Books by "David G. Dalin"
4 books found
The surprising two-hundred-year history of diversity in education, commerce, and science from the scholar the New Yorker dubbed America's "diversity detective" As a war on diversity upends government, corporate, and education policies, the history of the idea of diversity has never been more important. In this contrarian book, David B. Oppenheimer, a diversity skeptic turned admirer, chronicles how diversity became a foundational value of higher education over the last two hundred years, how it evolved as it was adopted in commerce and science, and the implications of the current backlash. The diversity principle--the idea that people with different backgrounds, experiences, identities, and viewpoints produce better work by engaging with one another--was a core tenet of the first modern research university, founded in Germany in 1810. It was the inspiration for John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, a touchstone of academic freedom; a hallmark of Charles Eliot's remaking of Harvard in the late nineteenth century to promote the "clash of ideas"; and a foundation of the twentieth century efforts toward equality of Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Pauli Murray. In telling the story of the diversity principle through the experiences of these and other remarkable thinkers, Oppenheimer argues for affirming diversity as a central value of education and an essential ingredient for a robust intellectual and political culture.
Guardian of the Wall examines Leo Pfeffer's church-state thought and its influence on the U.S. Supreme Court. The book argues that Pfeffer’s understanding of the First Amendment’s religion clauses, shaped as it was by his historical and religious context, led him to advocate a separationist historical narrative and absolutist application of the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses. Pfeffer’s jurisprudence was pivotal in shaping the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of the First Amendment throughout the last half of the twentieth century. Guardian of the Wall challenges the popular contention that Pfeffer’s separationist philosophy was hostile to religion and sought to remove religion from the public square. Instead, it illustrates how Pfeffer believed a broad reading of both religion clauses protected religious freedom, secured religious equality, and fostered authentic participation of religion in public life. The book concludes by analyzing the Court’s shift away from the strict separation of church and state during the past thirty years and contends that the Court should reconsider Pfeffer’s approach to the First Amendment’s religion clauses.
The first comprehensive history of how Jews became citizens in the modern world For all their unquestionable importance, the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel now loom so large in modern Jewish history that we have mostly lost sight of the fact that they are only part of—and indeed reactions to—the central event of that history: emancipation. In this book, David Sorkin seeks to reorient Jewish history by offering the first comprehensive account in any language of the process by which Jews became citizens with civil and political rights in the modern world. Ranging from the mid-sixteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first, Jewish Emancipation tells the ongoing story of how Jews have gained, kept, lost, and recovered rights in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, the United States, and Israel. Emancipation, Sorkin shows, was not a one-time or linear event that began with the Enlightenment or French Revolution and culminated with Jews' acquisition of rights in Central Europe in 1867–71 or Russia in 1917. Rather, emancipation was and is a complex, multidirectional, and ambiguous process characterized by deflections and reversals, defeats and successes, triumphs and tragedies. For example, American Jews mobilized twice for emancipation: in the nineteenth century for political rights, and in the twentieth for lost civil rights. Similarly, Israel itself has struggled from the start to institute equality among its heterogeneous citizens. By telling the story of this foundational but neglected event, Jewish Emancipation reveals the lost contours of Jewish history over the past half millennium.
Drawing upon Jewish categories of thought, this book suggests a way of thinking that might help prevent genocide.