Leon Kass - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Kass was born in Chicago to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. He described his family as "Yiddish speaking, secular, socialist." Although his upbringing was not religious, it was moralist: "Morality, not Judaism, was the religion of our home, morality colored progressively pink with socialism, less on grounds of Marxist theory, more out of zeal for social justice and human dignity." He would not begin to explore his religious heritage until later in his career

Kass enrolled in the University of Chicago at age 15, graduating from the College with a degree in biology in 1958. The College was well known for its extensive core curriculum, and Kass studied the "great books" then prescribed by Chicago's core. "I became a devotee of liberal education . . . with a special fondness for the Greeks." He graduated from the University of Chicago's medical school in 1962 and, following an internship in medicine at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, completed a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Harvard University in 1967, working in the laboratory of Nobel laureate Konrad Bloch.

In 1961, Kass married the former Amy Apfel, a fellow graduate of the College of the University of Chicago. As instructors in the College in later years, they would frequently teach seminars together. Their scholarly collaborations include several articles on marriage and courtship and a reader on the subject. (The Kasses have two married daughters and four granddaughters; they reside in Chicago and Washington.)

Leon and Amy Kass went to Holmes County, Mississippi, in 1965 to do civil rights work. The character of the rural, poor, and uneducated African Americans with whom they lived and worked contrasted with his colleagues at Harvard and other elite universities. It was this experience, he later said, that

caused me to shed my enlightenment faith and ultimately begin a journey in which Jewish thought would ultimately come to play a more prominent part. Why, I wondered then, was there more honor, decency, and dignity among the impoverished and ignorant but church-going black farmers with whom we had lived than among my privileged and educated fellow graduate students at Harvard, whose progressive opinions I shared but whose self-absorption and self-indulgence put me off. If poverty and superstition were the cause of bad character, how to explain this?