ABSTRACT
To celebrate the centenary of Horace Meyer Kallen's birth, a conference was held at the New School that was sponsored by the New School, the American Jewish Congress, and the American Section of the World Jewish Congress. He was the first Jewish professor of a non-Jewish subject in a non-Jewish college or university who was intimately and prominently identified with Jewish interests, Jewish concerns, and Jewish organizations. After graduating from Harvard, Kallen became an instructor in English at Princeton, where he remained for two years. Kallen discovered Zionism and threw himself into Zionist activity. In 1902 Solomon Schechter came to the United States to become head of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and soon after meeting Schechter, young Horace Kallen came to think of him as his "revered friend and teacher". Kallen referred to himself as a humanist, a temporalist, a pragmatist, an instrumentalist, and to his philosophy as Cultural Pluralism, Hebraism, as the Hebraic Idea, as the American Idea.
