Festival of the Creative Arts

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This is a moment of inquiry for the whole world: a moment when civilization looks at itself appraisingly, seeking a key to the future. In this spirit we shall examine the creative arts during our four-day Festival—examine them by performance, by asking questions, by the answers we receive. We cannot pretend to wisdom; but through performance we can provoke thought and free discussion; through discussing we can learn; and through learning we can rediscover our culture and ourselves. – Leonard Bernstein

The Festival of the Arts made its first mark on the Brandeis University campus in June 1952, in conjunction with the university’s first graduation. With over 3,000 attendees, the newly built Ullman Amphitheater was filled to capacity as musicians, artists, dancers, and actors presented their debut performances. President Sachar opened the ceremonies with an address to the university, describing the events that would take place as a reflection of the quality of university achievements. According to Sachar, the Festival of the Arts was meant to be “stimulating and provocative as well as aesthetic and exciting.” The four-day event not only excited those involved with the university, but became well-known nationwide.

Led by Leonard Bernstein, a prominent composer and professor of music, the festival included works in jazz, poetry, opera, theater, and film. The festival kicked off on June 12, 1952, with an opening event entitled “An inquiry into the present status of the creative arts.” This conversation concerning the nature of the arts was moderated by Leonard Bernstein himself. Bernstein, for whom the festival was later named, also directed the world premiere of his opera Trouble in Tahiti on the first night of the festival. This domestic tragi-comedy was performed in seven scenes, depicting a couple living in suburbia trying to overcome the challenges of unhappiness. The show was later performed on air for N.B.C. Television Opera Theatre.

The first Festival of the Arts also included the premiere of Marc Blitzstein’s translated adaptation of The Threepenny Opera, which later opened off Broadway in March 1954. The opera was praised for both its accuracy in transforming the original German opera and its fantastic composition. Other performances included Symphonie Pour Un Homme Seul by Pierre Schaeffer, with the choreography of Merce Cunningham, and Les Noces, a choral ballet by Igor Stravinsky. Jazz concerts presented various trends in bop and Dixieland jazz, including a performance by Miles Davis. Poets Karl Shapiro, Ludwig Lewisohn, Peter Viereck, and William Carlos Williams also engaged audiences by reading their personal pieces. Throughout the festival, stimulating moderated discussions took place to explore all areas of the art displayed.

The first Festival of the Arts at Brandeis was not only praised at the university, but also had critics and journalists commenting across the country. According to the New York Times Magazine, the best part of the festival was that “the arts were represented as they must always be—in their living state.” The article ended by stating, “There was, in sum, a sense of the ferment of ideas, and that is what Brandeis University hopes its annual festival of the creative arts will come to express to the world.” In another article, John W. M. Riley writes,

Such an event as this Brandeis festival of the Creative Arts, presented in the fourth year of the university’s existence, strikingly shows the vitality, awareness and creative energy which pervade the atmosphere at Brandeis.

In 2012, the Festival of the Creative Arts celebrated its 60th anniversary with performances by esteemed faculty members and students, exhibits at the Rose Art Museum, gallery openings, and community activities. More information about the Festival of the Arts can be found in the Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections at Brandeis University, including original speeches, reviews, pamphlets, and photographs.


Many thanks to Brandeis University student Debra Friedman for writing this summary.

Milton Hindus Meets the Monstrous Giant Céline

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Milton Hindus was born in 1916 in New York, New York and studied at City College (CUNY), Columbia University and the University of Chicago. Hindus taught at Hunter College (CUNY), the New School for Social Research and the University of Chicago before joining the Brandeis faculty in 1948. One of the original 13 faculty members, he remained an active part of the Brandeis community until his death in 1998. Hindus studied literatures in a range of languages, including (but not limited to) English, Yiddish and French. In 1959 he received the Walt Whitman Prize for a collection he edited entitled Walt Whitman: 100 Years Later. In addition to works on Marcel Proust, Charles Reznikoff and F. Scott Fitzgerald, he published a volume of his own poetry entitled The Broken Music Box (Menard Press, 1980). The Milton Hindus papers at the Brandeis University Archives contain a wide range of materials written by and relating to Hindus, ranging from an unpublished memoir to volumes of correspondence with literary greats including William Carlos Williams, E.E. Cummings and Upton Sinclair.



Of particular interest is Hindus’ complex relationship with the French modernist novelist Louis Ferdinand Céline. Hindus worked to popularize French literature in the United States, and became fascinated by Céline (born Louis Ferdinand Destouches), writing a preface to his classic novel Death on the Installment Plan when it was first published in the United States. Céline was a controversial literary talent whose style was marked by short, declarative sentences, near-constant use of slang and profanity, and ubiquitous exclamation points. The world described and satirized in his novels was full of filth, cruelty and folly, a fact that likely had something to do with Celine’s service in the First World War during which he was severely wounded. Just before the Second World War, Céline penned the first of three virulently anti-Semitic pamphlets, the last of which was published in 1941 during the German occupation of France. He also served as a physician to members of the leadership of the collaborationist Vichy regime, and was labeled a collaborator by the de Gaulle’s French government. Céline responded to this allegation by fleeing into exile in Denmark.

