Author: yudelbenyehudapress-com

Erez Sherman

In December of 2025, I received a call from Loyola Marymount University, a Jesuit institution in Los Angeles, inviting me to teach a course entitled Ideas of Zionism.

For many years, I had spoken from the pulpit about the increasingly difficult climate faced by Jewish students who openly identified as Zionists on the college campus. Students shared firsthand accounts of hiding their Jewish stars. One student even asked whether he should omit his Jewish identity from his dental school application for fear of rejection.

In April of 2024, just over a mile from my synagogue, Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, helicopters hovered overhead as they monitored the UCLA encampments. Hundreds of students chanted slogans without understanding the geography of the river or the sea. Jewish students were barred entry into parts of campus. Days later, the Jewish community organized a rally that ultimately contributed to the removal of the encampments by local law enforcement.

While I could describe from the pulpit the physical and emotional dangers many students faced, the truth was that I had not experienced those realities myself.

That is why, when Loyola Marymount first approached me about teaching Ideas of Zionism, I politely declined.

What if uttering the word Zionism led to the cancellation of the course? Who might enroll in the course—not in pursuit of understanding, but in an effort to silence discussion of Zionism altogether?

Loyola Marymount University had not offered this class since before October 7, 2023, before the word encampment entered the academic lexicon, and before Israel and genocide were routinely uttered in the same sentence.

While I do not possess a PhD in Israel studies, I do possess rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, a Master of Hebrew Letters degree, and a profound love for Israel: the land, the people, and the state.

Bret Stephens, writing in the Sapir Journal, in his essay, “Israel Studies Can Redeem Academia,” observes

The answer to the problem of capture is to refuse to get captured. Perhaps that means recruiting people whose credentials don’t include the letters P, H, and D. Perhaps it means insisting that the purpose of an Israel studies program is scholarship, not advocacy.¹

With Bret Stephens’ inspiration, I refused to be captured. I answered the call to teach thirty college students the history, intricacies, nuances, failures, and beauty of Zionism.

On the first day of class, I placed four signs in the corners of the classroom. Each sign contained a different definition of “home.”

1. Home is the place where you were born.
2. Home is the place where you find spirituality.
3. Home is the place where you currently reside.
4. Home is the place of your people’s origin.

Students stood beside the definition that resonated most deeply with them. As they debated and defended their choices, deeper questions emerged. Can one have more than one home? Can there be both an individual and a collective sense of home? Can identity emerge from a synthesis of these categories?

The students began studying a passage from Yossi Klein Halevi’s Letters To My Palestinian Neighbor, exploring the tension between the need for a homeland and the longing for one. To what extent was Zionism a response to physical insecurity, anti-Semitic violence, and pogroms? To what extent was Zionism an enduring yearning for land, language, and culture regardless of the conditions of Jewish life elsewhere?

Not until the third class was Zionism defined as the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. A student raised his hand and asked, “What is problematic with that?” That moment revealed the essential truth that teachers must cultivate questions, trust, and an intellectual foundation before offering answers. Zionism must be taught patiently, deliberately, and textually, one layer at a time.

The dates 1948, 1967, 1973, and the names Yitzchak Rabin, Golda Meir, and Menachem Begin were unfamiliar to almost every student. Yet, terms such as apartheid, colonialism, and genocide could immediately evoke in them associations with Israel.

Over the next five months, using Gil Troy’s The Zionist Ideas textbook, students explored six schools of Zionist thought: labor, political, revisionist, religious, cultural, and diaspora. Troy organizes each movement into three historical phases: the pioneers of the late nineteenth century through statehood, the builders of the twentieth century, and the contemporary thinkers of today. His work updates Arthur Hertzberg’s 1959 book, The Zionist Idea by incorporating female Zionist thinkers such as Golda Meir, Rebettzin Esther Jungreis, and Ruth Wisse, while still omitting non-Jewish Zionist thinkers.

As the next chapter of Zionist thought is shaped, it is imperative that the conversation be broadened to include Zionist allies beyond the Jewish community: Evangelical Christian leaders such as Bishop Robert Stearns and Reverend Johnnie Moore, who so tirelessly advocated for every hostage to be brought home with the risk of putting their own careers in jeopardy; African-American community leaders such as Pastor Michael Fisher and Pastor Dumisani Washington who travel to Israel and preach the moral and spiritual significance of Zionism; Muslim voices from moderate Arab societies such as Loay Alshareef and Anila Ali; organizations such as Sharaka, whose members march alongside the Jews at March of The Living; and the BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha community, whose guru traveled to Israel in 1999 and placed a flower in the crevice of the Western Wall, praying that every prayer ever inserted there be answered.

The Zionist conversation must also recognize a new generation of Zionist heroes: released hostages such as Eli Sharabi and Omer Shem Tov, the brilliant writings of witness Rachel Goldberg-Polin, the thousands of NOVA musical festival massacre survivors, and the brave young men and women serving in the Israel Defense Forces who put their lives on hold to defend Jewish people worldwide.

The book of Zionist ideas is not complete. Each generation must contribute its own chapter.

It was only with a core foundation of Zionist thought that students could engage intellectually with current events that could not have been expected prior to the start of the semester.

What should the students make of the conversation between Tucker Carlson and Ambassador Mike Huckabee? How should the students understand LeBron James’ remarks during NBA All-Star weekend that he heard Israel was a “good country” and might one day wish to visit? How should the students understand the action of Javier Bardem wearing a red hand pin at the Oscars while shouting “Free Palestine” from the stage?

In a class called Zionist Ideas, reading text does not suffice. The students needed face-to-face conversation. Guest lecturers included Rabbi David Wolpe, IDF veterans, Christian Zionists, Gazans who had fled Hamas rule, Israeli AI experts, and Hollywood producers engaged in creating the genre of “October 7th” media that will shape how the next generation learns about that fateful day.

As the class dissected primary texts and grappled with the complexity of Zionism, they were forced to confront this question: Now that the Zionist project belongs to them, how will they become responsible stewards of it?

It may appear odd that a Conservative pulpit rabbi was chosen to teach this class. But given the strong historical connection of the Conservative Movement to Zionism, it makes perfect sense that Conservative rabbis throughout the United States should be teaching this class to Jews and non-Jews alike.

Why Conservative Rabbis?

To understand why Conservative rabbis are uniquely positioned for this work, it is important to unpack the teachings of the foundational thinkers of Conservative Judaism.

Their ideas are not Israeli government policies. Rather, they concern the relationship between Diaspora Jews and the Land and the State of Israel.

Solomon Schechter and Zionism

Naomi Cohen, in her essay “Diaspora Plus Palestine, Religion Plus Nationalism,” writes that Schechter once remarked, “Zionism was, and still is, the most cherished dream I was worthy of having.”² Theodor Herzl willed the dream into political reality, but Schechter believed the dream required continual spiritual, religious, and cultural renewal.

Born in mid-nineteenth-century Romania, Schechter came to America in 1902 to lead the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. His Zionism synthesized political, religious, and cultural Zionism. For Schechter, a Jewish state would combat assimilation, would plant a divine seed into the Jewish people, and inspire a renaissance of Judaism in America.

In his 1906 essay, “Zionism: A Statement,” Schechter argued that the anti-Semitic attacks he was witnessing were not new. Over a century later, Schechter’s words connect to the twenty-first-century Diaspora Jews, with the steep rise of violence Jews face daily. Jews are attacked in front of a synagogue in Los Angeles, Jews in England are stabbed getting off a bus, a synagogue in Michigan is attacked by a runaway car, and Jews are massacred on Bondi Beach.

Yet, there is one critical difference between Schechter’s era and today. Schechter dreamed of an Israel that he did not have. Today, Jews have an Israel that must be preserved and kept sacred, so that any Jew in danger will always have a home.

Schechter insisted Zionism encompass multiple interpretations.

For some it is a rebirth of national consciousness; to others, it is Jewish culture; and to yet others, it is a physical refuge for Jews to live safely. Each of these paths share one principle: a unified agreement that “Palestine, the land of our fathers, should be recovered with purpose of forming a home for at least a portion of the Jews, who would lead there an independent national life.”³

Schechter distinguished between Americanization and assimilation. To be an American was admirable: to understand American history and comprehend American literature. To become assimilated was tragic. We must not lose our Jewish dignity. Schechter teaches, “It is this kind of assimilation, with the terrible consequences indicated, that I dread most; even more than the pogroms.”⁴

In other words, the worst enemy of the Jew is too often the Jew himself.

One student in particular embodied Schechter’s warning. He admitted that when friends expressed anti-Israel views, he remained silent because, “they weren’t talking about me.” He could not recognize how anti-Zionist rhetoric was directed precisely at Jews like him.

Schechter’s warning had come to fruition a century later.

This student’s story did not end there. At the conclusion of the semester, after immersing himself in Zionist texts, he presented to the class how he now identified most with religious Zionism. He saw Israel as a place of spiritual resonance and he hoped to pursue Jewish leadership on campus. His study of Zionism became a rediscovery of Jewish identity itself.

For Schechter, Zionism must be as relevant to Jews who choose to live in Israel as to those who continually choose to live in exile, whether by choice or by necessity.

What will be the marker of Zionism’s success?

Schechter writes that the focus must be on not only what happens in Jerusalem or Zion but what will happen for Jerusalem or Zion.⁵ In other words, the Diaspora Jew cannot be disconnected from the religious connection of the land.

Today, even within the Conservative Movement, the younger generation is disconnecting from Israel in the same way Schechter warns against, separating Zionism from Judaism. Some Conservative synagogues refuse to recite the prayer for Israel, pulpits are no longer adorned with the Israeli flag, and rabbinical students protest the presence of Israel’s president at their own ordination ceremony at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

Conservative Jews must not waver from Conservative Judaism’s roots.

For the last decade, millennials who attended Camp Ramah and USY and Jewish day school now say they were misled. They proclaim the Zionism taught in Schechter day schools, on USY Shabbatons and in Camp Ramah is not the Zionism that matches their universal values.

Students today must ask themselves, What does a world without Israel look like?

A world where six million Eastern European Jews were marched to the slaughter house.

What does a world with Israel look like? A world where over 2 million Jews in Arab lands, in the former Soviet Union, and in Ethiopia travel to the promised land from homes where they were no longer welcome.

At the same time, Jewish sovereignty in Israel, with a functioning military and democratic parliament, begs a different question, posed brilliantly by Ambassador Michael Oren in his essay “Jews and the Challenge of Sovereignty:”⁶ What does the responsibility of power look like and entail?

Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion coined the term mamlachtiyut, the principle of how Jews must act in power of a sovereign state. Each step along the way, a Jew must ask if he is doing the moral thing, the right thing, and the Jewish thing.

Oren writes, “Our responsibility today is to prove to ourselves, and the world, that the phrase “Jewish state” is not in fact a contradiction in terms. We cannot simply rest on our laurels and promote the innovations of the stand-up nations, but we must also be able to claim that with our strength we have compassion.” ⁷

Moshe Hess, writing a few years before Schechter in his essay “Rome and Jerusalem,” describes the dishonorable Jew, not as the pious Jew with head bowed, but the Jew who is ashamed of his identity.⁸

Students today must walk through the world as Hess’ honorable Jew, with Schechter’s dream alive, and with Michael Oren’s ownership of responsibility that comes with the reality of fulfilling Herzl’s dream.

Heschel, Kaplan, and Ben-Gurion

The idealism of early Zionist thinkers must also be balanced against the realities of sustaining a sovereign Jewish state.

In his essay “Israel: An Echo of Eternity,” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel writes

What is the meaning of the State of Israel? Its sheer being is the message. The ultimate meaning of the State of Israel must be seen in terms of the vision of the prophets: the redemption of humanity. The religious duty of the Jew is to participate in the continuous process of redemption.⁹

How are Jews to participate in this continual redemption?

Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan offers an answer in “A New Zionism,” arguing that Zionism must “reconstitute our peoplehood, reclaim our ancient homeland and revitalize our Jewish way of life.”¹⁰

Kaplan’s three directives will lead to deep interpersonal relationships and fulfill our religious mission.

Despite their theological differences, Heschel and Kaplan converge on a critical point: Zionism must not sever the Diaspora from the Land of Israel. The opposite is true; reclaiming our homeland has the ability to revitalize Judaism everywhere, and bind together Jews across the globe.

Policies and politics must not be the disturbance that prohibits Jews from reclaim the ideals of Zionism.

That is what Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion articulated when he wrote Am Segula: Memoirs, in 1970, when Israel was only 22 years old.

What is Israel? It is two things: an Ark and a Covenant; in other words, a refuge and a dynamic. I think the dynamic, the covenant, takes precedence over the concept of refuge.¹¹

Israel cannot be a static geographic location. Israel cannot only be a place for Jews to hide from the antisemitism of the outside world. Israel must be active, always growing, challenging itself as a sovereign state described by Michael Oren while refusing to become the ghetto that Kaplan sought to avoid. A covenant is not only for the present moment; a covenant when acted upon correctly is everlasting, a relationship that is continually built upon.

Covenants appear throughout the biblical tradition: Noah and the rainbow, Shabbat as a sign between God and the Jewish people. That continual covenant begins with revelation at Mount Sinai.

Rabbi David Hartman emphasizes that covenant in his essay “Auschwitz or Sinai,” as he responds to the argument that the Holocaust is the reason behind the creation of the State of Israel.

It was not Hitler who brought us back to Zion, but rather belief in the eternal validity of the Sinai covenant….we will mourn forever because of the memory of Auschwitz. We will build a healthy new society because of the memory of Sinai.¹²

If Israel only lives in the state of victimhood, then the covenant cannot and will not be renewed. Living with the optimism that each Jew has a part in the renewed covenant allows the Jewish people, with all the disagreements that are part of the people, to strive for the dreams of Schechter, Kaplan, Herzl, and the myriad of Jews over time who could only have hoped for the challenges and opportunities that the Jewish world has been gifted today.

How do Conservative Jews participate in that covenant living across the ocean? How do Jews who are not citizens of the State of Israel—who do not serve in the Israeli Defense Forces, but as Diaspora Jews—feel a deep connection to building the covenant of tomorrow?

From 1985-1988, the Conservative Movement published Emet v’Emunah, Conservative Judaism’s foundational philosophy. Within this document, the leaders of the movement articulated a vision of mutual dependence between Israel and the Diaspora.

Both the State of Israel and the Diaspora have roles to fill: each can and must aid and enrich the other in every possible way; each needs the other. It is our fervent hope that Zion will indeed be the center of Torah and Jerusalem a beacon lighting the way for the Jewish people and for humanity.¹³

This cannot be more true than in Los Angeles, California, the city with the third largest Jewish population in the entire world.

For the last five years, Sinai Temple has participated in the ShinShinim program in partnership with the Jewish Agency. Israeli high school graduates come to Los Angeles, live with host families, and teach the community about Israeli culture, society, and Hebrew language. They plan Yom Ha’atzmaut festivals, teach in our religious school, and instill Zionist pride in Diaspora communities. They often arrive with no religious background, having rarely or not at all set foot in a synagogue sanctuary.

Without fail, Jewish Diaspora communities learn a great deal from the ShinShinim, and equally without fail, the shin shin returns to Israel with a deep understanding of Conservative Judaism, of an egalitarian expression of Judaism that still struggles to take hold in Israel. To witness the magic of the ShinShinim program is also to comprehend the critical mission to further cement the Israel-Diaspora relationship.

Similarly transformative was the winter of 2024, when Sinai Temple hosted teenagers from the Eshkol Regional Council on the Gaza border for a week of respite after October 7. These young men had been members of a basketball team that disbanded after their homes were destroyed and their families murdered or help captive.

Initially, the teens and their coaches were resistant to entering a synagogue until their host families dragged them through the door. When they felt the warmth from the community and witnessed the welcome they received, they concluded Shabbat tefillah with a rousing rendition of Am Yisrael Chai standing on the bima with arms wrapped around each other.

The following year, the teens returned to Los Angeles. Synagogue attendance was optional, and yet every teen chose to come to Shabbat services because of the prior year’s experience. This is the covenantal relationship that the Conservative movement must nurture. Diaspora Jews strengthen Israeli Judaism even as Israel depends on Diaspora Jewish identity.

As the semester of Ideas of Zionism at Loyola Marymount University concluded, the students were administered an oral exam. There were two questions:

1. What led you to take this class?
2. How do you connect with Zionism after learning about it?

Student after student remarked, “I barely knew the word Zionism existed before I entered this classroom.”

These courageous students were not afraid to say, “I don’t know.” After months of study, they now know how to know. They were given the opportunity to learn, to engage, to ask difficult questions, and to think.

At the end of the semester, these students could identify that Zionism manifests differently across communities and individuals. They recognized that a Jewish democratic state is pluralistic, filled with arguments, and still under one flag. They understood that whatever Zionism one holds as their own, the central principle stays the same: the right of the Jewish people to have self-determination in their ancient homeland.

The complexity and beauty of Zionism can be seen in the composition of the Prayer for the State of Israel, Avinu Shebashamyim. Chief Sephardic Rabbi Ben Zion Meir Chai Uriel, who was exiled to Damascus in 1917 and returned to Israel in 1920, worked with Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi to unite the two distinct communities. In September 1948, Israel was only 4 months old, but these two rabbis came together to compose this prayer now recited in congregations around the world. Its central phrase, reshit tzemichat ge’ulateinu, that Israel should be the beginning and flowering of redemption, rings true through each text of every Zionist thinker.

As Gil Troy notes, the irony that two very different rabbis wrote this prayer, edited by the novelist Samuel Yosef Agnon and printed in a secular newspaper, is the epitome of what defines the Jewish homeland. It represents the dreams of the past whose echoes are still heard, the covenant that is renewed each day, and ultimately the hope felt when Hatikvah is sung toward the blue and white flag.

Be More

At the recent Leffell Rabbinic Zionism Conference in March of 2026, Ahmed al Khatib addressed 150 Zionist diaspora rabbis.

Ahmed was born in Gaza and lost his hearing due to an Israeli air strike. He also lost more than 30 members of his family in Gaza after October 7. At the same time, Ahmed speaks courageously against Hamas rule and for the moral reform within Palestinian society.

In front of 150 rabbis, Ahmed was asked how the Jewish community can help him after he has done so much for them?

Without hesitation, Ahmed looked at this group of rabbis representing thousands in their respective communities, and gave the group two answers.

He said, “Be more Jewish….and be more Zionist.”

His words were sincere. He meant it in the deepest way, in that Zionism must be more than a blanket love of a geographic location. Zionism must be a moral responsibility.

The students at Loyola Marymount also had the opportunity to engage with a Gazan, Hamza Howidy. Hamza left Gaza before October 7, after he was threatened by Hamas when he protested in the “We Want To Live” movement.

Hamza was asked, “What is your view on Zionism?”

He responded, “I am not sure what type of Zionist I am or even if I am one at all. But I do know what Zionism has done for the Jewish people, and I hope my people will work toward that same goal in the way your people have done.”

Sometimes it takes an outsider to remind us of the blessings we ourselves take for granted.

How many Jews take the time to study their own history in a deep way? The answer is not enough. For if they did, they would have the same response as the students when they were asked to describe their feeling toward Zionism in one word at the end of the semester.

One young man quietly said, “Healing. In a world where my entire knowledge of Israel came from my phone with posts and reels, it was healing to sit in a room, to learn these ideas, to process the history, to look at the maps, to see the pictures, to have face to face conversations with people—Jews, Arabs, Christians, faith leaders, politicians, and citizens, that live this reality each and every day.”

Od lo avdah tikvateinu—the hope is not yet lost.

The Conservative Movement, and particularly the Conservative rabbinate, has a critical role to play in sustaining this covenant for future generations. Zionism must not only be taught in afternoon religious schools and Jewish day schools. Conservative rabbis must be the ones to enter the college campus, bringing their intellectual rigor, theological depth, historical honesty, deep understanding of Zionism’s intricacies, and an enduring love of Israel.

