Author: yudelbenyehudapress-com

Matthew Austerklein

The rise of genetic testing has led to incredible insights about the human family, often calling into question our narratives of cultural continuity and purity. For a hundred dollars, a person can unearth a hidden map of their inherited traits, long-lost relatives, and the ancient origins of their DNA from across the peoples and the nations of the world. Discovering that one is 2% this or 10% that can of course make good dinner conversation, but it can also lead to a radical reorientation toward the story of one’s life. Finding Your Roots, the long-running PBS series by Harvard professor and public historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., operates on this very principle by showing guests how their DNA often upends long-held beliefs about their race, history, and even family tree. Ultimately, this genealogical journey leads to more understanding, empathy, and a broader sense of interconnectedness.

The Conservative Movement—the youngest of the three major movements of American Judaism—has perhaps the most complex musical DNA because of its characteristic breadth and permeability. As a movement devoted to Jewish peoplehood, its musical expressions over time rarely evinced a conscious ideology which would restrict its polity in song. Yet its “Sacred Cluster” of values, as described by JTS Chancellor Emeritus Rabbi Dr. Ismar Schorsch, surely held sway over its musical outcomes. Devotion to Israel, Hebrew, scholarship, halakha, and klal yisrael were pegs which anchored the big tent of Conservative Judaism’s music culture and under which it cultivated Jewish life and celebrated God and Torah.¹ Within these values, a veritable host of musical stories and religious intuitions are bound, representing a complex musical DNA which encoded the embodied musical practices of Conservative Judaism.

To convey the soundscape of this sacred cluster as it is still heard, I will take for my inspiration the very rhythms of the Conservative Movement’s heartbeat: its synagogue melodies. Such antagonistic historical figures as the Jewish musicologist Abraham Zvi Idelsohn and the antisemitic German composer Richard Wagner could agree that the Jew’s most authentic national inheritance was the music of the synagogue.² While these shared assumptions derived from Romantic, post-Herderian assumptions about nationalism, land, and cultural authenticity, they nevertheless convey a timeless sentiment that a religious community’s sacred melodies lie at the very bedrock of its identity.

The stakes have always been high. “I cannot think of a single congregation that achieves meaningful tefillah in the absence of good music,” wrote Chancellor Emeritus Arnold Eisen, even as he acknowledged the perennial, intergenerational battle lines within the movement over the use of musical instruments, the abridgment of the liturgy, artistic vs. folk repertoire, service length, and Hebrew vs. English.³ Traditions and attitudes toward music can often be fundamentally defining for religious communities, and even between Conservative congregations, as musical forms and choices embody distinct social, cultural, and theological visions of the world. By examining the origins of the melodies of the Conservative Movement, we will thus come to know not only the diversity of its composition, but the fullness of its legacy and the surprising story of our interconnectedness.

In describing the core liturgical melodies of the Conservative Movement, I proceed with some caution. My knowledge is necessarily founded on my own learning within the movement’s institutions. Growing up within them in the 1980s and 1990s, I have been a participant in Conservative synagogues, youth groups, summer camps, and as a student at the Jewish Theological Seminary. I attended cantorial school at a time of flux between the cantorially-driven repertoire of the suburban synagogue, the late-century ascent of Carlebach services and yeshiva melodies, and the twenty-first century advance of Reform-style songleading and new, post-Carlebach melodies from Songleader Boot Camp (SLBC), Jewish Renewal, and Hadar/Rising Song. I absorbed much of it, and from my experience working in Conservative synagogues for the past two decades I am attempting to offer a window into the genesis and composers of its core repertoire.⁴

This effort will inevitably be incomplete. I am sure that I will leave out some tune that the reader will feel is an essential part of the Conservative canon. In such a case, I am consoled by the prospect that the aggrieved reader will write me with their musical din toire, and thereby I will learn more of the larger story of which we are both a part. To every reader, I offer the same assurance that I give to everyone in my congregation: I want you to know that all of your tunes are the right ones. Finally, I must thank my cantorial colleagues, who have fielded my ever-curious questions about the origins of our sacred melodies over the years, and who remain among the greatest living repositories of our Jewish musical heritage.⁵

I. A Portal into the Past: Mathilde Schechter and the First Conservative Hymnal

Our knowledge of the earliest days of music in the Conservative Movement is deeply indebted to the research of Rabbi Ḥazzan Dr. Geoffrey Goldberg, who documented nearly half of the melodies of the Conservative congregational repertoire, all of which were notated within the first half of the twentieth century.⁶ Despite Reform and Orthodoxy being known as the standard-bearers for modern communal singing genres like nigunim and songleading, Goldberg’s research demonstrates that the Conservative Movement was the initial and primary force behind the development of American Jewish congregational singing. Such practices were almost nonexistent in either Europe or America by 1900. Classical Reform was dominated by the organ and choir, and the “Golden Age” of star cantors consumed the East-European immigrant generation.⁷ Yet the children of this second group were without the same needs for shtetl nostalgia as their parents and went in search of a more American aesthetic. It was to this generation that the newly reorganized JTS would minister under the charismatic administration of Solomon Schechter, who not only organized congregational singing but also founded the instruction of ḥazzanut at the Seminary.⁸

One of the earliest collections of the budding Conservative Movement’s sacred music derived from the remarkable efforts of Solomon Schechter’s wife, Mathilde Roth Schechter (1857-1924). Upon arriving in the United States, Mathilde became a vocal proponent of congregational song. Speaking to the National Council of Jewish Women, she lamented the lack of participation in worship, proclaiming that “the professional choir is a mistake unless it leads the congregation’s singing.” As Goldberg writes:

Mathilde’s appeal led to the establishment in 1905 of the Choral Society for Ancient Hebrew Melodies. To encourage participation from the immigrant community, rehearsals were relocated to the Downtown Educational Alliance (established in 1899 to promote Americanization of the immigrant Jews). Several local cantors and musicians, including Simon Jacobson, ḥazzan of the Seminary synagogue, assisted in selecting melodies, both Ashkenazic and Sephardic. The project culminated in the publication in 1910 of Kol Rinnah: Hebrew Hymnal. Its objective was “to present traditional melodies of the synagogue and the home…[and] to further the spread of congregational singing.”⁹

Peering into Mathilde Schechter’s hymnal project, we can see that many melodies now current within the movement were already present in print at its inception. With English translations from Henrietta Szold and musical harmonizations from uptown music man Lewis Montefiore Isaacs, Mathilde Schechter presented a hymnal for exclusively-Hebrew liturgy that would reflect the needs of modern Jews, designed for home use and study rather than the synagogue. This Hebrew hymnal stood in effective contrast to American-Jewish hymnals Zimrath Yah (1886) and the Union Hymnal (1897), which were cultivated by the Reform Movement and relied heavily on organ accompaniment and vernacular English, making them of little use to America’s Orthodox and traditional communities.¹⁰ As reviewed in the Jewish press:

The Hebrew Hymnal aims to supply a long felt need. It is not intended to supersede the Jewish Hymnals now in use, which are calculated primarily for synagogal purposes. The editors of the present volume hope rather to furnish the Jewish home and schools with a collection of hymns which will prove serviceable for the members of the family, particularly for the young.

Unlike preceding hymnals where non-Jewish hymns and melodies have often been admitted, the editors have sought not to incorporate anything which would mar the distinctly Jewish character of the collection. Only masterpieces of Jewish religious poetry and music have been included and in each case only such melodies have been employed as have been sanctioned by tradition and are truly the products of the Jewish genius.¹¹

In preparing her Hebrew hymnal, Mathilde Schechter relied upon the musical precedents of the Jewish community in her longtime home of Great Britain. Kol Rinah Utfilah: The Voice of Prayer and Praise (1899), a comprehensive hymnal for the full, traditional Hebrew liturgy and the musical foundation of nusaḥ anglia (Anglo-Jewish synagogue tradition), was published just a few years before the Schechters’ departure from England to the United States. Also known as the “Blue Book,” it was modeled after the Anglican hymnal itself, and was intended to prepare Jewish families and schools with melody, harmony, and translations for both synagogue and home rituals.¹² Mathilde Schechter borrowed an almost identical name for her own Kol Rinnah publication, employing the strategy (and often the repertoire) of Anglo-Jewry for the traditional American synagogue.

The Anglo-Jewish inheritance of Solomon Schechter’s program for American Judaism has been well documented, but not yet with regard to its music.¹³ Understanding this “special relationship” between nusaḥ anglia and Conservative Jewish music forms a necessary groundwork for understanding the earliest foundations of Conservative song. The Schechters had imbibed Anglo-Jewish music and aesthetics over the course of their two decades in England; Mathilde Schechter’s hymnal shares ten melodies for Shabbat and Festivals with the Blue Book alone, comprising only a portion of a yet larger corpus of Anglo-Jewish melodies which continue to define the Conservative service.

Figure 1. Ashkenazi Melodies for Yigdal for Shabbat (Myer Leon) and for Festivals (traditional). Published in Mathilde Schechter, ed., Kol Rinnah (1910), 5-6. Public Domain.

Kol Rinnah begins with two traditional yigdal melodies for Shabbat and for Festivals, the former being of special Anglo-Jewish provenance (Fig. 1). Its composer was Myer Leon (1750-1797), the ḥazzan of the Great Synagogue of London, who also made his name as an English opera singer. His yigdal melody achieved widespread fame not only among British Jews, but among Christians as well. The Methodist Thomas Olivers attended the Great Synagogue in 1770, and, upon hearing the melody, determined to adapt it as a Christian hymn. The result was “The God of Abraham Praise,” attributed to “Leoni,” which is still sung throughout Anglican, Episcopal, and even Catholic churches across the world.¹⁴ Leon’s melody remains part of British synagogue custom and, in part owing to Mathilde Schechter herself, American synagogue custom as well.

Kol Rinnah also contained several melodies by Julius Mombach (1813-1880), choirmaster of the Great Synagogue and regarded as the definitive Anglo-Jewish composer of the nineteenth century.¹⁵ While his melodies have largely fallen into disuse in America, they remain in the weekly repertoire of British Masorti Judaism.¹⁶ The one American exception (published not in Kol Rinnah, but in the Blue Book) is Mombach’s psalmody-style Psalm 92 for Shabbat Minḥah.¹⁷ This melody was employed by early JTS-facilitated services led by Rabbi Israel Goldfarb, whose contributions will be discussed at length.¹⁸

The Anglo-Jewish tradition is also marked by the permeability of music between England’s longstanding Ashkenazic and Sephardic communities—a feature also shared by the similarly mixed faculty and patrons of the “Old Seminary.” This relationship continues today in the persistence of a number of Spanish & Portuguese (S&P) melodies in the Conservative service, evidenced early on in the Schechter hymnal’s inclusion of the Sephardic melodies for ‘az yashir moshe (No. 5) and eil nora ʿalila (No. 22). Other notable Sephardic additions which achieved ubiquity in the Conservative Movement are the major-key Psalm 29 for Friday night, an Italo-Sephardic melody from Livorno (Leghorn) written by the Jewish musician and peripatetic composer, Michele Bolaffi (1768–1842), and the Spanish-Portuguese Adon Olam based on the melody for the piyyut, todot eil.¹⁹

The Schechter hymnal also bears the significant mark of the German-Ashkenazic traditions, many also current among British Jews. Familiar melodies today include the pan-Ashkenazic melodies for adir hu (No. 18) and ḥad gadya (No. 20); less familiar are the ledavid baruch (No. 13) and ein keloheinu (No. 11[b]) from the Frankfurt tradition.²⁰ Two featured German melodies (Fig. 2) would also later be adapted into the full birkat hamazon: shir hamaʿalot (No. 15) and migdol yeshuʿot (No. 16).²¹

Figure 2. Western Ashkenazi melodies for Shir Hama‘alot (15) and Migdol Yeshu‘ot (16). Published in Mathilde Schechter, Kol Rinnah (1910), 34-35.

In addition to Anglo-Jewish repertoire, Mathilde Schechter’s hymnal also leaned on broadly popular German-Jewish choral music whose printed compendia had transformed the European synagogue in the nineteenth century. These especially included the works of nineteenth-century synagogue composers Louis Lewandowski (1821–1894) and Cantor Salomon Sulzer (1804-1890).²² Torah service melodies featured by Schechter included Sulzer’s hodo ʿal eretz (No. 8) and Lewandowski’s se’u sheʿarim (No. 9) and hashiveinu (No. 10), the former two of which remain in Conservative practice (the latter is almost exclusively sung by British Masorti Jews). The impact of Sulzer and Lewandowski, carried by their widely-known musical compendia and the former’s notoriety as the father of the modern cantorate, is far more extensive than even Schechter’s hymnal reveals. Sulzer became the model of the modern cantor as musician and clergyman, and his melodies for ein kamocha, vayehi binsoʿa, and ki mitzion have defined the Torah service for countless congregations, as well as va’anahnu qor’im from the aleinu prayer.²³ Lewandowski’s compositions, while only later established in American practice, are revered across the Jewish choral world. In addition to the tunes notated by Schechter, his melodies for tzaddiq katamar and Friday night qiddush are weekly standards in Conservative synagogues, and even his lecha adonai for the Torah processional is favored in Israel and among independent minyanim (Fig. 3).²⁴

Figure 3. “L’cho adonoi,” Louis Lewandowski, Kol Rinnah U’t’fillah (1882): 34 (No. 43). Public Domain.

Another popular tune included by Schechter was the famous Teutonic ein keloheinu (No. 11[a]). Thought by many today to be a German drinking song, it was originally a synagogue composition, written and published in Gesänge der Synagoge zu Braunschweig (1841) by the music director of that community, Julius Freudenthal (1805-1874). Through both the published music and oral transmission, it became widely popular among German Jews.²⁵

Surveying Mathilde Schechter’s contributions to Conservative synagogue music, we find several strata of Jewish musical traditions coalescing under her guidance, representing a new soundscape for the traditional synagogue in America. Employing strategies and melodies she learned in England, Schechter gathered British, German, and Spanish-Portuguese synagogue melodies together with harmonically-simplified choral masterworks from well-known cantorial compendia to form her curriculum for congregational song. A cultural contrast to the background of New York’s large population of Eastern-European immigrants, this repertoire would seem to reflect the Schechters’ own JTS-centered aesthetic program, emerging from its position as a traditionalist seminary applying novel (and often British) strategies toward the coalescing of a new, American flavor of traditional Judaism.

II. Rabbi/Ḥazzan Israel Goldfarb: Father of Congregational (and Conservative) Song

No figure looms larger over both the early development of Conservative Jewish music and its contemporary repertoire than Rabbi Israel Goldfarb (1879-1967). Goldfarb immigrated from Galicia to New York at age 14, going on to graduate from Columbia University and receive his musical training at the Institute for Musical Arts (the forerunner of the Juilliard School). He graduated JTS as a ḥazzan in 1902, continuing on to obtain rabbinic ordination. Goldfarb’s compositional voice first emerged in his student days, during which JTS faculty and students were active in outreach to the Jewish youth of New York. Modeled after a Christian revivalist movement, their Jewish Endeavor Society (JES) held special Shabbat minḥah services downtown for those who worked on Saturday mornings. Goldfarb, then studying ḥazzanut at JTS, conducted these services.²⁶ His ma tovu from this repertoire is still sung across the Ramah camps today (Fig. 4).

Figure 4. “Ma Tovu,” Israel Goldfarb; notated in Goldberg, Congregational Song (2019). Reprinted with permission.

Hired as Rabbi of the Kane Street Synagogue in Brooklyn in 1905, Goldfarb went on to be a founding member of Schechter’s United Synagogue of America and collaborated with the budding Young Israel movement on the Lower East Side. His brothers and cousins also served as prayer leaders at Young Israel, and Goldfarb’s own melodies were frequently in use.²⁷ Throughout his career, Goldfarb provided music for the growing synagogues and institutions of first-generation traditional American Jewry, authoring widely popular books of melodies for choir and congregation together, including Friday Evening Melodies (1918), The Jewish Songster (1919), Song and Praise for Sabbath Eve (1920), and Synagogue Melodies for the High Holidays (1926). He was also recruited to the JTS faculty, where he taught ḥazzanut and synagogue melodies from 1920 to 1942. Thus over a forty-year period, Goldfarb’s musical talent touched Conservative congregations, cantors, choirs, and rabbis across the growing movement.

Today, many of Israel Goldfarb’s melodies remain a mainstay of the Conservative synagogue: vay’chulu and magen avot for Friday night; shomer yisrael for taḥanun; zochreinu l’chayyim and b’sefer chayyim (both in a minor key), yimlokh for the musaf kedushah (in a major key), and the march-like hayom t’amtzeinu for the High Holy Days.²⁸ Goldfarb’s success, as Geoffrey Goldberg points out, was conveyed not only through his influence across the movement but in his skillful adaptation of the Eastern-European aesthetic for a new generation:

The key to the success of Israel Goldfarb’s melodies was that he sought to retain the “warmth and impetuosity” of Eastern-European Synagogue song along with the “deliberate, orderly and dignified style...and classical structure” of the Western European Synagogue without “sacrificing much of the Jewish spirit for the sake of external beauty and harmonic form.²⁹

The most famous of Goldfarb’s compositions is surely shalom ‘aleichem, published in his book Friday Evening Melodies and often assumed to be of ancient provenance. In his mid-century correspondence with Ḥazzan Pinchas Spiro, Goldfarb confirmed that he wrote the melody on a bench in front of Low Memorial Library at Columbia University in 1918; by the time of his letter to Spiro in 1963, Goldfarb had observed that “many people came to believe that the song was handed down from Mt. Sinai by Moses.”³⁰ Reports of the melody’s far-flung peregrinations have come from across the world, including from one Jew in India who reported to Rabbi Morris Kertzer that the melody “came down by tradition from his ancestors.”³¹ Goldfarb’s original melody has been significantly changed by popular use, its alteration and anonymity a compliment to its having entered the oral heritage of world Jewry (Fig. 5).³²

Goldfarb’s contemporaries also created similar congregational melodies which endure within (and beyond) the Conservative Movement. His brother, Samuel Goldfarb, head of music at the Board of Jewish Education, authored the minor-key va’ani tefilati used on Festivals and High Holidays, and (with his brother, Israel) also the waltz-like kadesheinu bemitzvotecha for the Shabbat repetition of the amidah. The Young Israel movement, organized around “complete congregational singing,” employed music by both Goldfarbs. Conservative synagogues competed with the liberal Orthodox Young Israel for members, and many melodies from the latter movement are still extant in the Conservative repertoire. These include the bouncy halelu et adonai for Hallel, tzur yisra’el, an eil adon tune in a major key (now largely used for lecha dodi); na’aritzcha for Shabbat Musaf, and the widely-sung tune for bei ana rachetz, adapted from a cantorial recitative by Eastern European cantor-composer, Zeidel Rovner (1856-1943).³³

Figure 5. “Shalom Aleichem,” Israel Goldfarb, Friday Evening Melodies (1918). Public Domain.

But the downtown scene wasn’t the only crucible of congregational singing. Uptown, Mordechai Kaplan’s hand-picked cantor, Jacob Beimel, created his own “singing congregation” at the Jewish Center on West 86th Street which attracted cantors, presidents, and music directors to come and observe its successes.³⁴ Among his melodies are the major-key, fanfare-style vezot hatorah still in popular use today, as well as, argues Goldberg, the melody for shema that is most often attributed to Salomon Sulzer.³⁵ Beimel’s short-lived choir master, Abraham Binder, was the composer of the Shabbat morning mi chamocha (Fig. 6) in freygish mode (also known as Ahavah Rabah). Binder would join the HUC faculty in 1923 and become one of the major mid-century American advocates of Jewish music; his book championing his variety of biblical cantillation is still taught at HUC and is perhaps the predominant trope variation used in non-Orthodox American synagogues.³⁶

Figure 6. “Mi Chamocha,” A.W. Binder, Union Songster (1960). Public Domain.

This generative period of congregational song expressed the earliest ideological commitments of Conservative Judaism—preservation of tradition, attachment to Hebrew, and musical leadership supporting congregational singing. Pivoting away from the consuming star culture of the cantorial golden age, the melodies generated during the first decades of the twentieth century reflected a fusion of downtown, domesticated Eastern European sound and the uptown mix of German, Spanish-Portuguese, and Anglo-Jewish traditions embodied by JTS.