Hindus, who was proud of his Jewish heritage, had difficulty believing that his literary idol was an anti-Semite. He met with Céline in Denmark in 1948, and their harrowing series of meetings became the basis for Hindus’ 1950 book The Crippled Giant. Hindus’ papers include a large volume of materials relating to the writing and critical reception of The Crippled Giant, including a great deal of unpublished correspondence with and about Céline. The collection includes a petition supported by Hindus that argued for Céline’s innocence of the charge of collaboration, as well as Hindus’ correspondence with both French foreign office and U.S. State Department officials in defense of Céline. It also includes handwritten notes from the early stages of the writing of The Crippled Giant that show Hindus’ thought process in great detail. To see the finding aid for the Milton Hindus Collection, click the following link: Milton Hindus Papers



Photos of Milton Hindus are from the collections of the Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections, Brandeis University.

Description by Drew Flanagan, Ph.D student in history

The Brandeis Course Catalog: A Hidden Gem

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Anyone interested in the history of Brandeis University will be pleased to learn that all undergraduate and graduate course catalogs are now available in digital format via the Internet Archive. Known as the Brandeis University Bulletin, the university course catalog (undergraduate 1948-present; graduate 1953-present) is a surprisingly rich resource that offers far more than course descriptions. Particularly in the early years of the school’s founding, course catalogs served as promotional publications that sought to attract students and donors to the young university. Featured within their pages were photographs of campus structures (many now long gone), artists’ renderings of proposed buildings that never came to be, campus maps, and university master plans with full foldouts. Other photographs documented campus life and culture and helped to capture the prevailing zeitgeist. Students can be seen studying by the old wishing well, playing folk music in the Castle Commons, cheering at a football game, or dancing at a social. For those unaware that Brandeis once had a grape arbor and a terrarium (Brown Terrarium), that students once skated on Kane Reflecting Pool in Hamilton Quad (now Massell Quad), that General Education S was a required course for all students and featured guest speakers such as Robert Frost, Alfred Kinsey, and Margaret Mead, or that the original student center (Mailman) once stood where the new Shapiro Admissions Center currently resides, the course catalogs will confirm these and other noteworthy facts about the university’s past.

Click on the following links to view all Brandeis course catalogs (by academic year) on the Internet Archive’s website:
Undergraduate Catalogs
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Catalogs

description by Karen Adler Abramson, Associate Director for University Archives & Special Collections

Camelot Comes to Brandeis

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Fifty years ago, on January 2, 1960, John F. Kennedy announced his historic candidacy for the U.S. presidency. Later the same day, Senator Kennedy traveled from Washington, D.C. to Waltham, Massachusetts to appear on an innovative public television series hosted by Eleanor Roosevelt on the Brandeis campus. Produced by National Educational Television—forerunner of PBS—and filmed primarily at the Slosberg Music Center, “Prospects of Mankind” (1959-1962) provided a forum for prominent leaders and decision makers to discuss and debate important domestic and international affairs. Adopting a colloquium-style format, the monthly series included guests such as Ralph Bunche, John Kenneth Galbraith, Henry Kissinger, Edward R. Murrow, Bertrand Russell, and Adlai Stevenson. As a former delegate to the United Nations General Assembly who taught international relations at Brandeis in her last years, Eleanor Roosevelt was well suited to the role of program host. Kennedy’s visit to Brandeis in January 1960 was not his first; two years before he had participated in a convocation celebrating the establishment of the university’s landmark Wien International Scholarship Program. During his appearance on “Prospects of Mankind,” Kennedy, a member of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, was joined by Erwin D. Canham, Editor of The Christian Science Monitor and President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, Professor of Economics at M.I.T.’s Center for International Studies. The discussion focused on international trade, NATO, and the prospects for a joint European-American aid program to underdeveloped areas of the world. Following the program, Kennedy and Mrs. Roosevelt held a press conference addressing the Senator’s newsworthy announcement earlier that day. When asked for her views on Kennedy’s entry into the presidential race, Mrs. Roosevelt declined to comment, indicating that she would not be “for or against any candidate until after the convention.” Eventually, Mrs. Roosevelt became an ardent supporter of Kennedy and joined his administration as chair of the newly-created Commission on the Status of Women. Kennedy returned to “Prospects of Mankind” two more times after assuming the U.S. presidency: first to discuss the new Peace Corps (1961), and finally to address the status of women (1962). For information on how to access recordings of John F. Kennedy on "Prospects of Mankind," please contact ascdepartment@brandeis.edu or 781.736.4686. To view a list of all episodes available in the Archives & Special Collections Department, click on the following link: http://tinyurl.com/ygrcezh. description by Karen Adler Abramson, Associate Director for University Archives & Special Collections

The Brandeis Seal

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The University Archives receives many questions about the Brandeis University seal, which has undergone several revisions over the course of the school's sixty-plus year history.