The Conservative Movement stands on a mighty foundation. Let those dreams of the past enable the dreams of tomorrow, so that the eternal covenant will never be shaken between the Jewish people and the people of Israel. Students on college campuses are thirsty for knowledge, for a connection to a land and a people they barely know thousands of miles away. The Conservative Movement can quench that thirst and engage today’s generation in the eternal living covenant.

Rabbi Erez Sherman is the Senior Rabbi, Sinai Temple, Los Angeles, CA. He directs the Flesh Family Sinai Temple Israel Center and founded the Sinai Temple Israel Center Rabbinical School Fellowship.

---

1. ¹ Bret Stephens, “Israel Studies Can Redeem Academia,” Sapir Journal 20, Aspiration (2026): 84.

2. ² Naomi W. Cohen, ‘‘ ‘Diaspora plus Palestine, Religion plus Nationalism’: The Seminary and Zionism, 1902-1948,” in Jack Wertheimer, ed., Tradition Renewed: A History of The Jewish Theological Seminary, vol. 2 (The Jewish Theological Seminary, 1997), 115-176.

3. ³ Solomon Schechter, “Zionism: A Statement.” Published in pamphlet form by the Federation of American Zionists, December 28, 1906. Reprinted in Mordecai Waxman, ed., Tradition and Change: The Development of Conservative Judaism (The Burning Bush Press, 1958), 457-466.

4. ⁴ Schechter.

5. ⁵ Schechter.

6. ⁶ Michael Oren, “Jews and the Challenge of Sovereignty,” in Gil Troy, ed., The Zionist Ideas (Jewish Publication Society, 2018), 334.

7. ⁷ Oren, “Jews and the Challenge Of Sovereignty,” 335.

8. ⁸ Moses Hess, “Rome and Jerusalem,” The Zionist Ideas, 247.

9. ⁹ Abraham Joshua Heschel, “Israel: An Echo of Eternity,” The Zionist Ideas, 247.

10. ¹⁰ Mordecai M. Kaplan, “A New Zionism,” The Zionist Ideas.

11. ¹¹ David Ben-Gurion, Am Segula: Memoirs, in Gil Troy, ed., The Zionist Ideas, 150.

12. ¹² David Hartman, “Auschwitz or Sinai,” The Zionist Ideas, 257.

13. ¹³ Commission on the Philosophy of Conservative Judaism, Emet Ve-Emunah: Statement of Principles of Conservative Judaism (The Rabbinical Assembly, 1988), quoted in The Zionist Ideas, 33.

Jessica S. Cooperman

The ultimate world organization will be one in which, not merely anti-Semitism and every type of group prejudice will be impossible, but the interest in the many types of people in the world will be directed toward their contributions to the common welfare. The external foe which may then unite them will be none other than the conquest of the forces of nature; the inner unity will be a vast ethical and religious agreement that all men are in a literal sense brothers.¹

Rabbi Lee Levinger closed his 1936 study, Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow, with the quote above in which he aspired not merely to conquer antisemitism once and for all, but to triumph over human prejudice and usher in a true sense of “brotherhood” among peoples. It was a bold aspiration at any time, but particularly in 1936, a little more than a decade since the United States had passed restrictive legislation designed to keep “undesirable” immigrants out of the country, the Ku Klux Klan marched openly through the streets of Washington DC, and only a year after Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of their citizenship. Levinger, however, understood fighting against antisemitism and promoting a belief in human unity as a profound part of his scholarly mission. He was keenly aware of these national and international events but continued to believe that victory over prejudice was possible. Throughout the interwar period, he worked to persuade his fellow Americans that antisemitism was a corrosive force that they could—and indeed must—root out to protect the future of democracy.

Levinger was not alone in this quest. As historian Lila Corwin Berman has shown, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Jewish communal leaders and academics worked to promote “brotherhood” and build bridges between Jews and other Americans. Rabbis invoked the spiritual mission of Judaism, while social scientists deployed the language of sociology and group dynamics; both strove to situate Jews within the American mainstream and to protect Jewish communal religious and cultural particularism.² Levinger is not often included within the ranks of rabbis and scholars who worked to change American perceptions of Jews during this period. He did not occupy a prominent pulpit; and while he earned a PhD in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1925, he did not manage to secure one of the few academic positions held by Jews in the early twentieth-century United States. But from the 1920s through the 1950s Lee Levinger wrote popular sociological studies and histories that advocated for Jewish belonging in American society.

Levinger is interesting, in part, because although his scholarship is not widely remembered, his work exemplified many early twentieth-century arguments against antisemitism and for Jewish inclusion in the United States. He spent most of his career working for Jewish communal organizations rather than in a university setting, but he had respectable academic credentials and, based on the number of reprints and editions offered, his books sold well. He offered readers solid accounts of Jewish history and of the contributions Jews made to American society. He crafted compelling analyses of the social dynamics, prejudices, and campaigns of misinformation that brought antisemitism to the United States. And throughout most of his career, he remained optimistic that if Christian Americans only knew more about their Jewish neighbors, and if only Jews could cast off some of their own insecurities and insularities, they could together uproot the underlying causes of antisemitism in America.

As we consider the 250th anniversary of the United States, it is clear that the position of Jews globally and within American society changed profoundly over the course of the twentieth century. Yet despite the many differences in political and economic power, and social acceptance experienced by American Jews in the 1930s and today, there is a great deal of contemporary resonance in Levinger’s proposed cures for prejudice and in the blind spots within his analysis. Levinger believed in equality and in democracy but was willing to make political and ideological compromises in connection with immigration restriction to fight the spread of antisemitism in the United States. He wrestled with perceptions of the Jewish settlement in Palestine, he called for Christian support in the fight against antisemitism, and he argued that academic advocacy could change the course of public opinion. Lee Levinger’s successful career and surprising neglect within the historical record offers a useful touchpoint for thinking about the ways that American Jews, and scholars of American Jewish history, have thought about, worried over, and responded to antisemitism over the past century.

A Jewish Chaplain in France

Lee Joseph Levinger was born in Burke, Idaho in 1890. His parents had immigrated from Germany just prior to his birth. They later moved to South Dakota where they set up a store, and family histories describe them as shopkeepers of modest means.³ Lee excelled in school and earned a scholarship to the University of Chicago where he met and became engaged to Elma Ehrlich.⁴ After completing his BA, Lee pursued a rabbinical degree at Hebrew Union College and completed an MA in sociology from the University of Cincinnati.⁵ In 1916 after receiving ordination as a Reform rabbi, he took a pulpit in Paducah, Kentucky and saved enough money to marry Elma and start a family. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Levinger went to work as a field representative for the Jewish Welfare Board, providing social and religious services at a Naval Station just north of Chicago. On July 4, 1918, he received a commission as a US military chaplain and became one of only twelve rabbis to serve in the Chaplains Corps with the WWI American Expeditionary Forces in France.⁶

Levinger’s military service shaped his understanding of American society and provided him with a vision of the United States’ future that animated the rest of his career.⁷ As a chaplain, his position required him to provide spiritual support to all American servicemen, regardless of religion. But as one of very few rabbis to receive a military commission, Levinger understood that part of his job was also to serve as an “ambassador” of Jews and Judaism within the overwhelmingly Christian American military. He described his experiences in a 1921 memoir, A Jewish Chaplain in France, in which he made it clear that he took both of these roles very seriously.

Working with Christian soldiers and colleagues of all denominations, Levinger saw himself as promoting possibilities for mutual respect and cooperation, not only in the military, but in the country to which he and other servicemen would return after the Armistice was signed. His memoir gives sober account of the months he spent in France during and immediately following the war. He wrote movingly of sitting at the side of dying and wounded soldiers, conducting services before and after battle, and of assisting wherever necessary during the sometimes stressful, sometimes tedious hours spent waiting for the next assault. But alongside these stories, Levinger drew out the broader lessons he believed all Americans needed to learn from their soldiers’ sacrifices and their country’s experience of the war in Europe.

The most important lesson was that Europe had nothing to teach America. Levinger admitted that the British “Tommies” had done fine work holding the line against the Germans but reported that American men had little in common with the British and found them impossible to relate to. Americans, he claimed, preferred the Australians for their bold spirits and lack of “old world” pretensions. Aussies, Levinger reported, were “like our men, young, hardy, dashing…. They had a type of discipline of their own, which included saluting their own officers when they wanted and never saluting British officers under any circumstances.” He took particular pride “in hearing about their commanding officer, General Sir John Monash, who held the highest rank of any Jew in the war;” and noted that “it was no little honor to be the commander of those magnificent troops from Australia.”⁸

While he found the British to embody the priggish and uptight sensibilities of the “old world,” Levinger felt something akin to pity for the French. He noted the crass behavior of American soldiers who mangled French words and “appropriated” French property but argued that French culture was so rigid and ossified that it could not help but lead to corruption. He mocked the young French men who could be bought off for an American cigar and lamented the abundance of French women who turned to prostitution, but he blamed the situation not on the devastation created by the war, but on what he saw as the French’s outmoded ideas about social interaction. In the United States, he wrote, soldiers’ welfare organizations organized dances and parties where even “the daughters of rich and cultivated families tended canteen or danced with soldiers,” assuring that the men could find appropriate female companionship. But in France, old fashioned “conception[s] of good breeding and of marriage combined to forbid any contact” between “French girls of good family” and American soldiers—thus depriving the men of opportunities for what he saw as appropriate encounters with women of high standards, and making, in his words, the “conspicuousness of the loose element” all the more apparent.⁹

To Levinger, it seemed that the problem behind all of these outmoded and unproductive ideas and social divisions was a lack of liberty, particularly of religious liberty. “C’est la liberté,” Levinger quoted a French priest sighing wistfully upon hearing that in the American military, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish chaplains worked in cooperation to support the troops. In France, Levinger argued, “religious liberty is based on hostility and intolerance of religion” and that “religion there has meant historically the domination of one religion and the curtailment of liberty.” By positioning religion as the antithesis of personal freedom, the French were either tied to rigid and old-fashioned ideas or left unmoored from the grounding force of religion. In considering French Jews, he found those interested in Judaism to be somewhat backward in their world view, while those “interested in the world to-day,” he claimed, “have little interest in Judaism.”¹⁰

The “old world” of Europe thus held little appeal for Levinger. It seemed to him that its dogmatic conceptions of religion bred either secular contempt for the spiritual or small-minded adherence to traditionalism. Its social structures were archaic and ran contrary to the needs of the moment. Levinger saw a new world unfolding in the wake of the war—a world defined by the hardy, dashing, independent spirit of young Australians and Americans. It was a world which, despite the carnage of battle, he perceived to be full of vitality and potential that, he believed, could not come from a European society which kept men, women, and members of different social classes or religious groups divided by old and unproductive prejudices.

In the United States Levinger saw the possibility of renewal and revitalization, interfaith cooperation, and the overcoming of old prejudices. It seemed to him that the war allowed men to simplify creeds and commandments, and to distill their beliefs down to their most basic and essential level. To the soldier, Levinger claimed, the three worst vices were cowardice, selfishness, and pride. The most noble virtues: courage, self-sacrifice, and modesty.¹¹ The soldier’s most deeply held conviction, Levinger wrote, was “first and foremost hope. He looked forward to better things both for himself and for the world. He had … the religious certainty that the future will witness the dawning of a better day.” The soldier, Levinger continued, “cared little for creeds of any kind…. The soldier needed religion,” Levinger wrote, “he wanted God; [but] he cared very little for churches, creeds or churchmen.”¹²

Far from feeling despair or frustration over the soldier’s disdain for the institutions of traditional religion, Levinger saw the soldier’s system of belief as holding out redemptive promise of a future in which the divisions of church and creed would be superseded by what the soldier demanded—deeds rather than words; authenticity instead of hypocrisy; respect for brave, modest, self-sacrificing men; and disdain for outdated social orders and conventions. Jews, Levinger argued, would fare well in this new world. In the army, he wrote:

…the Jewish soldier demands no defense and needs no tribute. His deeds are written large in the history of every unit in the AEF; they are preserved in the memory of his comrades of other races and faiths. He was one with all American soldiers, for in the service, men of every type and every previous standpoint were much alike… The Jew was an American soldier – that really covers the story.¹³

In Levinger’s assessment, the sacrifices of WWI had ushered in a new era of mutual respect and enhanced Jewish pride. The Jewish soldier’s comrades respected him; Jewish chaplains worked side by side with Christian chaplains; Judaism was integrated into the workings of the military; and so, the Jewish soldier came to respect himself. The war, Levinger believed, taught lessons about the value of mutual and self-respect, religious identity freed from overly punctilious attention to tradition, and a deeply held, shared commitment to democracy and the common good. These lessons served as the starting point for Levinger’s decades-long quest to stamp out antisemitism.

Antisemitism in America

In the years following the war, Levinger accepted a congregational position in Wilmington, Delaware, but scholarship remained his passion. He returned to school while serving his congregation and earned a PhD in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1925.¹⁴ In doing so, Levinger actively participated in what historian Lila Corwin Berman describes as the “social scientific turn” among American Jews. He joined other (predominantly Reform) rabbis and intellectuals who sought to promote understanding between Jews and other Americans by using social scientific principles “to craft a public language of Jewishness to communicate the relationship between Jews and the non-Jewish world in which they lived.”¹⁵ As a sociologist, Levinger returned to many of the ideas about the American character and future that animated his memoir but focused his attention on a problem that vexed him—the persistence of antisemitism in a modern American context that should, seemingly, have long left this old-world prejudice behind.

Levinger published his dissertation under the title Anti-Semitism in the United States: Its History and Causes. He opened the book by describing the existence of antisemitism in the US as a paradox: How was it possible, he asked, that “the most ancient and most pervasive form of intolerance is now at home in a nation founded by revolution and dedicated to the principles of freedom and tolerance?”¹⁶ How, even more pointedly, could it persist after the experiences of the world war? Levinger turned to the tools of early twentieth-century sociology to uncover answers. He engaged the relevant scholarly literature on group identity, discussing how it forms and how subgroups come to be perceived as threats to the dominant group; he laid out events in American history, including shifting patterns of migration, demographic and economic transitions, and the rise of nativist movements; and he turned in particular to the aftermath of WWI in search of both explanations and solutions.

Levinger argued that the experience of the war created both remarkable opportunities for overcoming prejudices, and unexpected pitfalls that led to their post-war resurgence. In the army, where contact between groups had depth and substance, he claimed that all forms of prejudice, including antisemitism, had been significantly reduced “simply because all the various elements in our people were acutely conscious of their common enemy. Old-time prejudices, left over from the Civil War, were forgotten. Religious and racial intolerance were minimized because there was a common purpose, and a common intolerance of a common enemy.”¹⁷

But on the homefront, he argued, prejudice had been only temporarily suppressed through a combination of patriotic sentiment and government policy which demanded unity and censored divisive voices. Levinger concluded that some of the many subgroups within American society resented this enforced consensus, while the contact created through coercion had failed to offer a sense of mutual understanding strong enough to last beyond the armistice. As a result, he argued, after the war, old hostilities resurfaced quickly, directing themselves with renewed force toward noticeable subgroups within American society: African Americans, immigrants, Catholics, and Jews.

This resurgence of prejudice and antisemitism was not, he argued, a necessary outcome of either the war or of government policy. While it derived in part from nativist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, whose anger against officially imposed claims of national unity burst forth in the postwar period and represented “a subgroup revolting against the voluntary sacrifices for the nation during the war,”¹⁸ Levinger believed that postwar antisemitism and prejudice derived primarily from the continued importation of European ideas. Through publications like the Dearborn Independent, he claimed race science had made its way to the American public, introducing ideas from Gobineau in France, and Marr in Germany, to Russian émigrés fleeing the revolution, to American writers like Madison Grant and to Henry Ford’s popular newspaper.¹⁹ He acknowledged that the infiltration of European prejudices was not sufficient to explain American antisemitism, but noted that “(t)he form of the prejudice was its importation…”²⁰ In Levinger’s analysis, Europe again emerged as an essential source of social corruption.

In his view, America remained full of redemptive potential. Rather than despairing of an apparent surge in anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic and antisemitic sentiment following the war and particularly in post-war immigration restrictions, Levinger urged American Jews to embrace the sense of pride and confidence embodied by the Jewish soldier. He described the need for American Jews to resist the tendency to retreat into their own communities and accept the “inferiority complex” or “oppression psychosis” that, he claimed, often developed among members of threatened subgroups.²¹ And perhaps breaking with the American Jewish organizations that argued against the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act imposing immigration quotas, or perhaps bowing to the political reality of the moment, Levinger also argued that American Jews should consider embracing the benefits of immigration restriction.²² He noted that over the previous 25 years, the majority of Jewish immigrants to the United States had come from “a belated civilization,” and that given the limitations of the Jew’s experience in places like “Poland or Ukrainia, or Rumania,” it was unsurprising that “his adjustment [to American society] is not always a correct one, still less the same adjustment as that of the standardized typical American.”²³ Writing in 1925, Levinger observed that it was too early to judge the full impact of the new immigration quotas, but argued that “it is obvious that [it] will alter the animus and nature of anti-Semitism… even though it will not… stop anti-Semitism completely.”²⁴

Levinger believed that if Americans could stop the flow of antisemitic ideas into the country and encourage American Jews to embrace a healthier sense of identity, then scholars like himself could demonstrate how through the “accumulation of knowledge and the advancement of reason,” humans could eventually overcome all unnecessary divisions and see themselves as inherently united.²⁵ He turned to the war for examples of how true contact with others could lead to moments of connection strong enough to overcome prejudices. He cited the examples of American soldiers who brought home German brides after the war and told a story about a “harmless peasant boy” named Hans who abandoned his machine gun and willingly surrendered to advancing American forces. Hans, Levinger claimed, quickly became seen as the person he truly was, a friendly presence at the first-aid post, rather than as the enemy soldier Americans would have perceived if he had stayed at his post.²⁶ For this contact to be effective, however, it required depth. Surface-level encounters between groups could, he cautioned, be counterproductive as “[p]rejudice is always strongest on the frontier.”²⁷ But while intolerance might, at times, seem like the natural condition of human society, tolerance, he argued, “is the typical virtue of the modern world because the modern world is becoming increasingly self-conscious, intelligent and individualistic, and especially because the modern world is beginning to afford opportunities for real acquaintance between members of different peoples.”²⁸ The path to overcoming intolerance, therefore, lay in creating sustained contact and understanding between groups which “often opens the way to real acquaintance before which intolerance grows faint and may even vanish.”²⁹

American Jews, he argued, thus needed to appreciate that they could not fight prejudice and antisemitism on their own. The only effective response was one that emphasized unity among all Americans: “[D]irect propaganda” against antisemitism by Jews, Levinger cautioned, “may have some influence, but only as propaganda, not as argument to refute arguments from the other side. The fact of difference is the primary fact on which anti-Semitism, like all other intolerances, is based. This can be transcended only by an inclusive loyalty and inclusive purpose in which both sub-groups lose their own purposes and consequently their opposition.”³⁰

The fight against antisemitism required active support and engagement by Christians, and this Levinger claimed was a natural expression of American democracy and modernity. “Defense of Jews by non-Jews,” he wrote, “is a notable phenomenon of modern times, associated with the general growth of tolerance.”³¹ He cited protests against antisemitism issued by distinguished American Christians, including Presidents Wilson and Taft, and William Cardinal O’Connell, who attested that, “The loyalty and patriotism of our fellow citizen of Jewish faith is equal to that of any part of our people and requires no defense at our hands…” Levinger took heart from these expressions of solidarity, and remained confident that as the country closed its doors to European ideas and immigrants, Americans would reject outdated and imported prejudice. “The future,” he asserted, “will mark that growing unity in diversity of the American group mind; the mounting beauty of its many-colored canvas, the increasing harmony of its many-throated symphony.”³²

A History of the Jews in the United States

Throughout the rest of his career, Levinger sought to build the sort of mutual understanding and connection that would encourage more Christian Americans to embrace the fight against antisemitism and prejudice. After completing his PhD, Levinger accepted a position as Hillel Director at Ohio State University, where he taught classes on Jewish philosophy, and he and Elma opened their home to students eager for conversation—and homemade dinners.³³ But he also turned again to scholarship to help Jews fight “oppression psychosis,” develop a sense of pride and confidence in their status as Americans, and to advance the cause of mutual understanding between Christians and Jews.

