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This rabbi reshaped and revitalized Judaism in the 20th Century — how have we forgotten him?
These days, public monuments don’t have an easy time of it. Variously speckled with graffiti, pelted with red paint, rendered headless, melted down and reconfigured into something else entirely, their fate is a fickle one, their future no longer assured.
The same can be said of people who, in their own day, were monumental personalities, household names, whose pronouncements were once heralded and heeded but who, with the passage of time, now go unrecognized, their presence erased from our collective memory.
Then again, monumental personalities have a fighting chance at being rescued from the cruel fate that awaits their physical counterparts. Thanks to the intervention of a biographer, they’re given a second lease on life, their impact on society re-evaluated, their names, activities and ideas put back into circulation.
At least, I’d like to think so. As the author of a just-published biography of Mordecai M. Kaplan (1881-1983), a towering figure of the 20th century whose determination to reshape and revitalize American Jewish life set early generations of American Jewry aquiver, I’m heavily invested in obtaining a hearing, or, better yet, a fair shake, for my subject.
It’s not so much a matter of asking “what would Kaplan do?” by literally applying his words and practices to Jewish life today, making of him what so many contemporary American Jews make of A. J. Heschel: the wellspring of our moral conscience, much less a seemingly inexhaustible supply of quotable quotes. That’d be nice, of course, but it’s not what I have in mind when I speak of bringing Kaplan back into circulation.
My objective is more a matter of thinking through the lineaments of his legacy and reckoning with the ways in which his ideas about unity and community, choice, belonging and Israel, as well as his personal experiences with the limits of dissent, shape us. It’s to bring Kaplan into conversation with a generation who knows him not. But should.
Here’s why.
No fan of denominational divisions such as Reform, Conservative and Orthodox which, then, as now, segmented the Jewish community, Kaplan was an advocate, avant la lettre, of what we today call, and embrace, as post-denominationalism. Opening up opportunities for engagement and commitment, his concept of a robust Jewish life pivoted on options and possibilities rather than credentials, obligations and boundaries.
By Kaplan’s lights, all Jewish individuals, no matter their degree of ritual punctiliousness or belief in the divine should feel welcome to study a blatt gemara or observe Shabbat in their own fashion. The big idea, as he put it in 1928, was for Jews to find “joy in being Jews. Their Jewishness should be to them a source of enrichment and a means to the realization of what is best in them.”
Toward that end, Kaplan recalibrated the meaning of being Jewish in modern America, expanding its parameters. Well before “ethnicity” came into play as an omnibus term, one far more capacious and welcoming than “religion” as the locus of identity, he defined Judaism as a “civilization.” In articles, sermons and, in 1934, within the 500-plus pages of Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life, this self-styled theological maverick laid out in great detail his plans for its overhaul. Eschewing “blind habit” and sentimentality in favor of intentionality, he called upon his coreligionists to “rediscover, reinterpret and reconstruct the civilization of his people.”
At the time this whale of a book was published, readers of the Forward would have been familiar with what Kaplan was going on and on about. But they had a simpler, more down-to earth name for the constellation of gesture, movement, humor, foodways, literature, folk sayings, rituals, idioms and beliefs that constitutes a distinctive Jewish culture. They knew it as yidishkayt.
For Kaplan’s audience of alrightniks — rapidly acculturating, upwardly mobile American Jews living the “goods life” — resorting to and promoting a Yiddish term like yidishkayt wouldn’t do. The word didn’t fit with their well-cushioned sense of themselves.
The use of yidishkayt didn’t sit well with Kaplan, either. Having grown up in a litvishe home, himself an immigrant to the United States who, for a spell, lived on the Lower East Side, he was no stranger to Yiddish. But he dismissed it as a “ghetto language,” one that got in the way of modernization.
Kaplan spoke from experience. In 1904, the newly minted, recently hired rabbi at Kehilath Jeshurun, a traditional synagogue on the Upper East Side, was preparing to deliver an English-language sermon, then a novelty, on Rosh Hashanah, when he was stopped in his tracks. Rabbi David Willowski, aka the Slutzker rav, a visitor from the Old World, assumed the pulpit, not Kaplan, and delivered an old-fashioned drush – in Yiddish. Up in arms, Kaplan fired off a letter to his congregants, taking them to task for their belief that Yiddish was the “only means whereby Judaism could be saved.”
