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Overdue or overdone? Two scholars hope to secure the legacy of ‘Jewish Renewal’
(JTA) — Rabbi Arthur Green gave the commencement address last week at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Conservative flagship where he was ordained 56 years earlier.
His talk was mostly a response to political turmoil in Israel, but he also urged the graduates to pioneer a “new Judaism.”
“I had the good fortune, as a young seeker, to run into the Jewish mystical tradition, especially the writings of the early Hasidic masters,” said Green, who taught Jewish mysticism and Hasidic theology at Brandeis, the University of Pennsylvania and Hebrew College. “I have been working for half a century to articulate what could simply be called a Judaism for adults living in freedom. I am now near the end of my creative course. But you young people are just at the beginning of yours. We need you to enroll — however you can — in the task of the generations, that of re-creating Judaism.”
That is the language of Jewish Renewal, with which Green, 82, is deeply identified. Renewal isn’t a denomination, really, but a movement that was born in and reflects the 1960s and 1970s counterculture. Baby boomer Jews disillusioned with the large suburban synagogues that they considered soulless embraced Jewish practice that was spiritual, egalitarian, environmentally conscious and largely lay-led.
Baby boomer Jews disillusioned with the large suburban synagogues that they considered soulless embraced Jewish practice that was spiritual, egalitarian, environmentally conscious and largely lay-led. Renewal’s signature institution was the havurah — intimate prayer, study and social fellowships. Its soundtrack were the liturgical melodies composed by the hippy-ish, “neo-Hasidic” Orthodox rabbi, Shlomo Carlebach. And its rebbe — to the degree that an egalitarian movement had a central figure — was Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (1924-2014), a refugee from Hitler’s Europe and former Lubavitcher Hasid whose Judaism channeled the spiritual “New Age” of the 1970s.
These ideas and approaches may be familiar to you even if you’ve never heard of “Renewal.” Rare is the synagogue that doesn’t try to offer a more intimate spiritual experience for its worshippers, to shrink the distance between pulpit and pew, to incorporate new Jewish music and, in non-Orthodox and a number of Modern Orthodox synagogues, to increase the participation of women in prayer and study.
Those prayer shawls with rainbow stripes? That was a Schachter-Shalomi innovation.
How a counterculture movement came to be absorbed by the mainstream is the subject of a paper in a new collection, “The Future of American Judaism,” edited by Mark Silk and Jerome Chanes. Chanes is the co-author, with Shaul Magid, of the chapter on “Renewal” that claims it as one of the most influential if not defining Jewish movements of the last 50 years.
“While Jewish Renewal has never boasted a large number of members, its influence on the larger American Jewish community has been significant, in terms of its liturgical experimentation, its revisions of ritual and its overall metaphysics,” they write. “It has also served as an ongoing conduit of information and inspiration from its own past — the havurah movement, radical politics, feminism — to the next generation.”
I came to the paper after giving a lecture at my own synagogue on “The Crisis of the American Synagogue.” I spoke of declining affiliation rates, plunging enrollment in supplementary schools, the shrinking number of non-Orthodox synagogues. Most of my adult life has been spent in synagogues, havurot and institutions heavily influenced by Renewal. If the Jewish Renewal movement revitalized synagogue life in the last century, could it also be blamed for its struggles in this one?
Magid, a fellow in Jewish studies at Dartmouth College, and Chanes, an adjunct professor of Jewish Studies at Baruch College, presented their chapter at a conference dedicated to the release of the book, held Tuesday and Wednesday at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Magid made the claim — considered bold, at this small gathering of Jewish historians — that the three most important Jewish figures of the 20th century were Mordecai Kaplan, Menachem Mendel Schneerson and Shachter-Shalomi.
Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, downplayed the supernatural element of Judaism and instead called it a “civilization” defined by its people and culture. Schneerson, the Lubavitcher rebbe, turned an insular Orthodox sect into an outreach movement that promotes ritual practice among secular Jews.