In 1928 Lee and Elma together published The Story of the Jew for Young People, a book intended primarily for Jewish youth who, the Levingers believed, needed sources for the sort of pride and self-respect required to take their place in American society. As they wrote together in the book’s introduction, “this work is an attempt to summarize the great events of Jewish history for young people of confirmation and post confirmation age… it is vital that the young Jew shall have some sense of this great living drama of which he himself is part.”³⁴ In 1930, Lee Levinger published another account of the Jewish past, this one entitled A History of the Jews in the United States.

Both books were well received accounts of Jewish experience. The Story of the Jew, published by Behrman’s Jewish Book House, went through seven printings between 1928 and 1933. A History of the Jews in the United States, published by the Department of Synagogue and School Extension of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, went through two printings in 1930 and 1931; the publisher released a revised edition in 1935. The books were structured as textbooks intended for educational settings and included questions for discussion at the end of each chapter. While The Story of the Jew emphasized Jewish pride, A History of the Jews in the United States was meant to be used in non-Jewish settings, particularly in high schools. In it, Levinger attempted to avoid the sort of overt propaganda that he warned had little hope of changing minds and instead hoped that through their study of Jewish history in the United States, young Americans might learn to understand and find real connection with their Jewish neighbors and compatriots. The book was intended as an introduction to Jews and Jewish practices that could help facilitate the sort of relationships through which understanding would be built and prejudice vanquished. As Emanuel Gamoran, Educational Director of the Department of Synagogue and School Extension, explained in his series editor’s introduction to the book,

… it is well accepted in recent educational theory that one of the fundamental aims of education should be to bring about an intelligent, sympathetic, yet critical understanding of the immediate environment of the child. In America, one would expect this to be reflected in the publication of many texts for children and young people on American Jewish History. This should especially be done because of the unique and in many respects remarkable part which the Jew has played in the upbuilding of America.³⁵

In his own introduction, Levinger states his goals in even stronger terms, writing:

When we read American history or study it in our schools, there is seldom much mention of the Jews. Thoughtless people might judge from this that the Jewish people have had little to do with the history of the United States, or that the Jews are newcomers who arrived after others had founded the nation and made it great. But this happens to be far from the fact. Jews have lived in the land that is now the United States of America long before it won its freedom; they have worked for it sacrificed for it and loved it at every period of its history.³⁶

In A History of the Jews in the United States, Levinger attempted to detail the deep involvement of Jewish people in the history of the United States and to anticipate and answer the sorts of questions his readers might have about Jews, the things they did, and what they believed. Chapters thus included discussions of where Jews came from; how Jewish communities grew alongside the growth of the United States; different waves of Jewish immigration; Jewish lodges and charitable organizations; demographic statistics; Jewish education; types of Judaism and Jewish practice; Jewish contributions to American war efforts; and prominent Jews in American history and contemporary society.³⁷ Levinger told readers about the role of the United States in protecting Jewish rights. In a chapter entitled “United States Champion of Jewish Rights,” Levinger argued that “From Washington to Roosevelt we have noticed official spokesmen of the American people giving voice to a friendly and just attitude toward the Jews…not only to Jewish citizens at home, but also to oppressed Jews abroad… [The United States] befriended the Jew in many instances because it was the friend and champion of the oppressed, because it stood for liberty of thought and speech in religious and civil affairs.”³⁸ Defense of Jews and of their rights, Levinger argued, was a reflection of American values. Jews were part of the fabric of American society, and the United States stood behind Jewish communities in the United States and abroad as part of its broader commitment to religious and personal liberty.

Despite the inherent commitment to liberty that Levinger ascribed to the country and its citizens, he reluctantly admitted that antisemitism had appeared, and persisted, on American shores. In this book, as in his earlier ones, Levinger blamed this on foreign influence. After the world war, he argued, race theory and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were brought to the US by European immigrants, including exiled Russian aristocrats.³⁹ Through these immigrants, dangerous and dishonest ideas about Jews spread through American society. But, he reassured readers,

…[a]s we might expect in a land of freedom and liberalism, the anti-Semitic movement was taken up…only by certain groups, largely the ignorant, bigoted people who lived in small towns… and those who hated any strangers….The great majority of Americans were too fair and too intelligent to believe these accusations or join these societies of opposition.⁴⁰

Levinger’s disdain for small-town Americans might be surprising given his own origins, but perhaps even more surprising was his ongoing support for immigration restriction as a means of controlling the spread of antisemitism. While histories of Jewish life in this period often showcase the work of Jews who fought against the imposition of strict new quotas, Levinger argued that bringing in fewer foreigners would mean importing fewer corrupting foreign ideas.⁴¹ And perhaps more importantly, by slowing the pace of Jewish immigration, American Jews could assure that newer immigrants would more thoroughly adapt to their new circumstances, while those already established would be able to develop the communal foundations necessary to finally bring Jews entirely into the American mainstream. In a chapter entitled “What the Future Holds for the Jew in America,” Levinger defended the benefits of immigration restriction, arguing:

… foreign ideas, foreign scholarship, foreign ambitions will not be entering as they did with each successive wave of immigration… There will be more time for Jews to take stock of themselves, to solidify the progress made so far, to decide for themselves what the next step is to be. They will not be hurried into action, as they have been before, by the pressure of masses of needy immigrants or by the overwhelming need of their brothers in foreign lands… those in the United States particularly will have a breathing space for development of their own ideas from within.⁴²

With no new immigrants coming in, Levinger claimed that the “antis” would have nothing to rail against, and Christian Americans would naturally come to embrace the causes of liberty, tolerance, and brotherhood. Without new immigrants arriving, Levinger assured his readers in 1930 and again in the second printing in 1931, “Anti-Semitism is rapidly declining again in America after its one serious outbreak. The American people as a whole will have none of it… anti-Semitism cannot be a permanent movement in the United States.”⁴³

By the time the revised edition of the book was released in 1935, however, Levinger had become somewhat more somber about the influence of antisemitism in the United States. In an appendix to the new edition, Levinger wrestled with the ascendancy of Nazism in Germany and its appeal among Americans. In spite of his best efforts to help the country live up to the lessons of WWI, he wrote:

The revival of anti-Semitism so soon after the previous movement means that our opinion … that anti-Semitism cannot be a permanent movement in the United States, was much too optimistic… The Jews are not safe even in America so long as misery and ignorance prevail. Even in a land where equality is the law and the tradition, that equality can rest safely only on the happiness and comfort of the people as a whole. Depressions, wars, and the imported propaganda from foreign lands are a danger to America, and especially to the American Jew.⁴⁴

Antisemitism, Yesterday and Tomorrow

Like many American Jews, Levinger watched the events unfolding in Nazi Germany with a sense of dread; but he did not abandon his conviction that through scholarship and careful explanation, he could overcome prejudice and help Jewish and Christian Americans live up to their true potential. In 1936 Levinger took up the fight again with a new study, Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow. Levinger stuck with the themes and sociological approach that animated his earlier work on antisemitism but this book, published by Macmillan Press, was clearly intended for a wider audience. Accordingly, Levinger expanded his analysis of the history and causes of antisemitism into a study intended to edify the American public about the threat that antisemitism posed to the very foundations of democracy. Levinger traced the history of antisemitism from the ancient world, through the Middle Ages, to what he saw as its peak in Nazi Germany. He warned his audience that “America is the last country in the world where we would look for anti-Semitism. It is, as a matter of fact, the latest if not the last, country where anti-Semitism has finally taken root.”⁴⁵

Levinger argued that American society had long possessed an antipathy toward distinctive subgroups, insisting on the right to individual liberty but rejecting the persistence of “group life.”⁴⁶ This tendency, he argued, had propelled earlier waves of anti-immigrant sentiment, particularly against Catholics who were subjected to violence, discrimination, and false claims that adherence to Catholicism was antithetical to being a good American. However, antisemitism in the 1930s, he argued, drew its strength from multiple forces:

The current anti-Jewish movement in the United States began about 1931, and now, in 1936, shows few signs of weakening. It contains three elements which deserve mention: the German propaganda in America, the nativist revival, and the growing economic difficulties of the American Jew. The German element in this movement is a direct and natural result of the Nazi regime in Germany.⁴⁷

Levinger still blamed the importation of European racial theories for much antisemitism but highlighted the efforts of Nazi representatives and their American sympathizers for fomenting unrest in the United States. Drawing perhaps upon research done in his new position as Director of the Research Bureau of the B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundations, he described quota systems designed to keep Jews out of elite colleges, and restrictions on entrance to professional schools and organizations as a disruption to healthy Jewish integration into American society. He warned that “the normal distribution and normal income of the Jews, which was slowly developing, will be endangered,” leading to “an unhealthy crowding into a few types of work.”⁴⁸

Levinger did, however, begin to back away from his earlier optimism that the immigration restriction might solve the problem of antisemitism. In this book he argued that, if immigration quotas worked to quash antisemitic sentiment, one might expect to see improvement in the attitudes of Americans. But instead, although the number of immigrants entering the United States had already been drastically reduced, anti-immigrant and antisemitic sentiment persisted.⁴⁹

Levinger also expanded the scope of his study to include consideration of the Jewish settlement in Palestine. While recounting the history of anti-Jewish violence globally, Levinger paused to note that “One more incident of an anti-Jewish nature must be mentioned here,” although he argued that it was “entirely different in essence from anything else in this long and dreary tale of a people’s sorrows.”⁵⁰ He gave a short account of 1923 and 1929 Arab violence against the growing numbers of Jews arriving in Palestine to build a Jewish national home, but invoked both orientalist visions of Arab culture and sympathy with their resistance to British colonialism, arguing that

… there is no anti-Semitism in Palestine. The real crux of the situation there is the British Mandatory and the attempts of the Arabs to win complete freedom. The Jews were attacked, partly because they are symbols and beneficiaries of British rule, but even more because they represent an alien civilization, the culture of the West come to invade an Oriental land…. The Jew is thus again the scapegoat, this time as a pioneer of Occidental culture in the half-awakened immemorial East.⁵¹

Most central to his argument and his quest to root out prejudice in the United States, Levinger warned his readers that all Americans should be concerned about the effects of antisemitism. For Jews, even in cases where antisemitism did not lead to violence, it was likely to create a sense of internal communal cohesion and insularity that might feel reassuring but would ultimately lead to “oppression psychosis.” The resulting inferiority complex, Levinger cautioned, “may lead to extreme doubting and fear…. Or it may lead to suspicion, aggressiveness, what the Freudian school calls ‘overcompensation….’” which would ultimately prove disastrous. As proof, he quoted early twentieth-century sociologist Herbert A. Miller, who opined, “The method by which the Jew has had to survive is the method which makes his survival so often offensive to those among whom he lives…. He is a manifestation of the psychological result of the kind of oppression which has become psychopathic.”⁵² And while the antisemite might escape this form of psychopathy, Levinger warned that the “fascist ideal of uniformity” was dangerous for the majority as well as the minority, for “oppression is itself immoral and introduces a principle of immorality into the national life…. People are turned into things, tools for the use of the ruler or the governing class. Instead of serving the people, the ruler makes the people serve him or serve some vague national ideal, such as expansion of war, which may even be immoral in itself.”⁵³

Despite—or perhaps because of—the dangers Levinger saw in allowing antisemitism to persist, he remained convinced that in the United States, it could still be overcome. “As the causes of anti-Semitism, and of all race hatred, lie in environment rather than in heredity,” he insisted, “they can be cured.”⁵⁴ He praised the work done by Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and the B’nai B’rith to find this cure, particularly the ADL’s call to “eliminate horrible portrayals of the Jew” in school textbooks, in children’s books, and in popular media, and agreed that “ignorance concerning the Jew on the part of the public must be dispelled with true information.” But Levinger also reminded his readers that Jews alone could never “cure” antisemitism, as “The real causes are beyond the reach of the Jews themselves.”⁵⁵ The remedy could only be found in brotherhood and the efforts of Christian supporters.

Mr. Smith, Meet Mr. Cohen

While Levinger’s aspirations remained consistent, the atmosphere in which he wrote began to change as the threat of Nazism grew larger. At the end of Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow, Levinger noted with satisfaction that while Jews had found liberal-minded Christian defenders in earlier periods, several new books promoting better relations between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews had recently been published, and the National Conference of Jews and Christians was “conducting seminars, publishing literature, working through churches, synagogues and civic groups, in the effort to induce people to think clearly and fairly on problems of the relationship of Jews, Catholics, and Protestants.”⁵⁶ Scholar Alan M. Shore, writing about the history of Jewish-Christian relations in the mid-twentieth century, noted the same phenomenon, although with a more comprehensive explanation than Levinger was able to offer from his vantage point in 1936. “The rise of Hitler,” Shore argues, “triggered a response among elements of Jewish and Christian communities that broadened and reconfigured the scope of their relations, leading to a new foundation for mutual recognition.”⁵⁷

In 1940 Levinger made another foray in his ongoing fight against antisemitism, publishing Mr. Smith, Meet Mr. Cohen, which he co-wrote with James Waterman Wise, son of Rabbi Stephen Wise and an author who had long warned about the dangers of Nazism.⁵⁸ The authors explained that they embarked on this book project in order to “clarify and correct” the “ugly coldness” that had appeared between Jews and their Christian neighbors in recent years. To do so, they set out to introduce “Mr. Smith,” the average American Christian, to the culture and religious practices of “Mr. Cohen,” the average American Jew.

The book retraces much of the ground that Levinger had covered in his History of the Jews in the United States, although with less detail and in a more approachable tone. The authors’ goal was to pave the way toward a future in which Christian and Jew rose above their differences and embraced each other as friends and fellow American citizens. Or, as they wrote, “We know American Jews and believe that we can make them better known to their gentile neighbors – better known, and perhaps better liked by these neighbors.”⁵⁹ Ultimately however, as Alan Shore’s research suggests, the German threat and return of global war may have been more effective than scholarship at advancing the cause of brotherhood and making Americans interested in learning more about their Jewish neighbors.⁶⁰

As the war drew close to an end in 1944, the publisher reissued A History of the Jews in the United States, and revised editions were released again in 1949 and 1959. In the chapters Levinger added since the first edition in 1930, he conceded that his earlier enthusiasm for immigration restrictions had been misplaced. Describing the interwar growth of nativism, he acknowledged that “More disastrous for the Jews than all the anti-Semitic organizations were the new laws enacted to limit immigration in 1921, 1924 and finally in 1929.”⁶¹ It was these laws, he lamented, that made it impossible for European Jews to escape Nazism by coming to the United States, and left American Jews powerless to rescue friends and family from the Holocaust.

But while Nazism spread unprecedented disaster in its wake, Levinger argued that this war had finally awakened Americans from the grip of imported antisemitic propaganda. Ever optimistic, he explained, “we have seen how the Nazi program included bitter attacks on the American Jews, as well as on all Jewry. When the United States declared war on Germany all such direct propaganda had to stop. The great majority of Americans then came to realize the real nature of this German anti-Semitism, that it had always been a part of the fascist attack on our democratic institutions.”⁶² Americans may have failed to remember the lessons of WWI, but Levinger seemed assured that the lessons of WWII would never fade: All Americans now knew that “Anti-Semitism does not really belong in America,”⁶³ and American Jews, finally free of their sense of inferiority, had come to realize that “Only under a real democracy will the Jew have an equal chance …. So Jewish organizations have become more aggressive in fighting for democracy, for rights for the Negro, for the rights of labor and for expansion of immigration. To be a good Jew it is necessary also to be a good citizen.”⁶⁴

Lee Levinger passed away in 1966, a few years after Elma. By the time of his death, the United States had, at least rhetorically, accepted many of the ideals to which he aspired. But while scholars continue to explore the post-war period’s fight against antisemitism and embrace of Judeo-Christian brotherhood, Levinger’s work has largely been ignored.⁶⁵ As Jewish intellectuals and communal leaders wrestle with how to address fears of antisemitism today, it is therefore striking to hear new calls for the type of scholarship against antisemitism that Levinger wrote in the 1920s and 1930s. And it is equally striking to note how many of the issues that animated Levinger’s battle with antisemitism—government suppression of dissent, the relationship between antisemitism and prejudice and threats to democracy, Zionism, and immigration restrictions—resonate with our current moment. Why then has Levinger himself been forgotten? Perhaps it is because by the second half of the twentieth century, his work and his fight against antisemitism seemed outmoded. Or perhaps it was because he failed to appreciate the extent to which external forces, like wars and government policies, or Christian self-perception in the aftermath of Nazism, rather than scholarship on Jewish history, ultimately set the tone for American discussions of antisemitism. Certainly, reflecting on Levinger’s quest to root out antisemitism and push American society toward a better future forces us to think about the extent to which scholars, even successful ones, truly shape public opinion, and it reminds us of the blind spots and limits of scholarship as a tool of social change.

Jessica S. Cooperman, PhD is the Doris and Simon Konover Chair in Judaic Studies and Director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life at the University of Connecticut.

---

1. ¹ Lee J. Levinger, Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow (The Macmillan Company, 1936), 322-323.

2. ² See Lila Corwin Berman, Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Jewish Public Identity (University of California Press, 2009).

3. ³ Leah Levinger, “Family History,” Jewish History of Columbus and Franklin County, Archives-Library Ohio Historical Society, June 21, 1974; Bud Levinger, “Information about the Levinger Family Coming to the Country from Germany,” undated; and Charles and Leta Levinger, “Levinger Family Story,” undated. Collection of the author.

4. ⁴ Elma became a well-known writer, editor, educator, and speaker in her own right. She and Lee published two books together, but she also published many plays, poems, histories, and curricula on her own. For more information on Elma’s career, see The Jewish Women’s Archive: Elma Ehrlich Levinger | Jewish Women’s Archive, and Leah Levinger, “Family History.”

5. ⁵ Leah Levinger, “Family History,” 4.

6. ⁶ Lee J. Levinger, A Jewish Chaplain in France (The Macmillan Company, 1921), 10.

7. ⁷ Although it did not make him an enthusiastic supporter of military force. His daughter Leah described him as a committed pacifist later in life. See Leah Levinger, “Family History,” 22.

8. ⁸ Levinger, A Jewish Chaplain, 41-42.

9. ⁹ Levinger, A Jewish Chaplain, 176.

10. ¹⁰ Levinger, A Jewish Chaplain, 143.

11. ¹¹ Levinger, A Jewish Chaplain, 146.

12. ¹² Levinger, A Jewish Chaplain, 148-149.

13. ¹³ Levinger, A Jewish Chaplain, 114.

14. ¹⁴ Leah Levinger, 20-21.

15. ¹⁵ Corwin Berman, Speaking of Jews, 8.

16. ¹⁶ Lee J. Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the United States: Its History and Causes (Bloch Publishing Co., 1925), 9.

17. ¹⁷ Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the United States, 53.

18. ¹⁸ Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the United States, 76.

19. ¹⁹ Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the United States, 85-95.

20. ²⁰ Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the United States, 86.

21. ²¹ Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the United States, 102-104.

22. ²² On the American Jewish Committee’s fight against immigration restriction, see for example, MM Silver, Louis Marshall and the Rise of Jewish Ethnicity in America (Syracuse University Press, 2013), 222-245.

23. ²³ Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the United States, 94-95.

24. ²⁴ Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the United States, 95.

25. ²⁵ Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the United States, 32-44.

26. ²⁶ Levinger, it is worth noting, spoke German fluently, so his relationship with “Hans” may not have been the same as that of other American servicemen.

27. ²⁷ Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the United States, 50.

28. ²⁸ Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the United States, 53.

29. ²⁹ Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the United States, 50.

30. ³⁰ Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the United States, 101.

31. ³¹ Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the United States, 96.

32. ³² Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the United States, 118.

33. ³³ Leah Levinger, 13.