In the absence, then, of an acceptable home-grown term by which to express his objectives, it took Kaplan a while to come up with a designation appropriate to the mighty scaffolding that now encased them. Sometimes, he adopted a lyrical turn of phrase, writing in the prestigious Menorah Journal of 1927 that to reduce Judaism to a religion was like “changing a rosebush into a bottle of perfume,” and that to “preserve any of [its] elements without the others is like trying to cultivate roses in a vase.” At other moments, he’d render it more succinctly, almost formulaically: “Before Judaism, Jewishness.” Ultimately, Kaplan put his faith in “civilization” as the antidote to what troubled modern-day Jews: the notion of chosen-ness a vivid case in point.
While recognizing the significance of the “chosen people” concept as well as its hold on the collective Jewish imagination, Kaplan believed the designation to be more of a “spiritual anachronism” than a viable conceit by which to bind contemporary Jews together as one. Its age-old history notwithstanding, chosen-ness, he insisted, was ill-suited to life in a modern democracy, “out of place,” and, in one of his more controversial decisions, retired it from active liturgical and rhetorical duty.
In its stead, Kaplan substituted what he characterized as an “ethically acceptable” and decidedly modern rationale for Jewish collective identity: “peoplehood.” A vague, if emotionally powerful, claim to distinctiveness, it made community and unity the center of gravity of the modern Jewish experience rather than Torah, prayer or even Zionism.
“The old Zionism,” he declared in 1955, “was meant to have the Jewish People rebuild Zion. A New Zionism is now needed to have Zion rebuild the Jewish People.”
In his day, Kaplan worried lest his timing was off, that his ambitious ideas had come too early for the first generation of Eastern European-born American Jews and too late for second generation American Jews. Perhaps he was right to worry. But his vision of a “maximum Jewishness” is neither too early or too late for us. It’s right on time.
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Democratic socialists scored big primary wins. But that’s not the whole story.
(JTA) — A string of U.S. House primary successes for democratic socialists, most of whom are sharp Israel critics, was hailed as a major shift in party politics over the course of the summer. But now that the primaries have concluded, a full picture of the results shows that the group’s victories were concentrated in House races in the deepest-blue districts, while few politicians have scored wins in Senate races.
During the primary season, candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America won seven out of the 25 U.S. House primaries in which they competed, securing two wins in Michigan, one in Colorado, three in New York and one in Pennsylvania, according to the DSA’s vote tracker. However, these wins have all occurred in Democratic strongholds: New York City, Detroit, Denver and Philadelphia.
“It’s a little bit dangerous to overinterpret a handful of elections compared to all the others,” Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance at the Brookings Institution, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Calling the DSA the new big kid on the block is a little bit premature.”
In addition to the seven DSA primary winners, another DSA candidate who ran in a California nonpartisan primary advanced to a U.S. House runoff against a Democratic incumbent in November. Two additional democratic socialists, from Kansas and New Hampshire, withdrew before their respective House primaries.
Of the DSA’s 18 House primary losses, seven occurred in deep-blue areas – demonstrating that even in the country’s most progressive pockets, democratic socialists often weren’t popular. These defeats notably included one in St. Louis, where incumbent Wesley Bell trounced DSA firebrand and anti-AIPAC crusader Cori Bush.
Granted, the DSA victories are still unprecedented in a country where socialism has long been anathema. The candidates might have only succeeded in deeply Democratic districts – but that means they are all but assured victory on Election Day. Taken together, they’ll constitute a larger contingent in Congress than ever before.
Many of the DSA candidates made Israel and its supporters central issues during their campaigns, and there’s little doubt that their presence will tilt the Democratic caucus in the Congress further away from Israel.
The DSA’s official stance on Israel includes an end to the country’s “colonization and occupation of all Arab lands,” the “self-determination of the Palestinian people” and the cessation of “U.S. complicity in Israel’s genocide and apartheid.” Although the DSA has won fewer races than it has lost, the victories would more than triple the group’s presence in the U.S. House, with five newcomers in addition to Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
Jeff Robbins, a Boston-based attorney and former Democratic Senate staffer, said that supporters of Israel should be concerned by the wins, even if they don’t constitute a wave.