III. Musical Complexity and the Rise of the Conservative Cantorate

While American congregational song offered an initial component of the Conservative Jewish repertoire, it was not the only program of sacred music which rendered the commitments of Conservative Jews. The choral reforms of Rabbi Herman Rubenovitz, the 1908 JTS graduate who went on to make his name at Mishkan Tefila in Roxbury, Massachusetts, are a reminder of the early impulses which continued to animate Conservative Jews and lay the groundwork for the genesis of the Conservative cantorate. After several years serving in Kentucky, Rubenovitz came to Mishkan Tefila and found a decorumless traditional service which had largely been abandoned by the young, post-Orthodox generation.³⁷ Inspired by visits to the choral synagogues of Europe, Rubenovitz successfully advocated for the inclusion of organ and mixed choir. Membership grew rapidly, and Rubenovitz reflected that ”hallowed, traditional ritual of the synagogue was invested with a beauty and dignity which won the hearts of young and old.”³⁸

It was in this environment of traditional Jewish music with a trained European cantor, decorum, and high artistic merit that the young Mishkan Tefila member Leonard Bernstein fell in love not only with Judaism, but with music itself. Frequently attending Friday evening services conducted by European-trained Cantor Iszo Glickstein and music director Solomon Braslavsky, Bernstein found himself “crazed with choral music” under the spell of the cantor, choir, organ, and Braslavsky’s expert musical arrangements which, according to his sister, Shirley Bernstein, were textured with “the sounds of Giuseppe Verdi, Ernest Bloch, Modest Mussorgsky, Felix Mendelssohn, and Franz Schubert.”³⁹ Writing later to the Cantors Assembly in 1964 in honor of Braslavsky, Bernstein wrote:

Before I ever heard a concert, recital, or opera, before I had ever touched a piano, or knew that an organized musical life existed—before all these, I heard the music that Professor Braslavsky caused to be made at Temple Mishkan Tefila. I shall never forget that music, nor cease to be grateful for the power, conviction and atmosphere with which it was conveyed. I may have heard greater masterpieces performed since then, and under more impressive circumstances; but I have never been more deeply moved. Braslavsky’s music and music-making will always be with me, as a cherished memory and influence. Long life to him.⁴⁰

While chorally-led congregational song formed one pole of early Conservative music, the hybridity of Western decorum and harmony with traditional cantorial arts represented another. A founding synagogue of the United Synagogue of America, Mishkan Tefila’s musical program, among others, would come to represent the latter instinct within the unfolding movement—one which would be increasingly championed by its cantors.

To analyze the impact of cantors on the core repertoire of the Conservative Movement is to court a paradox. There is perhaps no more defining source of influence on Conservative synagogue music than its cantors, who have so often been the stewards, in both conservative and innovative ways, of its sacred soundscape. This was particularly true during the first twenty-five years of the Cantors Assembly (1947–1972) and the first two decades of the Cantors Institute (est. 1952). Attempting to refashion the cantorate for respectable, suburban Jewish communities and avoid some of the indignities of the Golden Age era, the CA recreated the Conservative cantor as an American clergyman and modern professional.⁴¹ Speaking to the Assembly in the year following the creation of the Cantors Assembly, its vice president (and future executive vice president of some forty years), Samuel Rosenbaum, described the roles of the cantorial professional at length as sheliaḥ tzibbur (prayer leader), educator, minister, musical connoisseur, and musically-creative talent.⁴² Working closely with the Department of Music of the United Synagogue of America, the emerging, organized Conservative cantorate became the major engine of shaping the movement’s music in the mid-to-late twentieth century.

From its founding, the Cantors Assembly set its musical program as a fusion of sophisticated sacred music and communal singing. Its first two publications were Rabotai Nevarech (1954), which included the popular melody for Birkat HaMazon used across the Conservative Movement today, and Zamru Lo (1955), a first of four collections of congregational melodies.⁴³ The culmination of fifteen years of cantorial conversations with the United Synagogue on improving the condition and repertoire of congregational singing, the Assembly published these two long-stewarded volumes under the editorship of Moshe Nathanson (1899-1981).⁴⁴ Born in Jerusalem, Nathanson was a beacon of Hebrew culture and Israeli song, spreading Zionism through music to an eager audience of young American Jews.⁴⁵

Nathanson’s contributions to Conservative song began with his Manginot Shireinu (1939), which helped to popularize a number of melodies still well-known today, including the Torah service’s av harachamim (adapted from a choral piece by Russian cantor Abraham Dunajewsky (1843–1911), the famous Ḥasidic-style yismeḥu (arranged by Nathanson), and the waltzy, minor “haleluhu betzilzelei shama” for Psalm 150.⁴⁶ But his perhaps most ubiquitous melody is the birkat hamazon tune itself, written by Nathanson at Camp Achva in the 1930s and which can be heard across Ashkenazic Jewry.⁴⁷ While the medley of tunes would evolve over time, the core is there in Rabotai Nevarech, including the opening melody, hazan et haolam (Fig. 7) which he originally adapted from his own tune for the avot (Fig. 8).⁴⁸

Nathanson’s contemporaries would also compose congregational songs that have withstood the test of time. One of the main faculty members of the Cantors Institute at JTS composed the bouncy, major meḥalkel ḥayyim melody known and used by Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Jews alike, although he composed it for children and was mortified at its spread

Figure 7. “Hazon es Ho-Olom,” Moshe Nathanson, Rabotai Nevarech (1954). Reprinted with permission.

Figure 8. “Ovos,” Moshe Nathanson, Zamru Lo (1955): 20. Reprinted with permission.

to the main service.⁴⁹ Similarly, lecha adonai for the Torah processional was composed originally by Cantor Gershon Ephros (1890–1978) in 1912 for the “children’s synagogue” of the Downtown Talmud Torah, but stuck for adult worshipers as well.⁵⁰ Ephros became a well-regarded leader among Conservative cantors, recognized also as the editor of an extensive six-volume cantorial anthology.⁵¹ Eric Mandell (1902–1988), longtime music director of Har Zion Temple in Philadelphia, composed the well-known ‘ahavat olam for Shabbat ma’ariv. The German-born Mandell, a survivor of Sachsenhausen concentration camp, was also a lecturer, conductor, and musicologist, maintaining one of the world’s largest private libraries of Jewish music, now held at the University of Pennsylvania.⁵²

The paradox of the Conservative cantorate was that its immense creativity, manifested in hundreds, if not thousands of compositions, arrangements, and recordings of synagogue music, began to decline along with their primary engine: the synagogue choir. As Jewish mass culture shifted toward Orthodox popular music and songleading in the 1970s and 1980s, cantors were exercising their musical influence across the more domestic life of synagogue ministry, choosing (not unnobly) localism over mass culture. It was much harder for a cantorial recitative or a choral piece to “go viral” like a congregational melody, as the former required access to music notation and musically (and Jewishly) literate sacred singers and worshipers. Thus as Conservative Jewish culture began to cool from the original generative energy which created the suburban synagogues of the 1950s–1970s, typified by a middle-brow fusion of congregational song and elevated, modernized cantorial artistry, the cantorate’s once pervasive influence on synagogue melodies became more limited to only the most recognized and highly-published of cantorial voices. Much of the rest of the repertoire slowly declined for lack of choirs to realize it.

This cantorial pivot away from mass culture simultaneously highlights the immense local influence of cantors as composers and musical curators for individual synagogues. Like the hundreds of Jewish villages in medieval Germany, Conservative synagogues are often defined by highly-localized traditions bequeathed by their community’s lineage of cantors.⁵³ One could write an entire monograph on this phenomenon of idiosyncratic sacred repertoire, which often provides a synagogue with its sonic identity. To illustrate, I will offer the example of my own community, Congregation Anshai Torah in Plano, Texas. Anshai Torah has never had an ordained cantor prior to my service, and yet includes several idiosyncratic melodies which reflect a specific cantorial inheritance. It possesses a unique Torah service melody, deriving from one of its seasoned bar mitzvah tutors, Warren Rubin, who learned it growing up at Beth Sholom in Roslyn, New York from his childhood cantor, Morton Kula (1929–2011). So too, our synagogue’s particular High Holiday melody for vayehi binsoʿa ha’aron by Louis Lewandowksi came from the childhood of its founding rabbi and sheliaḥ tzibbur, Stefan Weinberg. He had grown up at a small Conservative synagogue in Bay City, Michigan led by German emigré Rabbi Joseph Kratzenstein, who used many German cantorial and choral compositions in his service. Thousands of such cantorial legacies, both old and new, course through the musical veins of Conservative synagogues, even in the absence of choirs and with the rise of new movements in Jewish music which leave their mark upon the repertoire.

Nevertheless, a number of more recent cantorial voices have contributed melodies that have reached movement-wide use. Cantor Meir Finkelstein, a prolific cantor-composer who also enjoyed a successful career as a Hollywood composer/arranger, served at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles from 1982 to 2000 and composed one of its defining melodies—ledor vador—which traveled throughout (and beyond) the Conservative Movement, its soaring melody making it popular with cantors and congregations alike.⁵⁴ Similarly, the melodies of Sol Zim, popularized through his many albums and publications, melded the harmonic and rhythmic foundations of late-twentieth-century rock and pop with neo-Ḥasidic and cantorial musical gestures. His responsive ledor vador between cantor and congregation, mimekomcha malkeinu from Shaḥarit, and peppy kad’sheinu b’mitzvotecha with Ḥasidic vocables traveled across movements; his ‘avinu shebashamayim, written in 1988, is the defining tune for this prayer far beyond the Conservative Movement, popularized in synagogues and concert halls all over the world. In more recent memory, past Cantors Assembly president Alisa Pomerantz-Boro composed a cantorial Modim (1998) with a haunting congregational refrain which achieved great respect and wide popularity. And Cantor Gerald Cohen, a prolific composer who has long served on the cantorial faculties of both JTS and HUC, wrote a Psalm 23 which is known and sung at funerals by cantors of all non-Orthodox movements.

It is perhaps no surprise that melodies composed by Conservative cantors which gained wide currency within Conservative synagogues have also transcended the movement itself. This is at once a testament to their spiritual utility and to the slowly advancing convergence of congregational repertoire across American Judaism (and particularly the non-Orthodox movements). This phenomenon will be discussed further below.

IV. Nusaḥ: Preservation and Redemption

But perhaps the most pervasive impact of cantors on the Conservative synagogue music is upon the musical ligaments which unite its sacred songs—the practice of nusaḥ (Ashkenazi prayer chant). Coalescing in the wake of the Shoah, the Cantors Assembly and its members considered themselves deeply obligated as the guardians of the European synagogue traditions whose practice and practitioners had been decimated by the Nazi genocide. With the founding of cantorial schools at HUC and JTS (both of whose faculty included serious practitioners of traditional ḥazzanut), the necessity emerged to create a “Nusaḥ America” which would preserve the synagogue soundscape of the old world while adapting it to American needs and taste. Exhorting his colleagues to restore modern cantorial recitative through pure and tasteful traditional motifs, Cantor Adolph Katchko spoke of the redemptive power of nusaḥ to activate the dormant spirituality of American Jews:

A beautiful voice and great talented singing are by themselves not sufficient to arouse a spark of religious emotion of which we just spoke. This could be done only by the Hazzan with the beautiful voice, but who also makes use of the correct nusach. The correct nusach—that is very important, because deep down even in the most reformed Jew there glimmer sparks of a nigun here and there of our traditional nusachs, which only the Hazzan who uses the correct nusach can once more revive.⁵⁵

Fealty to nusaḥ in the Conservative Movement thus came to represent one of the essential features of its aesthetic covenant. Conservative cantorial discourse dealt frequently with the problem-solving nusaḥ preservation and the evolution of the traditional synagogue.⁵⁶ Cantorial schools, publications, and conferences together cultivated a commanding historical narrative emphasizing a millennium of musical continuity from medieval Ashkenazic practice through modern prayer chant, particularly of the most ancient category of “misinai melodies” which dated to the inception of Ashkenazic culture.⁵⁷ This historical consciousness among cantors yielded in the movement a Frankelesque “positive-historical” orientation toward synagogue music—positive in the sense of fealty toward the normativity and preservation of traditional nusaḥ, but also a historical sensibility in studying its development rigorously in order to discover its essence. This led to the cultivation and spread of carefully curated, “American” nusaḥ traditions, particularly at JTS. Cantors learned the predominantly Lithuanian tradition of nusaḥ via compendia gathered by Cantors Institute and H.L. Miller Cantorial School faculty members Max Wohlberg and Charles Davidson (1929–2023), the latter of whom codified the tradition in print.⁵⁸

In addition to providing the source material for Conservative davening practice, Wohlberg’s approach also preserved many elements of Western Ashkenazi (“German”) tradition which were feared to soon be lost. JTS cantors thus learned to daven and teach the Shabbat pesukei dezimra in Adonai Malach (Jewish major) mode, as well as to preserve a Western Ashkenazic motif for the words eil ḥai veqayam on Friday night. One particularly widespread German practice in the movement is owed to a single cantor, Ḥazzan Dr. Brian Mayer. A scholar of German synagogue music and the last PhD in Jewish Music to be awarded by JTS, as a seminarian Mayer convinced not only his fellow cantorial students but his rabbinical colleagues of the merits of preserving the Frankfurt tradition of the weekday Torah service, using simplified variants of the High Holy Day trope.⁵⁹ That JTS class passed this tradition on to Ramah camps during the 1980s, leading to its establishment as one of the sacred music markers of the Conservative Movement.

One of the most notable nusaḥ educators, however, was not a seminary professor but a beloved cantor from Iowa. Ḥazzan Pinchas Spiro served Tifereth Israel Synagogue in Des Moines from 1973–1995, and in 1990 was commissioned by the Cantors Assembly to create educational materials for its Ba’al T’fillah Institute, strengthening the knowledge of lay leaders and young cantors alike by documenting a basic form of the complete nusaḥ on recording and via “musical siddur,” which included Hebrew, English, and music notation of every prayer. These materials have become not only the foundational repertoire of Conservative lay leaders, but the go-to resource for rabbinical nusaḥ education and even cantorial education as well.⁶⁰ Spiro’s immense project, now available online (learn.cantors.org), resounds today as the unintentional stamma of Conservative nusaḥ—a largely anonymous musical grammar which has become a dominant voice within the oral tradition of contemporary nusaḥ practitioners, both within and beyond the movement.

V. Israel, Zionism, and Synagogue Melody

The Conservative synagogue has long provided a home for Hebrew, Zionism, and the influx of Israeli culture into American Judaism. This was also strongly conveyed in the Ramah camping movement, whose intensive Hebrew curriculum, Israeli staff, and all-Hebrew adaptations of Broadway musicals have long anchored its Zionist ethos.⁶¹ Israeli repertoire formed its own section in the official USY Bencher, B’kol Echad (1986) edited by Cantor Jeffrey Shiovitz, and represented a large percentage of its short songs (pp. 77–101), many of which are used during Conservative hakafot on Simchat Torah.⁶² Israeli tunes which entered the synagogue service were largely drawn from the liturgy-heavy selections of Israel’s annual Ḥasidic Song Festival (1969–1992), including Yedid Nefesh by Ehud & Sarah Zweig (1970), Ḥemdat Yamim by Shlomo Carlebach (1971); Or Chadash by Reuven Sirotkin (1973); Al HaNissim by Dov Frimer (1974); Lechu N’Ran’na by Reuven Sirotkin (1974); Adon Olam by Uzi Ḥitman (winner, 1976); Oseh Shalom by Nurit Hirsch (winner, 1977); and Malchut’cha by Reuven Sirotkin (1978).⁶³ In the wake of the Six-Day War, a new wave of Jewish pride swept American Jewry, and Israeli festivals provided a sonic anchor for growing with the spirituality and culture of the resilient and proudly Jewish country. And of course, the boilerplate Conservative service has incorporated the Israeli wedding song, Erev Shel Shoshanim by Yosef Hadar and Moshe Dor, as the standard “mimkomo” for the Shabbat musaf qedushah. Though Conservative cantors have long objected over its divergence from both the liturgical text and traditional nusaḥ, this Israeli song had become firmly lodged in the Conservative service, carried by the Zionist spirit of the movement.

VI. Rabbis

Although its early history is suffused by choral, congregational, and cantorial contributions, the repertoire of Conservative Judaism was also enriched by the musical creativity of its rabbis. Israeli-born Rabbi Moshe Pomerantz (1934–2024) wrote the ahavah rabbah melody currently used across the movement, composed when he was only nineteen years old, for a liturgical music contest at Camp Ramah in Connecticut (Fig. 9).⁶⁴ The melody has been simplified somewhat by folk use over the years, with the “avinu malkeinu” portion of the tune being replicated for the opening words.

Figure 9. Manuscript of “Ahavah Rabbah,” Moshe Pomerantz (1953). Reprinted with permission.

Rabbi Moshe Rothblum, rabbi emeritus of Adat Ari El (Valley Village, California) was another prolific composer in the Conservative rabbinate, serving as a music and drama director for Ramah camps in Ojai and Wisconsin and directing musicals at his home synagogue for forty-five years. It was at the beginning of this long career in Jewish music that he wrote the famous Friday night v’shamru in 1968 for a Hebrew play at Camp Ramah, Wisconsin. And more contemporarily, Rabbi Menachem Creditor wrote the song ‘olam ḥesed yibaneh as a response to 9/11, and his evocative anthem (based on Psalm 89:3) has achieved widespread popularity far beyond the walls of the Conservative synagogue. While the traditional roles of rabbi and cantor usually invested the latter with exclusive authority over synagogue music, the extension of the Conservative cantorate into broad realms of pulpit ministry has been similarly met with rising rabbinic leadership in music, particularly via summer camps and the rise of Jewish folk music.

VII. The Ḥasidic Nigun: Shlomo Carlebach, Orthodox Pop, and the Independent Minyan⁶⁵

The ascent of the nigun in Conservative worship can be seen from many different angles: the rise of Chabad Ḥasidism; the post-WWII growth in access to recordings and documentation of Ḥasidic melodies, the impact of the American folk movement; and the influence of a new generation of Orthodox composers and pop stars, including Ben Zion Shenker, Mordechai Ben David (MBD), and especially Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach.⁶⁶ Inspired by Carlebach’s signature melodies and ecstatic Friday night service, the entire Carlebach Kabbalat Shabbat repertoire took the Ramah summer camps by storm over the second half of the twentieth century, becoming its standard “nusaḥ” by the turn of the millennium. Other Carlebach melodies beyond Friday night in the Conservative service include his hakol yoducha,ʿod yishama (used for eil adon), veha’eir eineinu, veshamru (used for mimekomcha in Shabbat Shacharit), and major-key oseh shalom, among many others.⁶⁷

The rise of nigunim also reflected the adoption of a neo-Ḥasidic approach to liturgical music in Conservative spaces. Accessible melodies, sung either to words or Ḥasidic vocables, were the new currency of synagogue song and could easily be untethered from the prayers for which they were originally composed. Shifting away from a culture of written notation to oral transmission, neo-Ḥasidic technique involved building a community’s melody repertoire of nigunim via worship, recordings, and non-synagogue experiences like text study sessions, table singing, song circles, and concerts. Within an effervescent culture of new melodies across the traditional liturgy, a skilled prayer leader could facilitate kavannah by choosing from their palette of nigunim, creating opportunities for participation, novelty, and impromptu harmony.

Although diverging in significant ways from the strictures and uses of the nigun among Ḥasidism, this “neo-Ḥasidic” use of nigun serves a particular need within the social and spiritual challenges affecting modern Jews.⁶⁸ The nigun sensitively connects the lonely, sovereign self to a temporary, radiant network of living, human voices. It is a music of equity—a prophetic form which by its very structure eschews hierarchy and emphasizes the vocal equality of all worshipers before God.⁶⁹ It is also the music of therapy, surfacing through trance-like melodies the emotions which lie within each individual soul. Yet unlike much of the songleading world, the world of the nigun is more thickly cloaked in Ashkenazi culture, and, sonically, in the Jewish particularism typical of the Conservative synagogue.

Further Ḥasidic melodies found their way into the Conservative service during the Carlebach period via oral transmission, audio recordings, and published collections. The movement’s most famous yedid nefesh is itself a mashup of two Ḥasidic tunes. Its origin often labeled as “Pursa,” the melody appears in a Velvel Pasternak collection of Ḥasidic melodies, and likely refers to the community of Pursov, a Ḥasidic court close to Warsaw which was wiped out by the Holocaust. This melody is, perhaps, the only part of the community that remains.⁷⁰ Typically appended to the end of this yedid nefesh is a wordless Chabad melody known as nigun gaʿaguim. Both nigunim were broadly accessible to those who possessed Pasternak’s books; the mashup is understandable, if obscure as to its origins within the Conservative Movement.

Another Conservative melody notated in Velvel Pasternak’s Ḥasidic collections is the second paragraph of the ʿaleinu (ʿal kein nekaveh lecha), whose melody derives from a Hasidic tune used for menuḥa vesimḥa and haneirot halalu (Fig. 10).⁷¹

Figure 10. “Hanéros Halolu,” Songs of the Hassidim, ed. Pasternak (1968). Public Domain.

Such Ḥasidic nigunim and “Carlebach-style” services arose in tandem with the growth of Conservative Movement institutions in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly the Ramah camping movement and Solomon Schechter day schools. These institutions cultivated their own repertoires of communal song, often against the preferences and pieties of the movement’s cantors.⁷² Conservative rabbinical and cantorial students frequently attended synagogues and minyanim that adopted Carlebach tunes and other Ḥasidic melodies, including the Carlebach Shul, B’nai Jeshurun, and Kehilat Hadar (est. 2001) in New York City, and Kedem, the Leader Minyan, and Shira Chadasha (est. 2002) in Jerusalem.⁷³ Some of these institutions produced their own CDs, which were coveted items among emerging Conservative Jewish leaders eager to enhance the spirit of their worship.