34. ³⁴ Elma Ehrlich Levinger and Lee J. Levinger, The Story of the Jew for Young People (Behrman’s Jewish Book House, 1933), ix. The Preface to the second edition notes that “the first edition was exhausted within a month. It was introduced in many schools throughout the country…”

35. ³⁵ Editor’s Introduction to Lee J. Levinger, A History of the Jews in the United States, 2nd ed. (Department of Synagogue and School Extension of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1935), vii.

36. ³⁶ Levinger, A History of the Jews in the United States, 3.

37. ³⁷ Levinger, A History of the Jews in the United States, xi-xvi.

38. ³⁸ Levinger, A History of the Jews in the United States, 322.

39. ³⁹ Levinger, A History of the Jews in the United States, 361-63.

40. ⁴⁰ Levinger, A History of the Jews in the United States, 367.

41. ⁴¹ See for example, Libby Garland, After They Closed the Gates: Jewish Illegal Immigration to the United States, 1921-1965 (Oxford University Press, 2014); Hannah Greene, “Stuck in the Middle With(out) You: How American Immigration Law Trapped ‘Defective’ Immigrants Between Two Worlds,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 14, no. 2 (2023); and Greene, “Defective Classifications,” American Jewish History 108, no. 1 (2024). For a history of immigration to the United States, see Hasia Diner and Carl Bon Tempo, Immigration: An American History (Yale University Press, 2022).

42. ⁴² Levinger, A History of the Jews in the United States, 526.

43. ⁴³ Levinger, A History of the Jews in the United States, 372.

44. ⁴⁴ Levinger, A History of the Jews in the United States, 540.

45. ⁴⁵ Lee J. Levinger, Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow (The Macmillan Company, 1936), xxx.

46. ⁴⁶ Levinger, Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow, 127.

47. ⁴⁷ Levinger, Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow, 138.

48. ⁴⁸ In 1937, under the auspices of the Research Bureau of the B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundations, Levinger published a study entitled “The Jewish Student in America.” In 1938 he published another on “Professional Opportunities for Jewish Youth.” The quote is from Levinger, Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow, 142-143.

49. ⁴⁹ Levinger, Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow, 132.

50. ⁵⁰ Levinger, Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow, 106.

51. ⁵¹ Levinger, Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow, 107.

52. ⁵² Levinger, Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow, 291.

53. ⁵³ Levinger, Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow, 286-287.

54. ⁵⁴ Levinger, Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow, 300.

55. ⁵⁵ Levinger, Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow, 304-307.

56. ⁵⁶ Levinger, Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow, 311-312.

57. ⁵⁷ Alan M. Shore, Uncommon Allies: American Jews and Christians Uniting Against Hitler, 1933-1945 (Syracuse University Press, 2024), 5.

58. ⁵⁸ For an obituary of Wise, see “James W. Wise, 81; Author and Lecturer Warned of the Nazis,” New York Times, Nov. 30, 1983.

59. ⁵⁹ James Waterman Wise and Lee J. Levinger, Mr. Smith, Meet Mr. Cohen (Reynal & Hitchcock, 1940), ix.

60. ⁶⁰ Other scholars have also argued for the importance of WWII in advancing ideas about Jewish-Christian “brotherhood.” See for example, Deborah Dash Moore, GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation (Belknap Press, 2006); Thomas Bruscino, A Nation Forged in War (University of Tennessee Press, 2010); and Ronit Stahl, Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2017).

61. ⁶¹ Levinger, A History of the Jews in the United States (1959), 363.

62. ⁶² Wise and Levinger, Mr. Smith, Meet Mr. Cohen, 395.

63. ⁶³ Wise and Levinger, Mr. Smith, Meet Mr. Cohen, 397.

64. ⁶⁴ Wise and Levinger, Mr. Smith, Meet Mr. Cohen, 398.

65. ⁶⁵ On the fight against antisemitism and the embrace of Judeo-Christian brotherhood in the post-war period, see for example, K. Healan Gaston, Imagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy (Chicago, 2019); Rachel Gordan, Postwar Stories: How Books Made Judaism American (Oxford University Press, 2024); and Stuart Svonkin, Jews Against Prejudice (Columbia University Press, 1997).

Nicole Guzik

It should have served as a warning. When I began as a senior rabbi of a large congregation in 2023, retired members echoed the same message: this is the hardest time in Jewish history to be a religious leader. I laughed it off. The hardest time? Look at the clergy who served during the Shoah. Or consider the clergy who led efforts on behalf of civil rights and/or Soviet Jewry. As the Conservative Movement navigated fundamental halakhic changes—driving on Shabbat, the inclusion of women in liturgy and clergy positions, the acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community in officiating marriages and clergy roles—each of those shifts demanded courage, wisdom, and willing voices to make a difference. How could my own rabbinate come close to what my esteemed predecessors faced head-on?

I am hopeful this article will serve as a map for future clergy and laity, identifying a few of the major challenges current clergy members meet. These challenges have contributed to what I am calling the clergy mental health crisis in a post-COVID-19 era. Perhaps by naming the issues, understanding their mental and emotional impact, and offering some guidance, Jewish clergy and congregations will have a better understanding of what we (clergy serving onward from 2020) undertake daily and how to best address mental health challenges for ourselves and our laity.

In 2025, Atra: Center for Rabbinic Innovation developed a study to identify the causes of a crashing rabbinic pipeline. While 97 percent of the rabbis interviewed found their work immensely rewarding, more than 450 “would-be” rabbis turned away from the rabbinate as a career choice, fearing particular deterrents.1

Practical training, financial constraints, and geographical restraints were itemized as barriers, but burnout was identified as the “silent emergency shaping the present and future of the rabbinate.”2 I posit that the last six years have caused this silent emergency and should be addressed from the angles of mental and emotional health.

I am not alone in my analysis. In 2023, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a health advisory, and public statement entitled Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.3 Murthy explains that there are three vital components of social connection: structure, function, and quality. Structure refers to the frequency, variety, and number of our relationships. Function explains the purpose of the relationship and the type of support it provides. Quality determines the positive or negative impact on our lives. There has been a sharp decline in all social connections; from family engagement and companionship to non-household social engagement, people are spending less time with each other. According to the report, in 2020 only 47 percent of Americans claimed membership in a church, synagogue, or mosque—a dip below 50 percent and the first time the figure had reached that point since the question was first posed in survey form. While the percentage of faith-institution membership may be slightly higher in the wake of October 7, clergy are not immune from their own state of loneliness and disconnection, nor from vicariously feeling the pains of congregants suffering from chronic isolation. Murthy recommends that faith-based organizations provide more opportunities for in-person, safe, inclusive gatherings. His final recommendation is that healthy social connection should be modeled by those leading by example. The recommendation seems innocuous: faith leaders should provide more information about social connections, increase the frequency of social connections, and model healthy connections. In other words, faith leaders should create a community center that provides mental health awareness on top of pastoral support, Sabbath and holiday worship services, life-cycle officiating, fundraising guidance, and leadership training. To help provide an antidote to loneliness and isolation for others, faith leaders should become therapists and social-event planners alongside theological experts. Not impossible. But certainly daunting. Crushing, even. Who has the capacity to do it all?

And yet, many clergy have taken on these challenges—willingly and unwillingly. I found a second calling in returning to school in 2019 to train as a marriage and family therapist. This was not in response to the mental health challenges clergy are facing; it just happened that I went back to school at the most fortuitous time. Who knew that a worldwide pandemic would hit in 2020? My degree and my experience at the Maple Center, a sliding-scale therapeutic practice, opened my eyes to the severity of mental illness plaguing our greater community. My clients sat behind screens; due to COVID-19, I never met my clients in person. We discussed everything from fear of COVID to depression, OCD, anxiety, couple distress, family dysfunction, and attachment issues. General loneliness, distraction, and chronic mental paralysis pervaded each conversation. I found myself seeing similar themes within the congregation. We officiated funerals and b’nai mitzvah over Zoom. Imagine trying to comfort the bereaved as I sit behind a screen and as they hold a shovel, placing earth upon a grave. Or offering a mazel tov when the volume is barely working. The uncertainty over when the isolation would cease felt devastating and debilitating. As clergy and therapists, we try to give our clients and congregants hope—to help them find sources of resilience and to have faith in a brighter tomorrow. During COVID, we tried to see clients more often to meet their needs. We created more Zoom content to keep congregants connected. In response to the uptick of unplanned work, the physical and emotional well-being of clergy members plummeted.

The adrenaline of the COVID years lasted only so long. Now, as we walk through a post-COVID world, the toll has not been reduced. When and how have clergy members processed what the COVID years have done to our mental health? I am inclined to think that while some may be in therapy, most members of the clergy have done very little to repair the emotional wear COVID caused. It is highly doubtful that congregations or other Jewish institutions have invested time and resources for clergy to receive the kind of necessary mental support to navigate the vicarious trauma we have experienced. As we will discuss, the byproducts of COVID—telehealth, a greater reliance on social media, and AI—have added more stressors to our system. While COVID may have slowed our social calendars, to reconnect, synagogue programming calendars are now overflowing. Clergy leaders are tired. We cannot professionally or personally keep up with the demands that Murthy explains are necessary for a lonely nation to heal.

What does burnout look like? American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger defines burnout as a “combination of feeling emotionally exhausted, being drained of compassion towards others, and believing nothing you do makes a difference.”4 Burnout may also come from a sense of comparison. How does the scarcity of resources cause clergy to feel inadequate in what they provide for their parishioners? The ordained priest Callie Swanlund explains, “Both scarcity and comparison seem to reinforce we aren’t good enough, smart enough, attractive enough, wealthy enough, or successful enough, and that we’re somehow deserving of our not-enoughness.”5 In 2008, “8.7% of clergy, compared to 5.5% of US adults, qualified for moderate depression or higher.”6 That statistic was based on a survey of United Methodist Church clergy who identified expectations regarding availability, membership, finances, and congregational evaluation as among the highest stressors of the profession.7 The overlaps with Jewish clergy resonate deeply. The percentages surveyed in 2008, however, do not capture what has emerged in the last six years. While anxiety and depression rates have increased generally—and especially through the COVID years—research points to a person’s prior mental health well-being as the strongest indicator of how a clergy member fared during the global pandemic.

In the Jewish community, COVID is just the beginning. When Jewish clergy evaluate the ongoing forces shaping their mental well-being, the relevant subjects include October 7 and antisemitism, political polarization, and the age of social media. The remainder of this article will explore the psychological impact of each subject and offer some humble recommendations toward a healthier body of Jewish clergy.

October 7 and Antisemitism

My husband and I were installed as senior rabbis of Sinai Temple in 2023—more specifically, October 2023, two weeks after the hideous, tragic, and hateful events of October 7. While hundreds of Israelis were being slaughtered, we watched in horror as hundreds more were taken captive by Hamas, hidden in the torture tunnels of Gaza. The nightmare was just beginning to unfold: a war in Gaza, IDF soldiers dying day and night, congregants wondering what they could do, congregants asking how they could help. Overnight, synagogues became war operations zones—providing supplies to IDF units, raising money for ambulances, and offering Zoom and in-person education programs to keep up to date on the latest developments in Israel.

As the war continues, Jewish clergy have struggled to meet the demands of Israel’s needs while also satiating congregants’ desires to be useful. Moreover, as discussed in the next section, diverse opinions about the war in Gaza, the Israeli government, and Zionism have impacted Jewish clergy members’ emotional and mental state. From feeling conflicted in their own opinions to struggling to hold space for varied opinions within their congregations, it is no wonder clergy have felt a greater sense of burnout.

Dr. Rotem Regev explores a qualitative study focused on the mental health of Canadian Jewish mental health clinicians after October 7.8 She found an uptick in the needs of Jewish clients, while Jewish clinicians were faced with helping their clients even as they navigated similar feelings and emotions themselves. The navigation included fear in the workplace, losing a sense of belonging, worrying about family and friends in Israel, and a reopening of intergenerational trauma. Jews witnessing October 7—especially the vivid images on social media—were reminded of trauma experienced through the Iranian Revolution and the Holocaust. Regev explains that Jewish clinicians “described struggling to focus during sessions, crying between clients, feeling emotionally ‘flooded’ by the material they were hearing, and experiencing vivid reactivation of personal or intergenerational trauma narratives.” While clergy and clinicians differ in their scope of work, the vicarious trauma and countertransference they experience are similar. How many clergy members sat with congregants after October 7, attempting to comfort and embrace, and found themselves later numb or rooted on the couch? Or perhaps the clergy person found themselves emotionally and physically depleted, checking their phone for updates on their own family members while also facing competing priorities like funerals and hospital visits.

Another study came out of Northern California, in which Jews’ mental health was studied before and after October 7.9 The study is clear: stress, anxiety, and depression are all significantly higher for the studied population after October 7. Jewish clergy and clinicians are not immune from these statistics. Instead, Jewish clergy with raised levels of stress, anxiety, and depression must be able to attend to the needs of their flock. But who is attending theirs?

Political Polarization

Jewish clergy are faced with the emotional and mental repercussions of global political polarization. Depending where they live, clergy are asked how they feel about the president, the prime minister, about policy, about how current legislation is informed by Torah values, and they are encouraged to write, speak, and post political opinions online. They are also admonished when they write, speak, and post political opinions online. Congregants are pleased when a clergy member’s opinion matches theirs and disgusted when it does not. If a clergy person decides to be silent, vowing to keep the pulpit free of politics, some congregants are pleased; others feel restless, seeking answers in a Jewish space. Jewish clergy are anxious, attempting to create holy, safe, welcoming spiritual homes without offending one person or another; attempting to keep their jobs and own financial stability intact. At the end of the day, Jewish clergy end up offending someone and go home riddled with worry and tension. In addition, some policy positions and political opinions go directly against our own morals and standards. Our identities may feel attacked, depending on whoever is leading our city, state, nation and/or the State of Israel. Clergy may be facing congregants experiencing political polarization and political anxiety while experiencing the very same issues and symptoms themselves.

Dr. Angelica Soto, in Staying Sane in a Polarized World, explains the psychological impact of constantly managing political anxiety. She writes:

Chronic political anxiety doesn’t just create discomfort—it gradually alters how we process information, make decisions, and interact with others. When the nervous system remains in a prolonged state of threat or vigilance, the brain’s prefrontal cortex (responsible for nuanced thinking, empathy, and long-term planning) becomes less accessible.10

She continues, “Political stress narrows our thinking, and narrow thinking increases our susceptibility to confirmation bias, extreme messaging and tribalism.”11 She encourages all of us to regulate our nervous systems if we ever wish to reengage in healthy “discernment, dialogue and grounded action.”

A study through Barna explains that while 46 percent of clergy experienced depression in 2015, this number rose to 59 percent in 2020.12 Christianity Today lists political polarization entering the church as one of the growing issues facing clergy.13 Clergy are more likely to leave congregations facing internal conflict, with political polarization being one of those conflicts.14 And instead of churches providing ample support during these crises, clergy end up leaving the congregation and the vocation altogether.

A recent study on the impact of political polarization on clergy was conducted with 648 United Methodist pastors in North Carolina.15 The study explains that while some may try to avoid people with politically adverse opinions, this proves impossible in the workplace. Instead of the workplace serving as a place of belonging or safety, the workplace becomes a chronic stressor. For clergy, this is no different. The study noted prominent political mismatches between pastors and their congregations. The severity of the political mismatch often led to extreme occupational distress. It is interesting to note that, in this study, more liberal Protestant clergy felt a greater sense of occupational distress and mismatch than more conservative-leaning Protestant clergy. While it would be irresponsible to draw direct correlations with the Jewish community, one might surmise a similar inference in clergy-congregational political mismatch. A Jewish clergy member with a stronger liberal or conservative leaning than their congregation will likely experience occupational distress and feel a sense of political polarization within their workplace. With extremism on the rise on both the right and left sides of the aisle, it feels impossible for any clergy person today to avoid the mental, emotional, and social ramifications of political polarization—within the congregation and within their personal lives.

Social Media and the Anxious Generation

There are multiple ways to get ahold of me: phone call, text, Facebook message, Instagram message, WhatsApp. For those with X, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Snapchat accounts, I imagine those are other ways of connecting as well. COVID opened up an entirely new world of connection. Zoom is the norm, as is streaming well-produced synagogue services and online programming. In the medical and therapeutic world, telehealth is common, and some practitioners provide services only online. For Jewish clergy, there is a renewed expectation to be available—not just in person, but at all times. With multiple ways of “finding” us, clergy are expected more than ever to be present. There is also an expectation to maintain a social media presence. Who you are on the bimah should extend to your social media following. The online persona has become just as important as the in-person persona. Rabbi-as-influencer is not just trendy; it has become a standard part of the job.

How is this ever-present flow of social media and online presence impacting clergy? Carl Addison, with Earthen Vessel Ministries, writes, “The comparison parishioners make with polished and well-funded online services, along with the inevitable comparisons made with other preachers, has created feelings of inadequacy and doubt among many leaders.”16 In a world in which we already suffer from insecurities about whether we are good enough, there is an added level of online comparison. Preachers who are able to produce and edit online materials due to a healthier and more extensive budget may not feel as burdened as preachers with smaller production teams and fewer resources. However, those expected to produce online content feel a greater sense of pressure to produce more and more, essentially co-creating in-person and online communities.

In 2024, a scoping review compiled 114 articles studying social media’s mental health impact on adults.17 A striking 78.6 percent of the studies revealed higher levels of depression, anxiety, mood disturbance, and loneliness. In 2025, 84 percent of US adults were connected to a device for an average of six to seven hours per day.18 The awareness that we are missing notifications and messages because of our ability to be connected in multiple ways compounds the stress we are already experiencing. The lack of sleep compounds anxiety and depression. Our readiness to be available at all times to our congregants is one of the main debilitating factors to our physical and mental health.

Recommendations

With overflowing workloads, clergy may balk at carving out more time for self-help. However, without addressing the mental health challenges of the last six years, the clergy attending to the needs of our congregations will be emotionally depleted and physically ill.

A few modest, humble recommendations from a trained therapist and rabbi in the field:

• Congregations should invest in therapeutic offerings for their clergy. This may take the form of one-on-one counseling, group processing, or long-term or brief counseling sessions.
• Clergy unions should provide monthly or bimonthly processing groups with specific topics, such as COVID-processing or navigating October 7. The groups should not be designed to solve issues within congregations. Each group should include a licensed clinician who helps the clergy navigate their own trauma faced while serving as a Jewish leader during this time frame. If possible, groups should take into consideration the age/stage of the clergy person to help determine the best group makeup.
• While online processing groups may be the only possibility for some clergy (especially in more remote areas of the nation), in-person Jewish clergy gatherings for both social connection and emotional processing are ideal.
• Sinai Temple has hired a full-time licensed clinician to serve the congregation and, more importantly, the clergy. If a congregation can do so, having a clinician to address mental health stressors for the clergy and staff is a lifesaver. If the cost is too great, perhaps a few congregations can come together to create such a position.
• Before signing any contract for a congregation, clergy should be clear about how their political alignment or mismatch will inform the future of their mental health. Is this congregation an open tent, welcoming of all political opinions? How do the rabbi’s views differ from those openly stated by the congregation? Is there an expectation to keep politics away from the bimah? Does this expectation align with the rabbi’s desires and goals? These kinds of upfront conversations will help set the path for a healthier relationship between clergy and congregation.