Robbins, who also served as a delegate to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights under former president Bill Clinton, warned that if anti-Israel DSA politicians keep racking up wins, Democratic strategists will discourage candidates from supporting Israel’s response to Hamas after the Oct. 7 attacks.
Recommending any action to the contrary, he argued, will result in “the quickest campaign you’ve ever seen.”
“It will be over before you can say ‘the Golan Heights’,” Robbins quipped.
And yet, although the media spotlight has shone on the DSA’s standout victories, establishment candidates have secured more wins at the ballot box from a numerical perspective. In addition, democratic socialists have focused more on the House than the Senate, where they would need to appeal to broader statewide electorates to win seats.
One major exception to that rule is Florida DSA member Angie Nixon, who pulled off a stunning primary victory in a state that Trump won by about 13 percentage points in 2024. But she didn’t join the DSA until shortly before the election and she didn’t get its endorsement.
Another DSA Senate candidate, Gregory Levy of Ohio, will be running in the November general election as an Independent.
But the three other staunchly progressive Senate candidates who will be on the Democratic ballot in November – in Maine, Michigan and Minnesota – don’t define themselves as democratic socialists. While many are still highly critical of Israel, they have differences with DSA and are more interested in making sure they appeal to the more politically diverse populations they will face statewide. They face close races where swing voters who don’t identify strongly with either party are likely to make the difference.
For instance, though many of Abdul El-Sayed’s positions are similar to DSA policies, last month he told The Wall Street Journal that he is “not technically or practically DSA” and that he doesn’t oppose capitalism. At the same time, he has earned the support of many democratic socialist politicians, including Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Kamarck observed that Michigan, which has a huge Arab-American population, remains the nerve center of the Democratic Party’s pro-Palestinian movement. Yet although polls forecast a landslide victory for El-Sayed, who sharply criticized Israel throughout his primary campaign, she termed his victory in early August as “a squeaker.”
“It was a one-point race,” she said. “What that says is that this is not finished.”
Haile Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said in a statement at the time that although her group was disappointed in El-Sayed’s victory, his “razor-thin margin isn’t the resounding win for the far-left that was predicted.”
An Economist model issued shortly after El-Sayed’s victory predicted that the Democratic Party’s chances of winning in November fell to 48% following the primary. But a Marist poll published on Wednesday gave El-Sayed a seven-point lead over Republican Mike Rogers, with a 3.8% margin of error.
Meanwhile, post-primary predictions showed that Minnesota’s Peggy Flanagan would secure an easy victory in her blue state’s Senate race. However, a new KSTP/SurveyUSA poll found that her five-point lead over Republican Michele Tafoya had narrowed to a statistical tie. Like many party progressives, Flanagan has accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza.
As for Maine’s Jackson, the progressive was trailing Republican Sen. Susan Collins, a five-term incumbent, by 3 points, with a 3.1% margin of error, according to an AARP poll released on Thursday.
Nixon in Florida was 11 points behind Republican Sen. Ashley Moody, with a 4% margin of error, a Stetson University from late last month poll found. On the other hand, St. Pete Polls placed the candidates in a dead heat just the week before, giving Moody just a 0.3-point edge, with a 3.2% margin of error.
In a testament to the growing power of the DSA – even in a red state – Moody reportedly told Fox News Radio this week that she is “seeing way-too-close-for comfort polls in many Republican Senate races.”
And in an email blast sent the same day, according to Florida Politics, Moody warned that “the polls have been all over the place.”
“Some have us up. Two have us tied,” she wrote. “We’re in the final stretch, where everything we do, and your support, really matters.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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The two ways to see Oct. 7 – and how they’ll influence the Israeli election
There are two ways to look at the Oct. 7 attacks, and which way you do will determine, to a large degree, whether you want to see Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu survive the next election.
The first view is that Oct. 7 proved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be solved. The second is that it proved the conflict cannot be allowed to remain unresolved.