Rabbi Arthur Green delivers the commencement address at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan, May 18, 2023. (Courtesy JTS)
Schachter-Shalomi combined their visions and imagined a Judaism, said Magid, that “is no longer used as a tool for Jewish survival, but rather as a project for Jews to become part of the global community, to contribute to the global community.” Environmental awareness became a hallmark of Renewal, as did absorbing influences from other religions, especially Eastern ones. “He really did take Schneerson’s teaching about bringing Judaism to the streets and expanded it further to bring Judaism to the mosque, to bring Judaism to the monastery, to create another way of being Jewish which was not afraid of the world.”
In an interview with Magid before the conference, I asked if he and Chanes might be exaggerating Renewal’s influence.
“I’m sure there will be people who will claim that case but I don’t think so, no,” he said. Magid acknowledges that few people regard themselves as direct disciples of Schachter-Shalomi, and yet, like Kaplan, his influence is felt widely and deeply. “Each one of them had a futuristic vision,” he said. “They were able to cultivate a way of thinking about Judaism that was before their time and that eventually came into being in many ways.”
One of those skeptical of Schachter-Shalomi’s influence is Jonathan Sarna, professor of Jewish history at Brandeis, who gave the keynote talk at the conference. In his response to the panel on Renewal, Sarna doubted Schachter-Shalomi was as influential as Carlebach, the Conservative theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel or the Modern Orthodox philosopher Joseph Soloveitchik. “I don’t think we should delude ourselves into thinking that every innovator is a new Moses,” Sarna said.
Benjamin Steiner, a visiting assistant professor in religion at Trinity, also wondered if Renewal had spread “everywhere in the country, or only in large urban areas with critical masses of educated Jewish students.”
Listening to Magid’s response to such caveats, I thought of the quote often attributed to music producer Brian Eno: “The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.” Renewal’s influence spread beyond its founding havurot because many of their principals went on to important positions in academia and Jewish organizations, including Green, Rabbi Everett Gendler, Sharon Strassfeld, John Ruskay and Rabbi Arthur Waskow.
Small but influential Gen X and millennial institutions also bear Renewal’s fingerprints: the “Jewish Emergent Network” of independent congregations; New York’s Romemu and B’nai Jeshurun synagogues; egalitarian, traditional-style yeshivas like Hadar. Bayit, with a number of principals associated with ALEPH: the Alliance for Jewish Renewal, is an online artist’s collective and publisher of Jewish books, including a forthcoming Shabbat prayer book.
One of its contributors, Rabbi Rachel Barenblat, who was ordained by ALEPH, has argued that the influence of Renewal is felt even within Orthodoxy. “If you look at the Open Orthodoxy movement, if you look at the ordination of women as ‘maharats’ [by Yeshivat Maharat, a women’s seminary], the future of women as rabbinic leaders in Orthodoxy is already here,” she said on an episode of the “Judaism Unbound” podcast. “It’s not everywhere, but someday it will be.”
Magid and Chanes similarly claim a number of leading Jewish feminists as products of Renewal — they mention Paula Hyman, Eva Fogelman and Judith Plaskow — although some in the audience at Trinity insisted they gave Renewal too much credit for a movement by and for women. In there essay in the Silk/Chanes Book, Sylvia Barack Fishman of Brandeis University offers a counter-narrative of Jewish innovation over the past 50 years. In her chapter, she credits the “active partnership” of women in revitalizing American Judaism: Women’s religious expressions, she writes, “create social contexts and are distinguished by a communal dynamic, quite unlike the isolated, personalized Jewish experience, which some have claimed defines contemporary Jewishness.”
I came away convinced that Renewal has had an outsize influence on Jewish life, especially for baby boomers like me. But I also wondered if its outward-facing, syncretic Judaism failed to instill a sense of obligation to Jewish forms, institutions and peoplehood — unlike, by contrast, Orthodoxy in all of its booming present-day manifestations.
I asked Magid in what ways Renewal might have fallen short.
“Part of its failure is that it is very, very anchored to a certain kind of American counterculture that no longer exists. It hasn’t really moved into a 2.0 phase,” he said. “There are students and staff members that are still very tied to [Schachter-Shalomi’s] vision, and then there’s a younger generation, Gen Z, who have read some of his work and they’re influenced by it, but they really are thinking much more about, well, how does this translate into a post-countercultural America?”