Dr. Angelica Soto reminds us that when we must engage in a political conversation, we should do so without expecting to win an argument. She explains:

Engaging in political dialogue with care doesn’t mean trying to win an argument or convert someone to your way of thinking. It means showing up with a grounded sense of your own values, a willingness to acknowledge the emotional terrain others bring, and the self-regulation to stay present when things get heated. It means protecting your peace without closing your heart and creating space for dialogue without losing yourself in the process.19

• Clergy should set clear boundaries about how and when congregants can contact them. Understandably, a death in the middle of the night or an emergency deserves immediate attention. However, clergy should set a protocol within the congregation. Do we answer on WhatsApp? Perhaps all congregationally related activities and conversations should be streamlined through email only. There may not be one standard method of communication, but determining the boundaries early may prevent further symptoms of burnout.
• Does the congregation expect a clergy online presence? This kind of expectation should be well-defined and contained within the timeline of a regular work week. The pressures on clergy to “be perfect” are not new. However, a “perfect” online presence compounds the clergy mental health issue.
• How often is the clergy person taking sabbaticals, and for how long? Is the duration enough time for the clergy person to feel valued and gain a sense of renewal?
• Finally, the Jewish community should collaborate with local and national mental health organizations to develop shared language and shared goals. For example, each year, local Federations, synagogues and day schools should come together in partnership with local clinicians and mental health providers to discuss overarching goals for the sound mental health of the Jewish community. These goals should be shared on a national level and revisited twice a year, internally within each institution, regionally and nationally. The biggest challenge will be determining which organization is responsible for such an important endeavor. However, it would make sense for each movement’s union (Rabbinical Assembly/USCJ, URJ, Orthodox Union, etc.) to consider taking on this task.

Most clinicians analyzing this article would surmise that the overarching answers to healthy clergy mental health include the following: clear boundaries and expectations and carving out time to address one’s own well-being. Clergy members want to be in congregations. The Atra research conveys that this profession is still one many of us find rewarding and fulfilling. However, between October 7, rising political polarization, and the age of social media and ultra-connectivity, to be a clergy person is beyond mentally and physically draining. A partnership with congregations in addressing their clergy person’s mental health will ultimately lead to a healthier clergy person, and beyond that, God-willing, a healthier congregation.

Rabbi Nicole Guzik, AMFT, is Co-Senior Rabbi, Sinai Temple, Los Angeles, CA.

Bibliography

Addison, Carl. “Clergy Mental Health Crisis.” Earthen Vessel Ministries, November 7, 2023. https://carladdison.com/2023/11/07/clergy-mental-health-crisis/.

Atra: Center for Rabbinic Innovation. From Calling to Career: Mapping the Current State and Future of Rabbinic Leadership. 2025. https://atrarabbis.org/wp-content/uploads/From-Calling-to-Career-Mapping-the-Current-State-and-Future-of-Rabbinic-Leadership.pdf.

Atra: Center for Rabbinic Innovation. Rabbinic Pipeline: Executive Summary. 2025. https://atrarabbis.org/wp-content/uploads/Rabbinic-Pipeline-Executive-Summary-Final.pdf.

Barna Group. “Pastors’ Thoughts on Suicide and Self-Harm.” Accessed April 26, 2026. https://www.barna.com/research/pastors-thoughts-suicide-self-harm/.

Hasan, M. K. “Meta-Stress in the Digital Age: How Social Media and Constant Connectivity Create New Layers of Stress.” Annals of Medicine and Surgery 87, no. 9 (June 23, 2025): 5364–5367. https://doi.org/10.1097/MS9.0000000000003515.

Hibel, Lauren C., Mor Sigal, and Yael Teff-Seker. “Mental Health in Californian Jews before and after October 7, 2023.” Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy 17, no. 7 (2025): 1556–1563. https://doi.org/10.1037/tra0002011.

Koh, Geraldine Kaijun, Jenna Qing Yun Ow Yong, Andrew Ren Yi B. Lee, Brendan Shao Yang Ong, Chun En Yau, Cyrus S. H. Ho, and Yong Shian Goh. “Social Media Use and Its Impact on Adults’ Mental Health and Well-Being: A Scoping Review.” Worldviews on Evidence-Based Nursing 21, no. 4 (August 2024): 345–394. https://doi.org/10.1111/wvn.12727.

MacInnis, Adam. “The Mental Health Crisis Ministers Struggle to Talk About.” Christianity Today, April 2025. https://www.christianitytoday.com/2025/04/ministers-mental-health-crisis-struggle/.

Murthy, Vivek H. Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2023. https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf.

Proeschold-Bell, Rae Jean, and Jason Byassee. Faithful and Fractured: Responding to the Clergy Health Crisis. Baker Academic, 2018.

Regev, Rotem. “Compounded Traumatic Reality among Jewish Mental Health Practitioners in the Diaspora Post-October 7: An Exploratory Qualitative Study.” Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment (2025): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/10911359.2025.2586515.

Soto, Angelica. Staying Sane in a Polarized World. Angelica Family Wellness, 2025.

Swanlund, Callie. From Weary to Wholehearted: A Restorative Resource for Overcoming Clergy Burnout. Church Publishing Incorporated, 2024.

Tevington, Patricia, et al. Clergy Discontentment Patterns Report. COVID Religion Research Initiative, 2024. https://www.covidreligionresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Clergy_Discontentment_Patterns_Report-compressed_2.pdf.

---

1. ¹ Atra: Center for Rabbinic Innovation, From Calling to Career: Mapping the Current State and Future of Rabbinic Leadership (2025), https://atrarabbis.org/wp-content/uploads/From-Calling-to-Career-Mapping-the-Current-State-and-Future-of-Rabbinic-Leadership.pdf.

2. ² Atra: Center for Rabbinic Innovation, Rabbinic Pipeline: Executive Summary (2025), https://atrarabbis.org/wp-content/uploads/Rabbinic-Pipeline-Executive-Summary-Final.pdf.

3. ³ Vivek H. Murthy, Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2023), https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf.

4. ⁴ Herbert Freudenberger, quoted in Callie Swanlund, From Weary to Wholehearted: A Restorative Resource for Overcoming Clergy Burnout (Church Publishing Incorporated, 2024).

5. ⁵ Swanlund, From Weary to Wholehearted, 84.

6. ⁶ Rae Jean Proeschold-Bell and Jason Byassee, Faithful and Fractured: Responding to the Clergy Health Crisis (Baker Academic, 2018), 37.

7. ⁷ Proeschold-Bell and Byassee, Faithful and Fractured, 9.

8. ⁸ Rotem Regev, “Compounded Traumatic Reality among Jewish Mental Health Practitioners in the Diaspora Post-October 7: An Exploratory Qualitative Study,” Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment (2025): 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1080/10911359.2025.2586515.

9. ⁹ Lauren C. Hibel, Mor Sigal, and Yael Teff-Seker, “Mental Health in Californian Jews before and after October 7, 2023,” Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy 17, no. 7 (2025): 1556–1563, https://doi.org/10.1037/tra0002011.

10. ¹⁰ Angelica Soto, Staying Sane in a Polarized World (Angelica Family Wellness, 2025), 27.

11. ¹¹ Soto, Staying Sane in a Polarized World, 27.

12. ¹² Barna Group, “Pastors’ Thoughts on Suicide and Self-Harm,” accessed April 26, 2026, https://www.barna.com/research/pastors-thoughts-suicide-self-harm/.

13. ¹³ Adam MacInnis, “The Mental Health Crisis Ministers Struggle to Talk About,” Christianity Today, April 2025, https://www.christianitytoday.com/2025/04/ministers-mental-health-crisis-struggle/.

14. ¹⁴ Patricia Tevington et al., Clergy Discontentment Patterns Report (COVID Religion Research Initiative, 2024), https://www.covidreligionresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Clergy_Discontentment_Patterns_Report-compressed_2.pdf.

15. ¹⁵ Clergy Discontentment Patterns Report.

16. ¹⁶ Carl Addison, “Clergy Mental Health Crisis,” Earthen Vessel Ministries, November 7, 2023, https://carladdison.com/2023/11/07/clergy-mental-health-crisis/.

17. ¹⁷ Geraldine Kaijun Koh et al., “Social Media Use and Its Impact on Adults’ Mental Health and Well-Being: A Scoping Review,” Worldviews on Evidence-Based Nursing 21, no. 4 (August 2024): 345–394, https://doi.org/10.1111/wvn.12727.

18. ¹⁸ M. K. Hasan, “Meta-Stress in the Digital Age: How Social Media and Constant Connectivity Create New Layers of Stress,” Annals of Medicine and Surgery 87, no. 9 (June 23, 2025): 5364–5367, https://doi.org/10.1097/MS9.0000000000003515.

19. ¹⁹ Soto, Staying Sane in a Polarized World, 129.

Deborah Dash Moore

In 1994 Jenna Weissman Joselit, a historian of American Jews, published The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880-1950, that looked at the transformations that had occurred as American Jews moved from being immigrants to becoming second generation. Her evocative chapter titles—“Kissing Business, Yidishe Nachas, Red-Letter Days, Home Sweet Haym, Kitchen Judaism, The Call of the Matzoh, A Last Farewell”—marked transitions in marriage, motherhood, education, and religion, along with changes in the kitchen, classroom, banquet hall, and even the funeral parlor.¹ Indeed, Joselit borrowed her title from a short story by the Yiddish writer, Sholom Aleichem, where he described, with mordant humor, what it cost to get buried in America. Joselit may have been inspired by the historian Arthur Goren’s use of the short story in a published lecture he gave on Jewish funerals on New York’s Lower East Side, including impressive send-offs to Jewish criminals. The funeral of gangster Big Jack Zelig aspired to match that of Rabbi Jacob Joseph, considered the leading Orthodox rabbi in NYC in 1903 when he died. Thirty-six carriages and twenty-five automobiles followed Zelig’s casket in 1912; everyone who was anyone in the Jewish underworld attended the funeral, yeshiva students sang psalms, and Zelig was buried next to the famous Yiddish playwright Jacob Gordin. These honors exemplified changes brought about by capitalism.²

But whether hardworking householders or enterprising gangsters, everyone necessarily faced death. Goren emphasized the public character of mourning and its communal power to unite Jews in gestures of rededication, uplift, and solidarity through funeral processions on Manhattan’s streets.³ By contrast, Joselit stressed the quotidian dimensions of death, including its costs—reproducing, for example, a 1930s bill from a funeral home listing the various services performed and their prices.

The dust jacket of her book aptly summarized its contents and aims: “The selective relish with which most American Jews affirm their identity . . . has usually given rise to satire or consternation,” it explains, letting us understand attitudes toward American Jewishness at the end of the twentieth century. “The Wonders of America offers an alternative perspective,” it continues,

for this innovative social history of Jewish culture highlights the cultural ingenuity and adaptive genius of American Jewish life . . . . Drawing on advertisements and etiquette manuals, sermons and surveys, Jenna Weissman Joselit offers a lively . . . account of how American Jews created their distinctive culture . . . how they raised their children, decorated their homes, shopped and cooked, celebrated holidays, and marked birth, marriage, and death as they became at home in America. Her fresh, original analysis makes clear that it is . . . the small choices of daily life that shape and sustain a culture.⁴

These “small choices of daily life” continued to evolve in the postwar years and on into the beginnings of the twenty-first century. Although Joselit eschews theorizing the cultural and religious changes she depicts, she could have drawn upon what Leonard Norman Primiano, a scholar of religion and folklore, dubbed “vernacular religion.” In his 1988 article on “Vernacular Religion and the Search for Method in Religious Folklife,” Primiano rejected the then current distinction between “elite” and “folk” religions popular among scholars, instead positing that all religion was lived. “Understanding religion as ‘vernacular religion’,” he wrote, “does justice to the variety of manifestations and perspectives found with past and present human religiosity.” Primiano championed the term “vernacular” because of the way it did “justice to the experiential component of people’s religious lives” which could “only be satisfied by a term which specifically addresses the ‘personal’ and ‘private.’” Thus “Vernacular religion is, by definition, religion as it is lived: as human beings encounter, understand, interpret, and practice it. Since religion inherently involves interpretation, it is impossible for the religion of an individual not to be vernacular,” Primiano concluded.⁵ I want to suggest that Joselit’s and Goren’s framing of religious adaptations in the years prior to World War II as modes of Americanization can also be profitably understood, per Primiano, as expressions of vernacular American Judaism.

This essay extends the concept of vernacular American Judaism into the latter half of the twentieth century and first decades of the twenty-first century. It looks at some distinctively American Jewish practices drawing upon work by religious studies scholars and historians. Meant to be suggestive, rather than comprehensive, it argues that processes of religious invention, interpretation, practice, and experience continue to shape contemporary American Judaism as much as theological creativity.

Let me begin with one of the most far-reaching changes introduced into Judaism by American Jews. I am speaking, of course, of the impact of feminism that transformed Jewish education, ritual, liturgy, and leadership and continues to inspire new forms of religious expression. Rabbi and theologian Mordecai M. Kaplan, inspired in part by the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution that gave women the right to vote, introduced the idea and practice of bat mitzvah for his daughters, starting with his oldest, Judith, back in 1922. But the concept did not catch on until the rise of women’s liberation and second wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s, bat mitzvah had spread beyond Reform, Reconstructionist, and Conservative congregations to reach even some liberal Modern Orthodox congregations.⁶ And by the end of the twentieth century, it had joined bar mitzvah to become a hallmark of vernacular American Judaism. Along the way, it helped propel opportunities for women to gain advanced Jewish learning and the leadership that flowed from it.

The ordination of women as rabbis followed, starting first with Reform Judaism, then Reconstructionist Judaism, then in the 1980s Conservative Judaism, and in the twenty-first century, Modern Orthodox Judaism. Women’s ordination and scholarship spurred rewritten forms of liturgy (for example, morning blessings), revised translations of sacred texts (including Tanach), and new modes of midrash reflecting feminist insights.⁷ The impact of these changes extended to recognition of LGBTQ Jews in the twenty-first century as worthy of rabbinic leadership. Transformations initiated by Jewish feminists permeated vernacular American Judaism, although they did not necessarily extend to the Jewish world outside of the US.⁸

Despite all the changes, a 2006 article noted regarding the exclusion of women in leadership positions: “We have seen these patterns in the Jewish federation world, where no woman has served as CEO of any of the largest federations — ever.” It went on to enumerate the exclusion of women in the religious world:

We have seen these patterns in Conservative synagogues, where women are more active than men in all roles except for governance and liturgical leadership. We have seen them in the Conservative rabbinate, where only one woman has ever served as the leading rabbi in a large congregation, and where women rabbis get paid less than male counterparts as spiritual leaders of congregations of similar size. And we have seen them in the Jewish professional world, where the compensation patterns of JCC directors and of all communal professionals display substantial gender-related disparities, even after statistically controlling for the status of the position and the qualifications of the professionals.⁹

Twenty years later, both Conservative and Reconstructionist rabbinical seminaries have been led by women, a scholar and rabbi respectively, even if the critique of Jewish communal organizations stands.¹⁰

In the US, where Jewish women and men increasingly share equal responsibilities for leadership and authority, where girls and boys both receive Jewish educations, where women are integral members of Jewish life and contributors to Jewish culture, these attributes mark vernacular American Judaism as distinct from other forms of Judaism. They also represent a type of change sufficiently radical to prompt consideration of other innovations that flowed from understanding women and men as equal Jewish human beings.

I want to return to the widespread popularity of bar/bat mitzvah, drawing upon religious studies scholar Patricia Munro’s research. “When thirteen-year-old bar or bat mitzvah students stand before family, friends, and sometimes community in a public ritual, they exemplify the core values of Judaism, uphold the family honor, and symbolically represent the Jewish future,” she writes. The implications are profound. “Bar and bat mitzvah have affected who joins synagogues and how they participate, the way Jewish professionals allocate their time, what Jewish supplementary schools teach and why, and what comprises the regular religious service into which the bar or bat mitzvah ritual is embedded;” it has also exerted influence on American Protestant culture. Its widespread popularity among Jewish 13-year-olds and their friendships with Christians have brought knowledge of both elements of the event—ritual and celebration—into broader public consciousness.¹¹

Not only has the ritual has changed how “American Jews understand and engage with Judaism,” it has also changed how non-Jews understand and engage with Judaism. No longer an exotic spectacle, “a strange ethnic rite of passage far outside the mainstream,” but a vernacular American Jewish practice—Munro’s first chapter is titled “It’s Not Duddy Kravitz’s Bar Mitzvah Any More” referring to the 1974 movie’s video montage of exotic ritual practices shown at a bar mitzvah—it initiates more than the Jewish 13-year-old into consciousness of Judaism and its dimensions. Munro concludes, riffing on Ahad Ha’am’s notion about the reciprocal power of Sabbath observance to preserve Jewish life: “Bar mitzvah has played a crucial role in creating and sustaining American Judaism, so much so that it can be said that as much as American Jews have created bar mitzvah, so has bar mitzvah created American Jews.” The adoption of patrilineal descent by Reform Jews in 1983 challenged Reform congregations to figure out how to incorporate intermarried families. The bar/bat mitzvah allowed those families to demonstrate to fellow congregants that they had raised Jewish children.¹²

Along with changing life cycle rituals, American Jews rescrambled the hierarchy of Jewish holidays. Even as recognition of the significance of the High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur registered in public school calendars, at least in heavily Jewish cities like New York, American Jews were increasingly observing Passover instead.¹³ In the immediate postwar years, Passover moved to the top of the list of widely celebrated Jewish holidays. The sociologist Marshall Sklare argued that its popularity stemmed in part from its home-based structure, emphasizing family, and conducted around a table that culminated in a feast.¹⁴ As more American Jews participated in Passover seders, they also began to rewrite its central liturgical text, the haggadah.

An early pioneer of rewriting the haggadah, Kaplan emphasized its significance as a holiday of liberation, not redemption, linking the first emancipation of Jewish slaves from Egypt to subsequent emancipations throughout history, including such non-Jewish examples as the emancipation of serfs from their masters, and ending with the promise of democracy’s freedoms, also understood as an emancipation. Published in 1941 as American Jews watched World War II unfold in Europe, Kaplan’s political optimism expressed in The New Haggadah presaged other haggadot of the postwar years.¹⁵ In 1969 the activist Arthur Waskow’s Freedom Seder radically reimagined the seder as a political gathering of Blacks and Whites, Jews and Christians. Motivated in response to the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. the previous year, the Freedom Seder—held on April 4, the third night of Passover and the anniversary of King’s death—spurred ongoing rewriting of the seder liturgy and ritual. As Waskow wrote in the preface, “a Freedom Seder should be not only a ritual remembrance, not only a shared promise for the future, but itself a political act . . . as the first Passover was, when the people of Israel liberated themselves and their God.” ¹⁶

For several decades following the Freedom Seder, women regularly held feminist seders, repurposing a previous generation’s third seder tradition. Among the largest of these, Ma’yan: the Jewish Women’s Project of the Jewish Community Center of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, held seders that soon drew more than 1,500 participants each year on three consecutive nights before Passover. Ma’yan rewrote the haggadah for these seders, explaining “Seders are not rituals led by experts. They are home-based, peer-led rituals that can help us revive our personal connections with Jewish history, and restore our sense of ownership of Judaism’s future.”¹⁷ Jewish feminists reimagined the symbolic objects of the seder ritual. For example, they added “Miriam’s Cup” of water to the prophet “Elijah’s Cup” of wine.¹⁸ And in the early 1980s, inspired by scholar Susannah Heschel’s suggestion of how to include LGBTQ Jews as part of the seder, many American Jews placed an orange on the seder plate.¹⁹ Over the course of the next several decades, hundreds of haggadot were published, versions of vernacular American Judaism.²⁰ In the twenty-first century, American Jews increasingly adopted DIY versions, mixing texts from any number of sources. This type of individualism, encouraged by American capitalism, permeated other Jewish practices such as kashrut.

In the postwar decades kosher observance plummeted among American Jews as efforts to recruit food companies to agree to kosher certification escalated. The Orthodox Union increasingly succeeded in getting an ever-wider array of companies to accept their OU symbol and pay for a mashgiach to supervise industrial food production. At the same time, other Orthodox rabbis got into the act, introducing the concept and practice of glatt kosher and extending it beyond meat to dairy products and other types of food. They called on their followers to adopt their symbols when making food purchases. This fracturing of kosher certification emphasized the extent to which individualism had come to dominate vernacular American Judaism. Each Jew could choose which symbols, if any, they wanted to trust to determine whether food was kosher. Ironically, perhaps, successful advertising of kosher products simultaneously reached widening circles of Americans of all backgrounds. Hebrew National hit on the slogan, “we answer to a higher authority,” to imply the better quality of its all-beef hotdogs. Levi’s rye bread went further, explicitly urging Americans that “you don’t need to be Jewish to love Levi’s.” Hammering home the slogan were pictures—very clear for the time (the mid-1960s)—of non-Jews engaged in taking a bite out of a sandwich made with Levi’s rye bread: a native American wearing a headdress, an Irish cop in uniform, a Black boy.

