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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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The rabbinic backlash against Zohran Mamdani isn’t about Mamdani at all
The sheer number of letters by rabbis circulating about Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral campaign is “mind numbing,” a rabbi friend texted me earlier this week.
There’s the public letter decrying Mamdani, the Democratic candidate, sponsored by The Jewish Majority, which as of this writing has 1,138 signatures from rabbis, cantors and rabbinical students. But two or three other letters are also making their way through her circles. (One affirms a belief that Mamdani’s support for Palestinian rights comes from “deep moral convictions”; the others have not yet been made public.) “Make it stop,” she wrote.
The last two years have been unbelievably difficult for American Jews, and particularly so for rabbis. Rabbis have been tasked with counseling congregants deeply affected by the trauma caused by Oct. 7 and the rise in antisemitism, as well as the global outcry against Israel’s brutal bombardment of Gaza. Not to mention navigating efforts by certain political actors to weaponize Jewish pain in order to silence pro-Palestinian activists, remake higher education and accelerate an aggressive deportation agenda.
Now, the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas has created something of a vacuum, leaving rabbis to channel the complexity of the last two years into an unrelenting, disproportionate and often negative focus on Mamdani.
The old joke goes “two Jews, three opinions.” It’s rare to find Jewish consensus on where to get the best bagels, let alone a political issue. Yet rabbis from states as distant as Nevada, Illinois, Georgia, Indiana, New Mexico and Tennessee have signed the Jewish Majority letter, which calls out “rising anti-Zionism and its political normalization,” publicly affirming their opposition to a potential Mayor Mamdani. While the letter boasts 1,138 signatures, only around 100 of them actually live in New York City and would be directly affected by a Mamdani administration.
Isn’t it a bit strange that no cause has apparently rallied more American rabbis — not a devastating humanitarian crisis in Gaza; not an antisemitic AI chatbot developed by the richest man on Earth; not the Department of Homeland Security sharing antisemitic dogwhistles; not Immigrations and Customs Enforcement kidnapping people off the street — than opposition to a Muslim, Democratic socialist mayoral candidate who is not pro-Israel?
I find it hard to believe that New York City’s next mayor is truly the most vital issue facing American Jews outside this specific city. So why this level of focused condemnation?
I think there’s an answer in the striking timing of these letters. Mamdani won the Democratic primary overwhelmingly in June. Where were the letters then? If anything, his victory seems less assured than it did a month or two ago — recent polls suggest that former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, running as an Independent, has cut Mamdani’s lead in half following Mayor Eric Adams’ withdrawal from the race.
So what changed? With the ceasefire and the return of the last living hostages, I think that diaspora Jewry is suddenly unsure about our political role. Now that the living hostages — the one issue most of us agreed on in the last two years — are home safe, whom do we advocate for? What are we supposed to talk about now?
The flurry of these rabbinic anti-Mamdani letters less than a month before the mayoral election in November has been framed by some as an extraordinary expression of rabbinic unity in the face of a dangerous candidate. “Look at how many American rabbis have ever signed a letter,” one commenter on r/Jewish wrote on Reddit. “This is one of the largest rabbinic sign-on letters in history.”
But I worry this proliferation is a sign of insecurity in our community, not health.
In a time when it has felt so impossible to express nuance and to allow for a multiplicity of truths, Mamdani represents, for many, an easy opportunity to align against a figure whose position on Israel departs from the long-accepted political norm of vocal support.
A recent poll conducted by The Washington Post shows that nearly 40 percent of American Jews believe Israel has committed genocide. That number jumps to 50 percent between the ages of 18 and 34. Synagogue leaders, who are always trying to grow their community with new, younger members, must appease older, more pro-Israel congregants while remaining in touch with the changing views of the new generations — a balancing act that is increasingly untenable.
For a rabbi who is attempting to negotiate the tensions of differing political beliefs within their congregation, it is far easier to sign a letter than it is to reckon, both personally and communally, with the profound generational divide on Israel.
Mamdani’s campaign is not the only time that rabbinic leaders have spoken out since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023 — or this year. On Feb. 13, 350 American rabbis took out a full-page ad in The New York Times to oppose President Donald Trump’s plan to remove all Palestinians from Gaza. “Jewish people say NO to ethnic cleansing!” it read in bold letters. In July, 1,200 rabbis and Jewish leaders from around the world signed a letter urging Israel to open Gaza to humanitarian aid, followed by a letter in August from over 80 Orthodox rabbis, led by the former mashgiach ruchani of Yeshiva University, Rabbi Yosef Blau.
But the Jewish Majority letter has made by far the biggest impact. And I wonder at the usefulness of its signatories expending limited political capital against a candidate who, by all accounts, is likely to become mayor. When historians write about this charged era of American Jewish life, when authoritarian power is aggressively taking hold, I doubt that this letter will be regarded as a worthy use of their considerable communal power.
