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Melvin i. urofsky ’61 Sets the Bar for Studying Brandeis
For Melvin I. urofsky ’61,
’68 GSAS, Louis D. Brandeis
is like the man who
came to dinner — and
never left.
Urofsky, a historian, has devoted
decades to the legal lion
of Louisville who ascended to
the U.S. Supreme Court under
Woodrow Wilson and, after
serving on the high bench for
23 years, left an enduring mark
on jurisprudence and political
thought.
The culmination of a lifetime
of scholarship was Urofsky’s definitive
biography, published by
Pantheon Books in 2009 to critical
acclaim. Louis D. Brandeis: A
Life, a doorstopper at 953 pages,
came on the heels of seven
volumes of Brandeis correspondence
that Urofsky collected,
co-edited and published with
David Levy, a history professor at
the University of Oklahoma.
How long did it take Urofsky
to write the Brandeis biography?
“It took 45 years,” he says,
laughing.
To serious students of the
Supreme Court, Urofsky’s work
is no joke.
“Mel Urofsky is the gold
standard for Brandeis scholars,”
says Jeffrey Rosen, legal affairs
editor of The New Republic and
a law professor at The George
Washington University. Urofsky,
he adds, “has written a Brandeis
biography for our time.”
David Pride, executive direc-
tor of The Supreme Court Hist-
orical Society, which awarded
Urofsky its Distinguished Gris-
wold Prize for the biography in
2010, calls Urofsky “the foremost
Brandeis scholar in the
country.”
All told, the Urofsky oeuvre
encompasses 52 books he either
wrote or edited. His American
Zionism from Herzl to the Holo-
caust, published in 1975, won
the Jewish Book Council’s Morris
J. Kaplun Award in 1976, and
his Brandeis biography won the
University of Louisville Louis D.
Brandeis School of Law’s 2010
Brandeis Medal. Urofsky appears
in a 2007 documentary, Justice
Louis D. Brandeis: The People’s
Attorney, produced to mark the
sesquicentennial of the justice’s
birth, and he has lectured at
venues around the world for the
State Department.
Not bad for a kid from Liberty,
N.Y., a small town in the Catskills
where, Urofsky remembers, he
Melvin I. urofsky ’61 says his definitive biography of former Supreme
Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis is the product of 45 years of work.
PhOTO: JEFF wATTS, COuRTESY OF AMERICAN uNIVERSITY
B y eu G e n e L. me y e r ’64
MAY/JUNE 2011
54
literally knew everyone he encountered
on a stroll down Main
Street.
His family roots, however,
were on the Lower East Side.
Urofsky’s grandfather, a barber,
“summered” in the Catskills,
cutting the hair of resort-goers,
then moved the family to Liberty
and opened his own shop.
Urofsky’s father was a bookkeeper,
killed in a WWII training
incident in Texas; his mother
was a telephone operator.
Urofsky was valedictorian of
his high school class of 75, in
a school that had 12 grades in
one building.
A local Columbia alumnus, Dr.
Harry Golembe ’17, ’19 P&S, encouraged
him to apply, and a full
tuition scholarship sealed the
deal. He lived in Livingston (now
Wallach) Hall, entering as an
engineering student but switching
to history after higher level
calculus and chemistry courses
confounded him. Peter B. Kenen
’54, the great economist, was
Urofsky’s adviser, and Bernard
W. Wishey ’48, ’58 GSAS, Henry
Steele Commager and Walter P.
Metzger ’46 GSAS were among
his teachers. “This was a history
department of stars in those
years,” Urofsky recalls.
It was in Metzger’s 20thcentury
American history class
that “a light bulb went off — I
could do that,” Urofsky says. So
he went to GSAS, with the notion
that he, too, could teach.
He earned a Ph.D. in 1968 in
history.
Urofsky “fell in love” with an
American history course covering
1877–1920 that was taught
by William Leuchtenburg. This
led to a doctoral thesis proposal
on Brandeis’ role in shaping
Wilson’s progressive platform
for a “New Freedom.” But after
spending “a very happy day” immersed
in the Brandeis papers
in Louisville, Urofsky concluded
the documents did not justify a
thesis, which then became his
1969 book, Big Steel and the
Wilson Administration: A Study
in Business-Government Re-
lations.
By then, Urofsky was an
instructor at The Ohio State
University, where he began a
collaboration with a colleague,
Levy, that resulted in the eventual
publication of seven volumes
of Brandeis letters. “We
got a National Endowment for
the Humanities grant in 1967
[followed by several renewals],
went to Louisville together and
Xeroxed papers,” Levy says.
“We brought the papers back
to Columbus and laid them out
on the floor of his house. We
both had the feeling his wife
was chagrined.”
They were right. “Louis and
the papers were very often
under my feet,” says Susan
Urofsky. “They were sorting the
letters into multiple volumes.
There were just mountains of
paper around.”
Five books of edited and
annotated letters were completed
by 1978 and two more
were published in the 1990s,
after the two Brandeis scholars
obtained access to the papers
of Supreme Court Justice Felix
Frankfurter and the letters
Brandeis wrote to his family.
Meanwhile, Urofsky had
carved out a career at Virginia
Commonwealth University, in
Richmond, where he chaired
the history department from
1974–81. His Brandeis work