One of the most vivid examples of a successful sales pitch occurred as the makers of Manischewitz wine discovered a new audience for its sweet product among Black Americans, which reminded them of a similar wine made from Southern grapes. The company’s initial advertising campaign—“wine like mother used to make”—resonated with Black customers from the South. Then Manischewitz realized they needed make their name pronounceable. So, they started to promote “man-o-Mani-schewitz.” It caught on. “When astronaut Buzz Aldrin invoked the by-then iconic phrase ‘Man-O-Manischewitz’ to capture the awe he felt stepping on the moon in 1973, he also inadvertently certified the remarkable success of a quarter century of company marketing efforts.” ²¹ His exclamation was broadcast around the world.

Similarly, Hanukkah entered the public sphere starting in the late 1960s, albeit with controversy. It’s not that American Jews had not increasingly embraced the holiday, elevating it to compensate for the extensive commercialization of Christmas. Hanukkah was gradually rising in popularity among American Jews. But in the process, the festival of lights was changing into a celebration of religious choice. Vernacular American Judaism reinterpreted the Hanukkah “miracle” as “created by individual Jews who maintain their religious commitments, not by a divine power. Yet the emphasis on individual choice,” argues historian Dianne Ashton, “lent cultural support to those who were seeking new ways to enact their religious lives.”²²

Dissension arose, however, around new modes of celebration involving huge public menorahs set up in cities around the country and often lit by political figures. In the immediate postwar decades American Jews had worked hard, often through litigation, to get public observances of Christian religious holidays, especially Christmas and Easter, out of the public schools. Using court cases, the American Jewish Congress argued successfully before the Supreme Court to ban even generic forms of daily prayers, as well as to eliminate Easter and Christmas holiday pageants.²³ And now, Lubavitch Ḥasidic Jews were promoting Hanukkah observances in the public square.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Schneerson, taking inspiration from President John F. Kennedy’s creation of the Peace Corps to spread American values around the world, recruited young Ḥasidim to reach out to Jews first throughout the US and then throughout the world. Large public Hanukkah celebrations with enormous menorahs became their signature religious event. Political figures participated, kindling lights and signaling support of their Jewish constituents. In 1979, Chabad erected a 30-foot menorah in Lafayette Park across from the White House. President Jimmy Carter lit one candle of the menorah. “From the 1980s onward, Hanukkah assumed a role of public prominence,” observes historian Joshua Eli Plaut. “What historically had been internally based December dilemmas, once faced exclusively by Jews, expanded to become political wars, pitting Christian Americans of different political orientations against each other over whether Christmas and Hanukkah symbols should be displayed in public places.”²⁴

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, such observances—lighting candles, singing songs, sharing food—had become a widespread part of vernacular American Judaism. “By 2000 Hanukkah had become a winter festival familiar to broad swaths of Americans. Non-Jews who conclude that Hanukkah must be the most important of Jewish holidays,” Ashton urges, “should not be faulted for their error. After all, it garners more public attention than any other Jewish holiday.”²⁵ It is the only Jewish holiday, for example, to have a postage stamp, initially issued in 1996. Although the United States Postal Service had rejected any Jewish religious symbol three years earlier when it was first proposed, the change of heart occurred in response to a write-in campaign.²⁶

American Jews gradually integrated other forms of politics into their vernacular religious practices. In the 1970s and 1980s those politics centered on Soviet Jewry and efforts to get the American government to pressure the Soviet Union to allow Jews to emigrate. The anticommunism that helped to fuel the movement brought American Jews onto the same side as the government in the Cold War, a dramatic change in public perceptions of Jews from the postwar years when many were labeled Communists during the McCarthy era. The Soviet Jewry movement emphasized notions of American freedom as it affirmed a transnational Jewish peoplehood. But it embedded these ideas in tactics designed to engage large numbers of American Jews and ultimately to enter vernacular American Jewish religious practice.²⁷

Sociologist Shaul Kelner argues that these tactics emerged from what he calls the “mobilizing gaze” of activists. Sometimes rational choices, other times expressive choices, and occasionally both, they reflected in their solemn mode the influence of Jacob Birnbaum, the founder of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ) and “a religiously observant Jew who believed with his own perfect faith that the fight for Soviet Jewry bore religious significance.” Kelner characterizes the SSSJ mode of public demonstrations as “protest-as-religious-ceremony.” Perhaps one of the most effective forms of “cultural coproduction,” aside from the massive rallies on Solidarity Sunday that drew hundreds of thousands, occurred within the synagogue. Activists co-opted the widespread popularity of bar and bat mitzvah observances to encourage “twinning” the American ritual with a Soviet Jewish teenager unable to have a bar or bat mitzvah due to state persecution.²⁸

The popularity of the Boston Jewish rock group Safam’s song “Leaving Mother Russia” offers another example of vernacular American Judaism. Inspired by Anatole Sharansky’s arrest in 1977 and his words before the Russian court, Robbie Solomon wrote and then played the song with Safam at a concert “at the Rutgers Hillel house in N.J. This first performance of Leaving Mother Russia was so electric that the whole audience stood en masse at the end and joined in,” he recalled. “We knew we had captured the spirit of the Soviet Jewry movement in a way that only an inspiring song could.” The words, sung by American Jews often at massive rallies, affirm that they are “leaving Mother Russia” although, obviously, they are not living in the Soviet Union. It suggests the powerful political identification with Soviet Jews and the way in which it entered vernacular American religion, even following Sharansky’s release from prison nine years later. “During the instrumental break our custom was to read the names of all the refuseniks who were still behind bars,” Solomon explained. “The song was sung at all the rallies throughout the country in support of Soviet Jewry, including the giant gatherings in front of the U.N. Plaza, which some years exceeded 300,000 people.”²⁹

The soundtrack of vernacular American Judaism evolved in these years, especially but not only among Reform Jews. Abandoning the formality of choirs and English language hymns that had characterized the movement in the years prior to World War II, Reform congregations increasingly adopted a role for the cantor with a guitar.³⁰ The popularity of Debbie Friedman’s folk melodies, first sung at Reform summer camps accompanied by guitar, spread to the adults in Reform congregations.³¹ In 1993, her prayer for healing, Mi Sheberach, introduced a concept largely absent from Reform religious practice. The song, written in Hebrew and English, appealed to both God who blessed “our fathers” and served as a source of strength to “our mothers” and invited congregants to make praying for physical and spiritual health an integral part of the Sabbath liturgy. “May the source of strength who blessed the ones before us/ help us find the courage to make our lives a blessing,” Friedman sang, followed by a reversal of the invocation of God of our mothers and source of strength of our fathers. Then came the explicit prayer for healing: “Bless those in need of healing with r’fuah shleymah/the renewal of body, the renewal of spirit/And let us say Amen.” The numbers of congregants who found this prayer meaningful embraced diverse individuals who brought not just family members into the circle of healing but also friends, both Jewish and not Jewish. “I try to make prayer user-friendly,” Friedman explained. “Because the music is in a familiar genre, people are able to make the connection between the music and the text.”³²

But the most significant feature of vernacular American Judaism correlates with the rise of egalitarianism, namely, the integration of Holocaust observance and identification with Israel. In the 1960s and 1970s as women’s liberation shook up established practices of American Jews and initiated substantial and enduring changes in vernacular American Judaism, support for the state of Israel reached across denominational divisions, with only a few exceptions (e.g., Satmar Ḥasidim). Although the character of that supportive identification varied depending on time, place, and religious movement, it grew ever stronger over the decades. The popularity of Leon Uris’s Exodus, including Otto Preminger’s 1960 film version, recast Israel in America’s image. “Israel entered the popular Jewish-American imagination as a romantic screen legend,” secured and strengthened in the brief war of June 1967.³³ When the Soviet Union disbanded in 1991 and Jews were free to leave, the success of the Soviet Jewry movement coincided with the first Intifada, which began in December 1988, and was followed by the Oslo Peace Accords between Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and Yitzhak Rabin, premier of the State of Israel in 1993. The possibility for a peaceful resolution to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict coming only two short years after the end of the Soviet Union and the departure of over a million Soviet Jews, most settling in Israel, seemed to promise an era of peaceful coexistence.

The joint integration of Israel identification and Holocaust memorialization into vernacular American Judaism in the early 1990s cemented a narrative of redemption from the despair of annihilation to rebirth in the promised homeland. This was not a new narrative; it dated back to the late 1940s. But it achieved increasing prominence in the postwar decades, becoming dominant in the 1990s.³⁴ Even as vernacular American Judaism championed Passover as a holiday of liberation, the theme of redemption became increasingly associated with Israel’s establishment after the devastation of the Holocaust. Symbolizing this relationship, in 1988 Israeli politicians established the March of the Living, which brought Jewish youth from around the globe to Poland. On Holocaust Memorial Day, as observed in Israel (there is an international Holocaust Memorial Day which marks the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops at the end of January, observed in Europe), thousands of young people walked from Auschwitz to Birkenau. “I had a very unusual fifteenth birthday,” wrote the future novelist, Dara Horn. “During my birthday week, the end of April, I was traveling with 5,000 high school students from around the world, visiting concentration camps in Poland. I learned more there than I learned during my entire life in school; once I stepped out of a gas chamber, I became a different person.” The trip usually culminated in a visit to Israel. Horn wrote about what she saw and felt, published in Hadassah Magazine in 1992, that implicitly connected her experience learning about the horrors of the Holocaust with the State of Israel. She ended her essay: “In Israel I planted a tree with soil I had taken from concentration camps. In the soil were white specks, human bone ash. I am fifteen years old, and I know I can never forget.”³⁵

In the twenty-first century, as heritage tourism to Eastern Europe has boomed, the role of the March of the Living and, later, Birthright Tours of Israel, have kept pace, using the tourism experience to animate, stimulate, engage, and hopefully transform (as Dara Horn was transformed) young American Jews.³⁶ As a vernacular practice, with its own rituals and interpretation of contemporary realities and past ones, these forms of American Judaism have increasingly come under question because of Israel’s extended conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah, both politically established terrorist organizations supported by Iran. As of this writing, it is not clear what the outcome will be, whether vernacular American Judaism will find alternative connections to a redemptive narrative or reaffirm its current religiously inflected political ties to Israel. Fewer and fewer survivors of the Holocaust remain, so the linkages that worked well for the children of the postwar generation may need to be reimagined for their children, an American Jewry that includes ever larger numbers of non-Jews married to Jews and raising Jewish children. How they will shape vernacular American Judaism remains to be seen, but one can be confident that it will come from the “small choices of daily life.”

Deborah Dash Moore, PhD is the Jonathan Freedman Distinguished University Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She is Editor in Chief of the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization. Her most recent book is Walkers in the City: Jewish Street Photographers of Midcentury New York (Three Hills, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2023).

---

1. ¹ Jenna Weissman Joselit, The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880-1950 (Hill & Wang, 1994).

2. ² Arthur A. Goren, “Saints and Sinners: The Underside of American Jewish History,” Brochure of American Jewish Archives, no. 7 (1988): 19-21.

3. ³ See, for example, Arthur A. Goren, “The Rites of Community,” in Politics and Public Culture of American Jews (Indiana University Press, 1999).

4. ⁴ Joselit, Dust jacket.

5. ⁵ Leonard Norman Primiano, “Introduction: Vernacular Religion and the Search for Method in Religious Folklife,” in Leonard Norman Primiano, Vernacular Religion: Collected Essays of Leonard Norman Primiano, Deborah Dash Moore, ed. (NYU Press, 2022), 1-13; quote on 6.

6. ⁶ Pamela S. Nadell, America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today (W.W. Norton & Company, 2019), 182-183; Paula E. Hyman, “The Introduction of Bat Mitzvah in Conservative Judaism in Postwar America,” YIVO Annual 19 (1990): 133-146.

7. ⁷ Pamela S. Nadell, Women Who Would Be Rabbis: A History of Women’s Ordination 1889-1985 (Beacon Press, 1998), 118-221.

8. ⁸ For a discussion of similarities and differences in women’s religious roles focusing on mikveh and fertility treatments in the US and Israel, see Cara Rock-Singer, Gestating Judaism: The Corporeal Technologies of American Jewish Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2026).

9. ⁹ Steven M. Cohen and Shaul Kelner, “Gender Bias is a Fact of Communal Life,” Forward, June 21, 2006.

10. ¹⁰ Dr. Shuly Rubin Schwartz at Jewish Theological Seminary and Rabbi Deborah Waxman at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. Both concluded their tenure in 2026.

11. ¹¹ Patricia Keer Munro, Coming of Age in Jewish America: Bar and Bat Mitzvah Reinterpreted (Rutgers University Press, 2016), chapter 1, quotes on 1-2. It has acquired the reputation of a Bar/Bat Mitzvah Industrial Complex.

12. ¹² Munro, 1-2. See also, chapter 8.

13. ¹³ The Pew Survey of American Jews found that 62% of all Jews attended a Passover seder in 2019 (61% participated in a life cycle event and 62% shared holidays with non-Jews) compared to 46% who fasted on Yom Kippur. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/jewish-practices-and-customs/.

14. ¹⁴ Marshall Sklare, Jewish Identity on the Suburban Frontier: A Study of Group Survival in the Open Society (University of Chicago Press, 1979).

15. ¹⁵ Deborah Dash Moore, “Democracy and The New Haggadah,” American Jewish History 95, no. 4 (December 2009): 323-348.

16. ¹⁶ Arthur I. Waskow, The Freedom Seder: A New Haggadah for Passover (Micah Press, 1970), v-vi.

17. ¹⁷ The Journey Continues: The Ma’yan Passover Haggadah (2002), 2-4, quote on 4.

18. ¹⁸ On Miriam’s Cup, see The Journey Continues, 15.

19. ¹⁹ Susannah Heschel, “The Definitive Orange on a Seder Plate Story” (2001), published in the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, https://www.posenlibrary.com/entry/definitive-orange-seder-plate-story-0.

20. ²⁰ Joel Gereboff, “One Nation, with Liberty and Haggadahs for All,” in Key Texts in American Jewish Culture, Jack Kugelmass, ed. (Rutgers University Press, 2003), 275.

21. ²¹ Roger Horowitz, Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Foods (Columbia University Press, 2016), 142.

22. ²² Dianne Ashton, Hanukkah in America: A History (NYU Press, 2013), 232.

23. ²³ Stuart Svonkin, Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties (Columbia University Press, 1997).

24. ²⁴ Joshua Eli Plaut, A Kosher Christmas: ‘Tis the Season to Be Jewish (Rutgers University Press, 2012), 165.

25. ²⁵ Ashton, 262.

26. ²⁶ Plaut, 163-64. For decades the American Jewish Congress had battled the postal service over its religious-themed Christmas stamps, e.g., a Madonna and child with angels in 1966, The Annunciation in 1968, the Nativity in 1971.

27. ²⁷ For a history of Soviet Jewry movement see Gal Beckerman, When They Come For Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (Mariner Books, 2010).

28. ²⁸ Shaul Kelner, A Cold War Exodus: How American Activists Mobilized to Free Soviet Jews (NYU Press, 2024), quote on 48.

29. ²⁹ Robbie Solomon, “Unveiling the Legacy” https://robbiesolomon.com/leaving-mother-russia/.

30. ³⁰ Ari Y. Kelman and Jeremiah Lockwood, “From Aesthetics to Experience: How Changing Conceptions of Prayer Changed the Sound of Jewish Worship,” Religion and American Culture 30, no. 1 (2020): 26-62.

31. ³¹ Judah M. Cohen, “Debbie Friedman and the Changing Sound of Jewish Liturgical Music,” Contemporary Jewry 35, no. 1 (2014): 19-23; DOI 10.1007/s12397-014-9127-9.

32. ³² Quoted in Lior Zaltzman, “The Story Behind Debbie Friedman’s Beloved Mi Sheberach Melody,” Kveller July 2, 2024, https://www.kveller.com/the-story-behind-debbie-friedmans-beloved-mi-sheberach-melody/.

33. ³³ Deborah Dash Moore, “Exodus: Real to Reel to Real,” in Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting, J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler, ed. (Princeton University Press, 1994), 219.

34. ³⁴ Deborah Lipstadt, Holocaust: An American Understanding, Key Words in Jewish Studies (Rutgers University Press, 2016).

35. ³⁵ Dara Horn, “On Filling Shoes,” Hadassah Magazine (1992), published in the Posen Library of Jewish Civilization and Culture, https://www.posenlibrary.com/entry/filling-shoes.

36. ³⁶ Shaul Kelner, Tours that Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage, and Israeli Birthright Tourism (NYU Press, 2010).

Earl Schwartz

Many a twentieth-century commentator on Jewish education in the United States noted something “different”¹ and “noteworthy”² about Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. Writing in the 1990s, Jacob Marcus found it “curious” that the Talmud Torah of Minneapolis had gained a national reputation “off by itself, distant from mass Jewish communities,”³ while Daniel Elazar attributed strong educational programs in the Twin Cities to factors shared with other “Mississippi River Valley” Jewish communities, including distance from the “fissiparous” dynamics of large East Coast populations.⁴

What Marcus had found curious, others, like Elazar, would find fortunate. Smaller—but not too small—midwestern communities proved fertile ground for the development of constructive relationships across institutional divides: better situated, physically and socially, to foster “unity in diversity” through community-wide planning and coordination of resources.⁵ What might current educators learn from how resulting educational programs came to fruition and earned such praise?

Historical Overview

Through much of the twentieth century Midwest Jewish communities commonly conveyed a progressive, peoplehood-centered ethos. While larger Jewish populaces often broke into disparate enclaves, midsize Midwestern Jews tended to converge in Jewishly-diverse neighborhoods. Resulting day-to-day interactions increased the likelihood that community members were personally acquainted, leaving less room for factional divides.⁶ Class divisions would develop, but powerful, patronizing aristocracies of the sort found in many older and larger population centers were not characteristic of Midwestern communities. To a significant degree, working class consciousness burgeoned among local small business owners and their employees, rather than in the shadow of Jewish grandees and mammoth businesses.⁷ There were criminal episodes—bootleggers, fraudsters—but communities built past them. Such locales coincided with Mordecai Kaplan’s description and prescription of “organic” communities: “one in which all activities and institutions conducted by Jews for Jews are interactive, and in which the fostering of Jewish peoplehood, religion and culture is given primacy.”⁸ The New York “Kehillah” had its virtues as a concept, but it didn’t exist as a community. In the Midwest it did.

Jewish solidarity in the region was fueled in part by antisemitic threats and barriers. Carey McWilliams’ often-noted article “Minneapolis: The Curious Twin,” published in 1946, built toward the conclusion that Minneapolis could be considered the antisemitic capital of the country, but the “curious” side of McWilliams’ exposé is often overlooked—that far healthier conditions prevailed just across the Mississippi in St. Paul. If racist and anti­semitic influences plagued the region, positive forces were widely at work as well.⁹ “Curious,” once again.

It has been suggested that among the mores brought to the region by Scandinavian immigrants was an extra measure of “community mindedness.”¹⁰ Farmer-Laborite Floyd B. Olson, elected governor of Minnesota in 1931, would memorably embody this frame of mind for his Jewish constituents, uplifting working class self-esteem in tandem with Labor Zionist and other labor-oriented influences. A child of Norwegian and Swedish immigrants, Olson grew up enmeshed in the Jewish world of his North Minneapolis neighbors—so much so that he was likely the only governor of the period to speak Yiddish.¹¹

Olson’s election foreshadowed a liberal turn in Minnesota politics, in tune with La Follette Progressives in neighboring Wisconsin. Concurrent with publication of McWilliams’ article, Hubert Humphrey was elected mayor of Minneapolis, and in the years that followed the nation’s most prominent liberals, including Humphrey, Adlai Stevenson, George McGovern, Eugene McCarthy, and Walter Mondale, came from the region¹²—a congenial environment for the development of a progressive, community-minded Jewish agenda.