These conclusions point in almost opposite directions, yet both begin with something Israelis learned, or thought they learned, from the same horrific day. One says there is no point trying to mollify the Palestinians, because hatred of Israel runs too deep. The other says that leaving millions of Palestinians indefinitely in their current condition will produce catastrophe again and again. The tragedy is that Oct. 7 supplied powerful evidence for both.
The first view is not without foundation. Even to Israelis (and people across the world) who have long sought a peaceful accommodation, it was shocking to see the sheer joy of the Hamas terrorists as they butchered families while filming their own barbarism, calling parents to brag, then dragging innocents into Gaza where crowds wildly cheered.
But the real shock was the support for this in the West Bank and Gaza – polls showed two-thirds to three-quarters of Palestinians approved – suggesting coexistence is impossible. Rarely have polls been more devastating. As a result, many Israelis lost sympathy for Palestinians and concluded that a cleansing inferno is required. The brutal war that followed certainly reflected that.
The second way to see Oct. 7 is that the Palestinian issue cannot be ignored – that the situation of the Palestinians was so unacceptable that something terrible was bound to happen. Many Israelis have trouble accepting this, because it does not really explain Hamas, which would fight Israel in any case, even if it were led by a far-left government willing to hand over to it every inch of the West Bank and Gaza and divide Jerusalem. But it might explain why so many Palestinians – even ones not in denial about the facts – were prepared to support it.
This view also offers at least one reason why the propaganda war waged by Hamas and its supporters has been so successful. There are others – including antisemitism and an outright denial of Israel’s right to exist . But the fundamentally unacceptable situation of the Palestinians is a big one, to be sure.
The combination of these factors yielded stunning results and contributed to an unfair vilification of the country that continues to frustrate Israeli voters.
By Oct. 9, before Israel had even identified all its dead or invaded Gaza, accusations of “genocide” were already circulating online, then among activists, NGOs, academics and eventually governments. By Oct. 13, protests denouncing “genocide” took place in London. On Oct 17, the Qatar-based Arab Center for Research & Policy Studies held a symposium called “The War on Gaza: Palestinian Defiance and Resistance against Orchestrated Genocide and Expulsion.”
Within weeks, South Africa accused Israel of “genocide” at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, invoking the “crime of crimes,” a term most associated with the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide and Rwanda. “This libel is powered by a relentless campaign of indictment that engraves a lie into collective memory,” says Adam Fisher, one of Israel’s top venture capitalists, who has researched the propaganda campaign in detail.
When Israel’s military entered Gaza, it faced an enemy that had deliberately embedded weapons caches, command centers and rocket launchers in homes and crowded neighborhoods, including hospitals, schools, mosques and UN sites. Hamas fighters vanished into tunnels beneath civilian areas, turning every dead child, collapsed building and grieving parent into material for a global indictment of Israel on social media. The strategy was clear: maximize civilian suffering, isolate Israel internationally, weaken American Jewish support and ultimately erode U.S. backing.
The implication is that Oct. 7 was a response to Palestinian suffering. The suffering is real, but Hamas was never defending Palestinians. The Iran-backed jihadist group has long sought to destroy Israel rather than establish a Palestinian state, and its campaign of terrorism after the 1993 Oslo Accords helped destroy the peace process by driving Israelis to the right.
Still, none of this makes the pre-Oct. 7 reality acceptable. In the West Bank, three million Palestinians live alongside some 500,000 Jewish settlers without equal rights, largely under military occupation, while extremist settlers have increasingly engaged in violence with the government and military often looking the other way. In Gaza, more than two million Palestinians endured a devastating Israeli-Egyptian blockade because Hamas ruled the Strip. It failed to prevent Hamas from arming itself while making civilian life miserable.
On Al Jazeera recently I was placed opposite a young Gazan named Ahmed Abo Askar, introduced as a humanitarian activist and engineering student. He said he had gone three days without eating, and looked like it. He hoped an aid flotilla might get through and then smuggle out his ailing father.
I tried to put things in perspective, explaining about Hamas and the need to be rid of it. Ahmed answered emotionally: “Israel, not Hamas, they are the ones who killed my sister, killed their children and their entire family on 6 November 2023. Not all of Palestinian people are Hamas. The goods, why it’s not entering? ‘It’s because of Hamas.’ We are not Hamas. We are human in the end.”