Twenty-first century Conservative liturgical music has been especially transformed by the culture of independent minyanim (2000–present). Founded by empowered Jews from both yeshiva and day school backgrounds (with many rabbis among them), minyanim presented a halakhically normative and musically empowering environment for communal song. The repertoire of the minyanim initially included Carlebach, yeshiva repertoire, Orthodox pop songs by hit composers like Moshe Laufer, MBD, and Abie Rotenburg, and melodies from artists like Simply Tzfat whose albums brought together devotional tunes from across the Ḥasidic world.⁷⁴

Recent generations of Conservative rabbis have often longed for the minyan’s ethos of equity and communal emotion to successfully bridge into the more hierarchical environment of the synagogue. Conservative clergy, and increasingly Jews beyond the Conservative Movement, have leaned on the musical successes and repertoire of the Hadar Institute, led in music over the last decade by its bard and inspiration, Joey Weisenberg. Making his way throughout the movement’s institutions as a frequent concert artist and musician-in-residence, Joey’s heimish teaching, unique compositional voice, and charismatic musicianship have led to a broad impact on American Jewish music writ large.⁷⁵ This culminated in 2016 with the founding of the Rising Song Institute (www.risingsong.org), which serves as a successful catalyst and record label for emerging Jewish artists and the practice of traditionally-oriented communal Jewish music. Now co-anchored by rabbi, composer, and skilled session musician Deborah Sacks Mintz, Rising Song presents an ever-flowing stream of communal song via Bandcamp and YouTube, as well as fellowships and in-person learning opportunities which have created a network of musicians and prayer leaders, many of whom serve in the Conservative Movement.

The musical ethos of the independent minyan and Rising Song, together with a broad range of Ḥasidic and neo-Ḥasidic melodies, has by now entered the mainstream of the Conservative cantorate, rabbinate, and synagogue. Rather than recounting the full repertoire here, I refer the interested reader to Shira Chadasha: Music of the Independent Minyan (Cantors Assembly, 2016), which brings together a thorough picture of the standard repertoire of the independent minyan movement in its first two decades. That the Cantors Assembly published this volume is itself a testament to the transformation of the Conservative Movement. Rabbi Elie Kaunfer, executive director of the Hadar Institute, first characterized the volume as “like Amtrak publishing a guide to airline travel.”⁷⁶ Yet this was in many ways a return to the original publishing strategy of the Assembly from sixty years prior, fulfilling its original role in the Conservative Movement as advocates for both sophisticated sacred artistry and congregational song.⁷⁷

VIII. Jewish Renewal—From Camp Ramah to Chanting Services

Also included in the Cantors Assembly’s Shira Chadasha volume, and somewhat obscured by its title, is a significant collection of Conservative music from the Jewish Renewal Movement. Rabbi Zalman Shachter-Shalomi (1924–2014), one of the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe’s first shluchim (emissaries), was often invited to Ramah camps to try his novel program of spirituality, song, and even English davening. He led campers in sewing their own multicolored tallitot and encouraged egalitarian use of tallit and tefillin in the early sixties, decades before women’s ordination in the movement.⁷⁸ The movement that “Reb Zalman” founded considered itself the “Research & Development” sector of Jewish spirituality, experimenting widely with ecstatic and traditional davening and with eastern devotional forms like yoga, chant, and meditation.⁷⁹ Once considered a fringe movement, practices and musical repertoire developed within Jewish Renewal are now recognizable across the Conservative Movement, particularly those with chanting services or mindfulness centers.

Some of the transfer of Renewal repertoire in America is due not only to the rise in yoga and meditation across the late twentieth century, but from experiences that offered Conservative clergy and laity exposure to Jewish Renewal music. The Davenen Leadership Training Institute (DLTI), co-created in 2000 by Reb Zalman’s students, Rabbi Marcia Prager, Rabbi Shawn Zevit, and JTS graduate Ḥazzan Jack Kessler, served as a two-year training program not only for Jewish Renewal students but also for Jewish prayer leaders of any denomination, including a number of Conservative rabbis, cantors, and lay musicians (including this author). Both Jewish Renewal and its affiliated clergy association, OHALAH, have considered themselves trans-denominational in nature, offering opportunities for spiritual seekers of all movements. Furthermore, two students of Ḥazzan Kessler, Cantors Jaclyn Chernett and Jalda Rebling, would go on to found the European Academy for Jewish Liturgy (est. 2007) which continues to impact Masorti Judaism by providing one-on-one online nusaḥ education and in-person retreats to European prayer leaders.

The influence of Jewish Renewal was also apparent in locations where Conservative Jews studied for communal leadership. Romemu, a Renewal synagogue founded by Rabbi David Ingber on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in 2006, quickly became a curiosity and sometime haven for many spirituality-craving JTS seminarians. In Israel, the Jewish Renewal community Nava Tehila, anchored by the compositions and touring ensemble of Daphna Rosenberg and Yoel Sykes, gained widespread popularity, particularly as musical rabbinical students from JTS and other seminaries were invited to serve on their musical team as “levites” during their Israel year. Thus in the twenty-first century, Jewish Renewal repertoire percolated through the JTS and Israel rabbinical and cantorial experience back into Conservative Movement schools and communities.

Renewal repertoire extant in the Conservative service includes a variety of melodies: chants by Shefa Gold for ashrei (Shira Chadasha 81), elohai neshamah (75), and ozi vezimrat yah (97); the meditative ein od by Peter Saltzman (69); a sufi chant originally by qawwali artist Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and adapted for Psalm 150 (35), and many melodies by Nava Tehila, especially ʿoseh shalom with its clave rhythm and ecstatic chorus of “nay-nay-nay-nay.” Shared with the independent minyan repertoire is also the Christian hymn “Sanctuary” by Randy Scruggs & John Thompson (1982), which was adapted with Hebrew words across the early twenty-first century, either as a qedushah melody or a free-standing devotional.

The ethos and repertoire of Jewish Renewal and the independent minyan movement have now each approached normativity in Conservative music, including the movement’s experimental prayer conference Kol Tefillah, hosted at Temple Beth Am in Los Angeles. With innovations inspired by Renewal and Rising Song alike, ecstatic-meditative spirituality is an ever growing influence
within the emerging voices of the movement.⁸⁰

IX. Jewish Folk and the Road to Songleader Boot Camp

The Conservative interest in nigunim was also part of an adjacent, fundamental shift in American religion away from centralized authority and elite culture and toward community, folk music, and personal meaning. This was in no small part related to the American folk revival of the 1960s and 1970s, which also saw Israeli, Hebrew, and Yiddish folk songs take center stage as expressions of Jewish authenticity. Shlomo Carlebach himself was a significant part of this scene, along with Jewish folk singers like Theodore Bikel (1924–2015) and Chava Alberstein (1946–). In the Reform Movement, a more American-inflected folk sound could be heard among a host of new artists like Jeff Klepper & Daniel Friedlander (of Jewish folk group Kol B’Seder) and Debbie Friedman (1951–2011). Among a number of melodies, Klepper & Friedlander’s shalom rav and Friedman’s mi shebeirach have both gained currency in the Conservative Movement, while the latter’s havdalah melody now crosses every denominational line. This more Reform-coded repertoire was first opposed by the synagogue establishment, as its English language and American ethos stood in the face of their commitments to nusaḥ, Hebrew, and traditional Ashkenazi sound. Yet by the mid-1990s, cantors and synagogues were already far more open to the songleading style.⁸¹

A bridge figure in Conservative songleading during this period was Craig Taubman, whose “Friday Night Live” services at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, beginning in 1998, formed a new paradigm for Conservative worship experimenting with contemporary instrumental accompaniment. Taubman, who began composing and leading new Jewish music as a counselor at Ramah Ojai, has contributed many widely-known liturgical melodies to the Conservative Kabbalat Shabbat repertoire, including romemu, adonai sefatai tiftaḥ, hashkiveinu, and his jaunty, klezmeresque lecha dodi.⁸²

In the modern era, songleading—like nigunim from the Orthodox and chant from Renewal—has been mainstreamed from the Reform Movement into the Conservative Movement. This is partially due to the musical crucible of Songleader Boot Camp (SLBC), an annual conference launched in 2009 by Jewish singer-songwriter Rick Recht. Over the last ten years, SLBC has become a haven for not only new Jewish songleading talent but of the training of songleaders from Camp Ramah, as well as the reinvigoration of rabbis and cantors with prayerful energy and new repertoire. A key figure holding space for this emerging world of Conservative songleading is Rabbi Josh Warshawsky, whose upbeat melodies like mah rabu and hame’irah
have become a mainstay of ruaḥ in the Ramah Camps.

Figure 11. “Nigun Cholov Yisroel” for “El Adon,” Cantor Jacob “Milk” Sandler. Reprinted with permission.

As SLBC has grown as a home for songleading within (and beyond) the Conservative Movement, a new cohort of Conservative cantors has joined its ranks of participants, faculty, and composers, as with Cantor Jacob Sandler’s melody (Fig. 11).⁸³ It is a further testament to the bridge between these musical worlds that the Conservative Cantors Assembly (CA) and Reform American Conference of Cantors (ACC) are imminently co-publishing Rabbi Warshawsky’s first songbook. As the Conservative polity and leadership have transformed in the twenty-first century, so too have all the once-defining musical styles of all strands of American Judaism—nigunim, chant, and songleading—converged on the Conservative Movement, demonstrating the evolving musical spirit of klal yisrael.

X. Conclusion

Reflecting upon this broad genealogy of Conservative Jewish music, one sees a family marked by musical diversity and change. The movement’s present soundscape comprises a sacred cluster of Jewish music from across time and place: early-twentieth-century American congregational songs, British synagogue hymns, Spanish and Portuguese melodies, German and Lithuanian nusaḥ, cantorial synagogue masterworks, Ḥasidic nigunim, songleading tunes, meditative chant, Orthodox pop, choral music, and the localized repertoire of hundreds of individual synagogues. We are the founding voices of American congregational singing, and also heirs to the positive-historical effort to redeem traditional nusaḥ and to realize the spirituality of sophisticated religious music. Like our DNA itself, we contain multitudes.

This interconnectedness should only make us more devoted to the ideal of klal yisrael, “the unfractured totality of Jewish existence and the ultimate significance of every single Jew.”⁸⁴ What also becomes clear through this overview of our movement’s musical history is the great need to reach out to, include, and prioritize our next generation. As Chancellor Schorsch remarked, “despite all the dispersion, dichotomies and politicization that history has visited upon us, Jews remain united in a tenacious pilgrimage of universal import.” The path of that vital pilgrimage is paved with the melodies of our musical ancestors. We continue the journey by sharing the soundscape with our children, teaching them our songs and allowing their voices to lead us as well. Especially in our tumultuous era, this awareness of our musical past should strengthen us in this tenacity, as we weave our melodies to embrace each other, Torah, and the Holy One, bringing us faithfully into the future.

Ḥazzan Dr. Matthew Austerklein is the Cantor of Congregation Anshai Torah in Plano, Texas. A 2011 graduate of the H.L Miller Cantorial School, he recently defended his doctoral dissertation in Jewish Studies (magna cum laude) at Halle-Wittenberg University, entitled “The Professionalization of the Ashkenazic Cantor in East-Central Europe, 1500-1750.” Ḥazzan Dr. Austerklein has served on the faculty for several cantorial programs and has lectured on Jewish music for over forty synagogues, universities, seminaries, and Jewish institutions. He writes weekly at Beyond the Music (mattausterklein.substack.com), where he has published over 150 essays on Jewish music, arts, and culture.

---

1. ¹ Ismar Schorsch, “The Sacred Cluster: The Core Values of Conservative Judaism,” Conservative Judaism 47, no. 3 (1995): 3–12.

2. ² Matthew Austerklein, “Jewishness in Music,” Beyond the Music, Substack, May 19, 2025, https://mattausterklein.substack.com/p/jewishness-in-music.

3. ³ See Arnold Eisen, “Tefillah and Synagogue,” Conservative Judaism Today and Tomorrow (Jewish Theological Seminary, 2014).

4. ⁴ For another overview of Conservative music in its broader American Jewish context, see Mark Kligman, “Contemporary Jewish Music in America,” American Jewish Yearbook 101 (2001): 125–128.

5. ⁵ My special thanks to Cantor Sam Weiss and Ḥazzan Dr. Brian Mayer, who read drafts of portions of this article and offered helpful feedback.

6. ⁶ Geoffrey Goldberg, “The Development of Congregational Song in the American Conservative Synagogue: 1900–1955,” Journal of Synagogue Music 49, no. 1 (2019): 35-88.

7. ⁷ Goldberg, “Congregational Song,” 35.

8. ⁸ See also Neil W. Levin, “Music at JTS,” Tradition Renewed: A History of the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS Press, 2014), 719–792.

9. ⁹ Goldberg, 38.

10. ¹⁰ See Rachel Adelstein, “(Shabbat) Angels in America: Israel Goldfarb, ‘Shalom Aleichem,’ and the Search for Nusach America,” Music & Minorities 2 (2023), doi:10.52413/mm.2023.16.

11. ¹¹ “Books Received,” Reform Jewish Advocate (April 16, 1910), 394–395.

12. ¹² For a thorough study of the Voice of Prayer & Praise in its English context, see Danielle Padley, “From Ancient to Modern: Identifying Anglicanism in an Anglo-Jewish Hymnal,” Music & Letters 104, no. 1 (2022): 31–58.

13. ¹³ See, for example, Michael Panitz, “Judaism in the Queen’s English: The Anglican Context of Schechter’s “Catholic Israel” and Associated Terminology, Conservative Judaism 64, no. 3 (Spring 2013): 62–84.

14. ¹⁴ See Alexander Knapp, “The significance of Meier Leon’s “Yigdal” melody as a link between Jewish and Christian hymnody in eighteenth-century London,” Jewish Historical Studies 45 (2013): 79–102.

15. ¹⁵ Mathilde Schechter, Kol Rinnah, 28 (No. 12, “Adon Olam–Second Tune”): 56–57; (No. 23, “Ki Ono Amecho”).

16. ¹⁶ For the current repertoire of British Masorti melodies, visit https://masortiprayer.org.uk/.

17. ¹⁷ Francis Lyon Cohen, ed. The Voice of Prayer & Praise: A Handbook of Synagogue Music for Congregational Singing, 3rd edition (Lowe & Brydone, 1933), 98–99.

18. ¹⁸ See Goldberg, “Congregational Song,” 40; this melody was still in use at Shabbat afternoon services at JTS until their discontinuation around the second decade of the twenty-first century, likely due to the dissipation of its Shabbat community via the increasingly common practice of rabbinical and cantorial students spending their weekends at student pulpits, often for the needed assurance of financial stability.

19. ¹⁹ HUC-Cincinnati Klau Library, Birnbaum Collection, Mus. Add. 11, Versetti posti in musi dal Prof Sig M. Bolaffi, dedicati al Sig A. Cracolo (1826); David Conway, “On Michele Bolaffi, an Itinerant Jewish Musician” (paper presented at the Jewish Historical Society of England, London, April 2008). For a notation of todot eil, see D.A. de Sola, The Ancient Melodies of the Liturgy of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews (Wessel & Co., 1857), 56. The tune is sung for Adon Olam in the Bordeaux Sephardic tradition, which may account for its frequent identification as “French Sephardic.” My thanks to Rev. Zachary Edinger for his assistance in sourcing this melody.

20. ²⁰ For the latter two documented as part of the Frankfurt tradition, see Isaac Mayer Japhet, Shirë Jeshurun (Kaufmann, 1881): 84 (No. 50); 140 (No. 85).

21. ²¹ German Jews had a tradition of using piyyut melodies for Psalm 126 (shir hama‘alot). See Naomi Cohn Zentner, “Resounding Ritual Time and Place: Psalm 126 in the German-Jewish Tradition,” Hebrew Studies 60 (2019): 223–254; this particular melody corresponds to the Western Ashkenazic piyyut “or panecha” for Shabbat Shekalim. My thanks to Rabbi Avi Bloomenstiel for this observation; For more on the melodies of Birkat HaMazon and their origins, see Eric Contzius, Grace After Meals: A Progressive Response, M.S.M. Thesis, Hebrew-Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (New York, 1995); Matthew Austerklein, “A Dallas Mystery Solved,” Beyond the Music, Substack (June 29, 2026): https://mattausterklein.substack.com/p/a-dallas-mystery-solved.

22. ²² See Judah M. Cohen, Jewish Religious Music in Nineteenth-Century America: Restoring the Synagogue Soundtrack (Indiana University Press, 2019).

23. ²³ Mistakes regarding the attribution of this last melody abound; Goldfarb published a simplified version of it in his Songster labeled as “traditional,” and Nathanson indicated the author as Sigmund Sabel (see note 48). For Sulzer’s notation, see Salomon Sulzer, Schir Zion (Kaufman, 1905), 55. My thanks to Cantor Sam Weiss for providing sources and clarification regarding this melody (private communication). On Sulzer’s symbolic role in the cantorate, see Jonathan L. Friedmann, “Sulzerism, Sulzermania, and the Shaping of the American Cantorate,” American Jewish History 101, no. 2 (April 2017): 287–306.

24. ²⁴ As pictured in Figure 3, see Louis Lewandowski, Kol Rinnah U’t’fillah (Bote & Bock, 1882), 34. On Lewandowski’s reception in America, see Judah M. Cohen, “Louis Lewandowski in America: A Case Study in Adaptation and Synagogue Music History,” American Jewish Archives Journal 75 (2023): 49–73.

25. ²⁵ See Amnon Seelig, “Hirsch Goldberg’s Compositions and the Music of the Braunschweig (Brunswick) Jewish Community in the 19th Century,” Master’s Thesis, University of Potsdam, 2008; Matthew Austerklein, “Not a German Drinking Song,” Beyond the Music, Substack (June 8, 2026), http://mattausterklein.substack.com/not-a-german-drinking-song.

26. ²⁶ Goldberg, “Congregational Song,” 39; A similar strategy of Shabbat afternoon convenings was initiated in 1902 by Lily Montagu to develop and spread liberal Judaism in Great Britain. See Ellen M. Umansky, “Lily Montagu,” Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, March 20, 2009, Jewish Women’s Archive https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/montagu-lily. The notation of “ma tovu” (Figure 4) is excerpted from Goldberg, “Congregational Song,” 40.

27. ²⁷ Henry Michelman, “Israel Goldfarb (1879–1967): Rabbi, Cantor and Influential Composer.” The Synagogue Journal 1856–2006, no. 6.

28. ²⁸ These have all been gathered and identified by Goldberg. See “Congregational Song,” 46–52.

29. ²⁹ Goldberg, 52.

30. ³⁰ For this letter from Goldfarb and its larger context, see Pinchas Spiro, “Israel Goldfarb’s Shalom Aleichem,” Journal of Synagogue Music 16, no. 2 (1986): 38–46; for a full evaluation of Goldfarb’s melody within the context of American synagogue music, see Adelstein, “(Shabbat) Angels in America.”

31. ³¹ Henry Michelman, “The Journey of a Hebrew Melody: Rabbi Israel Goldfarb’s Shalom Aleichem,” Rayonot: A Journal of Ideas (Park Avenue Synagogue), http://www.jewishmusic-asjm.org/shalom-aleichem.html. Goldfarb’s “shalom aleichem” is also frequently borrowed in the Conservative service for v’eineinu tir’enah of the shaḥarit kedushah.

32. ³² In addition to slight rhythmic alterations, the structure of the song has altered from A-B-B-A to A-B-A-B in common use. See Adelstein, “(Shabbat) Angels in America” and Matthew Austerklein, “Composers Anonymous,” Beyond the Music, Substack (March 10, 2025),
    http://mattausterklein.substack.com/composers-anonymous.

33. ³³ Goldberg, “Congregational Song,” 41–42, 80–85.

34. ³⁴ Goldberg, 42–45.

35. ³⁵ Goldberg, 45.

36. ³⁶ JTS, in contrast, largely taught Torah cantillation according to the Lithuanian variant documented by one of the Cantors Institute’s first faculty members, Solomon Rosowky (1878–1962). I have always thought of Binder’s trope as having notated a bar mitzvah boy experiencing a quick, adolescence-induced yodel during the tippeḥa. For the notation of “mi chamocha” see Union Songster: Songs and Prayers for Jewish Youth (CCAR, 1960): 295-296.

37. ³⁷ Michael R. Cohen, “The Travails of Early Jewish Theological Seminary Graduates: Solomon Schechter’s Disciples and the Challenges of the Emergent Conservative Movement,” American Jewish Archives Journal, 63, no. 2 (2011): 6.

38. ³⁸ Cohen, “The Travails of Early Jewish Theological Seminary Graduates,” 7.