Magid also feels the ideas of Renewal will become more important as American Jews’ attachment to Israel wanes, and the living memory of the Holocaust recedes.
If Rabbi Green’s speech at the JTS graduation was any indication, then the ideals of Jewish Renewal still hold their appeal.
“We need a new Judaism in America… where we also have the fresh air needed to create it,” he said. “How do we move forward… in articulating a Jewish theology for today that is both intellectually honest and spiritually rewarding?”
The audience of future Jewish leaders and teachers leapt to its feet.
—
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Columbia selects Jennifer Mnookin, Jewish U of Wisconsin chancellor, as its next leader
(JTA) — Three different women have taken turns as Columbia University’s president amid ongoing turmoil surrounding the handling of pro-Palestinian protests on the New York City campus. Now, Columbia has invited a fourth — and the first to be Jewish — to try her hand at running the Ivy League school.
Jennifer Mnookin, the chancellor of University of Wisconsin, has been chosen as Columbia’s next president, the co-chairs of the school’s board of trustees announced on Sunday. She will be the school’s first Jewish leader since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, triggering a war in Gaza and a student protest movement in the United States of which Columbia was an epicenter.
Mnookin, a legal scholar, served as dean of the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law before moving to Wisconsin in 2022. At least two other candidates reportedly declined the Columbia position prior to her selection.
She takes the helm at a delicate time for Columbia as it continues to reel from the fallout of the student protests, which has included included penalties from the Trump administration, rapid leadership changes and ongoing fear and anxiety among many Jewish students.
“I am honored and thrilled to join Columbia University at this important moment,” Mnookin said in a statement released by the university. “Columbia is defined by rigorous scholarship, a deep commitment to open inquiry, world-class patient care, and an inseparable and enduring connection to New York City, the greatest city in the world.”
She follows three other women who struggled amid the turmoil. The president in charge on Oct. 7, Nemat Minouche Shafik, cited the “period of turmoil” that followed when she resigned in 2024; she had faced criticism from members of Congress as well as the Columbia community over her handling of the student encampment that formed this year.
Her temporary replacement, Katrina Armstrong, stepped down in March 2025 as the school faced pressure from the Trump administration over antisemitism allegations. Armstong’s successor, the current interim president, Claire Shipman, struck a $221 million deal with Trump to settle the claims; she also apologized soon after taking office for having suggested the removal of a Jewish member of the school’s board of trustees.
Now, Mnookin will be responsible for managing Columbia’s relationship with federal authorities, weighing and implementing the recommendations of its antisemitism task force and healing a divided campus, which has been closed to outsiders now for years.
“The last few years have been undeniably difficult for the Jewish and Israeli communities on campus. While challenges remain, there is a vibrant, joyful, proud Jewish community at Columbia,” Brian Cohen, executive director of Columbia/Barnard Hillel, said in a statement. “I am hopeful that President-elect Mnookin will bring the reputation, experience, and understanding that we need to build on that strong foundation.”
It will be Mnookin’s first time working at a private university. At Wisconsin, first sent law enforcement to shut down a student encampment, then negotiated with protesters after they established a second one. The deal required Students for Justice in Palestine to comply with university rules related to protest in exchange for the right to present their divestment demands to “decision makers,” who did not accede to them.
She also denounced neo-Nazi protesters who marched on the Wisconsin campus in November 2023, calling them “utterly repugnant.” Through it all, she gained a reputation for promoting open inquiry and academic freedom — even as Wisconsin, like dozens of other universities, faced a federal investigation over antisemitism allegations.
“I think universities should be spaces where ideas, and different ideas, embodied by people from different backgrounds, come together, and where it won’t always be comfortable, but where we will learn and do better from that engagement,” she said in a roundtable of college presidents published in The New York Times in November. (The other presidents were also Jewish: Sian Bellock of Dartmouth College and Michael Roth of Wesleyan University, who has emerged as a rare leader in higher education who is willing to spar with the Trump administration.)
