cultural critic later quipped, mordantly borrowing a phrase from Theodore Adorno, that if poetry could not exist after Auschwitz, there could at least be New Rochelle, standing for a comfortable middle class Jewish life—and there was, though with troubled memories.
Smith wonders now, she says, whether her father had ever actually been a Communist Party member? A question without an answer, for the children of tens of thousands who went underground in their own ways, or surfaced as people who they had, in part, created in order to survive. Very often, especially but not only in Hollywood, they had joined the Communist Party during wartime, when the “Communist Political Association” seemed to be a natural part of the American landscape. Others had never paid dues at all as members of the left fraternal associations, which were consistently three or four times as large as the Communist Party itself. Still others were simply members of Party-led unions, numbering in the hundreds of thousands until the Red Scare.
Operation Mind, a short work of several essays, emerged at the beginning of this past year, just before the Trump administration entered office, anticipating correctly some kind of witch-hunt revival at the University of Michigan. The book was created around a historic document, a 1952 pamphlet by two graduate students at Michigan, Natalie Zemon Davis and Elizabeth Douvan. A brief introduction notes that reminders have never been absent from campus since: the university library is named after the administration who suspended the four students—including Chandler Davis, husband of Natalie Zemon Davis—who declined to testify on their own activities or nonactivities.
The document in question, from 1952, is more than lucid. It reminds readers that the hearings on “Un-Americanism” that began in 1948, directed against a local of the United Auto Workers, commenced over the decades in different forms with the same content. I am most amused with the House Un-American Activities Committee’s attack on Hollywood films, reading class resentment into the dialogue of a film that few remember now, None But the Lonely Heart, said to be the only film script of his work that satisfied its author, Clifford Odets. The pamphlet closes with the hearings then impending in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
In Alan Wald’s chapter, “The Instruction of History,” the renowned scholar of the literary left goes over recent cases of classes canceled and the teachers fired (the list has expanded wildly since the book’s publication), taking special note of how “anti-Zionism,” a criticism of the Israeli state’s systemic apartheid and ongoing genocide of Palestinians, has been lumped with “antisemitism,” quite another kettle of gefilte fish. As Wald says, “Informed individuals know that anti-Zionism means criticizing a political ideology and state, not a people or a religion,” and yet the new lexicon of the right “would make George Orwell blush” (93). Let us quickly put aside Orwell’s own nefarious role in the British Red Scare near the end of his life. Surely, he knew better.
Wald warns, above all, against the “Mad Surrender Disease,” in which college administrators rush to gratify the new blacklisters, all too eager to drop programs and departments, fire untenured teachers, and pledge 1,000% loyalty to the Donald Trump administration’s notion of Americanism (100). In the epilogue, Rebekah Modrak wraps up the booklet with an appeal for action: “Find friends and colleagues to collaborate. Distribute ideas deemed dangerous by those in power” (113).
The epilogue is dated January 2025. What has happened since then? Not everything is bad—the success of the Zohran Mamdani campaign for mayor of New York City proves that—but the bowing of campus administrators to Trumpian demands has been met haphazardly, largely after the fact, and only in a minority of cases with anything resembling courage. We are grateful for what little spunk we see, of course. We can hope to see a lot more.
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