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Civil Liberties And The 'Imaginative Sustenance' Of Jewish Culture, Susan Bandes

College of Law Faculty

This short essay is included in a symposium issue entitled "People of the Book: Judaism's Influence on American Legal Scholarship." It is a meditation on how my background as a Reform Jew growing up in New York City influenced my work as a constitutional lawyer and my scholarship in the fields of criminal procedure and federal jurisdiction. As Irving Howe observed: "The imaginative sustenance that Yiddish culture and the immigrant experience could give to American Jewish writers rarely depended on their awareness or acknowledgement of its presence. Often it took the form of hidden links of attitude and value." In …