In the end, the anti-Mamdani letters say very little about Mamdani and everything about American Jewry. Instead of coming together based on a shared commitment to Jewish values, American rabbis are choosing an enemy to ally against. Instead of drawing “a line in the sand,” as one commentator framed the letter, I fear it is simply a line that will further divide us.
Since Oct. 7, American Jews have been buffeted by anti-war protests, antisemitic attacks and institutional strife. The Hamas attacks and Israel’s war in Gaza have unleashed a profound internal and external reckoning about the previously sacrosanct relationship between the U.S. and Israel. With the tenuous ceasefire coming soon after the start of a new Jewish year, and the traditional pro-Israel consensus irrevocably cracking under the strain of war and religious extremism, American Jews have an important opportunity, now, to look inward.
What have we learned over these painful years? How can we heal, while also taking responsibility for the ways in which we did not use our power for good? How do we want to use our communal power, period? If the party line on Israel has changed, how do American Jews want to change with it?
The conversations within the Jewish community are just beginning, and will last long past the New York City mayoral election on Nov. 4. I pray that our rabbinic leaders will have the courage to help us have them.
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How a curator and a rabbi joined forces to keep a piece of Boston’s Jewish history alive
The most striking artifact in the Judaica collection at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts isn’t from Yemen or Galicia, or any other far-flung Jewish community that’s long since dispersed; it’s from Chelsea, Massachusetts.
The magnificent wooden Torah ark is just shy of 12 feet tall, and until 1999 it was the centerpiece of the Orange Street Synagogue, in Chelsea, a suburb that once teemed with so much Jewish life it earned the nickname ‘Little Jerusalem.’
But with American synagogues now closing at a record pace, the arks and facades and stained glass windows that testified to American Jewry’s dynamism face an unsettled future.
Indeed, to make the short hop from Chelsea to northeast Boston, the MFA’s ark took a rather scenic — even biblical — route. There’s a last-gasp reprieve as destruction looms; an extended stint in a wilderness of sorts (Texas); and a healthy sprinkling of rabbinic wisdom.
All the same, it illuminates an often forgotten chapter in Boston’s Jewish story.
A thriving Jewish enclave
Around the turn of the 20th century, tens of thousands of mostly eastern European Jewish immigrants arrived in Chelsea, transforming a provincial Protestant outpost into a chiefly working-class center of Jewish cultural, religious and economic life. By 1920, it had between 15 and 20 synagogues; a Hebrew School that graduated over 400 people a year; and dozens of clubs and organizations that held their meetings in Yiddish.
One of its more well-known inhabitants was Sam Katz, a Galician immigrant who was, for a time, Massachusetts’ pre-eminent woodcarver. Katz was born in 1884 in Veshnevets, modern Ukraine, and emigrated to the US in 1910. He lived briefly in New York before settling in Greater Boston, where, even though he lacked formal training, he built an estimated 24 synagogue arks during the 1920s and 30s. “These immigrant wood carvers, in general, learned from their father and their grandfather,” said Simona Di Nepi, curator of the MFA’s Judaica collection.
Still, Katz found his own style. “When I see vine leaves and grates and these kinds of lions,” Di Nepi told me, pointing to a pair of gilded lions affixed to either side of the MFA’s ark, “I know that it’s Sam Katz.” Perched on top of the ark is a bald eagle, jostling for position with a Torah crown. Taken together, said Di Nepi, the sculptures are a kind of shorthand for the burgeoning Jewish-American culture Chelsea represented. Indeed, this is one of the gallery’s abiding themes: the various ways artists have combined age-old Jewish iconography with time- and place-specific motifs.
The ark needs a hero
By 1950, Jewish Chelsea had entered a terminal decline. Many of its inhabitants had moved to tonier Boston suburbs like Brookline or Newton, propelled by improving socio-economic mobility, though the construction of the Tobin Bridge between 1947 and 1950 also pushed out some 250 families and effectively split the Jewish community in two. In early 1999, the Orange Street Katz Torah ark closed for a final time, its fate uncertain.
That’s when rabbi David Whiman, a congregational rabbi in nearby Newton, and an avid Judaica collector, stepped in.
Whiman salvaged the ark alongside a small crew of friends. A small screen in the gallery plays grainy footage of Whiman in an oversized white T-shirt, smiling broadly. Though the Orange Street shul pews are empty, and the work laborious, Whiman and his group appear noticeably upbeat. The opportunity to preserve such an invaluable link to Chelsea’s Jewish past is, clearly, a happy one. (Whiman, rabbi emeritus at North Shore Synagogue, did not respond to an inquiry.)