39. ³⁹ Shirley Bernstein, Making Music: Leonard Bernstein (Encyclopedia Brittanica Press, 1963): 20.

40. ⁴⁰ Cited in Jonathan Sarna, “Leonard Bernstein and the Boston Jewish Community of His Youth: The Influence of Solomon Braslavsky, Herman Rubenovitz, and Congregation Mishkan Tefila, Journal of the Society for American Music 3, no. 1 (2009): 35–46; see also Elizabeth A. Wells, ed., Leonard Bernstein in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

41. ⁴¹ On the Golden Age and its contrast to “respectability” of the Conservative synagogue, see Jeremiah Lockwood, “What Is the Cantorial ‘Golden Age’? Hefker Khazones (Wanton Cantorial Music) or ‘the Key to the Jewish Soul’?,” Cantors Assembly 75th Anniversary Journal, Matthew Austerklein, ed. (Cantors Assembly, 2022), 327–337; also Lockwood, Golden Ages: Hasidic Singers and Cantorial Revival in the Digital Era (University of California, 2024), https://www.ucpress.edu/books/golden-ages/paper.

42. ⁴² Samuel Rosenbaum, “The Musical Functions of the Cantor in the Synagogue,” in Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Conference-Convention and Department of Music of the United Synagogue of America (Cantors Assembly, 1954): 32.

43. ⁴³ New Cantors Assembly publications of congregational melodies restarted in the twenty-first century with Zamru Lo: The Next Generation: Shabbat (2004), High Holidays (2006), and Hallel, Shalosh Regalim, and Weekdays (2009); Ruach HaDarom: Anthology of Congregational Synagogue Melodies from Latin America (2015); and Shira Chadasha: The Music of the Independent Minyan (2016).

44. ⁴⁴ On the conversations among the United Synagogue and Conservative cantors on congregational singing in the 1940s and 1950s, see Goldberg, “Congregational Song,” 85–88.

45. ⁴⁵ See Eli Sperling and Edwin Seroussi, “Mordecai and Judith Kaplan, Avraham Zvi Idelsohn, and Moshe Nathanson—Voices of Palestine” in Singing the Land: Hebrew Music and Early Zionism in America (University of Michigan Press, 2024), 103–136; Nathanson is also recognized by many scholars as the composer of the words to hava nagila.

46. ⁴⁶ For these and other Nathanson arrangements, including a popular anim zemirot tune by Cantor Yossele Rosenblatt, see Goldberg, “Congregational Song,” 58-60.

47. ⁴⁷ British Masorti Jews have their own variants of the birkat hamazon medley, particularly for the paragraphs nodeh lecha and bamarom yelamedu.

48. ⁴⁸ This avot (Ovos) tune partially excerpted above is notated in Zamru Lo: congregational melodies, prayers, zemirot, hymns, ed. Moshe Nathanson, vol. 2 (Cantors Assembly, 1955): 20. As of the publication of this article, it is still sung for Shabbat morning among the Conservative synagogues of Dallas, Texas; In Zamru Lo, Nathanson also published the opening to the well-known aleinu (vol. 1, p. 112), indicating its composer as Sigmund Sabel (1849-1924). For more on Sabel’s musical career, see Matthew Austerklein, “The Freemason’s Aleinu: Brotherly Love, Relief, and Truth about an Old Melody,” Beyond the Music, Substack (July 13, 2026):
    https://mattausterklein.substack.com/p/the-freemasons-aleinu.

49. ⁴⁹ Those who search can find the composer’s name with some ease; out of deference to his wishes not to be associated with the melody, I have omitted his name here.

50. ⁵⁰ Goldberg, “Congregational Song,” 55.

51. ⁵¹ For a biography of Ephros, see Marsha Bryan Edelman, Rabbi Ario Hyams, and Ario S. Hyams, “A Guide to the Unpublished Musical Works of Gershon Ephros (1890–1978): An Annotated Bibliography: With Biographical Background and Personal Reminiscences by Rabbi Ario Hyams,” Musica Judaica 11, no. 1 (1989): 58–85. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23687669.

52. ⁵² See “Mandell German Jewish Music Collection,” Grayzel Digital Platform, June 18, 2026, https://grayzel.gratz.edu/digital-collection/mandell-german-jewish-music-collection.

53. ⁵³ Sometimes this phenomenon occurs as a choral piece remaining in a congregational form in the absence of a choir. This occurs frequently in British Masorti Judaism, where many originally choral compositions from the Blue Book, particularly by Louis Lewandowski and Julius Mombach, remain in weekly use as congregational tunes.

54. ⁵⁴ When this melody is played at Sinai Temple, congregants will put their arms over each other’s shoulders and sway, leaning into the prayer’s sentiment of intergenerational continuity and faith.

55. ⁵⁵ Adolph Katchko, “Changing Conceptions of Hazanut,” in Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference-Convention and Department of Music of the United Synagogue of America (Cantors Assembly, 1949): 8.

56. ⁵⁶ See Jonathan L. Friedmann, “From text to melody: the evolution of the term nusach ha-tefillah,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 20, no. 3 (2021): 339–360, https://doi.org/10.1080/14725886.2020.1805905; For more on cantorial ideology regarding nusaḥ, see Joseph A. Levine, Rise and Be Seated: The Ups and Downs of Jewish Worship (Jason Aronson, 2001).

57. ⁵⁷ For a genealogy of this cantorial term, see Jonathan L. Friedmann, “Songs from Sinai: The Origins of a Musical Category,” European Journal of Jewish Studies 13 (2019): 28–42. For a general collection of Ashkenazi cantorial terminology, see Hanoch Avenary, “The Musical Vocabulary of Ashkenazi Ḥazzanim,” in Studies in Biblical and Jewish Folklore, Raphael Patai, Francis Lee Utley, and Dov Noy eds. (Indiana University Press, 1960), 187–198.

58. ⁵⁸ The JTS approach to nusaḥ via Wohlberg and Davidson can be found in Charles Davidson, Immunim III: Sefer Hadrakhah – An Annotated Guide and Commentary on the Application of Nusaḥ Hatefillah Beminhag Ashkenaz or the Liturgical Year, 3rd edition (Ashbourne Music Publishing, 2013). In the spirit of preservationism, the prolific composer Davidson (with hundreds of published works) composed a notable Tisha B’Av service employing old kinot melodies from poems that are now rarely sung. See Davidson, Ad Ana Bechiya Betziyon: A Ma’ariv Service for Tish’ah Beav (Ashbourne Music Publishing, 2012). For Davidson’s complete works, visit
    https://www.ashbournemusicpublishing.com/.

59. ⁵⁹ For documentation of this tradition, see Brian J. Mayer, “The origins and identification of the nusaḥ le-ḥol of Frankfurt am Main,” Journal of Synagogue Music 19, no. 1 (July 1989): 6–55.

60. ⁶⁰ Spiro’s books are more rarely used in formal cantorial education at JTS, where the nusaḥ curriculum has leaned on improvisation in the Wohlberg/Davidson tradition, together with written musical materials gathered by longtime nusaḥ pedagogue Joel Caplan and a host of individual cantorial coaches.

61. ⁶¹ On Hebrew at Ramah, see Sarah Bunin Benor, Jonathan Krasner, and Sharon Avni, Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps (Rutgers University Press, 2020), 82–110.

62. ⁶² See B’Kol Echad, 1st edition, Cantor Jeffrey Shiovitz, ed. (United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism, 1986),108–114. For an oral history of B’Kol Echad, listen to Matthew Austerklein, “Don’t Forget to Bentsch: Talking ‘B’kol Echad’ with its editor, Cantor Jeffrey Shiovitz,” Beyond the Music, podcast audio, December 9, 2024. https://open.substack.com/pub/mattausterklein/p/dont-forget-to-bench.

63. ⁶³ For a full accounting of the festival, see Edwin Seroussi & Motti Regev, Popular Music and National Culture in Israel (University of California Press, 2004). One festival selection that was more adaptable within the Reform than the Conservative Movement was Tzvika Pik’s “Shema Yisrael,” winner of the festival in 1972. Its myriad repetitions likely disqualified it from use in Conservative synagogues, as well as the ubiquity of the traditional “Sulzer Shema.” On the likely attribution of the “Sulzer Shema” to Cantor Jacob Beimel, see Goldberg, 44-45.

64. ⁶⁴ Camp Ramah Connecticut flourished from 1953-1965, after which it moved to Palmer, Massachusetts and became Camp Ramah New England. My sincere thanks to Rabbi Pomerantz’s daughters, Cantor Raquel Pomerantz Gershon and
    Cantor Alisa-Pomerantz Boro, for sharing their father’s story and manuscript with me.

65. ⁶⁵ Parts of this section are adapted from my previous article, “The Sovereign Musical Self: Musical Leadership in the Conservative Movement,” Journal of Synagogue Music, 46, no. 1 (2021): 19–22.

66. ⁶⁶ Shenker is the composer of the evocative mizmor l’david (Psalm 23) often sung at Conservative funerals or for Yizkor, although its original context was se’udah shelishit. For a recent monograph on Shenker and the twentieth century in Ḥasidic music, see Gordon Dale, A Life in Music: Ben Zion Shenker and Hasidic Song in America, Yuval vol. 14 (Hebrew University, 2025), https://jewish-music.huji.ac.il/en/node/24900.

67. ⁶⁷ The allegations against Rabbi Carlebach of sexual impropriety have caused much pain to his alleged victims and deep soul-searching within the Jewish community, particularly in the wake of the #MeToo movement of the 2000s and 2010s. The above discussion of his impact within Conservative Jewish music is not meant to condone any improper or illegal behaviors, alleged or otherwise, relating to Rabbi Carlebach. For scholarship on this unfortunate side of Rabbi Carlebach’s career, see Sarah Imhoff, “Carlebach and the Unheard Stories,” American Jewish History 100, no. 4 (October 2016): 555–560; that journal issue is dedicated to evaluating Rabbi Carlebach’s legacy and contains other articles of note. For Carlebach’s complete repertoire, see Velvel Pasternak, ed., Shlomo Carlebach Anthology (Tara Publications, 2016).

68. ⁶⁸ On the distinctiveness of neo-Ḥasidic music, see Sam Weiss, “Carlebach, Neo-Hasidic Music, and Current Liturgical Practice,” Journal of Synagogue Music 34 (2009): 55–75; For an analysis of the Orthodox Ḥasidic practice of congregational singing, see Sam Weiss, “Congregational Singing in Hasidic Congregations,” Journal of Synagogue Music 30, no. 1 (2005): 96–101.

69. ⁶⁹ For further sociological and theological analysis, see Matthew Austerklein, “Musical Equity and Musical Hierarchy,” Beyond the Music, Substack (March 4, 2024): https://mattausterklein.substack.com/p/musical-equity-musical-hierarchy.

70. ⁷⁰ See Velvel Pasternak’s anthology Songs of the Chassidim, vol. 2 (Bloch, 1968). My thanks to Cantor Sam Weiss for this suggestion.

71. ⁷¹ Pasternak, Songs of the Chassidim, 87. This is also a well-known klezmer tune. See Harry Kandel, “Khevre, nit gezorgt” recorded July 23, 1926 on Kandel’s Orchestra, (Victor, 1927) vinyl LP, https://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/4W4BF3Q. My thanks to Cantor Jeff Warshauer and Cantor Sam Weiss for helping to identify this melody.

72. ⁷² One such melody is shehu note shamayim, which entered the Ramah camps by the 1970s. The song’s origins are still obscure; it is the author’s opinion that the most likely candidate is the Irish drinking song, “Son of a Gambolier,” which was used for “St. Nicholas Terrace,” a football fight song at City College of New York. More research is required to confirm such suspicions. Many cantors have composed alternatives to this ditty over the years, introduced into synagogues and Ramah camps with various levels of success. For more on this melody and the cantorial attitudes toward the Camp Ramah repertoire, see Joseph A. Levine, Rise and Be Seated, 112–116.

73. ⁷³ Jewish Renewal, a movement founded by Carlebach’s fellow Chabad shaliaḥ, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, also leaned heavily into Carlebach’s repertoire. Ḥazzan Jack Kessler (1944–2024), a JTS cantorial graduate and Dean of the ALEPH Cantorial Program, was himself a former backup musician for Carlebach. See section VIII below.

74. ⁷⁴ I am only a partial insider to this repertoire, having attended and led services at independent minyanim in the late 2000s and having sung on Joey Weisenberg’s first CD. The independent minyan repertoire is surely worthy of its own full musical and ethnographic analysis.

75. ⁷⁵ For Joey’s philosophy and approach to Jewish communal singing, see especially Joey Weisenberg, Building Singing Communities: Practical Guide to Unlocking the Power of Music in Jewish Prayer (Mechon Hadar, 2011); The Torah of Music: Reflections on a Tradition of Singing and Song (Hadar Press, 2017). Short teachings of Joey’s are now also available at Joey’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@joeyweisenberg.

76. ⁷⁶ See Matthew Austerklein, Foreword, Shira Chadasha: Music of the Independent Minyan, Jeffrey Shiovitz, ed. (Cantors Assembly, 2016).

77. ⁷⁷ A new volume of congregational song, Shirata, is forthcoming from the CA within the next twelve months.

78. ⁷⁸ For an interview with Reb Zalman on his time at Ramah, see William Berkowitz, “Two Dialogues with Zalman Schachter-Shalomi: The Hasidic Approach to Song and Its Application to Camp Ramah,” Journal of Synagogue Music 34 (2009): 137–141.

79. ⁷⁹ See Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Davening: A Guide to Meaningful Jewish Prayer (Jewish Lights, 2012).

80. ⁸⁰ It is of note that as of the writing of this article, Romemu now holds office space at JTS. See www.romemu.org. Another emerging site of musical influence in the movement is Zamru, an experimental music and prayer program based at the Fuchsberg Center in Jerusalem. See
    https://fuchsbergcenter.org/zamru/.

81. ⁸¹ Debbie Friedman received a very generous and self-reflective reception when she first appeared at the Cantors Assembly Convention in 1995. For this fascinating moment, see “Composers Roundtable,” Proceedings of the Forty-Eighth Annual Convention of the Cantors Assembly (Cantors Assembly, 1995): 70–72, 76–79.

82. ⁸² This klezmeresque Taubman lecha dodi is based on a Russian street melody, “Tsyplyonok Zhareny” (Fried Chicken), a dark-humored ballad about the grim realities and terror of the Russian Civil War. Its refrain, “the chicken also wants to live,” became a protest against the oppression of the Red Terror and was later featured in Soviet-era cinema. The lyrics are further attributed to famous Jewish-Russian satirist Yakov Yadov, and borrows from melodic phrasing from klezmer and Yiddish theater. My thanks to Cantor Pavel Roytman for providing the colorful background of this melody.

83. ⁸³ Conservative-trained SLBC core faculty have included Rabbis Sharon Brous, Brad Horwitz, and Josh Warshawsky and Cantors Joanna Dulkin and Jacob “Milk” Sandler. Many Conservative clergy, seminarians, and musicians have also appeared as presenters. JTS also brings a yearly student contingent led by both rabbinical and cantorial faculty. My thanks to Cantors Dulkin and Sandler for their assistance in gathering this information.

84. ⁸⁴ Schorsch, “The Sacred Cluster.”

Jeffrey S. Gurock

As Americans pause to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, many of their fellow Jewish citizens worry whether their country will continue to live up to the promises of that iconic document. Challenges to the Jew’s place in society, and sometimes even their lives and sacred property, have emanated from a variety of militant groups and venues. Jewish defense groups, as is their wont and mission, have been quick and sure to quantify instances of Jew hatred. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), for example, has gone so far as to create a website for individuals who have experienced “an incident of antisemitism, extremism, bias, bigotry or identity-based hate or discrimination to report it to ADL,” which will do its best, “to assess information…and, if available, offer support or resources.” ADL wants to know of even some personal incidents like a Jew wearing a yarmulka or Jewish star punched or cursed by a hater.¹

Amid this contemporary crescendo of crises and concerns, there is, however, a safe space favoring American Jews within this country’s world of sports. There, protocols of tolerance support this minority group. Yet, even as today’s Jews have been “chosen-in”— they have been accepted as teammates more than ever before—questions exist about the extent to which those Jewish athletes, who are driven to achieve in this secular arena, still connect to their ethno-religious group’s past and future. The delineation of the complexities within this comfort zone is an important, but all too often unrecognized, counterpoint narrative to weighty problems in this troubling era for Jews. This sensitivity to Jews and Judaism was not the case a century ago.

Back then, in the 1930s—unquestionably, the most-widely remembered incident of disrespect and marginalization of a Jew in the sports stadium took place in 1934. Then, the Detroit Tigers’ management and its city’s rooting public pressured Hank Greenberg, their star first baseman, to play crucial games in a close pennant race on the Jewish New Year. He was told, in no uncertain terms, that he had an obligation to his local Detroit community—not the Jewish community—to be on the field during the High Holidays. The slugger was comforted somewhat by a local rabbi’s ambiguous statement: that while the decision was up to him—Rabbi Leo Franklin would not tell him what to do—he should search his soul and determine why he might don his uniform. For the rabbi, if Greenberg showed up because baseball was his “livelihood,” he should absent himself from “work” on the holiday. However, if “taking part in the game would mean something not only to himself but to his fellow players and in fact at this time to the community of Detroit” (emphasis mine), he should be in the lineup. Greenberg played on Rosh Hashanah. If he had any qualms about being at Navin Field on that holy day, he reportedly “brightened visibly” when was told after the game what the rabbi had said and stated, “I didn’t do the wrong thing after all.” Greenberg did absent himself eight days later during Yom Kippur, though it need be noted that by that time, his club had reduced the so-called “magic number” to secure the league championship flag to three with ten games to play. This calculus significantly reduced the pressure on the slugger. No matter: still Detroit’s Jews of that era hallowed Greenberg’s statement that day of Jewish identification at a time when their city was a hotbed of haters such as Henry Ford, Father Charles Coughlin, and the Ku Klux Klan, paradigms of hostility to this minority group. Greenberg made it clear where he stood when he showed up, for a while, at Detroit’s Congregation Shaarey Zedek and received a standing ovation from congregants. That moment, in a synagogue, was his public statement of identification.²

Thirty-one years later, as is also well known, when Sandy Koufax decided to stay away from the ballpark on Yom Kippur, neither his Dodger management nor the team’s fan base questioned his choice. Times were changing dramatically and favorably toward Jews. If anything, an increasingly culturally pluralistic America applauded Koufax linking himself that day to his Jewish religious ancestry. The historical record is unclear whether the self-effacing player stayed in his hotel room or quietly attended services on that holy day. No matter: To this day, many Jews have seen the Hall of Fame lefthander as a consummate ethnic role model. As one rabbi recently put it in 2024: “Koufax, more than any other Jewish ballplayer, symbolizes the American Jew who makes it, succeeds, is at the top of his field, but does not deny and even affirms his Jewish identity,”³

Meanwhile, also in recent decades, baseball owners have prayed not to be queried about the so-called “High Holiday Question.” For example, in 2004, Dodger outfielder Shawn Green could not make up his mind whether to play or sit out crucial games, waffling that “I’m totally committed to getting to the post season, and at the same time, I’m committed to my religion … I wish there was a solution but there’s not. I wish Yom Kippur could be in April.” Conflicted, Shawn Green opted to play Kol Nidre Night but did not suit up the afternoon that followed. That was his determination of the extent of his Jewish observance.⁴

For the record, the Almighty did not visit the so-called “Koufax Curse” on Green— the semi-serious superstition that a Jewish player who is on the field on Yom Kippur is doomed to fail. In fact, he hit the game-winning home run the night he played. But if the outfielder was spared divine retribution, he was called to task in some Jewish religious quarters for the alleged sin of promoting assimilation. To his critics, Green demonstrated not only a lack of self-respect but, arguably, symbolized the tenuous state of Jewish life and prospects for the future for failing to fully separate himself from a welcoming American crowd for at least for 24 hours a year. They wondered that if young Jews followed his lead, whether Judaism could survive in an environment where, above all, Jews desired to always be “chosen-in” and in all venues. But there was also pushback against these critics among those who praised him for struggling to balance assimilation and identity. For them, in an era where, increasingly, Jews were not religiously observant, Green was in his own way a role model. It was pointed out sympathetically that he involved himself in a myriad of Jewish causes and philanthropies—even if he had married out of the faith as so many of his co-religionists were doing. For these voices, Green’s behavior offered, if anything, a measure of encouragement about Jewish prospects for survival in a tolerant America as he found his own ways to connect to his community.⁵

While Jewish spokespeople of various opinions debated Green’s situation, the team owner wanted no part of this dilemma. Dodger owner Frank Mc Court made clear that it was “a personal decision and it’s his decision to make.” Mc Court’s equanimity was more than just a present-day reflection of American tolerance and acceptance; in this case, McCourt was part of a community which included Jewish owners—and from 1998–2015 had a Jewish Commissioner Alan (“Bud”) Selig. Much like other arenas in high level corporate life—sports is a big billion-dollar business— and American Jewish Lords of Baseball are insiders within boardrooms. Thus, theoretically, if these powerful Jewish sports moguls cared about the annual concomitance of the Major League post-season and Jewish High Holidays, they might modify the Major League calendar—but perhaps more importantly, this hands-off policy reflects a recognition of Jews as fans who want their holy days respected.⁶

This demeanor toward a minority group as consumer ticket holders dates to 1986 when religiously observant Jewish Met fans demanded that post season games themselves be moved away from Jewish holidays. Ultimately, the games went on as scheduled, but owners got the message that Jewish fans were worthy of courtship.