Indications abound of broad-based vigor in Midwest Jewish communities, from the close of the nineteenth century through the twentieth. Minneapolitan Nina Morais Cohen, daughter of Clara and Sabato Morais, attended the founding conference of the National Council of Jewish Women in Chicago in 1893, leading to the formation of a Minneapolis chapter shortly after her return, and a St. Paul chapter a few months later.¹³ Fannie Brin, also a Minneapolitan, served as President of the NCJW through much of the 1930s. Louis Hurwich, longstanding superintendent of the Boston Bureau of Jewish Education, would assert that Boston was “the first community in the United States to organize Jewish education on a community-wide basis, and as a community responsibility,”¹⁴ but the Boston Bureau was formed in 1920, while a communal Talmud Torah, precursor of a local Bureau of Jewish Education, had been established in Des Moines, Iowa six years earlier.¹⁵ The first “Hillel House” was founded adjacent to the Champaign-Urbana campus of the University of Illinois in 1923 (followed in 1924 by a University of Wisconsin Hillel in Madison, Wisconsin), and in the 1930s one of the two Hebrew-speaking Habonim Labor Zionist “הכשרה/preparation for aliyah” farms in the United States was established in Minnesota.¹⁶ Hebrew Theological College in Chicago would emerge as a center of progressive Orthodox thought, and Twin Citians Frances and Julius Butwin produced the first English anthology of Sholom Aleichem. In the spring of 1960 Abraham Joshua Heschel served as a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota, and the next year at the University of Iowa.

This swell of productive energy was accompanied by a pronounced tendency toward inclusivity. One indication of this inclination is the comparatively high proportion of Midwest Jews who came to identify with Conservative Judaism, accompanied by a surge of Midwestern prominence in Conservative circles. The movement’s “rooted cosmopolitanism”¹⁷ meshed well with Midwestern tendencies. The first Camp Ramah (as well as the Reform movement’s first permanent overnight camp) was located in Wisconsin, and Conservative congregations in Minneapolis and in St. Paul both claimed the distinction of being home to the first chapter of United Synagogue Youth. A statistical profile of several Jewish communities, published in 1984, showed 53% of respondents in Minneapolis and 55% in St. Paul identified as Conservative. The next closest percentage was Richmond, Virginia, at 40%.¹⁸

Numerous mid-to-late-twentieth-century figures prominent in the Conservative Movement grew up in the Twin Cities, or spent a major portion of their public life there, including University of Judaism Dean Max Vorspan, United Synagogue Executive Director Albert I. Gordon, and Rabbinical Assembly presidents Arnold Goodman, Harold Kravitz, Perry Rank, and Kassel Abelson, who also served as Chair of its Laws and Standards Committee.

Twin Cities Conservative congregations would come to figure prominently in fully equalizing female and male duties and roles. Recalling a bat mitzvah receiving an aliyah along with her triplet brothers at Beth El Synagogue in 1951, a witness remembered Rabbi David Aronson walking to the front of the bimah at the conclusion of the Torah reading, looking outside and saying, “I don’t see any lightning. I don’t hear any thunder.”¹⁹

Even Lubavitch had a regional quality. One of its more prominent spokespersons in the 1970s and 1980s, a professor of public health at the University of Minnesota, grew up in Winnipeg, attended a Peretz Folk School, and in his younger years leaned toward Labor Zionism. Lubavitch’s longtime “Head Shliach” was a child of North Minneapolis and attended the communal Talmud Torah. A modicum of midwestern progressivism could also be discerned in the founding of Chabad’s women’s education program “Bais Chana” in St. Paul in 1971.

And if the Twin Cities Jewish communities proved exemplary in their pursuit of common ground, Gunther Plaut, in his study The Jews in Minnesota: The First Seventy-five Years, maintained that early in the century Duluth, Minnesota outpaced Minneapolis and St. Paul “along the path of communal unification,” beginning with a high degree of cooperation between German Jewish immigrants and those who soon followed from Eastern Europe. “Of the three major Minnesota communities which saw the development from a unitary to a dual Jewish community [German-Eastern European] structure, Duluth was the first to foreshadow the ultimate third step: the reunification into one single Jewish community.”²⁰ This tendency was still evident in 1970 when Duluth’s Conservative and Reform congregations merged and relocated to the city’s Jewish Community Center, which was also home to a communal Talmud Torah. Such developments confirmed Plaut’s observation, but in the ensuing decades the potential for communal productivity ebbed with a sharp decline in the city’s Jewish population.²¹

Jewish Education in Minneapolis and St. Paul

Through much of the twentieth century, characteristics Daniel Elazar associated with the region as a whole were commonly noted in connection with Jewish education in Minneapolis and St. Paul, in particular.

While some Minneapolis Talmud Torah administrators and instructors would demonstrate decidedly weak teaching and personal skills, in its most successful years it was a major social and cultural intersection in the community. In Europe, the term “Talmud Torah” came to be linked with community-supported schools for children from families that could not afford private tutors. The Talmud Torah of Minneapolis proudly embraced and extended this legacy of Jewish public education.

Writing in 1952, Leo Honor, originator of the expression “unity in diversity,” concluded that the Minneapolis Talmud Torah had been “one of the outstanding Talmud Torahs in the country, with its graduates radiating a profound influence in every phase of Jewish life.”²² Up through the mid-1960s its main facility was located on Minneapolis’s Near Northside, where a large proportion of the city’s Jews lived, with branches in South Minneapolis, and at the close of the 1950s in St. Louis Park, a first-ring suburb. Into the 1970s, classes met 7 hours a week. The school year extended well past the close of the public school system’s academic year, and began again before it resumed.

By maintaining kashrut throughout the school, observing the traditional calendar, requiring kippot, and placing the study of Tanakh in Hebrew at the center of the curriculum, the Talmud Torah signaled that traditionally observant students had a home at the school. The founding in 1944 of Torah Academy, an Orthodox day school, in cooperation with the Torah Vedaas Academy in New York, reflected the dissatisfaction of some with the Talmud Torah’s curriculum. Nonetheless, in its first five decades a significant number of Torah Academy students also attended the Talmud Torah, a telling indication of its position in the community. The location of its main facility within walking distance of the majority of Jewish households in the city into the 1950s,²³ along with a diverse faculty and student body, nurtured a sense of Jewish common ground greater than a particular congregation or movement represented, including in matters of gender. In 1922, the same year that Judith Kaplan, daughter of Mordecai Kaplan, celebrated becoming a bat mitzvah, Minneapolis Talmud Torah President Sarah Berman, in an article in the American Jewish World (a regional weekly), noted, “mention should be made of an innovation introduced by a representative of the women for the consideration of the Board of Directors. This innovation is to put the girl students on an equal footing with the boys by giving the girls something corresponding to Bar Mitzvah.”²⁴

The school’s place in the community was in keeping with the halakhic prioritization of bet ha-midrash over bet ha-k’nesset, and the aggadic insistence that talmud Torah was of even greater significance than a long list of priorities, including mindful prayer—a point to be recalled at the outset of morning prayer.²⁵ In such a community it was no surprise that the Talmud Torah would give birth to a congregation, Beth El Synagogue, founded in the early 1920s as successor to the Talmud Torah’s well-attended student and alumni worship services.

George Gordon, the school’s central figure in its formative years, personified these qualities. Having studied at the Telz Yeshivah in Lithuania, he went on to pursue a medical degree, and in 1900 began his practice in North Minneapolis. Gordon’s dedicated service as a physician was deeply appreciated in the community, but in 1928 he moved from medicine to serving as director of the Talmud Torah, guided by an educational perspective closely resembling Mordecai Kaplan’s, with whom he was in personal contact.²⁶

Minneapolis Talmud Torah curricula would focus on nurturing students’ sense of membership in a living people with a shared history, a shared language, distinctive practices, a multifaceted literature, and mutual responsibilities; curricula in which Moses and Moses Maimonides, Emma Lazarus and Levi Yitschak of Berdichev, Ahad Ha’am and Henrietta Szold all had a place at the table, with the ensuing conversation unfolding, to a great degree, in Hebrew.²⁷

A telling indication of the social dynamic underlying these developments was the role played by Samuel Deinard, rabbi of Temple Israel from 1901–1921, in maintaining communal ties. Temple Israel was the only Reform congregation in the city at the time, and on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, when his Southside congregation held no services, Deinard attended Knesseth Israel, a Northside Orthodox congregation, where he would be invited to deliver the sermon—in Yiddish.²⁸ Deinard also strongly identified with the Zionist movement, despite significant opposition to Zionism in Reform circles of the day. Gunther Plaut concluded that in Deinard the community “intuitively recognized the spirit of the new community to come…”²⁹

But inclusiveness wasn’t simply a local idiosyncrasy. The devastation of European Jewry, followed by the establishment of the State of Israel, led to a period of worldwide Jewish affinities, made personal through the lived experience of family, neighbors, and friends. The convergence of Jewish ethnicities and orientations in Israel was an inspiring indication of vigorous intra-Jewish diversity, extending beyond the reach of the most horrible of circumstances. Both loss and renewal confirmed the timely pertinence of communal schools and curricula centering on inclusive peoplehood, a shared history, and a shared future. Midwestern communities were especially well situated to mediate this sensibility.

In 1951 the Talmud Torah’s main branch moved a short distance to a new building facing Frances E. Willard Elementary School. The implication was clear enough: The Talmud Torah was an educational counterpart of the school across the street. But other forces were shaping Jewish communal life as well. in the post-World War II years, as discriminatory practices receded, Jewish North Minneapolis began to give way to upward, outward and “white-flight” mobility. In 1948, approximately 60% of Jewish residents of greater Minneapolis lived on the Northside. By 1959 the percentage had shrunk to 38%.³⁰ Amid these changes, and despite indications of continued vitality, Jonathan Krasner dated the initial contraction of the Talmud Torah to this period, noting that though “One area of the country where the Talmud Torahs held out a little longer was the Mississippi Valley…By the 1950s even the venerable Minneapolis Talmud Torah, which maintained strong enrollment figures, had cut its extracurricular program, reduced its hours, and saw its academic standards decline.”³¹

Nonetheless, into the 1960s and 1970s, enrollment remained relatively high, and curricula continued to focus on ivrit b’ivrit speaking and reading instruction, biblical and classical rabbinic texts, and more recent Jewish thinkers. Depending on the particular class and instructor, high school students might be introduced to the Jewish Thought Today volume of Louis Jacob’s “Chain of Tradition” series, Mishnah (in Hebrew), the Hebrew script of Yehudah Amichai’s radio play היום בו נקבר מרטן בובר (The Day Martin Buber Was Buried), and the book of Job, taught by a member of the Orthodox Torah Academy day school faculty.

As the Jewish Northside unraveled and the Minneapolis Talmud Torah’s communal presence receded, Elazar’s thesis regarding regional characteristics was reconfirmed in St. Paul. By the 1960s the great majority of the city’s Jewish residents had moved to the city’s Highland neighborhood. Synagogues and Jewish-owned small businesses followed, along with a newly coalesced communal Talmud Torah. In the years that followed one indication of a broad commitment to inclusivity was the finding in a 2004 population study that 13% of Jewish households in greater St. Paul (695 households) were from the former Soviet Union, a percentage second only to New York City.³² Resettlement and integration efforts, including full Talmud Torah scholarships for the children of immigrant households, resonated strongly with the sort of “organic” Jewish community Kaplan envisioned.³³

As in Minneapolis, St. Paul’s Talmud Torah students came from both Conservative and Orthodox congregations, but a significant number of Reform congregation members and unaffiliated youth were also enrolled in its programs. Its administration and faculty came to include highly skilled educators from around the world, including Israelis with Yemenite and Georgian backgrounds,³⁴ instructors who had grown up in Argentina and Chicago, a Covenant Award winner from Green Bay, Wisconsin,³⁵ and six authors or co-authors of Jewish educational books.³⁶ Enrollment would peak in the early 1960s at approximately 550 afternoon school students, out of a St. Paul Jewish population of approximately 10,000.³⁷

Through the early 2000s the Talmud Torah remained the community’s educational center, offering a supplementary afternoon school program, a day school (founded in the early 1980s), an early childhood program, and an adult education program, while also serving as the home of the Twin Cities Jewish Middle School, co-founded with the non-denominational Minneapolis Jewish Day School. The depth and breadth of learning the Talmud Torah provided is reflected in a list of guests who met with students, including Israel Prize-winning author Natan Shaham, Knesset member Meir Pail, Israeli-Palestinian writer Anton Shammas, moral development theorist Lawrence Kohlberg, Yad leKashish founder Miriam Mendelow, Chief Kadi of Israel Ahmed Nattur, Hebrew University Law Professor Zev Falk, and Minnesota Attorney General “Skip” Humphrey, son of Hubert Humphrey.

In the St. Paul Talmud Torah Afternoon School study of biblical texts in Hebrew began in the elementary grades, and among high school classes offered was a course on mystical, rational and existential approaches to Jewish life. In the 1990s, fifth- and sixth-grade St. Paul Day School students studied nine chapters of Mishnah (in Hebrew), along with additional rabbinic sources, in preparation for service on the school’s Vaad Din/Justice Committee, which was responsible for resolving complaints brought to the committee by students, faculty or staff members. Curricula in each of the agency’s programs were designed developmentally, presenting challenges that stimulated growth—taught by skilled and knowledgeable faculty, with ample instructional time. Curricula met students where they were, while leading them to ask, “What is beyond that horizon? And then that one? And how can I find out?”

In their study Ethnic Identification Among American Jews (1974), Arnold Dashefsky and Howard Shapiro maintained that the St. Paul Talmud Torah offered a “highly illuminating” example of what a central communal education agency could achieve when unencumbered by the organizational politics and ideological constraints that so often hampered synagogue-based programs. In both Minneapolis and St. Paul, centering Talmud Torah curricula on Hebrew language skills, classical texts, and contemporary thinkers and issues appealed to families from across the community, including significant numbers of households not affiliated with a synagogue. The cooperative division of responsibilities freed congregations to focus on in-depth development of liturgical skills, with impressive outcomes in both settings.³⁸ Writing in the mid-1960s, longtime University of Chicago Hillel Director Maurice Pekarsky argued that Jewish communities in search of “a beginning, roots, and a future” must build educational programs that “help us discover the means of traveling in time.”³⁹ The St. Paul Talmud Torah’s schools did just that.

A degree of regional educational vitality also persisted. An annual Jewish educator’s conference was held in the 1980s and 1990s, alternating between the Minneapolis and St. Paul Jewish Community Centers. Modeled after the national Coalition for Advancement of Jewish Education/CAJE conferences, “Minne(sota)-CAJE” brought together educators from across the ideological spectrum. Educators also benefitted from documents and artifacts gathered and maintained by the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest, sparking research and numerous publications.

However, in the Midwest, as throughout the country, indications of communal dissolution were accumulating. Deeply introverted forms of Orthodoxy exerted growing influence in traditional circles,⁴⁰ and while Birthright/Taglit and other Israel-focused initiatives continued to attract significant participation, links between American Jews and Israelis were growing more tenuous and strained. The 2013 Pew Center study Portrait of Jewish Americans indicated that 43% of respondents identified “caring about Israel” as indicative of being Jewish, one percent higher than those who chose “Having a good sense of humor.”⁴¹ There was little reason to doubt that an increasing number of Twin Cities Jews were nearing a comparable perspective.

Symptomatic of these developments was the spasmic contraction of the Minneapolis and St. Paul Talmud Torahs. By the 1980s the Reform congregation Samuel Deinard had led succeeded in gaining direct funding from the Minneapolis Federation for its education program, a major step away from the communal agency system. Writing in the early 1980s, former Talmud Torah of Minneapolis Director L.I. Kaiser, while lauding the school’s successes, concluded that members of an increasingly diffuse community “now serve other gods and other needs.”⁴² In 1990 Elazar noted that even in Minneapolis, where the Talmud Torah “is considered a community jewel, when the very substantial segment of Federation leaders who are affiliated with the Reform temple acted to provide the latter’s far less intensive school with Federation support, they succeeded in breaking a 70-year rule that Federation aid for Jewish education was solely directed to the community institution…”⁴³ Today what remains of the Talmud Torah of Minneapolis is a joint project of the city’s two Conservative congregations. Enrollment is open to the community at large, but it no longer retains the central, integrative position it once held.

Developments in St. Paul would eventually follow a similar course. One of the community’s Conservative congregations led the way in challenging the Talmud Torah’s standing as communal common ground, echoing developments in Minneapolis 20 years earlier. When the congregation announced in 2000 that it was opening its own afternoon school, the President of the St. Paul Federation responded, “The preservation of communal Jewish education remains an important value for the St. Paul Jewish community and of the United Jewish Fund and Council [Federation]…we need to be mindful of the importance of maintaining our communal agencies and institutions. I would hope that all elements of our community would rededicate themselves to finding solutions to community issues which benefit and enhance the entire St. Paul Jewish community.”⁴⁴ Even so, Federation support for a communal agency-centered approach to Jewish education in St. Paul withered in the years that followed, and the Twin Cities Jewish Middle School succumbed to inter-city tensions in 2007.⁴⁵

By 2024, all that was left of Dashefsky and Shapiro’s “highly illuminating” Talmud Torah of St. Paul was its adult education program, and in 2025 that program was transferred to a local self-described “journalism and engagement hub.” The Talmud Torah’s website indicated that

For nearly 70 years, TTSP has been a cornerstone of Jewish education in the Twin Cities, shaping generations through innovative programs and unwavering commitment to communal learning.

Looking ahead, the TTSP is evolving its role to amplify its impact by transitioning from direct programming to a grant-making model, supporting organizations that share a vision for vibrant Jewish education and individuals who hope to access opportunities for learning.⁴⁶

Jewish “belonging,” in the Twin Cities and elsewhere, would increasingly resemble membership in a private organization or organizations. Newcomers to the area, along with local youth, were left to grapple with communal questions absent memories of a curious and illuminating past. Appeals to Klal Yisrael (Jews in general) were no match for the ensuing challenges. While am/עם (people) shares its root with eem/עם (with), a klal/כלל (generality) is, in essence, an abstraction.

*****

If many Midwestern Jewish communities once embodied characteristics of Mordecai Kaplan’s “organic” community, in recent decades they have largely come undone. Some factors, both constructive and adverse, were idiosyncratic, having to do with local social and economic developments and particular persons—the Minneapolis Talmud Torah’s George Gordon, for example. However, leadership positions, paid and voluntary, were also open to individuals unsuited for the work, or with little lasting commitment to that specific locale. The Twin Cities communities were fortunate in this regard, though not without exceptions.

Broader cultural influences were also shaping Jewish communities throughout the region and country. The authors of Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life,⁴⁷ published in 1985, maintained that life in America had long been riven by a tension between social responsibility and personal opportunity, tensions that were taking their toll on the social side of life. By the closing decades of the twentieth century a growing proportion of American Jews, including Midwesterners, were immersed in the pursuit of personal advancement in ways that did not always mesh well with what would be needed to productively sustain their Jewish communities.

Some changes were physical. Excepting those who continued to seek out residences within walking distance of their synagogue, Midwestern Jews were living farther apart from one another. This geographical change came with institutional ramifications. As “nearby” faded as a primary motive for synagogue membership, congregations sought new members by marketing customized programs and services to Jewish consumers. Coinciding with a general dilution of the construct “community” (e.g., “online community”), the term would commonly come to be used in the Twin Cities as a euphemism for “congregation.” The decision of the Minneapolis and St. Paul Federations to directly allocate educational funds to congregations, along with funds to Orthodox programs informed by premises decidedly divergent from principles broadly affirmed by Twin Cities Jews, signaled a significant recalculation of “community.”

