The North American premiere of Nahum Glatzer and the German-Jewish Tradition, a film on the former Brandeis Near Eastern and Judaic Studies professor, was held in the Mandel Center for the Humanities on Wednesday night. The filmmaker, Judith Glatzer Wechsler '62, and Prof. Jonathan Sarna (NEJS) held a discussion with the audience after the screening.

Wechsler, Glatzer's daughter and a scholar in her own right, said before the screening that her motivation for creating a documentary on her father could be encapsulated by a saying of the German philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: "What you have inherited from your fathers, you must acquire in order to possess it."

Glatzer was born in 1903 and was a professor of Jewish history and philosophy at Brandeis from 1951 to 1973, according to the film. His mentors included the Jewish philosophers Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. Glatzer was additionally editor in chief of Schocken Books, where he edited and published Franz Kafka's novels in English.

"Professor Glatzer really taught everything, from the Bible to the 20th century," Sarna said. "And it is really quite extraordinary, in an age of specialization, to remember that we had a Nahum Glatzer who really embraced the all and published in so many different areas."

Sarna discussed how Glatzer's research methods "very much reflected some of the Wissenschaft [scientific] ideas of what made the Science of Judaism, as they called it, a science that academics study." Sarna added that those research methods have become unpopular in contemporary academia: "Some of the German ideas of objectivity, of the objectivity of the scholar, are today seen by younger scholars as perhaps illusory."

The film details Glatzer's childhood in Lemberg and Bodenbach, Germany, and his upbringing in a progressive Orthodox family that allowed him to read the works of Heinrich Heine as a child. Wechsler includes images of Glatzer's childhood homes and the gymnasium at which he studied in Bodenbach, which she visited in order to get a feeling for his everyday life as a child. "It was very important for me to be physically present," she said.

Wechsler stated that the film originally focused exclusively on Glatzer's intellectual and spiritual life but, at the urging of her daughter, she added material on his personal life, including an anecdote on how Glatzer and his wife exchanged letters "almost every day that they were apart." Glatzer and his wife met when she was only 16.

Sarna recounted how Glatzer brought Sarna's father, Prof. Nahum Sarna (NEJS), to Brandeis in 1965, creating an "island of German scholarship" where the professors always wore suits and formally greeted each other by their titles.

Sarna stated that students, when asked what courses they were taking, instead of saying a course on Job, would say, "I am taking Glatzer" because he was so renowned.

Arthur Green '61, a professor at Hebrew College in Newton, Mass. reminisced about taking Glatzer's course on Isaiah during his freshman year here and called Brandeis during Glatzer's era "a hub of that transmission of German-Jewish intellectual creativity to a generation of us American kids, American Jewish kids, who were hungry for it."

"My father was a man of great reserve," Wechsler said. "He might be embarrassed of so much attention paid to him."