Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies Kutler Lecture

Stephen J. Whitfield, Brandeis University. No white intellectual did more to defeat the racism that pervaded the assumptions undergirding American race relations in the twentieth century than Franz Boas (1858-1942). He did so as a public intellectual with authority in social science. Almost certainly no intellectual was more hated by white supremacists than Boas, whose Jewish identity needs to be connected to his record of opposition to hierarchical notions of race.