Mnookin was raised in a Reform Jewish family in the Bay Area that escalated its Jewish engagement when she asked to celebrate her bat mitzvah, according to her father Robert. A scholar of conflict negotiation, he described the evolution in his 2015 book “The Jewish American Paradox: Embracing Choice in a Changing World,” which he said he wrote in part to explore his own late-onset attachment to Judaism.
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Tim Walz invokes Anne Frank in pressing Trump to end ICE operations in Minnesota
(JTA) — Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, invoked Anne Frank in exhorting President Donald Trump to call off the ICE operations in the Twin Cities in which a second protester was killed over the weekend.
Speaking at a press conference on Sunday, Walz — whose master’s degree focused on Holocaust education — suggested that the conditions facing children in his state during the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement raids were of a kind with those facing Frank during the Holocaust.
“We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside. Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank,” he said. “Somebody is going to write that children’s story about Minnesota.”
The prominent mention of Frank, who died of disease in a Nazi concentration camp after her family’s hiding place was betrayed, adds to a growing discourse about whether ICE’s operations targeting immigrants in Minnesota can be compared to the Nazis’ tactics in rooting out Jews during the Holocaust. Figures such as Stephen King and Bruce Springsteen have likened ICE to the Gestapo.
Until recently, Nazi comparisons were long considered inappropriate by many in the Jewish world who argued that such analogies cheapen the memory of the particular genocide against the Jews. In the last decade, that norm has to some degree fallen away, with voices on both the right and left likening their opponents to Nazis.
On Sunday, some of Walz’s critics denounced his comments and said an immigration crackdown cannot be compared to the deliberate murder of Jews. Retweeting an account called Stop Wokeness, the activist Shabbos Kestenbaum tweeted, “One million Jewish children were killed during the Holocaust. Illegal immigrants are offered thousands of dollars to take a free flight home. Tim Walz is an evil retard.”
In a post on X responding to Walz’s analogy, Stephen Miller, a top aide to Trump, wrote, “The purpose of the rhetoric is to incite attacks on ICE.”
But others said the comparison was apt, with a quotation from Frank’s diary circulating widely online as it did in 2019 in response to ICE raids then. The quotation, those sharing it suggested, offered a close parallel to what has been playing out in Minnesota.
“Terrible things are happening outside,” the passage says. “Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared. … Everyone is scared.”
Jewish voices, too, have invoked the Holocaust in arguing for intervention in Minnesota, where federal agents on Saturday shot and killed a man, Alex Pretti, who had been protesting their presence.
“What did we learn from the Holocaust? We have to act and we have to resist,” one rabbi who flew into Minnesota to protest told the Religion News Service last week.
Walz, a Democrat who was the vice presidential candidate in 2024, wrote a master’s thesis on Holocaust education, arguing that the Holocaust should be taught “in the greater context of human rights abuses,” rather than as a unique historical anomaly or as part of a larger unit on World War II.
“Schools are teaching about the Jewish Holocaust, but the way it is traditionally being taught is not leading to increased knowledge of the causes of genocide in all parts of the world,” he wrote in his 2001 thesis, completed while he was a high school teacher.
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How yizkor books bring the sights, sounds, and even smells and tastes of lost Jewish shtetls back to life
Rye bread, sour milk, and maybe some herring — for a poor Jew, these were the makings of a meal. The Jews I have in mind were residents of the small market towns, or shtetls, once strewn across Eastern Europe. Shtetls had their token elites, the grain and lumber brokers who ate white bread with butter. For the vast majority, however, the bread was black and there was no butter.
I’ve spent the last few years reading about these towns for Once There Was a Town, a book I’ve written about yizkor books and the world they portray. But my interest is more than academic; my father was born in one of these towns, and I’ve been hearing its stories since I was a kid.
The word yizkor is a form of the Hebrew verb “to remember.” Literally translated, it means “may he remember.” A yizkor book is a book of remembrance.