Baseball stadiums all over the country sell kosher hot dogs and knishes. Some proprietors have gone even further in catering to an even smaller cohort of American Jews: those who desire to recite the evening prayers while a night game is in progress. A designated area is set aside for these devotions and the spot is announced to the rooting public. However, in their zeal to reach out to Jews, one club inadvertently made the error of honoring a Christian possessed of a Jewish sounding name at a Jewish Heritage Day.⁷

The Yom Kippur dilemma has been largely resolved and infrequently discussed, except among those Jews who closely monitor the Jewish and baseball calendars. However, in recent years, attention has been drawn to a few college football players who define themselves as “Orthodox” and how they attempt to navigate their religious commitments and their desire to be part of the team whose games almost always take place on the Jewish Sabbath. In most cases, those in charge of sports programs warmly accept them. Thus, with the arrival of the semiquincentennial, Jews have begun to feel increasingly more at home in the athletic arena.

In 2020, media attention was focused for a moment when Sam Salz, who some three years earlier had “walked on” to the Texas A&M football team and was put into a game for one play. What was so unusual and intriguing was that Salz—a self-defined Orthodox Jew, who had attended a Jewish day school in high school and had never before played football—was fulfilling his dream of playing for a topnotch college team. To his mind, he was fulfilling his fantasy without violating the Sabbath. He navigated the apparent break with halakha (Jewish traditional strictures)—in this case “carrying in public precincts,” even if it was just a football—under the guidance and approval of the local campus Chabad rabbi who, on game day, welcomed Salz to services in the morning and early afternoon before the wide receiver walked onto the stadium gridiron. He wore number 39 on his uniform to remind him of the Mishnaic categories of work forbidden on the Sabbath, which he and his Jewish religious outreach mentor determined he was not violating.

Supporting his fidelity to the faith on an ongoing basis, the team, beginning with coach Jimbo Fisher, who “made arrangements to accommodate his Jewish observance, from exempting him from team travel and activities on Shabbat and other Jewish holidays to providing kosher food and his own kosher microwave in the team facilities.” Teammate Muhsin “Moose” Muhammed praised Salz’s work ethic, stating, “He has always been a good teammate, and he’s had a positive influence” at Texas A&M.

But Salz wanted more than just the chance to carry the ball for one fleeting moment. He saw himself, not unlike the Chabad rabbi, as an emissary for Judaism, teaching his teammates and all others on campus, who might ask, what the Jewish faith was all about and stood for. Looking ahead, he dreamed “to get ordained as a rabbi [and] a motivational speaker” believing that “there’s probably a Jewish kid, and maybe even especially an Orthodox kid, who wants to play football or wants to play sports and is sitting somewhere confused about what he should do, or who’s told that he’ll never be able to do it. Even getting to see me run down the field, successful play or not, could give him all the hope he wanted.”⁸

Five years later, in 2025, Zevi Eckhas, another self-defined Orthodox football player, possessed of far more athletic abilities, made a comparable splash when he explained to his fan base how his religious beliefs coincided positively with the demands of his sport. This starting quarterback for Washington State University told a reporter “I’m a big believer that everything that’s done through God…Every time I put on my pads and go outside and throw a football, I know that with God’s help, football and everything I do in my life is completely intertwined with my religion.” To publicly punctuate his beliefs, before every game, he went to the 18-yard line, kneeled and prayed to “just thank Him for all He’s done for me and continues to do.” Of course, the number 18—which in Hebrew is “Chai,” meaning life—has folk significance in Judaism. Privately, Eckhaus, who like Salz was a Jewish day school student and from an observant home, demonstrates daily his deep regard for the rules of Jewish tradition by putting on tefillin every day and studying mishnayos—a foundational Jewish legal text every week.

However, he openly admitted that “Shabbos is still tricky because we play on Saturdays… eating kosher is also hard because of the cafeteria and being at the facility most of the day.” [But] “I try to keep as much as I can with my religion.” Eckhaus did have his own “High Holiday dilemma” in 2024 when Yom Kippur fell on Saturday. As backup signal caller, he was not put in the game. However, he “was still present on the sidelines” while observing in his own way the fast day.” He recalled: “I did not eat or drink for 25 hours, and Coach Dikert even went out of his way to have a private room set aside for me after the game for me to finish out the prayers.”

Like Salz’s, Eckhaus’ teammates also have been “very accepting and welcoming of him.” He was quick to point out that he “even had two Palestinian offensive linemen in his college career and these guys”—who were positioned to protect him on the field—“were some of the nicest to me…There’s no bickering or tension around religion.” Undoubtedly, they did not react to his kneeling before games. Christian teammates often do likewise before and after games to thank the Creator.⁹

Meanwhile, just a few states over, in 2024, Jake Ratzlaff, the Jewish starting quarterback at Brigham Young University, offered a very different, and almost assimilatory message, when the media questioned him about his plans for Yom Kippur. He replied that he had no problem at all suiting up. He, and his family, offered explanations that suggested that Jewish religious commitments were not important to them even though his group identification was affirmed by the Star of David necklace that he wore on and off the field. The young man asserted that “it’s going to be a special day that there’s a Jewish kid playing football because if it makes headlines, that means I get to be another light for someone else and that means I have to win.” Clearly untroubled by his choice and driven toward athletic success, he implied that he hoped another Jewish athlete might follow in his cleated footsteps. When his decision did attract national attention, and ESPN queried his mother, she noted that within their own hierarchy of allegiances—to both faith and sport, as Jake was raised in both worlds—playing on Judaism’s holiest day was “the way he can best contribute to the community (i.e., the athletic community) that he is in right now.”¹⁰

Salz and Eckhaus have relied on the positive attitudes of their school’s coaches and administrations and the friendship of their fellow teammates to achieve their religious-athletic goals. It has remained for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) to codify such tolerance. The major case in point was their rulings—in place for more than a quarter century—supporting the unyielding fidelity to religious strictures of Yeshiva University, an Orthodox institution. First and foremost, although not all players are equally punctilious in their personal observances, the school cannot have their teams play on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays. Most notably and certainly problematic, when they have an outstanding team, they would have to back away from competition if a post-season game was set for Friday night—the beginning of the Sabbath—or Saturday during the day. The inclusive NCAA has gone along with a request for a time shift; thus, the Yeshiva tilts have taken place at Friday noon rather than at 8 p.m. Similarly, in the regular season, the local metropolitan area league, the Skyline Conference, has worked around Yeshiva’s unalterable calendar requests. The Maccabees—the team’s moniker—along with their sister squad, the Lady Maccabees, have been longtime members of that league. If anything, given the idiosyncratic nature of Yeshiva’s participation, when something special happens athletically at the Manhattan school, an intrigued journalist might pick up the story. Otherwise, the goings-on within this small college association do not make it to the papers.¹¹

And then there has been the NCAA’s long-term nodding affirmatively to the unusual way Yeshiva athletes—men and women—dress on the court. According to the sports establishment’s rule book, basketball players cannot wear any “head decorations, headwear or jewelry” while playing. There are also protocols about the length of uniforms. However, it has been accepted that religious men and married women who always keep their heads covered and women who dress very modestly may do so when they compete. When, in 2001, Yeshiva first asked for formal relief for its women, its athletic director sagely cast his request as not a uniquely Jewish appeal. He noted strategically: “I would imagine that similar requests have been made for other student athletes of faiths that have similar restrictions” [Muslims, etc.] The NCAA agreed.¹²

In 2022, the management of National Basketball Association’s (NBA) Detroit Pistons drafted an outstanding Orthodox player for its “G League” minor league development team. From the very start, among all who were concerned, it was understood that if Ryan Turell made the club, he would be accorded his religious needs; much like Texas A&M privileged Sam Salz. Terrell possessed sterling credentials as an athlete. He was a three-time Division III All-American and in 2022 he was voted National Player of the Year at his level of competition. It was felt that he would fit in among a variety of NBA aspirants who hoped, through success on the Detroit Motor City Cruise squad, for a shot at the big-time league. Turell signed up; during his two years on the team, the owners followed through on their promises. For example, when a road game took place on a Friday night, Turell “walked back to the hotel, where he stayed for the remainder of the day of rest. He was provided with four kosher meals and a hot plate and a ride home after sundown Saturday.”¹³

Ownership’s responsiveness to Turell’s needs stemmed, to begin with, from their sense that he could contribute to the club’s success. But perhaps there were two additional elements in play. Generally, G league teams compete in front of, at most, half-empty arenas. But here there was the idea that Orthodox fans, both in Detroit and especially in Greater New York when the Cruise played the Long Island Nets, would attend in large numbers.¹⁴ Additionally, for more than thirty years, Jewish community leader and philanthropist William “Bill” Davidson had owned the Detroit franchise from 1974 until his passing in 2009. Though not Orthodox, Davidson was a deeply committed Jew who, in fact, endowed a School of Jewish Education at the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Given the Pistons’ “Jewish tradition”, it might have been a nice touch to support Turell’s religious disposition. His teammates on the Cruise concurred with the owners’ apparent feelings. Turell “was grateful to have supportive teammates who respect[ed] his cultural and religious background…It’s really cool to have a locker room where we can share so many different cultures and backgrounds with each other—we’re all people.”

On the road throughout the country, Turell did not suffer catcalls from opposing players and their fans and he ignored some social media anti-Jewish slights. Wherever he appeared, there was acceptance—and even some fascination—on and off the hardwood.¹⁵

With Turell chosen-in, his fan base at Yeshiva was agog with happiness and expectations. Some of the faithful even dreamed that he might make it to the NBA. For them, it was the culmination of a series of seasons where the Maccabees won a remarkable fifty games in a row from 2019-2021, with Turell and a few other fine players in the lead. Their success attracted an uncommon amount of positive publicity in the Jewish and general press for a team that played and prayed. In some Orthodox quarters, it bespoke magnificently how one of their own kind within America could “balance the needs of their own professional careers with…commitment to religious observance and halacha [Jewish law].” However, “some folks fel[t] that a real kiddush hashem [sanctification of God’s name] would have been created had Turell refused to accept the offer to play in the G league, placing Shabbat observance ahead of his professional desire.” Some rabbis questioned whether playing basketball on the Sabbath, even if he is not driving to and from the games, is halachically permissible. A question was raised about whether the uniform he wore was appropriate Sabbath dress. The American world of sports had no problem at all with his sartorial getup in line with what other G players were wearing. But it was an issue for very strict constructionists of Jewish law. It is not known “if Turell asked an Orthodox rabbi about the permissibility of playing ball on Shabbat.” We may surmise that Salz’s Chabad rabbi in Texas would have told him to go ahead. Back in New York at Yeshiva University some religious leaders were not so certain.¹⁶

From a basketball perspective, Turell’s two years with the Cruise club were not crowned with great success: he averaged only four-five points and two rebounds a game. In 2024, he took his sports skills to Israel where he has played (to date, 2026) in its professional league.

Notwithstanding these tableaus of sports tolerances, and with all of the religious dilemma resolution that has sometimes followed, there are other instances when Orthodox Jewish teams still faced opposition to scheduling switches. When these problems occur, sometimes those affected, feeling entitled within American society and comfortable with the court system, have made their case with the help of gentile supporters. In 2012, for example, a Texas sports association took a decidedly negative stance on the Sabbath-sports question only to be upbraided by a variety of non-Jewish voices. In February of that year, a Jewish day school in Houston made it to the state semi-finals only to run up against an imposed Friday night start time. Their Christian religious school opponents indicated that they had no problem with an early tip-off time. But the Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools refused the request—only to face criticism for its stance. For example, the coach of the professional Houston Rockets, Jeff Van Gundy, was among those who spoke to the New York Times and ESPN, calling for a change of heart. Far from quiet or intimidated, a group of school parents sought a restraining order from a local magistrate to allow the team to play before sundown. Wilting under criticism, the association folded and the game took place at the “right” time. The Jewish team lost the match, but a point had been made.¹⁷

Some years earlier, Amalya Knapp was disappointed that the national governing board of her chosen sport, gymnastics, would not count her fine performance on a Sunday toward earning a medal in the second part of a two-day championship meet because this Orthodox youngster had not competed on the Sabbath. A local Orthodox politician was ready and eager to press this issue and wrote to USA Gymnastics. He contended that its policies did not go far enough “to accommodate athletes from all religious and racial backgrounds.” Knapp’s parents were not interested in furthering a growing controversy in their New Jersey town over whether religious exemption has a place in sports. Rather, they saw the issue as a teaching moment for their athletically precocious seven-year-old about her need to balance being both an athlete and a Jew. In the end, Amalya chose to observe Jewish religious tradition and not compete. Her parents would encourage her to stick with gymnastics, taking ice skating lessons, and playing soccer, among other sports—but never on Saturday or Jewish holidays. Like so many contemporary Jewish athletes who care—each in their own ways—about their faith, she would seek her own safe space or comfort zone.¹⁸

Jeffrey S. Gurock, PhD is the Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University.

---

1. ¹ For a compilation of antisemitic incidents, see ADL.org/audit-antisemitic-incidents. On reporting incidents, see https://www.adl.org/report-incident. For an example of a recent physical attack against a Jewish visitor to New York, see “Tourist from Israel Sucker Punched during Unprovoked Attack in Midtown,” ABC 7 New York, October 29, 2025, https://abc7ny.com/post/midtown-tourist-attacked-rabbi-jerusalem-sucker-punched-during-first-visit-nyc/18088056/.

2. ² William M. Simons, “Hank Greenberg: The Jewish American Folk Hero,” Sports and the American Jew, Steven A. Riess, ed. (Syracuse University Press, 1998), 192-200.

3. ³ For a comprehensive biography of Koufax, see Jane Leavey, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy (Harper Perennial, 2010). On the continuing question of whether Koufax attended synagogue, see Jacob Gurvis, “The Jewish Sport Report: Where did Sandy Koufax go on Yom Kippur when He Didn’t Pitch? An Investigation.” Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), October 11, 2024. For a rabbi’s praise for Koufax, see Sarah Wexler, “Sandy Koufax as a Jewish American Sports Icon,” in Sandy Koufax Book (N.Y. Society for American Baseball Research, 2024).

4. ⁴ On Green’s dilemma, see Murray Chass, “On Yom Kippur, Green Opts to Miss at Least One Game,” New York Times, September 23, 2004. For opinions for or against Green from Jewish sources, see Jeffrey S. Gurock, “Baseball, The High Holidays and Jewish Status and Survival,” in Marc Lee Raphael, ed., What is Jewish about America’s “Favorite Pastime”? (College of William and Mary, 2006), 32-33.

5. ⁵ On the “Koufax curse,” see Armin Rosen, “The Koufax Curse,” Tablet, June 19, 2024.

6. ⁶ On kosher foods and Jewish services at ball parks, see Jenna Weissman Joselit, “Home Plate and Hot Dogs are Like Ball and Glove when Summer Hits, Forward, July 12, 2002. On Jewish services, see Louis Berney, ”Worshipping More than Baseball at Camden,” Baseball Weekly, May 29, 1996.

7. ⁷ On the mistake of honoring a Christian, see Joshua Yaffa, “Florida Team Strikes Out,” Forward, June 9, 2006.

8. ⁸ “Texas A&M’s Sam Salz Cherishes his First Taste of College Football—and the Opportunity to Inspire Orthodox Jews,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), November 22, 2024.

9. ⁹ Shiryn Ghermezian, “Washington State University’s Jewish Quarterback Explains How Religion Fuels his On-Field Success,” The Algemeiner, December 2025. See also Joseph Straus, “Getting to Know Zevi Eckhas, the Bowl-Bound Jewish Quarterback who Prays at the 18-yard line,” Greater Houston Jewish News Media, December 4, 2025.

10. ¹⁰ Phillis Cramer, “Israeli Deni Avdija Sits Out Yom Kippur NBA game; Jewish BYU Quarterback Suits Up,” Forward, October 14, 2024.

11. ¹¹ See Rick Rojas, “After Fasting and Before the Sabbath, Yeshiva Debuts in N.C.A.A Tournament, New York Times, March 1, 2018; “The Orthodox Jewish Hoops Team that has the World’s Attention,” New York Post, February 27, 2018. It is quite noteworthy, as another indication of tolerance toward religious minority groups, that the NCAA calendar accommodations have also been granted to Mormons, Seventh-day Adventists, and other Christian groups that adhere to their Sabbath traditions on Saturday.

12. ¹² See on Yeshiva-NCAA correspondence, Richard Zerneck to Amy Rule, October 25, 2001 and Barbara Jacobs to Zerneck, October 31, 2001, noted in Gurock, “Orthodoxy on Display in the Arena of Sports, 1920-2000,” in Jack Wertheimer, ed., Imagining the American Jewish Community (Brandeis University Press, 2007), 134.

13. ¹³ “Ryan Turell–Men’s Basketball,” https://yumacs.com. On the Piston organization helping Turell observe the Sabbath, see Michael Feldstein, “Ryan Turell and the Challenge of Modern Orthodoxy,” Jewish Link, November 16, 2022.

14. ¹⁴ Andrew Lapin, “‘Put in Ryan!’: Orthodox NBA hopeful Ryan Turell’s fan base turns up in Detroit,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), November 21, 2022.

15. ¹⁵ William “Bill” Davidson-Basketball Hall of Fame,” https://www.Hoophall.com. On Turell’s teammates’ positive attitude toward him, see Michael Sudhalter, “The 24-year-old California Native is Trying to Become the First Orthodox Player to Make the NBA,” The Detroit Jewish News, February 29, 2024.

16. ¹⁶ On Yeshiva’s success on the court, see “The Longest Streak in Men’s College basketball,” ESPN, November 5, 2021; On the debate within Yeshiva University about Turell’s religious choices, see Feldstein.

17. ¹⁷ “Jewish High School Back in Texas Tournament after Parents File Lawsuit,” Wall Street Journal, March 3, 2012. On a local court affirming the right of a Jew to wear a yarmulka while playing, see an Associated Press dispatch that appeared in the Gainesville Sun (January 11, 1983) and in many other American newspapers.

18. ¹⁸ “Seven-year-old Gymnast Balances Religious Faith and Sports.” New York Post, March 5, 2011.

Tom Baker

I grew up in St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in LeRoy, New York, a small town about halfway between Rochester and Buffalo. Belonging to St. Marks meant Sunday School, choir practice, church camp, church suppers, and, as a teenager, service as an altar boy. Most of my ancestors on both sides of my family arrived in America before 1776. My father’s family lived north of the Mason Dixon line. My mother’s family lived south of that line until her parents moved from Virginia to Buffalo, where my parents met, so my family has ancestors who fought for independence and on both sides of the Civil War.

Before leaving LeRoy, the only Jews I knew were the characters in Chaim Potok’s novels. I loved their introspection, their struggles with their families and communities, and the brilliance of their inner dialogs. I never thought I could have friends like that, until I met my Jewish classmates at Harvard College.

I attended my first Jewish service while I was a law student. I went with my future wife, Sharon, to the High Holiday services led by the Hillel rabbi in a packed Sanders Theater. Later, Sharon and I started going to Friday night services at Shaare Zedeck Synagogue in Puerto Rico. That was part of the deal we made when I broached the idea of spending a year in San Juan so I could clerk for a federal judge, or at least so I remember. Sharon remembers no such deal and reports that we went to Shaare Zedeck to meet people. Whoever is right, it was an easy introduction to synagogue for me. We were just visiting, nobody seemed to care that I didn’t know what I was doing, and Sharon was a good teacher.

I stopped working on Shabbat a few years later. I was working at a large law firm in Washington while Sharon experienced quasi-single parenthood in the suburbs. Observing Shabbat gave us a reliable way to spend more time as a family. We went to Beth Tikvah Synagogue in Rockville, rather than closer synagogues, because the rabbi, Howard Gorin, told Sharon he would allow me on the bimah with her for our daughter’s naming, even though I was not Jewish.

Not long after that, our three-year-old son announced at the dinner table, “I’m Jewish, Mommy is Jewish, Rachie is Jewish.” He looked at me and asked, “What are you, Daddy?”

I don’t remember what I said, but it could not have made sense to him, because it would not have made sense to me. We were living a more Jewish life than almost anyone we knew, other than our Orthodox neighbors—so much so that the wife of another young lawyer at my firm commented to Sharon, “It must be nice to be married to someone who’s the same religion as you. My husband is Methodist and I’m Presbyterian and we can’t agree on which church to go to.”

