ABSTRACT
The initial grant from the American Jewish Committee covered the expenses of the Institute of Social Research’s project on anti-Semitism for the twelve months beginning April 15, 1943. According to plans devised at the last minute in New York by Pollock and Leo Lowenthal of the Institute and representatives of the AJC, the funds were to finance both “political” research under Pollock’s direction in New York, and “psychological” research under Horkheimer’s direction on the West Coast. The news of the unexpected grant caught the West Coast contingent of the Institute by surprise. Newly settled in the bungalow community growing up around Santa Monica, and deeply enmeshed in their co-authorship of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno found themselves forced to interrupt their joint philosophical efforts. In an attempt to partially satisfy the requirements of the AJC grant but also continue their theoretical collaboration, the two men devised a plan to refocus their philosophical endeavors and to explore theoretically the destructive tendencies lying at the root of anti-Semitism. For the AJC’s benefit they labeled their writing project “Psychology of Anti-Semitism” (by the end of the following year, this study was added to Dialectic as its final chapter, under the title “Elements of Anti-Semitism”). 1