Ethnic bonds that had once moderated ideological differences were also waning. Growing up in many a mid-twentieth-century Mississippi Valley Jewish community had come with a very real sense of ambient Yiddishkeit, conveyed through the spoken Yiddish one might encounter on the street, at neighborhood shops, and in the nearby homes of family and friends; not the antique manner of a self-contained faction, but a broad, living legacy, reinforced by a healthy measure of halakhic observance among many, and halakhic deference among many others. Such experiences had helped to substantiate a Jewish רשות הרבים/public domain, fertile ground for expansive and deep Jewish education. More recently, younger midwestern Jews would more likely encounter sporadic hints of Yiddishkeit, if at all, in the form of stereotypical foods, music, and a comedic accent; from people, to ethnic group, to religion, to vestigial remains.

What might this teach us about deep and broad belonging and learning?

1. It has been suggested that the phrase ḥaverim kol Yisrael (all Israelites belong) in Birkat ha-Ḥodesh (blessing preceding a new moon) stems from early rabbinic efforts to spread the word that every pilgrim to the Temple would be treated as having observed requisite purity practices, and would therefore be considered an observant חבר/ḥaver/someone who belongs for the purposes of the pilgrimage; חברים/ḥaverim/those who belong —not centered on friendship per se, but belonging.⁴⁸ Children in other locales could easily encounter Jews who did not consider them חברים, but that was far less likely in Minneapolis or St. Paul, where talmud Torah was communal common ground, introducing students to their local Jewish contemporaries in shared learning contexts.

2. Communal schools such as the Twin Cities Talmud Torahs were particularly well situated to a) embody a deep and broad embrace of Jewish life through inclusive faculties, enrollments and curricula; b) maximize access to educators in the community; c) foster relationships among faculty, staff, and students of varying backgrounds; d) make efficient use of limited material resources; e) provide educators sufficient hours and compensation to warrant their focused commitment; and f) set tuition rates in keeping with constituents’ circumstances. Given these factors, reestablishing local communal agencies (not simply “bureaus”) remains a commonsense approach to Jewish education. Defining “local” for these purposes may prove challenging, but it is a vital challenge.

3. There is a world of difference between using communal resources to build institutions that draw disparate elements of a community together, and the politic scattering of assets. Parceling out communal resources among congregations and private schools facilitates the absence of day-to-day educational interactions between faculty, students, and their families. In these days of Jewish factions and fractions, providing support for shared learning that traverses halakhic and ideological divides is a crucial responsibility of communal funding bodies.

4. If it is to prove formative, one’s Jewish education must be as engaging, intellectually substantive, and inspiring as any of one’s other learning experiences, if not more so. Courting students with, in Maurice Pekarsky’s words, “therapy education, survival education, education in pleasantness,”⁴⁹ rather than seriously challenging them, can lead students to reasonably conclude that a typical Jewish education comes with childish expectations and ineffectual outcomes, and can therefore be left behind. In their most vigorous years the Twin Cities Talmud Torahs went a long way toward contradicting that conclusion, employing faculty and curricula of sufficient depth and breadth to warrant the ongoing regard of Orthodox and non-Orthodox parents and students alike.

Policies of the Twin Cities Talmud Torahs indicated due regard for dietary and calendrical halakhah, while constructively engaging halakhic diversity. Reflecting on Northside sights and smells on Friday afternoons, George Gordon was remembered as saying that “reiaḥ hayahadut” is as important as “ruaḥ hayahadut”—the smell of Judaism is as important as the spirit of Judaism.⁵⁰ A pervasive presence emanated from the homes of neighbors with varied backgrounds and orientations. Today’s students and their families may understand halakhic standards in different ways, but an overarching appreciation of both reiaḥ and ruaḥ must prevail if a communal school is to genuinely prove a point of communal common ground.

5. If contemporary Jewish communities are to constitute something more than adjacent organizations and affinity groups, members must have enough confidence in one another to engage challenges collectively. One possible step in this direction would be more serious use of participatory decision-making on a communal level. The liberal principle of individual autonomy has greatly influenced Jewish-American life, but no corresponding emphasis on liberal-democratic Jewish communal processes has taken hold.⁵¹ Such procedures can prove divisive; but if carefully constructed and constructively applied (possibly accompanied by study groups on Jewish sources dealing with communal governance), community-wide forums and decision-making practices could help to stimulate an informed sense of belonging. As Tocqueville noted, the greater good of democratic processes is not that they inevitably lead to the very best decisions, but that they spread “a restive activity through the whole social body, a superabundant force, an energy that never exists without it, and which, however little circumstances may be favorable, can bring forth marvels.”⁵² Jewish communities are deeply in need of such energy. Efforts to foster commonality in Midwestern Jewish communities were bolstered by local circumstance and an ample measure of community-oriented leaders. Absent such circumstances, restoring the in-common in community requires ever more conscious effort, and a greater sense of shared responsibility.

6. Camping continues to carry significant educational potential. The Midwest played a key role in the development of Jewish overnight camping, but it came with the problematic implication that one may need to leave one’s home community to experience a fully encompassing and inspiring Jewish way of life. For youth who live apart from a Jewish community, or in a community that has no apparent place for them, camping can lead to lifelong friendships and serious learning, but it must not lead campers to conclude that the episodic idylls of camp life constitute an alternative to life in a day-to-day community, with its mix of ages, households, vocations, and perspectives.

7. While the Reform movement’s 1885 Pittsburgh Platform asserted that “We consider ourselves no longer a nation but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine nor a sacrificial worship…”, its 1937 Columbus Platform dramatically reversed course: “In the rehabilitation of Palestine, the land hallowed by memories and hopes, we behold the promise of renewed life for many of our brethren. We affirm the obligation of all Jewry to aid in its upbuilding as a Jewish homeland by endeavoring to make it not only a haven of refuge for the oppressed but also a center of Jewish culture and spiritual life.”⁵³ In the Reform movement this was a dramatic change; but in the Twin Cities, affirmation of Jewish peoplehood in Zionist terms was long prevalent, strongly reinforced by the Labor Zionist standard that the common good is best calculated in terms of consequences for common folk. That Saadia Gelb, author of The Kibbutz Experience and prominent Mapai figure, and Melford Spiro, author of Kibbutz: Venture in Utopia, were both alumni of the Talmud Torah of Minneapolis is one small but telling sign of this influence.

Israel-related cultural renewal and inclusivity played a large role in rendering Twin Cities Talmud Torah curricula rooted and invigorating, but that sensibility has dramatically receded. Nationally, this trend is most pronounced among younger Jews. A 2025 Washington Post poll indicated that while roughly 56% of respondents described themselves as “emotionally attached” to Israel, the number dropped to 36% of 18-34 year-old respondents.⁵⁴ At the same time, it is hard to imagine the current prime minister of Israel consulting a wide array of Jewish thinkers from around the world about a piece of legislation pending in the Knesset, as did David Ben Gurion in 1958.⁵⁵

The story of the Jewish people cannot be honestly taught without due regard for how Zionism has shaped recent stages of that story. However, doing so must include serious consideration of varied voices at Israel’s founding and subsequent events and personages, both inspiring and troubling, all within the context of the larger Jewish story. The range and prominence of speakers who met with Talmud Torah of St. Paul students in the 1970s to 1990s conveyed to students, their families, the Jewish community, and the community at large that the Jewish education they were receiving was brave, deep, and broad.

Self-aware self-criticism is a foundational characteristic of Jewish learning. Jewish educators should no more look the other way when the subject is current events than when it is Amos’s confrontation with Amaziah. The Land of Israel has a unique status in the Jewish story, and the Jews of Israel are now the largest Jewish populace in the world, the only Hebrew-speaking society, and a signal embodiment of Jewish peoplehood. Ḥaverim kol Yisrael. But as Yeshayah Lebowitz observed: “…the historical Jewish people isn’t defined in governmental-state terms… The historical Jewish people is defined in terms of its Jewishness…”⁵⁶

*****

Jewish communities in many other locales have struggled to devise versions of the communal characteristics that converged in the Twin Cities, where inclusivity was enhanced by the quality of learning their educational agencies offered, and learning was buoyed by a palpable communal presence. The Twin Cities are now among those struggling locales, but through much of the twentieth century the successes of the Minneapolis and St. Paul Talmud Torahs was widely viewed as “illuminating.” Relationships could falter and outcomes weren’t always ideal, but something of the potential of cooperative Jewish communities to provide exceptional learning opportunities was evinced on both sides of the Mississippi; communities in which understanding a communal school to be a Jewish public institution was common sense, and common ground, for the common good.

Earl Schwartz is retired from the Hamline University religion department, where he also directed the social justice studies program. He is the author of Moral Development: A Practical Guide for Jewish Teachers (Alternatives in Religious Education, Inc., 1983) and Arc of the Covenant: Jewish Educational Success on the Upper Mississippi (Lexington Books, 2019), and co-author with Rabbi Barry Cytron of When Life is in the Balance (United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, 1986) and Who Renews Creation (United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, 1993).

---

1. ¹ L.I. Kaiser, “Minneapolis is Different,” Jewish Education 50, no. 3, (Fall 1982): 34-38.

2. ² A. P. Gannes, ed., Selected Writings of Leo L. Honor (Reconstructionist Press, 1965), 47.

3. ³ Jacob R. Marcus, United States Jewry, 1776-1985 (Wayne State, 1993), 589.

4. ⁴ “…the rising Jewish education establishment, mostly concentrated in the big cities on the East Coast…gave in early on to rabbinic demands to establish congregational schools and other fissiparous tendencies which may have been appropriate for their large cities…” “The National-Cultural Movement in Hebrew Education in the Mississippi Valley,” D. Elazar, https://dje.jcpa.org/articles2/hebrew-mississippi.htm.

5. ⁵ See, e.g., L.I. Kaiser’s reference to “remoteness from the East, the source of Jewish cultural chaos” as a significant asset in the school’s strongest years. “Minneapolis is Different,” 37. Also: L. Gartner, Jewish Education in the United States, A Documentary History (Teachers College, 1969), 31.

6. ⁶ It is estimated that from the 1930s through the 1970s, approximately 20,000 Jews lived in Minneapolis and its suburbs. During the same period it is estimated that St. Paul’s Jewish population dropped from 14,000 to under 10,000. They Chose Minnesota: A Survey of the State’s Ethnic Group, June Drenning Holmquist, ed. (Minnesota Historical Society, 1985), 491.

7. ⁷ Based on data from the early 1980s, Arnold Dashefsky and Bernard Lazerwitz observed a positive correlation between Jewish affiliation and self-employed occupations, along with sales, clerical, and manual labor. See: A. Dashefsky, B. Lazerwitz, Charitable Choices: Philanthropic Decisions of Donors in the American Jewish Community (Lexington Books, 2009), 62.

8. ⁸ M. Kaplan, Questions Jews Ask (Reconstructionist, 1956), Introduction.

9. ⁹ Noteworthy in this regard were St. Paul’s seven private colleges, along with a University of Minnesota campus, the second highest per capita ratio of colleges of any city, after Boston, in the United States.

10. ¹⁰ It is commonly assumed that the English term “community-minded” comes from the Danish “samfundssind.” Regarding “Midwest Nice,” see: Kimberly Haala, “Good for you, good for others: Practicing the kindness behind ‘Midwest Nice,’” https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speaking-of-health/kindness-behind-midwest-nice.

11. ¹¹ George H. Mayer, The Political Career of Floyd B. Olson (Minnesota Historical Society, 1951), 5, 8. An uncle of the author confirmed having heard Olson address a gathering in Yiddish.

12. ¹² Vicki Peiser’s Jews in Germantown (Minnesota Jewish Historical Society, 2025) presents a contrasting picture of Jewish life in a non-urban portion of Minnesota southwest of the Twin Cities.

13. ¹³ On a visit to the Twin Cities, Susan B. Anthony stayed with the Cohens.

14. ¹⁴ Jonathan Krasner, The Benderly Boys and American Jewish Education (Brandeis, 2011), 128.

15. ¹⁵ F. Rosenthal, The Jews of Des Moines, the First Century (Jewish Welfare Federation of Des Moines, Iowa, 1957), 78-80.

16. ¹⁶ The other farm was located in New Jersey.

17. ¹⁷ The expression, coined by Kwame Anthony Appiah, is an ironic twist on the antisemitic caricature of Jews as “rootless cosmopolitans.”

18. ¹⁸ Alvin Chenkin, Gary A. Tobin, Recent Jewish Community Population Studies: A Roundup (American Jewish Committee, 1985), 171.

19. ¹⁹ North Side Memories: An Oral History of Minnesota’s Largest Jewish Neighborhood, P. Freshman, L. Mack Schloff, eds. (Upper Midwest Jewish Historical Society, 2000), 30.

20. ²⁰ Gunther Plaut, The Jews in Minnesota: The first Seventy-five Years (AJHS, 1959), 139.

21. ²¹ The Jewish population of Duluth in 1930 was estimated at approximately 4,000. By 1977, the number had dropped to approximately 1,000 Jewish residents. They Chose Minnesota: A Survey of the State’s Ethnic Groups, 491.

22. ²² Selected Writings of Leo L. Honor, 67.

23. ²³ The neighborhood’s walkability is highlighted in North Side Memories: An Oral History of Minnesota’s Largest Jewish Neighborhood, vol. 2, P. Freshman, Linda Mack Schloff, eds. (Upper Midwest Jewish History, 2000).

24. ²⁴ L. Schloff, And Prairie Dogs Weren’t Kosher (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1996), 171.

25. ²⁵ מותר לעשות בית הכנסת בית המדרש אבל בית המדרש אסור לעשותו בית הכנסת שקדושת בית המדרש יתרה על קדושת בית הכנסת, ומעלין בקדש ולא מורידין. (משנה תורה הלכות תפלה, יא:יד).

    “It is permitted to transform a synagogue into a house of study. However, it is forbidden to transform a house of study into a synagogue because the sanctity of a house of study exceeds that of a synagogue and one must proceed to a higher rung of holiness, but not descend to a lower rung.” (Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Prayer 11:14, trans. Eliyahu Touger, Sefaria, sefaria.org.)

26. ²⁶ Regarding “champions of Hebrew education” in the region, Elazar acknowledged that though there were no statistics, “it seems that the majority were Litvaks and indeed it was in the cities with heavy Litvak settlement that Hebrew education was most successful. As maskilim they were educated to see Hebrew as essential to Jewish peoplehood and culture…” “The National–Cultural Movement in Hebrew Education in the Mississippi Valley.” D. Elazar. Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daniel Elazar Papers Index. Regarding early Jewish educational initiatives in the Twin Cities, see Plaut, chapter 24, “Teach Them Diligently.”

27. ²⁷ Regarding the influence of the Hebrew renaissance on twentieth-century Jewish life, see B. Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution (University of California Press, 1993).

28. ²⁸ Plaut, 217.

29. ²⁹ Plaut, 303.

30. ³⁰ By 1971, an estimated 2% remained on the Northside. Minnesota Historical Society MNopedia, https://www.mnhs.org/mnopedia/search/index/group/talmud-torah-minneapolis.

31. ³¹ Krasner, 376-377.

32. ³² St. Paul United Jewish Fund and Council 2004-2005 Annual Report, 6.

33. ³³ Concurrently, the St. Paul Jewish Community would receive national recognition for its efforts to integrate youth with physical and cognitive disabilities into its programs.

34. ³⁴ In the 1970s and early 1980s, the Hebrew faculty included a daughter of Siegfried Lehmann, an Israel Prize recipient and founder of the Ben Shemen Youth Village.

35. ³⁵ Rabbi Joel (Yosi) Gordon, executive director of the Talmud Torah of St. Paul from 1978-1990, and a faculty member in the years that followed, received the award in 2000.

36. ³⁶ Harry Malin, Dori Weisman, Phyllis Cytron, Louis Newman, Rabbi Joel Gordon, and the author.

37. ³⁷ A. Dashefsky and H. Shapiro, The Jewish Community of St. Paul, MN, United Jewish Fund and Council, 1971, https://www.jewishdatabank.org/api/download/?studyId=465&mediaId=C-MN-St._Paul-1969-Main_Report.pdf.

38. ³⁸ The liturgical writings of Miles Cohen, author of לוח השנה, and Perry Rank, co-editor of מורה דרך, both of whom with roots on the Northside, are one sign of this outcome.

39. ³⁹ Tradition and Contemporary Experience, A. Jospe, ed. (Schocken, 1970), 289.

40. ⁴⁰ The Orthodox congregation that hosted Reform Rabbi Samuel Deinard on Rosh Hashanah seventy-some years earlier, now located in a Minneapolis suburb, fractured into three congregations, two of the three adopting highly insular ideologies. The congregation’s last rabbi before the fracture had served on the Talmud Torah faculty. In St. Paul, the remaining Orthodox congregation came to be strongly influenced by Chabad.

41. ⁴¹ Portrait of Jewish Americans, October 1, 2013, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2013/10/01/jewish-american-beliefs-attitudes-culture-survey/.

42. ⁴² Kaiser, 38.

43. ⁴³ D. Elazar, “The Future of Central Agencies for Jewish Education,” Jewish Education 58, nos. 3-4 (1990): 10.

44. ⁴⁴ American Jewish World, January 14, 2000, 1.

45. ⁴⁵ A subsequent Federation-sponsored communal education planning effort, initiated in conjunction with “listening sessions” in 2012, reflected this disintegration. See: St. Paul Jewish Federation Community Planning Process, Priority 4: Strengthen Jewish Education, Final Report, October 2018, https://cdn.fedweb.org/fed-103/2/PANEL%25204%2520Strengthen%2520Jewish%2520Education%2520Final%2520Report%2520PDF.pdf.

46. ⁴⁶ Talmud Torah of St. Paul website (discontinued), https://ttsp.org/, April 4, 2026.

47. ⁴⁷ Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (University of California Press, 1985).

48. ⁴⁸ See Issachar Jacobson’s comment on Mahzor Vitry’s reference to the passage:

    יששכר יעקבסון, נתיב בינה (סיני ,1987), 234–235. ֿ

    Ephraim Urbach noted that such usage perhaps shared its etymology with similar terminology used by far more exclusive Jewish groups of the period.

    526. א.א. אורבך ,חז׳׳ל: פרקי אמינות ודעות (מאגנס ,1969), 520–

    Hillel’s “אל תפרוש מן הציבור”/“Don’t separate from the general public” is intriguing in this regard. Given its wording, he could well have intended, “We must not become the “פרוש/Pharisee” elitist sect we are made out to be!”

49. ⁴⁹ M. Pekarsky, “The American Jewish Community—What Lies Ahead?” in Tradition and Contemporary Experience, 290.

50. ⁵⁰ North Side Memories, 40.

51. ⁵¹ There is ample evidence of democratic influence on Jewish communal decision making, reaching back to the early rabbinic precedent that “an action regarding communal needs ציבור) (צרכי is taken on condition that the majority of the community (רוב הציבור) accepts it (Tosefta Sanhedrin 2:13).” For additional examples see:

    מדינת ישראל כמדינה יהודית ודמוקרטית (האיגוד העולמי למדעי היהדות, 1999), פרק ד׳.

52. ⁵² Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, eds. and trans. (University of Chicago, 2000), 196.

53. ⁵³ For more on the Reform Movement’s platforms, see “Platforms,” Central Conference of American Rabbis, https://www.ccarnet.org/rabbinic-voice/platforms/.

54. ⁵⁴ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/10/06/jewish-americans-israel-poll-gaza/.

55. ⁵⁵ Ben Gurion sent them a letter with the question: Should a child whose father is Jewish but whose mother is not, be registered in Israel’s “Register of the Population” as Jewish, if that is the expressed wish of both parents? He began the letter with the explanation that the Knesset had instructed a committee in which he was included “to consider ‘statements of opinion by Jewish scholars in Israel and abroad on this subject,’ and to formulate registration rules ‘in keeping with the accepted tradition among all circles of Jewry…’” Recipients ranged from Solomon Freehof, President of the World Union for Progressive Judaism (Reform), to the Lubavitcher Rebbe, the rabbi of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Yemenite Community, S. Y. Agnon, and A. J. Heschel. See: Jewish Identity, Modern Responsa and Opinions, S. B. Hoenig, ed. (New York, 1965).

56. ⁵⁶ ישעיהו ליבוביץ, אמונה היסטוריה וערכים (אקדמון, 2002), 114.