“If people think I’m Jewish, what’s holding me back?” I wondered. Even my mother thought it was time. “Tom,” she had said before our interfaith wedding, “I don’t care what religion you choose, but your family should have just one religion.”

Inertia was a factor to be sure, but the real problem was pride. I knew so little, but I knew enough to know that the Jewish learning curve was massive. As long as I was just the nice, intermarried spouse who went with his family to synagogue, I could excuse my lack of knowledge. If I signed up, it would be a different story.

But then our son asked that question. Did I want to be part of his people or not?

How could I not? So, I made the call to Rabbi Gorin that he had been waiting for. Sitting in his office to discuss what conversion would entail, it never would have occurred to me that, one day, I would be the president of Lower Merion Synagogue, the largest Orthodox congregation in Pennsylvania.

On the way to that day, Sharon and I joined five synagogues in four different cities, I converted twice (first with a Conservative beit din in Miami and then with an Orthodox one in West Hartford, Connecticut), we spent two sabbaticals and many summers in Jerusalem, and we put our three children through Jewish day schools. From the beginning of my academic career, first in Miami, then West Hartford, and now Philadelphia, I have been the person the dean’s assistant emails to check on the dates for the Jewish holidays.

Ours is an American Jewish story. The details may be unique, but the story of a Christian-American man or woman falling in love with his or her Jewish-American friends and then deciding to join the Jewish people is not.

* * *

I spent the past academic year on sabbatical as a faculty fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. The sabbatical/fellowship year provided me the opportunity to reflect on the meaning of my family’s American Jewish story in the larger context of Jewish intermarriage and conversion.

From the scholarly literature, I learned that not much is known about the people who intermarried and converted into the Jewish people until nearly the twentieth century. We know that it did happen.¹ But the social separation between Jews and non-Jews in most of the world prior to the mid-nineteenth century means it’s unlikely that intermarriage and conversion-in to the Jewish people occurred very often, relative to marriage between two Jews—which clearly was the dominant pattern—and conversion-out, much of which was forced.²

Until sometime in the twentieth century, intermarriage almost always was a stop on a journey out of the Jewish people. University of Michigan Professor Todd Endelman reports that in Europe and among US elites, intermarriage was a way to try to escape social limits on Jews; while in the rural US it was a function of the small number of Jews outside of a few big cities and, thus, looks more like ordinary American assimilation.³

Rates of intermarriage increased significantly in the US over the course of the twentieth century, to the point where there was grave concern within Jewish institutions in the US about the “continuity crisis” this posed.⁴ More recent research suggests that American Jewish continuity is not at risk to the extent first thought.⁵ Many, if not most, of the children of intermarried couples in North America identify as Jews, and the originally non-Jewish spouses often come to identify with the Jewish people, whether they go through a formal conversion process or not.⁶

The extent to which Reform and even Conservative congregations depend on the volunteer work of converts and their spouses, and the increasing number of those congregations that grant some form of membership status to a non-Jewish spouse illustrate this new reality.⁷ As I can attest, the trend extends to at least part of the Orthodox world as well. Non-Jewish spouses cannot be members of Orthodox synagogues, but there are converts active in each of the Orthodox synagogues I have frequented since first joining Beth David Synagogue in West Hartford, and their families are over-represented on synagogue committees and other volunteer activities.

Reading the scholarly literature on intermarriage and conversion, and the even larger volume of popular and Jewish institutional literature, I was struck by the relative absence of the voices of originally non-Jewish spouses. There are exceptions, of course. Jennifer Thompson and Keren McGinity have conducted qualitative and ethnographic research that includes these voices; if you look hard enough, you can find some first-person accounts.⁸ But the center of gravity in much of the scholarly and popular literature reflects an institutional perspective that treats the people drawn to their Jewish neighbors, friends, classmates, and co-workers as a threat—to be approached at arm’s length at best.

As Zayde to four young Jewish grandchildren (and counting), and as a veteran of synagogue and Jewish day school boards, I understand that institutional perspective. But here in North America, Jews are not going to stop falling in love with their non-Jewish neighbors, friends, classmates, and co-workers. And those neighbors, friends, classmates, and co-workers are going to face a choice as a result. “Do I join the Jewish people or not?”

Having made my choice, I have a stake in the answers they give to this question. Like most people reading these words, I would like those answers to be “Yes,” if that comes with a commitment to live as a Jew and knowledge of what that means. But I would like the answer to be “Yes” even if their only commitment is to support the Jewish identity of their spouses and children and to learn over time what that means. That was my commitment when I took the first steps beyond what Yale Professor of Religious Studies Christine Hayes calls “Jewish adjacency” toward gaining formal status as a Jew, first under the rules of the Conservative stream of Judaism and, later, under Orthodox rules.⁹

Developing a Jewish identity and being recognized by the community as authentically Jewish (what Hayes helpfully calls gaining “standing” in the Jewish community) are, as Hayes carefully explains, related to the formal process of gaining official Jewish status within one or more of the streams of Jewish practice.¹⁰ But, as she also explains, identity and standing involve different and less well-marked processes.¹¹

Because I had years of Jewish adjacency and our family was so present at synagogue and day school, I gained Jewish standing among our Conservative Jewish community in Miami as soon as I finished my first conversion and gained Jewish status. The same thing happened when we wanted to join an Orthodox synagogue in West Hartford, Connecticut. We had just returned to the US after living on the Jewish calendar in Jerusalem during a sabbatical year, and we wanted to be part of a community trying their best to do the same in the Diaspora. Our children were in Orthodox day school, and we already observed the other mitzvot that the rabbis required (Shabbat, kashrut, taharat ha-mishpachah), so the West Hartford Orthodox rabbis and our new community saw my conversion as a technicality. I went through a real process that taught me things that I needed and wanted to know, and I affirmed real commitments, but the outcome was never in doubt.

Developing a Jewish identity that felt authentic to me was much harder, and there were many more bumps along the way. Like the time, not so long ago, the rabbi told me that, despite what I might have heard, a certain prominent person in the community had not said that a convert couldn’t be president of Lower Merion Synagogue—which of course meant that some people were saying such a thing. Or the time more recently, when a different very important person in the community expressed doubt about whether I could say kaddish for my mother (whose ashes were interred at St. Marks). I could and did. Or the time many years ago, during my first conversion, when the mohel in Miami asked me to recite the Sh’ma. As hard as it may be to believe, I thought at the time that the Sh’ma was just the single line Sharon recited with our children each night. So, he had to lead me through the rest, syllable by painfully humiliating syllable. Or the many times when I went to services at a synagogue in a new place for the first time, hoping desperately that nobody would ask me to do something that would somehow demonstrate that I didn’t really belong.

I wish I could say that I experienced those and other experiences as bumps on the road to Jewish status or standing, and not as challenges to whether I would ever feel authentically a Jew. But, except for the kaddish example (which just got me sad and angry), each and every one of these experiences challenged my emerging self-identity as a Jew, and even today I’m not sure that I’m done with those challenges.

If my experience is anything like that of others, we need not only to do more to treat the people who are drawn to us as opportunities rather than threats, but also to recognize that coming close is a process that can take a lifetime to complete. The latter can be true as well for born Jews who were raised, or who became, distant from committed Jewish life; but it is differently true for converts and the Jewishly adjacent for reasons I’m sure I do not need to explain to this audience.

Professor Hayes and her Hartman Institute collaborators have provided a caring and thoughtful roadmap for Jewish organizations that wish to explore how to foster a community of belonging.¹² I advocate even more strongly than they can (because they are speaking to the widest possible range of Jewish organizations) for committed Jews and secure Jewish communities to embrace the Jewishly adjacent. We should listen to and learn from them. We should explore ways to encourage them to make their own version of my choice, while respecting the choices they make. But we should, especially, support them along the way.

We can be confident as we do this, because we have so much to offer: Torah, avodah, tikkun olam, and, perhaps most importantly, the communities that make these and other aspects of a full Jewish life possible. That life provides so much meaning and such generous human connection in a world without enough of both. Yes, some of the people we embrace will remain only Jewishly adjacent, but their lives will be richer as a result; ours will be, too.

Tom Baker is the Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. He is also the former president of the Lower Merion Synagogue, the largest Orthodox congregation in Pennsylvania.

For Additional Reading

Berman, Lila Corwin. The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution. Princeton University Press, 2020.

Cohen, Shaye J.D. The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties. University of California Press, 1999.

Cohen, Steven M. “Jewish identity research in the United States: Concepts and findings, in Demographic Shifts in the Jewish World: Forecasts and Implications.” Jewish Agency, 2002.

Diamant, Anita. Choosing a Jewish Life. Schocken Press, 1997.

Endelman, Todd. Leaving the Jewish Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History. Princeton University Press, 2015.

Hayes, Christine. “Building Communities of Belonging: Jewish Identity, Conversion, Intermarriage, and Adjacency.” Kogod Research Center for Contemporary Jewish Thought at the Shalom Hartman Institute, 2026.

Kaufman, Joanne. “Are you a Jew? To serve on a synagogue board, increasingly the answer can be ‘No.’” Forward, July 20, 2023.

Lipset, Seymour Martin and Earl Raab. Jews and the New American Scene. Harvard University Press, 1995.

McGinity, Keren R. Still Jewish: A History of Women and Intermarriage in America. New York University Press, 2009.

McGinity, Keren R. Marrying Out: Jewish Men, Intermarriage, and Fatherhood. Indiana University Press, 2014.

Sasson, Theodore, Janet Krasner Aronson, Fern Chertok, Charle Kadushin, and Leonard Saxe. “Millennial Children of Intermarriage: Religious Upbringing, Identification, and Behavior Among Children of Jewish and Non-Jewish Parents.” Contemporary Jewry 37, no. 1 (2017), 99-123.

Suberman, Stella. The Jew Store. Algonquin Books, 1998.

Survey on Reform Synagogue Interfaith Inclusion Policies and Practices. Center for Radically Inclusive Judaism, 2019. Available at: https://www.cfrij.com/surveys/survey-on-reform-synagogue-interfaith-inclusion-policies-and-practices/.

Thompson, Jennifer A. Jewish on their Own Terms: How Intermarried Couples are Changing American Judaism. Rutgers University Press, 2013.

---

1. ¹ Shaye J.D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (University of California Press, 1999), 3-4.

2. ² Todd Endelman, Leaving the Jewish Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History )Princeton University Press, 2015), 94.

3. ³ Endelman at 11, 51, 81, 177, 361-362; see also Stella Suberman, The Jew Store (Algonquin Books, 1998).

4. ⁴ See, e.g., Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, Jews and the New American Scene (Harvard University Press, 1995), 74; Steven M. Cohen, “Jewish identity research in the United States: Concepts and findings, in Demographic Shifts in the Jewish World: Forecasts and Implications,” Jewish Agency (2002): 17; Lila Corwin Berman, The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution (Princeton University Press, 2020), 10.

5. ⁵ Keren R. McGinity, Still Jewish: A History of Women and Intermarriage in America (New York University Press, 2009); Marrying Out: Jewish Men, Intermarriage, and Fatherhood (Indiana University Press, 2014); Jennifer A. Thompson, Jewish on their Own Terms: How Intermarried Couples are Changing American Judaism (Rutgers University Press, 2013).

6. ⁶ Theodore Sasson, Janet Krasner Aronson, Fern Chertok, Charle Kadushin, and Leonard Saxe, “Millennial Children of Intermarriage: Religious Upbringing, Identification, and Behavior Among Children of Jewish and Non-Jewish Parents,” Contemporary Jewry 37, no.1 ( 2017): 117; McGinity, Still Jewish, 210.

7. ⁷ See, e.g., Joanne Kaufman, “Are you a Jew? To serve on a synagogue board, increasingly the answer can be ‘No.’” Forward, July 20, 2023; Survey on Reform Synagogue Interfaith Inclusion Policies and Practices, Center for Radically Inclusive Judaism, 2019.

8. ⁸ See, e.g., Thompson (2013); McGinity (2009 and 2014).

9. ⁹ Christine Hayes, “Building Communities of Belonging: Jewish Identity, Conversion, Intermarriage, and Adjacency,” Kogod Research Center for Contemporary Jewish Thought at the Shalom Hartman Institute (2026), 23.

10. ¹⁰ Hayes, 10.

11. ¹¹ Hayes, 9.

12. ¹² Hayes, 9.

Shuly Rubin Schwartz

Adam Karov etzel Atzmo. People are related to themselves. Sanhedrin 9b.

This statement, meant to explain why it is prohibited to testify against oneself in court, captures for me the way I think about my career at JTS. Recounting the story of my professional journey is possible only by interweaving several interrelated aspects of my identity—female, Conservative Jew, historian, and institutional leader.

As a historian, looking back on the past—both personal and professional—has always felt natural. I believe I enriched my community’s understanding of JTS’s role in the world today by incorporating, in one way or another, the arc of history into everything that I said or wrote. Virtually every significant talk I gave began with sharing my conviction that one cannot know how to move forward without first looking backward to discern what one might learn from the experiences of the Jewish people in the past. Conscious of the shoulders I stand on, I frequently referred to my predecessors—how they met the challenges of their era and how that might inform the way we might meet the challenges of ours. With this as a starting point, I identified patterns and precedents, resisting quick judgment on current events despite the pressure in today’s social media landscape for instantaneous reactions or statements.

While this orientation as a historian facilitated my ability to navigate my professional career, most recently as chancellor, I also understood the extent to which my personal history and the many other identities I embrace impacted my career.

I was born into a family that valued Jewish learning, observance, culture, and tradition. A family steeped in a love of the Hebrew language and the State of Israel: my great-grandfather who was a passionate advocate for the revival of the Hebrew language, my grandfather who chose to study at JTS as he craved an intense Jewish education before preparing for a career in medicine, and then my parents who hoped to devote their lives to serving the Jewish people and gained the knowledge and training to do so, also at JTS.

I grew up as a preacher’s kid in a suburban community with a thriving synagogue that my father had served since his student days. Ordained by JTS in 1953, he and his cohort—and their wives—were among the many rabbinic couples who brought Judaism—and particularly Conservative Judaism—to Jews hungry for connection and meaning in postwar suburban America. These rabbis were what we would now call “entrepreneurs,” leading fledgling start-up synagogues with passion, dedication, and creativity, determined to engage this generation of Jews and build up a rich Jewish life. I had a front-row seat to this flourishing.

Attending an Orthodox Jewish day school until ninth grade, I gained a strong Judaic and Hebraic education. My horizons widened through more intensive exposure to western literature, science, history and ideas when I entered the local public high school. There, I also developed a close friendship with someone who had attended Catholic school; together, we learned from one another and expanded our insular perspectives.

To ensure the continuation of my Jewish learning, my father founded a branch of JTS’s Hebrew high school program, Prozdor, in his synagogue, so that I, and other Long Island teens, could continue our Jewish learning—one weekday evening per week at the Wantagh Jewish Center, coupled with Sunday mornings at JTS. These classes exposed me to a way of integrating my Jewish and secular education that felt thrilling. Through USY and Camp Ramah, I experienced a rich Jewish life beyond my home and developed nourishing friendships and leadership skills. By the time I left for college, I had been exposed to the richness and variety of Conservative Judaism—robust, integrated learning; prayer; observance; a commitment to making the world a more just place; and the joy and power of a nourishing network of like-minded individuals.

For my college years, I craved an academically rigorous, secular education in a place where I would also find a Jewish community engaged in the practice and study of Judaism. This led me to Barnard College, which, located blocks from JTS, would enable me to continue part-time study in its Teachers Institute, access kosher food through the Barnard meal plan, and be part of a large community of Jewishly-engaged students.1 Entranced by the study of history, I pursued further study in JTS’s graduate school. I began to imagine a career that would harness my learning to serve the Jewish people—though what form that would take felt inchoate.

During my years of graduate coursework, I was painfully aware of the frustration of gifted female classmates who amassed credits in the hope that JTS’s rabbinical school would soon open its doors to them. This experience later spurred me to consider how talented, educated Jewish women channeled their learning before they could even contemplate women’s ordination, let alone be ordained themselves. These gnawing questions led me, two decades later, to undertake the research that culminated in my book The Rabbi’s Wife.

By the 1980s, my husband, Rabbi Gershon Schwartz, was serving as a congregational rabbi, and I was struggling to find my niche as a rabbi’s wife and graduate student. Though I had observed my mother in the rebbetzin role and understood both its pitfalls and joys, second-wave feminism spotlighted how the role epitomized the derivative nature of female power, something that went against the grain of feminist goals. I tried to balance being a supportive spouse who took on some traditional roles such as hosting and tending to congregants’ needs while also utilizing my expertise to teach in the synagogue from time to time. Most of my waking hours were spent rearing four young children while also laboring to finish my dissertation.

Intellectually, it was a lonely stretch, as I found no like-minded peers in this suburban setting who shared my quest to combine parenting, community building, teaching, and dissertation writing. I made slow progress, eventually earning my PhD in Jewish history in 1987, the first woman at JTS to do so. After revising the dissertation and publishing it as a monograph, I began to despair of finding a fulfilling, full-time professional position that would allow me to further my craft as scholar and teacher.

It was during this period that my husband invited a JTS faculty member to serve as Scholar-in-Residence over Shabbat in our synagogue. A few weeks later our guest called, inviting me to return to JTS as a part-time assistant dean. Living too far from JTS and with our youngest still in pre-school, I regretfully declined the offer. After several months, I grew despondent, sure that another opportunity would never present itself. Thankfully, a year and a half later, it did. Fortuitously, my husband had just accepted a position at a synagogue forty minutes closer to JTS and our youngest would begin first grade. I accepted without hesitation.

So, in 1991, I began serving as the Assistant to the Dean of List College. A year later, I joined the faculty and in 1993 became dean of the college, a position I held for twenty-five years. During that time and later as dean of the Gershon Kekst Graduate School, and briefly as Provost, I grew enrollment, shaped curricula, initiated new programs, mentored hundreds of students, and worked with faculty and colleagues to further strengthen JTS’s academic core and student experience. At the same time, I also honed my teaching skills and scholarly interests in American Judaism/Jewry, Jewish women’s history, and gender studies. I shared my scholarship with others through articles, conferences, and scholar-in-residence weekends. All these experiences helped me contextualize, in real time, my perspective on the rapidly evolving Jewish landscape of the late twentieth and first quarter of the twenty-first centuries. At the same time, I observed firsthand the way that JTS, its student body and its faculty, and synagogue life had changed since my formative years. These encounters deepened my insights and enabled me to play a role in shaping the future of JTS and the Conservative Movement.

And all this occurred at a time when the Jewish feminist movement’s impact was at its height, and I benefited greatly from the changing landscape and greater cultural interest in women’s voices. I became a trailblazer in part because I was blessed to be in the right place at the right time in history. And I was well suited to appreciate this good fortune because, as a scholar and teacher, I could trace the path women had taken to arrive at this point.

JTS had long been a pioneer in educating women. In the first decade of the twentieth century, JTS admitted as a special student its first woman, Henrietta Szold, who later went on to establish Hadassah in 1912 and lead what became the largest voluntary women’s organization and largest Jewish membership organization in the United States.2 In 1909, JTS President Solomon Schechter then established the Teachers Institute, which accepted women as well as men, thus making it possible for women to obtain advanced Jewish learning and prepare for careers in Jewish education.3 Women’s League, founded in 1918 by Schechter’s wife Mathilde, created numerous opportunities over many decades for women to both deepen their Jewish knowledge and enhance Jewish life as volunteers.4 Camp Ramah, founded by JTS in 1947, provided additional learning and leadership opportunities for both sexes.5

But, by the 1970s, this gap between women’s knowledge and their opportunities for professional leadership had become untenable for many. Notably, it spurred a group of women who called themselves Ezrat Nashim to lobby the Rabbinical Assembly for full equality. In their words: “To educate women and deny them the opportunity to act from this knowledge is an affront to their intelligence, talents and integrity.” This soon led to a cascade of changes, as the Conservative Movement embraced egalitarianism in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and JTS opened its rabbinical school to women, ordaining its first woman, Amy Eilberg, in 1985.6

When my appointment as Chancellor was announced on June 1, 2020, I experienced an outpouring of support and excitement from all corners of the Jewish world, but especially from women. I came to understand that my appointment held symbolic importance that transcended me. That the eighth chancellor was a woman gave younger female Jewish leaders a sense of validation and possibility. Echoing the sentiments expressed when JTS began ordaining women rabbis, these women felt the gap between their capabilities and professional opportunities shrink with my appointment. They grew more confident that they too might someday attain positions of leadership that had felt out of reach to them. Similarly, parents of young girls expressed elation, knowing that their daughters would grow up with the expectation that women as well as men could serve in such an esteemed role.

