Max Ascoli (June 25, 1898 – January 1, 1978) was a Jewish Italian-American professor of political philosophy and law at the New School for Social Research, United States of America.
After World War II Ascoli brought the widows and the two families along with the mother of the two brothers to the United States where they remained for several years.
[4] He was active in the Mazzini Society, an anti-fascist organization founded in 1939 by Italian intellectuals who had fled fascist Italy.
[5] His work with CADMA (Committee for the Assistance and Distribution of Materials to Artisans), which was headed by theorist and art critic Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, and the House of Italian Handicraft supported the 1950-53 partially US-Government funded exhibition Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today co-curated by Meyric R. Rogers and Charles Nagel, Jr.[6] In 1938, Ascoli teamed up with a noted writer and correspondent Dorothy Thompson.
He was assigned to go to Latin America because the OSS feared that the Axis powers were trying to make inroads in such countries as Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil.
During the course of his career, Ascoli would teach at a number of prominent US institutions: Yale, Columbia, Chicago, North Carolina, and Harvard.
Contributors included: Dean Acheson, James Baldwin, McGeorge Bundy, Isaac Deutscher, Theodore Draper, John Kenneth Galbraith, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Irving Howe, Henry Kissinger, Irving Kristol, Boris Pasternak, Eugene V. Rostow, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Peter Viereck, and Edmund Wilson.
[1] The Immigration History Research Center Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries, houses Max Ascoli's papers.