Remembering More Than a Century of M.H. Abrams


Once an Abrams student, always an Abrams student, it seems, especially for the American Jewish critic Harold Bloom who, Abrams once told “The New York Times,” “continuously claims me as his intellectual father and calls his students my intellectual grandchildren. Harold is strongly Oedipal in his theory…It is a precarious position to be in, I suppose.” Yet more than just a stand-in as a symbolic King Laius in some Sophoclean mishpocheh, Abrams made clear his own moral and ethical priorities and a hard-won sense of what was important in life, which he learned in Long Branch, New Jersey, where he was born in 1912 to a family of Russian Jewish emigrants. There, Abrams spoke Yiddish exclusively until he went to school at age five. From his parents, who were of the generation that experienced anti-Semitic pogroms, Abrams became aware how to conduct himself in violent times of turmoil. So in 1968, during the student revolution, with faculty buildings under threat of fire-bombing, Abrams recalled at Cornell during a public celebration of his hundredth birthday: “It was a terrible time, a terrible time. I went to bed each feeling sick about what was going on, both nationally and internationally, and specifically at Cornell.” Instead of just fretting, Abrams organized an informal small faculty group, which included the great physicist Hans Bethe, a half-Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany, to meet at Abrams’ home in order “to avoid taking sides apart from the essential side, the side of survival of honor and decency… to carry the academic ship through these terrible storms.”
Abrams and Cornell did survive the storms, the better to take another ethical stance at the height of the trendy deconstruction movement in literary criticism, which was seen by its opponents as destroying the very idea of values or meaning in texts. In a 1977 article, Abrams pointed out that if language cannot communicate objectively, this could “open a cultural vacuum that will be filled by power-hungry authoritarians who have no doubts about what they want or scruples about how to get it.” Just over a decade later, Abrams’ article seemed prophetic when a scandal broke out surrounding one of the deconstructionist movement’s leading lights, the Belgian-born critic Paul de Man (1919–1983), who, it was discovered, had written anti-Semitic articles in Nazi-Occupied Europe. When he suggested that the denial of meaning might lead fascists to fill the vacuum, Abrams had not known that de Man published in 1941 his approval of Nazi destruction of “Semitic interference in all aspects of European life.” Yet Abrams, as a wide-eyed observer of his century, knew what was possible. He realized how fortunate he was to find a job at Cornell in 1945, after studies at Harvard, at a time when America’s colleges maintained strict quotas for Jewish students and faculty. He once told the “Chronicle of Higher Education”: “What broke the barriers was the Second World War, both because of Nazi persecution of the Jews, for which many people felt they had to compensate, and because colleges were stripped of their faculties during the war… Colleges had to build faculties in a hurry and couldn’t afford to be prejudiced the way they were used to.”
This change in university policy was directly responsible for Abrams’ subsequent ability to maintain ideals of honor and decency in future decades at Cornell and for a wider public of admiring readers.
Benjamin Ivry is a frequent contributor to the Forward.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a gift today!
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Most Popular
- 1
Opinion The dangerous Nazi legend behind Trump’s ruthless grab for power
- 2
Opinion A Holocaust perpetrator was just celebrated on US soil. I think I know why no one objected.
- 3
Culture Did this Jewish literary titan have the right idea about Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling after all?
- 4
Opinion I first met Netanyahu in 1988. Here’s how he became the most destructive leader in Israel’s history.
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward Trump administration restores student visas, but impact on pro-Palestinian protesters is unclear
-
Fast Forward Deborah Lipstadt says Trump’s campus antisemitism crackdown has ‘gone way too far’
-
Fast Forward 5 Jewish senators accuse Trump of using antisemitism as ‘guise’ to attack universities
-
Fast Forward Jewish Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky reportedly to retire after 26 years in office
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.