These sentiments moved me deeply, but they also impressed upon me the responsibility that comes with being a “first,” something I had hardly thought much about before. Beyond the conventional qualifications that I brought to the role—degrees I had earned, books and articles I had written, and accomplishments as an administrator, teacher, speaker, and mentor—and beyond the specific initiatives I yet hoped to achieve, I understood that I had the opportunity to change hearts and minds simply as the first woman in this role. My professional experiences were also colored by personal loss. During my years as dean, I grieved the death of my parents in the 1990s, and my son and husband in the early 2000s. Returning to work and the classroom each time right after shiva, saying kaddish at JTS regularly, and speaking openly about the grief and devastation that I felt, I both benefited greatly from the warm embrace of the JTS community and—as I realized only later—unconsciously modeled ways of integrating loss into a hopeful and generative path forward. When I remarried several years later, my new husband, Eric Fishman, happily embraced the JTS community, as it did him.

All of these experiences—my personal history and the influence of JTS on it, my evolution as educator and historian—shaped my chancellorship, but this required a shift in how I communicated. As a historian, I generally relied on sources and footnotes to anchor my work. Except for the introduction to my second book on rabbis’ wives, and my contribution to Jeffrey Gurock’s book Conversations with Colleagues: On Becoming an American Jewish Historian, 7 I rarely wrote in the personal voice. When I spoke publicly, my authority—like that of any historian—stemmed primarily from my familiarity with the sources—written, oral, material—that informed my analysis and perspective.

As chancellor, I quickly realized the need to recalibrate my voice, for the JTS community was looking to me not only for historical perspective but also for institutional leadership. Students, faculty, alumni, Conservative Jews, North American Jews, Jewish women, Jewish institutional leaders, and American religious leaders hoped for inspiration, guidance, insight, role modeling, and a sense of direction. Harnessing my many identities proved to be essential to being able to meet these needs.

Reading my many talks, communications, and writings from the past six years, I can see the extent to which I embodied a manner that was consciously relational, nuanced, flexible; one that normalized the embrace of loss, vulnerability, empathy, and care. Many might characterize this as “female,” but I prefer to see it as the only way I—a female, Jewish historian and educator, and seasoned administrator—could lead.

As chancellor, I also had a unique perch from which to witness and experience the evolution of contemporary American Jewry, especially of Conservative Judaism. My initial encounters were virtual, since the first eighteen months of my chancellorship coincided with the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. American Jews could easily have focused solely on their and their loved ones’ health and employment, their children’s schooling, and the procurement of food and household necessities, relegating their Jewish lives to an afterthought. But, as Jews have done throughout history, many chose to adapt to the new reality and find new ways to engage Jewishly. And Jewish leaders met this taxing moment with creativity, empathy, and dedication. Connecting with our alumni who served as clergy, educators, and communal leaders; speaking to synagogue communities; participating in conferences devoted to aspects of the Jewish experience and embracing virtual learning for a full academic year at JTS, I witnessed extraordinary resilience, devotion, and commitment on the part of professionals in the field and among our JTS faculty, administrators, and students, all of whom nimbly adjusted their expectations and protocols to create new ways to meaningfully pray, study, offer pastoral care, celebrate happy milestones and foster community.

Then, when COVID restrictions lifted and I began visiting Conservative synagogues around the country, I again witnessed robust communities of devoted, educated, engaged Jews deeply proud of their thriving communities. Their delight was palpable as they articulated their choice of affiliating with a synagogue that embodied Conservative Judaism, both through its talented and devoted leadership and through its congregants. They affirmed their commitment to prayer, study, halakhah, and Israel. They also worked together to nurture caring communities and build bridges with others in our country and in other faith communities.

I found this same dedication each summer when visiting Camp Ramah, which operates under the educational auspices of JTS, its founding institution, and is the camping arm of the Conservative Movement. I returned energized by my encounters with teens and young staff who were passionately engaged in serious Jewish learning, observance, and community building. And, at JTS, I engaged with a growing number of talented students eager to make a difference in the Jewish future by preparing for careers of service.

All of this flew in the face of conventional wisdom and data, as well as scholarly analysis. The Conservative Movement had been in a period of retrenchment for well over a decade. United Synagogue Youth (USY), which had been a flourishing and meaningful outlet for intensive Jewish observance, learning and community for thousands of Conservative Jewish teens—including my own children and over one-third of List College students during the first half of my deanship—steeply declined in numbers. United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism (USCJ) closed its college-programming branch, Koach, in 2012. Two years later, the Solomon Schechter Day School Network separated from USCJ after declining enrollment and school closures. The 2020 Pew study found that only 8% of Jewish adults under 30 identified as Conservative Jews, a new low that followed years of decline. So it was not surprising that, without fail, wherever I spoke or taught, someone would pull me aside, their agitation visible, to ask me about the dying Conservative Movement. “What are we going to do?” they wanted to know, “because our synagogue/camp/school is thriving, but the Conservative Movement is dying.”8

After experiencing this more times than I can count, I grew to understand that while the Conservative Movement continues to face challenges, evidence of resurgence abounds. I’ve come to realize that the biggest challenge to the Conservative Movement today stems less from a flaw in Conservative Judaism’s approach, ideology, or leadership and more from a lack of confidence in the efficacy of the movement as a whole. Too often have I witnessed people’s inability to confidently embrace the Conservative Movement because they feel it doesn’t measure up either to the movement’s twentieth-century heyday or to the success of other streams of Judaism at present. Conservative Movement Jewish leaders, and future studies of the Conservative Movement, would benefit from revisiting old tropes with fresh eyes, naming the crisis of confidence and addressing it head-on.

Similarly, North American Jewry shared a growing concern that the pipeline to future clergy leadership had run dry. Emerging in the wake of the growing popularity of non-denominational, egalitarian minyanim and yeshivot, this trend was most acute among denominational seminaries that had historically produced most of the rabbis who served North American Jewry. For example, from 2002-2012, JTS ordained on average 23 rabbinical students per year; from 2013-2021, the average dropped to 14.

This led many prominent communal leaders and foundations to conclude that the movements had outlived their usefulness and ought to either merge or embrace a post-denominational identity.

My experience with devotees of particular streams of Judaism as well as what I learned through trusted seminary president colleagues at both denominational and non-denominational institutions, led me to the opposite conclusion. It reaffirmed my conviction that distinct differences in emphasis, tone, prioritization, and perspective were a boon to the Jewish future, for it offered more Jews more portals of entry to Judaism. Historians know that Judaism has never been monolithic and that it thrives in large measure precisely because of its varieties of expression. Collaboration, when appropriate—not mergers—is what’s needed in today’s world. It grows best from a soil of mutual respect cultivated by diverse groups that each bring unique strengths to the table.9

This conviction has indeed borne fruit. Thanks to foundation-funded tapping grants to encourage young people to consider clergy careers and other initiatives, young people again began to seek out rabbinic training, and many of them specifically wanted to become Conservative rabbis. To ensure that they would be fully prepared to enter the program, JTS introduced new initiatives, such as a low-residency mehinah program. In Fall 2026, JTS will welcome over 3 times the number of rabbinical students it enrolled 5 years ago.

My tenure as chancellor also coincided with escalating polarization in American life, a reorientation of American Jewish attitudes toward Israel, and a sharp rise in antisemitism. Reflecting on my first year as chancellor, in 2021, I noted to the board that “This has been a year of such turmoil, in our country and in Israel, in heightened sensitivities around race relations, gender norms, and politics. It has been a time of rising violence generally and of antisemitism specifically.” I knew that to address these divisive times, JTS had to lead “with head and heart and with empathy and humility.” I had not expected that this vision would be put to the test so quickly, but earlier that spring, 10 JTS rabbinical students added their names to a letter signed by almost 100 rabbinical students critical of Israel’s actions during its conflict with Hamas.10 The condemnation that JTS, and I personally, received was swift, harsh, and unrelenting. JTS was assumed to be harboring and sympathetic to anti-Zionists, and I was taken to task for not criticizing the students publicly and affirming JTS’s Zionist bona fides. Resisting this pressure, I chose to do nothing in public. Why? As I explained to the Board:

Frustrating as it can sometimes be, education is a slow, deliberative process and sadly this approach goes against the grain of the now-common cultural habit of quick judgment and public shaming. JTS is offering a different path, one that is nuanced, modest, and humane, and while it doesn’t make headlines, it is the most effective path in the long run, for, if education is to be life altering and lasting, if critique is to have a chance of being heard, none of this can be done with blunt instruments.11

And that is what we did, then and throughout my tenure. Listen, educate, discuss, disagree, but with both an underlying respect for one another and a love for Israel in all its complexity. By the time these students were ordained, virtually all had expressed gratitude to JTS leadership for modeling an approach that helped them both grow in wisdom and observe a model they would strive to adopt in their careers.

Challenges to this approach grew only more intense after October 7. As voices on the extremes garnered handwringing and media attention and as polarization pressured Jews into believing that they must express either unalloyed loyalty to Israel or reject Zionism outright, JTS steadfastly modeled something different. Many in the broader community appreciated the approach that we took. Participating in panels, missions, and structured dialogue on these issues, I experienced a growing desire among many to embrace complexity and nuance, to pair a rigorous critique of Israel’s policies and/or government with unwavering commitment to the State of Israel. Again, I found myself needing to foreground how to hold contradictory ideas and commitments with conviction and passion, resist the temptation to retreat into insularity, and foster allyship even during precarious times.

In this moment, prior encounters with interreligious engagement proved invaluable. I had been intrigued by and appreciative of the variety of religious expressions since high school; these sentiments were enhanced by my study of religion in college and graduate school. As a faculty member, I pushed the boundaries of interreligious understanding by co-teaching courses with Christian colleagues at our neighboring Union Theological Seminary. All of this cemented my commitment to religious pluralism and to interreligious dialogue.¹²

Thus, after October 7, while pressured by many to call out my presidential colleagues on Morningside Heights for failing to stem antisemitic activism on campus, I deliberately chose the opposite tack by inviting all New York City college presidents to JTS and reaching out to Christian and Muslim clergy to help them better understand what they were dealing with. I worked to find common ground and sow seeds of fruitful collaboration even on the most fraught issues. This approach has yielded dividends over the past few years, with deepened partnerships and new collaborations, coupled with greater respect and renewed appreciation. Thankfully, I was fortified in these efforts knowing that this bridge-building was intrinsic to the leadership of my predecessors.

Unlike my scholarly writings, my communications during this period lack the rigorous historical analysis that can only emerge over time. Instead, these communications will become the primary sources for nuanced perspectives during this troubled period that will, I hope, form the basis of a more complex understanding of this critical moment in our history.13

With this as a starting point, I identified patterns and precedents, resisting quick judgment on current events, despite the pressure in today’s social media landscape for instantaneous reactions or statements. I strove to meet the acute needs of my community by helping them make sense of what was going on around them, particularly in the aftermath of October 7.

My training as a historian also meant that I sometimes felt like an archeologist, bringing back to life central figures in American Jewry—and in JTS’s history especially—who were barely known by today’s students, as I charted JTS’s course for the future. For example, through our strategic planning process, we were keenly aware of the need for JTS to offer a strong, steady moral voice anchored in our tradition that would enable people to find their bearings in this fraught time.

I knew that in doing so, we would be reimagining the conviction of Chancellor Louis Finkelstein, who effected this goal in the postwar period through his Institute for Religious and Social Studies; Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion; annual High Holiday messages in the New York Times; and popular radio and then television series, The Eternal Light.14

JTS’s twenty-first-century iteration of this vision involves convening politicians, journalists, public intellectuals, academics, and institutional leaders to discuss contemporary challenges in a non-dogmatic but thoughtful, intellectually compelling way. Dialogue across difference was our goal—dialogue borne of genuine respect for the views of others, the recognition of other truths as well as our own, and a deep conviction that we must grapple with the insights, values, and imperatives of our tradition on the burning issues of the day and their implications for the present. JTS further amplifies these convenings through the ongoing work of our current centers—the Hendel Center for Ethics and Justice and the Millstein Center for Interreligious Dialogue.

Similarly, when JTS launched the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, I felt that I was very much reinvigorating the vision of Mordecai M. Kaplan, the founding dean of JTS’s undergraduate school, the Teachers Institute, who taught at JTS for many decades and who believed in an expansive Judaism that included not only religion but also language, literature, art, music, dance, and more.

Surely, leading an institution as a historian only took me so far. Yet, I believe that this orientation, coupled with a deep commitment to meeting the needs of students, faculty, staff, trustees, supporters, and alumni—and a clear vision for JTS’s future—helped propel the institution forward in impactful ways that were authentic to its singular role in the landscape of American Jewry.

Adam Karov etzel Atzmo. People are related to themselves.

I hope I brought the best of my training, experience, commitments, vision, and relationships to my work at JTS. May my successor take this beloved institution to even greater heights in the decades to come.

Shuly Rubin Schwartz, PhD is Chancellor Emerita and Irving Lehrman Research Professor of American Jewish History at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

---

1. ¹ The Teachers Institute was established in 1909. The Seminary College of Jewish Studies which began in the 1920s was incorporated into the Teachers Institute in 1931. A dual-degree program between the Teachers Institute and Columbia University’s School of General Studies was established in 1953. In 1979, a dual-degree program was established with Barnard College. This undergraduate division was renamed the Albert A. List College of Jewish Studies in 1986. For a full institutional history, see Tradition Renewed: A History of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Jack Wertheimer, ed. (Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1997).

2. ² Hadassah: The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, https://www.hadassah.org/.; Shulamit Reinharz, “Szold, Henrietta,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed., Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, eds. (Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), 19:409-411. Gale eBooks, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX2587519475/GVRL?u=nysl_me_jethsoa&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=04d8fa1f.

3. ³ Wertheimer, Tradition Renewed: A History of the Jewish Theological Seminary, 1:567.

4. ⁴ “History,” Women’s League for Conservative Judaism—Jewish Women’s Group, January 9, 2014, https://www.wlcj.org/about/about-womens-league/history/.

5. ⁵ “Who We Are,” Camp Ramah, https://www.campramah.org/mission.

6. ⁶ “Jewish Women Call for Change,” Jewish Women’s Archive, https://jwa.org/teach/livingthelegacy/documentstudies/jewish-women-call-for-change; and Sasha Kranson-Forrest, “Egalitarianism in Jewish Spaces Is More than Inclusion,” Jewish Women’s Archive, https://jwa.org/blog/risingvoices/egalitarianism-jewish-spaces-more-inclusion.

7. ⁷ “From Kremenets to New York: My Personal Journey as a Historian,” in Conversations with Colleagues; On Becoming an American Jewish Historian, Jeffrey S. Gurock, ed. (Academic Studies Press, 2018).

8. ⁸ Naomi Zeveloff, “Will Schechter Schools Leave Conservatives?” Forward, July 9, 2012; Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, February 12, 2014; Sam Cohen, “College Dropouts,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, July 3, 2012, https://www.jta.org/2012/07/03/ny/college-dropouts; Daniel Gordis, “Conservative Judaism: A Requiem,” Jewish Review of Books, Winter 2014, https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/566/requiem-for-a-movement/ and “Jewish Americans in 2020” Pew Study, May 11, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/jewish-americans-in-2020/.

9. ⁹ Roberta Rosenthal Kwall, “The 2 Options Left for Conservative Judaism,” Forward, December 22, 2015; Forward Staff, “We asked 30 rabbis: Is Judaism heading toward a post-denominational future?” Forward, May 19, 2020.

10. ¹⁰ “Rabbinical and Cantorial Students Appeal to the Jewish Community,” https://docs.google.com/document/d/17iNzy0uThn6YECqiBx9t_R-WAHF7m2Kkxxiq8v0IfPA/edit?usp=embed_facebook.

11. ¹¹ Shuly Rubin Schwartz, “Board Report, 6-21, and Reflections and Vision for 2022,” June 16, 2021, personal files of author.

12. ¹² Initially, I co-taught Jewish and Christian Women in the American Historical Experience: A Comparative Perspective for several years with the late Rosemary Keller, professor of church history, while also serving, at her request, as the Judaism section editor of the Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America, Rosemary Skinner Keller and Rosemary Radford Reuther, eds. (2006). I also served on the advisory board of the Westminster Dictionary of Women in American Religious History, Susan Hill Lindley, ed. (2008). I later co-taught with Professor Mary C. Boys both Women Transforming Religion & Society and Studies in Jewish-Christian Relations. We also co-authored “Reorienting ‘Settled Identities’: A Course on Jewish-Christian Relations,” in Studies in Jewish-Christian Relations 17 no. 1 (2022): 1-17; and “Passover & Easter,” in the Encyclopedia of Jewish-Christian Relations Online, Walter Homolka, Rainer Kampling, Amy-Jill Levine, Christoph Markschies, Peter Schäfer and Martin Thurner, eds. (2020).

13. ¹³ Andrew Lapin, “Engagement in campus Jewish life spiked after Oct. 7 but has since dropped down somewhat, Tufts study finds,” Forward, September 4, 2024, https://forward.com/news/650442/engagement-in-campus-jewish-life-spiked-after-oct-7-but-has-since-dropped-down-somewhat-tufts-study-finds/. For my writings, see https://www.jtsa.edu/chancellor-schwartz-leadership-scholarship/.

14. ¹⁴ The Institute for Religious and Social Studies was founded in 1945; the Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion in 1939. The High Holiday messages were published in the New York Times beginning in the 1940s, and The Eternal Light radio program aired from 1944–1989 and was adapted for television in the 1950s. See Wertheimer, Tradition Renewed: A History of the Jewish Theological Seminary, 1:188–89, 191–94, 588.

Adam S. Ferziger

It was a cold Sabbath morning in 1972 and I was eight years old. Walking with my dad to our Modern Orthodox congregation from our home in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, we passed a distinguished looking man wearing a hat and long coat. He too appeared on his way to shul, but was going in the opposite direction. My dad then proceeded to share that this was a well-known Jewish leader and scholar by the name of Gerson Cohen, who was the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in Manhattan.¹

Duly impressed, and rambunctiously curious, I asked: “If he is such an important religious figure, why is he carrying his tallit (prayer shawl) to synagogue on Saturday?” I had been taught that according to Jewish law it is forbidden for a Jew to transport an object from a private to public space on the Sabbath, that is, unless an eruv, or symbolic border, is erected. My father explained that Cohen was a leader in the Conservative Jewish movement, and that this stream of Judaism was more lenient in regard to the laws of carrying on the Sabbath.²

To the best of my recall, this was my first introduction to the commonalities and distinctions between Orthodox and Conservative Judaisms. I may have heard these terms or titles previously, yet that day I learned that both denominations professed principled allegiance to observance of Jewish law but departed from one another through their interpretations in ways that sometimes manifest in visibly different behaviors. Perhaps intuitively I realized that regardless of the relative severity of a particular regulation, the public face of certain acts influenced their roles as distinguishing elements between different Jewish subgroups.

***

In the conventional historiography of American Judaism, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were characterized by “institutional fluidity.” As historian Jeffrey Gurock has described, many synagogues and individuals did not see themselves as strictly Orthodox or Conservative in the contemporary sense; rather, they were traditionalists navigating a spectrum of acculturation. The “Schechter Era” at the Jewish Theological Seminary (beginning in 1902) initially aimed to create a “United Synagogue” that would encompass all traditional elements. However, as the seminary increasingly embraced historical-critical methods of study and sanctioned certain innovations, the ideological distance from the stricter traditionalists grew.³

A primary catalyst for this friction, as historian Jonathan Sarna has asserted, was the gradual adoption of mixed gender seating (the removal of the mehitzah divider). While initially viewed by some as a pragmatic concession to American social norms to keep families together, it eventually evolved into a definitive theological boundary. The family pew became a physical indicator of the shift toward Conservatism, alienating the more traditionalist, immigrant-connected Jews who viewed the separation of genders during prayer as an inviolable halakhic requirement.⁴

As the practice of mixed gender seating spread, the clash over the mehitzah became a legal and social battleground that forced congregations to choose a side. In several high-profile court confrontations, such as the Mt. Clemens case in Michigan, the presence or absence of a barrier became the primary evidence used to determine if a synagogue was legally Orthodox or had moved into the Conservative camp. The United Synagogue of America eventually accepted mixed seating as a hallmark of its movement, while the Orthodox Union (OU) and the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA) moved to make the mehitzah a mandatory requirement for membership.⁵ This structural and physical change in the sanctuary helped accelerate the end of institutional fluidity, making it increasingly difficult for a congregation to remain ambiguous about its denominational affiliation.⁶

A second boundary emerged from a monumental religio-legal decision. The 1950 “Responsum on the Sabbath,” issued by the Conservative Movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, formally permitted driving to the synagogue on Shabbat. While congregants may have understood this change primarily as a pragmatic concession to suburbanization, for the Orthodox rabbinate, the codified shift—from tacit recognition that most American Jews were not personally punctilious in their observance—to formal permission represented a fundamental break from the traditional halakhic process.⁷

Based on these developments, scholars have long identified the 1950s as the watershed period when the institutional fluidity of the immigrant era finally collapsed into rigid sectarianism. By this reading, the post-war years functioned as a formal “divorce” between Orthodoxy and Conservatism, finalized by these two non-negotiable boundary markers. To the historian focusing on elite discourse and organizational policy, these developments meant that by the 1960s, the two movements had retreated into mutually exclusive camps with burned bridges and distinct identities.⁸

The view from the street, however —specifically from the leafy, intellectually vibrant blocks of Riverdale in the 1970s and 80s—suggests a far more nuanced and liminal reality.⁹ While the national movements were engaged in polemical battles, the lived experience of a Modern Orthodox youth in that section of the Bronx revealed a landscape of porous borders. In Riverdale, the absolute separation described in academic literature was often subverted by the presence of a scholarly aristocracy that defied easy categorization. It was a neighborhood where standard Orthodox laypeople studied Talmud under the guidance of JTS professors, and where the children of Conservative rabbis and Orthodox professionals met in classrooms, social events, and as basketball teammates.