Everything I said was true – but he won the argument anyway, because he was a decent person suffering. No history lesson trumps that.
The insane situation has traumatized Palestinians and Israelis in parallel ways. The Palestinians – who are rooted in a conservative society disinclined to compromise – have been made, in large numbers, desperate enough to support a nihilistic movement like Hamas, which is truly genocidal against Jews.
As for Israelis, it has made huge numbers of them stop wanting to think seriously about Palestinians except through the lens of security and punishment. Some openly fantasize about expulsion. Empathy is viewed as naïve. Oct. 7 made Israelis a little crazy too – exactly per the plan of Hamas.
So the Israeli opposition — people deeply hostile to Netanyahu and his extremist coalition — is mostly afraid to touch the Palestinian issue at all in the campaign ahead of the Oct. 27 election, preferring to focus on Netanyahu’s epic domestic failures. Politically, the calculation is correct.
That is where the two interpretations of Oct. 7 attach themselves to the choice Israelis face in this election. Netanyahu has spent much of his career arguing, in practice if not always explicitly, that the Palestinian problem can be managed rather than solved: Contain Gaza, maintain Israeli control of the West Bank, expand settlements, periodically use overwhelming force and resist international pressure for Palestinian statehood.
If the lesson of Oct. 7 is that Palestinian hostility is essentially immutable and territorial compromise merely brings the enemy closer, then Netanyahu’s basic worldview survives despite his catastrophic failure on Oct. 7. The answer is deterrence and permanent Israeli security control — not another attempt at political reconciliation.
Gadi Eisenkot, the main challenger on the center-left, is more complicated. He is hardly offering Israelis a new Oslo: He has explicitly rejected a Palestinian state in the near- or medium-term and says the old two-state formula is unrealistic after Oct. 7. But he has also opposed more West Bank settlements and other measures that would make eventual territorial separation impossible.And he has long warned against Israel sliding into a binational state.
The implication is less a peace plan than a direction: Preserve the possibility of separating Israelis and Palestinians, change the conditions that perpetuate the conflict, and leave open a political horizon even if nobody can presently say exactly when it nears and how it ends. In that sense, the choice is not between Netanyahu and a dove. It is between continuing to manage an apparently permanent conflict and a government that might at least begin trying to move toward a possible peace.
But if Israelis conclude that Palestinians only understand force – which, by the way, Hamas clearly doesn’t – we’re guaranteeing a death spiral. Such a problem left to fester, without any attempt to change the dynamic, will blow up again and again. So after the election, if Netanyahu and his destructive right wing coalition are mercifully gone, this will need to be addressed in new and creative ways.
Both views of Oct. 7 rest on a foundation of facts. The invasion and massacre – and the widespread support for it among Palestinians – simultaneously dismantled both the Israeli left’s confidence in Palestinian intentions, and the Israeli right’s belief that the Palestinian problem could be indefinitely managed.
But it also proved that distrust is not a policy. Israel can build fences, destroy armies, assassinate commanders and punish those who attack it. What it cannot do is make millions of Palestinians disappear. If there is no political answer to that reality, eventually there will be another violent one.
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Country star Zach Bryan dons ‘Free Palestine’ shirt at Gillette Stadium
(JTA) — Zach Bryan, one of the world’s most popular country artists, appeared onstage wearing a shirt that read “Free Palestine” on Saturday night at Gillette Stadium outside Boston.
The venue was at the center of the dispute between stadium owner Robert Kraft and rapper Macklemore, who was blocked from performing there after Kraft objected to statements and imagery from an earlier stop on the tour and a “broader history” that Kraft characterized as antisemitic.
Representatives for Bryan and Kraft did not respond to requests for comment.
Bryan, whose biggest hits include “Something in the Orange” and his Kacey Musgraves duet, “I Remember Everything,” broke a stadium attendance record with 73,538 people on hand, the stadium said in an X post.
Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots, helped lead an effort by stadium owners to block Macklemore from performing at their venues as Ed Sheeran’s opening act. Sheeran tried to distance himself from the venue owners’ actions, but his backup band and other acts subsequently withdrew from the tour.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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