In 1948, the Brandeis University Bulletin (course catalog) showed a simple circular seal with the words "Brandeis University" surrounding two Tablets of the Law; the tablets were inscribed with the first ten letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

The university's first president, Abram Sachar, transformed the seal into a more secular symbol designed by Kenneth Conant, a professor of medieval history at Harvard University and an expert on heraldry. Conant created a shield containing an image of three mounds of ice with three licks of fire rising from them—representing a literal translation from the Yiddish: Brand (Fire) and Eis (Ice). The number three was a reference to the city of Boston, which was built on a trimount, and could be seen from the Brandeis campus. President Sachar decided to surround the shield with a quote from Psalm 51: "Truth Even Unto Its Innermost Parts."

The second seal was delineated by a simple line but in 1950 an ornate Baroque framing appeared and the Hebrew word "EMET" (Truth) was newly inscribed on the trimount. This design continued until c.1983, when the current blue and white seal of a shield within a circle was introduced. A committee was then formed to evaluate the new unofficial seal; though committee members recommended that the heraldic shield be replaced by a book, the shield remains to this day.



description by Maggie A. McNeely, Assistant Archivist

Charlie Who?

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In January of 1950, a group of male Brandeis students living in the former Smith Hall—a converted military barracks—came up with the idea of organizing a variety show, something akin to a "semi-satirical, semi-entertaining all-male revue." The group, known as Hi Charlie, was founded that spring and held its first production on May 13, 1950. Called simply, "Hi Charlie: A Musical Revue," the program was directed by Jay Aronson, ’52 and held in Nathan Seifer Hall, an auditorium in Ford Hall. Included were a series of dance numbers and satirical skits with names such as "Administration Tsooris," "A Nite at the Arena," and "Quiet, Please." The inaugural production was a resounding success and inspired a new annual tradition at Brandeis.

In its second year, "Hi Charlie" moved from the "curtainless and almost stageless" Seifer Hall to Hovey Hall in Waltham. For one memorable ditty, the all-male cast dressed in drag and danced the can-can (as seen here), a performance that, according to The Justice, included "several well-placed 'bumps' and 'grinds.'"

In recognizing the limits of an all-male revue, Hi Charlie became co-ed in its third season and transformed into a full-scale musical comedy troupe with productions written, directed, acted, and staffed by Brandeis students. Performances returned to the campus in 1954 and were held at the outdoor Ullman Amphitheater. Three years later, the Hi Charlie Alumni Association was founded with the goal of perpetuating and expanding the ideals of the organization. By the time Hi Charlie folded after the 1969/70 school year, the association had a full technical staff including a producer, assistant producer, technical director and musical director.

description by Karen Adler Abramson, Associate Director for University Archives & Special Collections

Ralph Norman: A Gifted Presence

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Before Brandeis officially opened in the fall of 1948, a portrait photographer with a studio on Newbury Street was hired, on a contractual basis, to document the emerging university. In 1950 Ralph Norman became Brandeis’s first university photographer and was well on his way to becoming one of the most beloved members of the Brandeis community. Over the course of thirty-three years, Norman photographed the growth and development of the university, creating a visual trove that has become indispensable to the work of the University Archives.

Norman was originally from Roxbury, Massachusetts and dropped out of school at the age of fourteen to help support his mother and sisters. He was an accomplished boxer and bowler, the latter ability transforming his career path from grocery worker to celebrated photographer; in 1928 Norman won a bet on a bowling game and in the process acquired his first camera equipment, along with photography lessons. Soon thereafter he created a darkroom and enlarger in his bathroom and would later teach his wife to print as they embarked on the wedding photography business.

When Ralph Norman began to photograph Brandeis, there were approximately 107 students and thirteen teachers on campus, which made for a very close-knit community. Norman’s giving and loving yet no-nonsense character quickly made him the go-to person for anything from car rides to campus, to personal advice, to financial loans. He sponsored and participated in many types of events, parties, and picnics on campus. In 1950 he decided to throw a barbecue for the first graduating class (Class of 1952) and it was so popular that it grew to become an annual event attracting hundreds. Brandesians still enjoy the annual Ralph Norman Emeritus Barbeque.

Norman was very fond of his several dogs and they became welcome fixtures on campus. The name chosen for the popular campus coffeehouse located in the Castle—the same coffeehouse that inspired alumni creators of the TV series, Friends—was inspired by Norman’s beloved dog, Cholmondeley.

In 1977 Brandeis awarded Norman with an honorary Master of Arts degree. The citation noted: “Behind the shutter, your enchanting patter and spontaneous smile have made you a campus treasure.” In 1981, the year of his retirement, a student loan fund was established in his name. Three decades of Norman’s photography became the basis for the university’s striking fortieth-anniversary publication, From the Beginning: A Picture History of the First Four Decades of Brandeis University (1988).

In 1983 at the age of 69, Ralph Norman became blind due to an eye disease. However, this disability did not stop him from teaching photography and becoming president of a camera club at his retirement residence in Florida. He died on July 8, 1995, by all accounts still a kind and wonderful man who considered himself to be very lucky.

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Sources: University Photography Collection finding aid; Ralph Norman Memorial Service program, 1995, University Photography Collection; Miami Herald, 1986. All images from the University Photography Collection, Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections Department. description by Maggie A. McNeely, Assistant Archivist