ABSTRACT
The ambivalence of institute members became obvious in the anti-Semitism studies of the Frankfurt School in the 1940s and 1950s, namely, the study of anti-Semitism within American labor and the study of the authoritarian personality, studies that were sponsored by the Jewish Labor Committee and the American Jewish Committee, respectively. Though one of the arguments of the founders in the 1920s to persuade Hermann Weil to endow the institute had been the need to study anti-Semitism in Germany, it was not until 1943 that the institute launched such a study which, oddly enough, was concerned with anti-Semitism in the United States rather than in Germany. This article, published in the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, was the first document to reveal the failure of Critical Theory in the most glaring fashion. An obvious trait of Critical Theory is its Marxist commitment which becomes most evident in the third thesis on bourgeois anti-Semitism and in Horkheimer’s article “The Jews and Europe” of 1939.