Whiman kept the ark with him as his rabbinical career took him first to Houston, where he stayed for the better part of decade, and, later, to Syosset, Long Island. And then, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, he emailed Di Nepi. He had heard the MFA was establishing a permanent Judaica collection. “He initially said, ‘I’m a collector, and you can have anything you want,’” Di Nepi recalled. In 2022, she went to Syosset, and was immediately taken with the ark. “There were other things that I might have been interested in,” she said, “but this was so much a Boston story — a local story.”
The ark bore the scars of nearly 20 years in storage. “All the attached pieces were in a box,” Di Nepi said. “And the wood had marks all over it.” Over six months, the MFA’s Conservation department, led by Christine Storti, restored the ark’s original flourishes: On top, an eagle and a torah crown; just below, two golden lions and three Magen Davids; and, in the middle, two gilded hands of Kohanim clasped together in prayer. Di Nepi then placed the renovated ark on a bimah-esque plinth, where it remains today, resplendent in the dim gallery light.
For every rescued Torah ark, however, are dozens that couldn’t overcome the demographic and cultural changes that have reshaped American Judaism during the past half-century. “There used to be a high demand for Torah arks,” Di Nepi said. “But now, we have the inverse situation, where there is mass demand for finding homes for arks that are closing.”
The Sam Katz ark is therefore a monument to a community that’s largely slipped from view. Yet there’s one fragment of Jewish Chelsea that’s proved remarkably durable. The glass light bulb Katz hung from the ark more than a century ago still works, Di Nepi told me, though she and Storti opted against displaying it, given its obvious fragility, and commissioned a replica. I am nevertheless consoled by the thought that somewhere in the Museum of Fine Arts’ storage there’s a tiny piece of Jewish Chelsea, waiting to shine again.
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A second rabbinic letter, arguing against Jewish rejections of Mamdani, enters the NYC mayor’s race
A second rabbinic letter about the New York City mayor’s race repudiating the first has drawn hundreds of signatures in the day since its launch.
Titled “Jews for a Shared Future,” the new letter rejects the argument that the frontrunner in the race is unacceptable because of his opposition to Israel and contends that Jews should see their safety in New York City and beyond as entwined with that of others.
“In response to Jewish concerns about the New York mayoral race, we recognize that candidate Zohran Mamdani’s support for Palestinian self-determination stems not from hate, but from his deep moral convictions,” the letter says. “Even though there are areas where we may disagree, we affirm that only genuine solidarity and relationship-building can create lasting security. That work has sustained us for generations wherever Jews have lived, and remains our only path forward.”
It also responds to attacks on Mamdani’s Muslim identity, saying, “Jewish safety cannot be built on Muslim vulnerability, nor can we combat hate against our community while turning away from hate against our neighbors.”
In the day since its launch, the letter has been signed by 740 Jews. Of them, 230 are rabbis, 40 located in or near New York City.
Some of the signatories have previously offered their public support for Mamdani, including Sharon Kleinbaum, who spoke at his rally in Queens on Sunday, but others have not. Although some do not work in traditional pulpits, many others do. Some are well known for their own anti-Zionist activism that puts their outlook on Israel in line with Mamdani’s, but others openly identify as Zionists.
In a sign of how complex the current political discourse is for politically liberal Jews, at least one retired rabbi signed both the “Shared Future” letter and the broadside it follows.
The first letter, denouncing Mamdani and the “normalization of anti-Zionism,” began circulating a week ago and has now topped 1,150 signatures, with hundreds of signatories in New York City. It has roiled Jewish communities across the country as congregants look for their rabbis on the list.
The new letter was written by Rabbi Shoshana Leis, a graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College who helms Pleasantville Community Synagogue in New York City’s northern suburbs. In a post on Facebook, she said she had begun drafting the letter on Sunday after observing the “painful divisiveness” that the first letter was creating and that she had “struggled” to formulate a response that would not run the risk of “further reinforcing the divisions.”
A breakthrough came, she said, after consulting with other rabbis and drawing on the work of Israeli and Palestinian shared-society activist organizations.
“What happens in NYC often resonates throughout the country. While I do not endorse any candidates and do not have a vote in the NYC election, I do endorse a particular way for Jews to show up in America,” she wrote. “Our safety is interconnected with the safety of our neighbors, and the path to friendship is through the difficult but rewarding work of building relationships, one at a time, even across significant and vital differences.”
The dueling letters underscore a pitched divide around politics in the pulpit, exacerbated this year by the Trump administration’s decision to stop enforcing a rule that barred clergy from making political endorsements. Some rabbis have said that they have refrained from signing letters related to the New York City election, even when they may agree with the contents, because they see such direct political advocacy as inappropriate and divisive.
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