His father, Oszkár Jászi, was a sociologist, historian, and politician who served as Minister of Nationalities in Mihály Károlyi's cabinet during the Hungarian Democratic Republic of 1918–19 before moving to the United States in 1925 to join the faculty of Oberlin College as Professor of Political Science.
Recognized as “one of the most respected critics of German literature in the United States” as well as “one of the most beloved professors of the University,”[3] he developed an original style of teaching that was rigorous yet also accessible to the non-specialist.
Methodologically, he favored what has been termed “an ontological approach”;[4] pedagogically, he incorporated Socratic dialogue and what, for lack of a better word, may be called “lecture.”[5] In all this, he brought to his classes, and was capable of eliciting from his students, an exceptional degree of personal engagement.
Among his former students who have credited his influence are W. Michael Blumenthal,[6] U.S. Secretary of Treasury under President Jimmy Carter (and later, Director of the Jewish Museum, Berlin); and philosopher and Jungian theorist Wolfgang Giegerich.
Alongside his career as Professor of German Literature, Jászi spent much of his adult life working on a massive philosophical project dealing with fundamental questions of being and knowing, especially—but not only—in the area of aesthetics.
These investigations, phenomenological in nature and method, treat such concepts as being, consciousness, time and space, change and motion, identity and difference, subject and object, part and whole.
Emil Staiger, speaking of Jaszi’s book Erkenntnis und Wirklichkeit, called it “one of the most essential contributions to ontology in the entire realm of German research [...] possibly the most significant work in this area since Kant.”[11] Other superlatives, equally impressive, came from the likes of Wilhelm Emrich,[12] Richard Brinkmann,[13] and Erich Heller.