While the yizkor book tradition goes back to medieval times, those I’ve been studying were written after the Holocaust as a way to memorialize the communities destroyed by the Nazis and their facilitators. Anthologies of a sort, these books were written by both Holocaust survivors and emigrés from before the war, all from the same shtetl, working together to document the ways of life characteristic of their fallen hometowns.
Key players in their production were organizations that had formed decades before the Holocaust. Starting in the late 19th century, in immigrant cities like New York, Jews from the same town had banded together to create self-help societies which you could turn to in times of crisis. If a family member was sick and couldn’t work, these societies provided financial support. When a townsperson died, they ensured a plot in a Jewish cemetery. After the war, they assumed responsibility for writing the town yizkor book.
Erased from the physical world, those towns are conjured back into existence in these yizkor books. Working with the theory that whatever was left out would be forgotten, yizkor book writers sought to cast a wide net and record everything. Caught in that net were the foods people ate.
Left to right: Chaya Liba Peltz, Aaron Ziegelman, Luba Ziegelman.
In front, Tova Peltz Courtesy of Jane Ziegelman
The books speak eloquently to the sparsity of the weekday diet, which for many consisted primarily of potatoes, porridge and coarse, rye bread. Six days of austerity, however, were followed by the Sabbath, when Jews are commanded to partake “of fruits and delicacies and to inhale sweet odors.” Sabbath foods shared certain characteristics. Challah and gefilte fish were sweet and delicate, and so was compote (stewed fruit) and tsimmes, (carrots sweetened with prunes.) It was fat, however, that people hankered for most. Chicken soup with golden rings of fat dancing across the surface, chopped liver enriched with onions fried in goose fat (shmaltz), stuffed derma (cow intestine stuffed with flour and schmaltz) and a schmaltz-laden kugel.
Our modern-day food groups — protein, fat, carbohydrates — held no meaning for a poor Jew who saw food in just two categories. Like heaven and earth, like men and women, like time itself, food was divided into the holy and the mundane.
A qualification: All food comes from God so all food is holy. Certain foods, however, are fortified with an extra dose of holiness. In some cases, it was obvious which was which — between rye bread and challah, for example, there was no confusion. With some foods, however, it all depended on preparation. During the week, dried beans were combined with kasha or barley for a meal that was both cheap and filling. Saturday’s cholent was also made with beans, but these beans had been braising all night with a fatty bone. A potato soup “whitened” with a splash of milk was among the mundane foods Jews subsisted on Sunday through Friday. But a potato kugel, glistening with schmaltz and redolent of onion, was a dish worthy of the Sabbath Queen!
And then there were zoyers, the fermented foods that defied classification. Cucumbers, beets, mushrooms, radishes, cabbage, apples and even berries were some of the foods that homemakers turned into zoyers, what we call pickles. For people who relied so heavily on bread and potatoes, the tang of a zoyer provided a welcome counterpoint to all that starchiness. And when the pickles were gone, you could dip your potato into the sour and salty brine.
Zoyers also came in liquid form, the most popular of which was a drink called kvass. A fermented drink made from stale bread, kvass was produced both at home and by the local kvassnik or kvass maker. Jews loved their kvass for its fizzy tartness. More than that, however, they saw it as a kind of culinary metaphor. In the sourness of kvass, they saw their own lives. Here, a former resident of Rakishok, a shtetl in Lithuania,, remembers his weekly visits to the kvass maker:
I remember how my father would send me with a kopek on Shabbos night to buy kvass for Havdalah. The kvass, alas, was made from the crusts of black bread, and was very sour, like the sourness of the mood of the coming gray week and its worries.
Zoyers were also at home on the Sabbath table; in fact, meals were considered incomplete without them. Or to put it another way, zoyers offered a kind of culinary satisfaction that no other food could deliver.
“A young man sat down to a holiday meal of chicken, kreplach and tsimmes,” one yizkor book author wrote. “After the meal, his wife asked if he was satisfied with the food. ‘Of course,’ he answered, ‘but unless I have eaten even a little bit of zoyers, I am not a person.’”
I take comfort knowing that this is a feeling I have experienced too.
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