Background
Kallen was born into a rabbinic family from the Silesian town of Berenstadt. When he was five years old, his family emigrated to the United States.
Kallen was born into a rabbinic family from the Silesian town of Berenstadt. When he was five years old, his family emigrated to the United States.
He graduated from Harvard University in 1903.
Kallen taught English at Princeton University (1903-1905) before returning to Harvard for his doctorate in philosophy. In 1908 he began to teach philosophy at Harvard as well as at Clark College, and subsequently spent seven years at the University of Wisconsin on both the philosophy and psychology faculties from 1911 to 1918.
During this time he published William James and Henri Bergson (1914) and The Book of Job as a Greek Tragedy (1918). After World War I. The Structure of Peace and The League of Nations, Today and Tomorrow earned him the status of close associate to Colonel Edward M. House, then adviser to President Woodrow Wilson at the Versailles Peace Conference. At the age of eighty-three he accepted a teaching position at Long Island University.
His activism in Jewish affairs found expression through the American Jewish Congress, the American Association for Jewish Education, and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Dedicated to the preservation of civil liberties and minority rights, Kallen sat on a number of governmental committees and organizations, including the Presidential Commission on Higher Education, the New York City Commission on Intergroup Relations, the International League for the Rights of Man, and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.
Kallen believed that Jews and other ethnic groups should maintain a proud and knowledgable loyalty to their native heritage and in this way uniquely contribute to the rich variety that is American culture, where all differences should be welcomed.
Consistent in his indebtedness to the values of Judaism (as expounded in Judaism at Bay, (1932), and Of Them Which Say They Are Jews (1954), edited by J. Pilch, he argued for over half a century in favor of a Jewish homeland in Eretz Israel (see Zionism and World Politics, 1921, and Utopians at Bay, 1958).