This brief memoir challenges the clean lines of historical consensus. It explores the tension between the “cataclysmic” denominational differences cited by rabbis and scholars and the vast commonalities experienced by families.¹⁰ Through a series of personal bookends—encounters that began with youthful judgment and matured into mutual respect—I reflect on a community that, perhaps uniquely, remained a laboratory for Jewish solidarity long after the historians declared the experiment over. Alternatively, numerous parallel communities existed that were characterized by a similar ambience of denominational fluidity. In either case, the very existence of such an exceptional local model raises questions as to what enabled such a dynamic to prevail long after the boundaries had seemingly been concretized.

***

Some eight years after discovering that there were learned and observant Jews who carried their tallit to synagogue on the Sabbath, at the beginning of my junior year of high school, my exposure to the intricacies and distinctive characteristics of Conservative Judaism expanded measurably. A college-age neighbor, who had attended a well-known yeshiva in Israel and was a fellow member of the Orthodox Riverdale Jewish Center, asked me if I was interested in serving as a Sabbath Torah reader at the Conservative Adath Israel synagogue (now known as CSAIR). He explained that the congregation was very respectful of personal Orthodox standards: I would not be required to chant into a microphone (forbidden on the Sabbath, according to most Orthodox authorities); at that time women did not get called up to the Torah on a regular basis; and I could pray in an isolated area of the sanctuary without mixed-gender seating. Since my bar mitzvah, my father had encouraged me to read the Torah publicly and this sounded like a good opportunity. At $35 per Shabbat, it would also be a nice income in return for doing a mitzvah.

When I shared the offer with my parents, they too were in favor, although my dad preferred that I pray in an earlier Orthodox service each Saturday morning, and then go to the Conservative house of prayer to perform my Torah recitation.¹¹ I must admit that during the two years when I served as Torah reader, I didn’t fully listen to my dad. More often than not, I would wake up late after practicing the Bible portion deep into the night and then go straight to CSAIR. I have pondered from time to time whether my academic interest in the origins and evolutions of modern Jewish religious movements emerged from the hours I spent sitting alone in the pews, comparing the prayer book of the Conservative Movement with the one that I had grown up with in Orthodox settings.

I had my official tryout on the Sabbath of the intermediate days/Hol ha-Moed of Sukkot. I performed the task relatively well, definitely not perfectly, but competently enough that they were willing to take me for the job on a regular basis. Uncannily, as I left the bimah (rostrum) in the front of the sanctuary, a man called me over, shook my hand, and congratulated me on my reading. Then, his face turned stern. He asked me if I was aware of a particular grammatical issue that would impact on the Hebrew pronunciation of specific words. It was clear to me that for this man, fulfillment of the obligation to read the Torah publicly would be impaired if this grammatical nuance was not properly addressed. I pleaded ignorance and he sent me to study this topic thoroughly for the future so that I would achieve the level of proficiency that was expected in this synagogue. As I walked away from him, I realized that the man was Professor Gerson Cohen, the chancellor of JTS, and the same individual whom I had passed eight years earlier carrying his tallit bag to shul.

So here we are at the bookends of the initial exposure of an Orthodox young man to Conservative Judaism. As a child, I had called this man out for lack of adherence in his observance of the law; now the same man called out my teenage iteration eight years later for his relative ignorance in performance of another religious requirement.

These bookends manifest a certain liminality that characterized my experience as a Modern Orthodox young man in Riverdale, New York. On the one hand, it was clear to me that the religious milieu and ideology with which my family identified was distinctive from the Conservative institutions and their core constituencies. Some of these were even considered to be deviant and maybe even destructive by people I respected. At the same time, I saw around me so many examples of devoted Conservative Jews, whose behavior, values, ideals, and perceptions of Judaism were very close to the ones that I had been taught. Interestingly, I never had any doubt that I was an Orthodox Jew, but I did have difficulty with the polemical ambience of the relationship to other denominations as it was presented to me when I got a little older.

To offer some additional examples of my contact with Conservative Judaism and Jews while growing up in Riverdale: my father, who was not blessed with the opportunity to learn Talmud extensively at a high level as a child and young adult, was eager to engage with this central repository of Jewish law and lore. To this end, he participated in a very active study group that met every Saturday for over thirty-five years and served as my parents’ core social group throughout their lives in Riverdale. Each Sabbath afternoon, the men arrived at the home of one of the group members and explored a Talmudic folio for an hour or so before they took in a light “third” meal, sandwiched by afternoon and evening collective prayers. The members of the shiur (class/lecture), as they referred to their weekly gatherings, were all Sabbath observers and some of them might have even sent their kids to more traditionalist-style non-coeducational day schools. Yet the learning circle was led by a respected professor from JTS, Rabbi Dr. Dov Zlotnick, a student of Professor Saul Lieberman, arguably the greatest academic Talmud scholar of the twentieth century.¹² Both Lieberman and his protégé were strictly observant Jews, who nonetheless remained affiliated with JTS, a Conservative institution, where they trained generations of rabbinical students throughout most of their respective careers.¹³ Indeed, there were quite a few professors and rabbis who were active in the Conservative Movement and in the seminary who were regular members of the Talmud group over the years. The more prominent figures that I can recall were: Rabbi Joseph Brodie, vice president emeritus of JTS,¹⁴ and Rabbi Gordon Tucker, who was subsequently dean of the JTS rabbinical school as well as rabbi of a large Westchester, New York Conservative congregation.¹⁵ No one questioned their religious commitments. They were full-fledged members of this ostensibly Orthodox group, even as they dedicated their lives to advancing the goals of the Conservative Movement.¹⁶

In terms of my own schooling, I attended two Modern Orthodox day schools: the SAR Academy in Riverdale and later the Ramaz Upper School in Manhattan. In both cases I had numerous classmates who were children of Conservative rabbis, whose families affiliated with Conservative synagogues, and who spent their summers at the Conservative Camp Ramah.¹⁷ In fact, one of my best friends at SAR came from a traditional but not strictly-observant home and celebrated his bar mitzvah at CSAIR. His uncle was a well-known Conservative congregational rabbi. I was also proud to share the basketball court with the son of the chancellor of JTS after Cohen’s retirement (Professor Ismar Schorsch), who was co-captain of the SAR team during my first year on the squad in seventh grade.¹⁸ While I knew there were differences between Orthodoxy and Conservatism, I did not look down upon my classmates and I certainly never thought that their Judaism was inauthentic or lacking meaning.

On a family level, my parents too had grown up in Orthodox homes in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Borough Park and Bensonhurst, but neither of them had attended Jewish secondary schools. Like most of their second-generation Jewish neighbors, they went to local public high schools. When it came to my older siblings, despite available options, my parents also did not see a direct correlation between school choices and cultivating their personal Orthodox identities. At the same time, it was critical to them that their children continue their Jewish educations past bar mitzvah age and throughout their adolescent years. Due to this unequivocal dedication, they spent a considerable portion of their income on private tutoring for my two older brothers and sister. At a certain point, however, they realized that structure was important and that having a social content as part of Jewish learning would make it more interesting and attractive. This was especially so when these studies were in addition to my siblings’ rigorous prep school demands. After exploring a number of options, they concluded that the best institution to achieve these goals was the Prozdor program at JTS.¹⁹ The result was that my brothers and sister, along with an assortment of Riverdale kids from Orthodox and non-Orthodox affiliated homes, would carpool to JTS every Sunday morning and once during the week for intensive Jewish studies lessons. In the process, they developed friendships with other kids who came from families that chose this path. As a matter of fact, one of my siblings’ closest friendships emerged from their studies at JTS. Two of my brothers also had their first experiences in the land of Israel as part of the conservative USY youth movement’s “Pilgrimage” teen summer programs.

To be perfectly honest, I did not find the secular high school/supplementary Jewish studies approach attractive and worked hard to convince my parents to send me to Ramaz, a Jewish high school which combined rigorous general and Jewish studies, and most importantly enabled me to play on the varsity basketball team without conflicts related to games that were scheduled on the Sabbath. Suffice it to say, once again, in high school as well I had numerous classmates whose families were connected to JTS and the Conservative Movement. We were aware that most kids were Orthodox affiliated, but the denominational distinctions were really not a major divide.

After high school, when I spent two years studying Talmud in Israel-based yeshivot, and later when I attended Yeshiva University, I had far less direct connections with Conservative kids. Moreover, for the first time I was exposed to some Orthodox authorities who described the Conservative Movement pejoratively as “out of the [Jewish] ballpark” and refused to set foot in the edifice of a Conservative synagogue under any condition.²⁰ While I learned a great deal of Talmud and Jewish law from some of these figures and drew inspiration from other aspects of their deep religious commitments, I was put off by the polemics and antagonism that were highlighted on many occasions.²¹

Was my porous upbringing an anomaly or at best a particularly Riverdale phenomenon? To be sure, the geographic proximity of Riverdale to JTS—fifteen to twenty minutes by car along with direct subway service—played a crucial role. Many of the Conservative families I met exemplified the JTS elite who were richly educated in traditional Jewish literature and committed to a Conservative approach to Jewish observance. Then again, Riverdale was even closer to Yeshiva University, the educational centerpiece and ideological breeding ground of American Modern Orthodoxy, and within a few years became home to the New York branch of the Lithuanian Haredi Telshe Yeshiva.²² Riverdale’s denominational liminality may have also been facilitated by three dynamic liberal voices within the Orthodox rabbinate: Rabbi Jack Sable, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg and Rabbi Avi Weiss, each of whom led local Modern Orthodox synagogues at formative periods in the community’s development, and themselves highlighted Jewish solidarity over denominational exclusivism.²³ As such, there is likely some truth to a “Riverdale Exceptionalism” understanding. At the same time, there exist communities in Manhattan, White Plains, Boston, Los Angeles, and certainly in numerous Midwest cities, that seemed to feature their own versions of porous boundaries between Orthodoxy and Conservatism.

The “Riverdale Exceptionalism” described in this memoir provides an informative counter-narrative to the standard historiography of American Jewish denominationalism. Beyond the local logistic and unique personality elements that facilitated late twentieth-century Riverdale’s intradenominational ambience, there are sociological factors related to the broader evolution of American Jewish communal life that bear consideration.

In parallel to the ideological and religio-legal divides, Jeffrey Gurock has referred to the period from 1900 until 1960 as “Twentieth-Century American Orthodoxy’s Era of Non-Observance,” during which the majority of Jews who affiliated with Orthodox institutions were not necessarily punctilious in their personal religious behavior.²⁴ In point of fact, most of the founding members of the Riverdale Jewish Center, established in 1954, would have fit smoothly into that category.²⁵ By the mid-1960s, a more observant contingent began to move into the neighborhood and rapidly take the reins of leadership. That said, the founders remained involved, some through their base in the men’s club and the sisterhood. At least during my childhood, the lay leadership of the synagogue continued to reflect the heterogeneity of its membership.

An extraordinary personal memory illustrates this makeup. At the Sunday evening party that my parents held for my bar mitzvah in 1977, the former president of the synagogue, who was also my Little League softball coach, approached me. He said, “Son, I prepared a special gift for you. Yesterday, I slipped a small tape recorder into my tallit bag and recorded your Torah reading. Here is the cassette.” I was stunned, touched, and slightly bewildered to discover that my multiple mistakes were now on record for posterity. Luckily, no good soul performed a similar act of kindness during my subsequent tenure as Torah reader at CSAIR.

In retrospect, this story testifies to the individual diversity that continued to exist in Riverdale Orthodox spaces long after the denominational divide had seemingly become permanent. To be sure, there are still numerous Orthodox synagogues throughout North America attended by Jews who did not abide by the core demands of Jewish law. Notwithstanding, their representation has declined dramatically and it is certainly less likely that they would be chosen as president of the synagogue. The porous boundaries that I experienced reflected the gap between the split of the movements and the ongoing religious lifestyle overlap of their synagogue memberships. For multiple Riverdale Jews of the 1970s and early 1980s in both Orthodox and Conservative congregations, they could still have easily found themselves in the alternative settings.

Since the late 1980s, not only have the organizational lines become far more hermetic, but the religious lifestyles and outlooks of their core populations have less in common. Some will attribute this to the transition to full gender equality within Conservative Judaism, reflected most prominently by Cohen’s ordination of the movement’s first woman rabbi in 1985, and the Orthodox backlash that ensued.²⁶ Others may focus on the rising rates of exogamy among products of the Conservative Movement from about the same time period.²⁷ Still others may point to the triumphalism that characterized Orthodoxy at this period. As they celebrated having upended mid-century predictions of their demise and emerged as a vibrant, self-sufficient American movement, punctuated by strong rabbinical leadership and Jewishly-educated and religiously allegiant constituency, their tent grew smaller.²⁸

What is clear is that lived religion often operates independently of ideological positionality. While scholars emphasize the formal “divorce” of the 1950s triggered by non-negotiable legal boundaries like mixed seating and driving on Shabbat, I suggest that the porousness of the Riverdale community during the 1970s and early 1980s was enabled by a shared commitment by its religious elites to a life of Jewish observance. Indeed, this was still paralleled, to a great degree, by a common perception by the broader memberships of the Orthodox and Conservative congregations that, regardless of personal behavior, observance of Jewish law was a religious ideal. But especially among the elites, the bridge between seemingly separate worlds was built upon a mutual dedication to the rhythms of Jewish law and practice, even when interpretations diverged dramatically. In Riverdale, the Conservative laypeople and rabbis did not view their practices as a departure from tradition, but as a principled expression of it.

The existence of such a community highlights that for these individuals, the “rhythm” of Judaism in the home and in the public square remained remarkably similar to their Orthodox counterparts. Figures like Gerson Cohen or the professors in the Shabbat afternoon Talmud group exemplified a Conservative constituency who were richly educated in traditional literature and committed to a rooted Jewish lifestyle. For these families, the vast commonalities of a Sabbath-observant life—keeping kosher, valuing intensive Jewish education, and engaging in high-level text study—outweighed the polemical divides that occupied the rhetoric of national movements. Having been nurtured in an Orthodox congregation and then spending two formative years reciting the Torah portion in a Conservative one, the underlying religious language remained close enough to enable me to navigate between them relatively seamlessly.

This experience offers a vital nuance to classic scholarship that emphasizes the decline of halakhic allegiance within the wider Conservative Movement.²⁹ While the national trend may have moved toward a less observant laity, the local reality in Riverdale was defined by a constituency that saw living an observant life—according to their specific interpretations—as fundamental to their identity. The porous borders were maintained because both groups recognized in each other a fundamental commitment regarding Jewish life, a shared common religious language. Ultimately, lived religion presents a far more complex picture than ideological positionality alone; it suggests that even after formal institutional boundaries have been seemingly concretized, a shared core engagement with religious principles and practice can sustain a sense of solidarity and mutuality.

***

Around the year 2015, a new prayer framework was organized in Riverdale that runs under the auspices of CSAIR. The Kivinu Minyan meets once a month on Saturday morning and is described in congregational literature as “Full traditional liturgy, spirited singing, and minimal interruptions aimed at creating an intense focus on the davening, followed by learning.”³⁰ The driving force and unofficial rabbi of the framework is Rabbi Ethan Tucker. Tucker spent significant chunks of his childhood in Riverdale in both the Orthodox and Conservative communities and was graduated from Ramaz Upper School. His kids attended SAR. Today he is the co-president and rosh yeshiva (educational head) of Yeshivat Hadar,³¹ a fully egalitarian, tradition-oriented institution for higher Torah study and rabbinical training, based on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, with growing representation in Israel as well.³² Tucker received his BA from Harvard, Orthodox ordination in Israel, as well as a PhD in Talmud from JTS. He is considered a highly influential halakhic authority within the emergent tradition-oriented post-denominational sector of American Judaism.³³ Like his partners in founding and shepherding Hadar, he has a strong Conservative pedigree. His father is Rabbi Gordon Tucker, the former dean of the JTS rabbinical school and a prominent congregational rabbi as well. Today, the father is Vice Chancellor for Religious Life and Engagement at JTS. All the same, the son and his cohorts chose to create a post-denominational institution that in many ways reflects the more law-centric spirit that once prevailed in the elite circles of Conservative Judaism during my youth.

Kivinu attracts participants from across the Riverdale denominational spectrum, including numerous members of Orthodox congregations who identify with its egalitarian ethos and its prayer/study combination. Like his father, who once sat next to my father at the Sabbath Talmud shiur taught by Professor Dov Zlotnick of JTS, the younger Tucker is a partner in writing a new chapter in the liminal denominational history of the Riverdale Jewish community. It is too early to tell whether this is an isolated Riverdale phenomenon, or indicative of a broader renaissance of a less rigidly divided spectrum of American Jewish congregational life.³⁴

Adam S. Ferziger, PhD is Professor in the Israel & Golda Koschitzky Dept. of Jewish History & Contemporary Jewry and Rabbi S.R. Hirsch Chair for Research of the Torah with Derekh Erez Movement at Bar-Ilan University. His book, Beyond Sectarianism: The Realignment of American Orthodox Judaism (Wayne State University Press, 2015), received a National Jewish Book Award. His most recent monograph, Agents of Change: American Jews and the Transformation of Israeli Judaism (New York University Press, 2025), was chosen by the Association for Israel Studies (AIS) as co-winner of the Shapiro Prize for Best Book in Israel Studies.

---

1. ^{1 *} Thank you to my mother, Sandra Ferziger Gottlieb, to my wife Dr. Naomi Ferziger, and to my siblings, Dr. Reuven Ferziger, Jonathan Ferziger, Minna Ferziger Felig, and Ari Ferziger, along with Dr. David Bernstein, Rabbi Dr. Seth Farber, and Bennett Katz for their valuable comments on an earlier draft.

   ¹ On Cohen, see Raymond P. Scheindlin, “Gerson D. Cohen (1924-1991),” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research (1992): 15-18. I learned subsequently that his mother, known as “Morah Cohen,” had been my mother’s Hebrew and Jewish studies teacher at the Shulamith School for Girls in Borough Park, Brooklyn.

2. ² The Conservative Movement never removed the prohibition of carrying from domain to domain, but it introduced the factor of performance of a mitzvah as a source for leniency. The issue of eruv is treated briefly in a recent responsum: see David J. Fine and Barry J. Leff, “Electric Cars on Shabbat: A Renewed Responsum on the Sabbath,” Committee of Jewish Law and Standards, OH 305: 18b (2023), https://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/sites/default/files/2023-07/fine_leff_shabbat-final.pdf.

3. ³ Jeffrey S. Gurock, Orthodox Jews in America (Indiana University Press, 2009), 109-147.

4. ⁴ Jonathan Sarna, “The Debate Over Mixed Seating In The American Synagogue,” The American Synagogue: A Sanctuary Transformed (Cambridge University Press, 1987), 363-394.

5. ⁵ “Traditional” mixed-seating synagogues that remained Orthodox-affiliated remained a more common feature in some Midwest communities. See, for example, Dan Elazar, “The Organized Jewish Community of Greater Chicago,” The Daniel Elazar On-Line Library, https://dje.jcpa.org/articles2/chicago.htm.

6. ⁶ Elazar.

7. ⁷ On both legal and cultural aspects of the driving responsum, see Jenna Weissman Joselit, “In the Driver’s Seat: Rabbinic Authority in Postwar America,” Jewish Religious Leadership: Image and Reality 2, Jack Wertheimer, ed. (JTS, 2014), 659-70.

8. ⁸ Jack Wertheimer, A People Divided (Brandeis University Press, 1994), 95-184.

9. ⁹ On the evolution of Riverdale’s Jewish life, see Neil MacFarquhar, “At the New Year, a New Day for Riverdale; A Bronx Neighborhood Is Now a Lively Center for Orthodox Jews,” The New York Times (Oct. 1, 1997), https://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/01/nyregion/new-year-new-day-for-riverdale-bronx-neighborhood-now-lively-center-for-orthodox.html. For a contemporary demographic profile, see: https://communitystudy.ujafedny.org/explore-data/riverdale-kingsbridge.

10. ¹⁰ Reuven P. Bulka, The Coming Cataclysm: The Orthodox-Reform Rift and the Future of the Jewish People (Mosaic Press, 1984).

11. ¹¹ At the time, I discovered that at least regarding the Amidah prayer, they were remarkably similar, with the notable exceptions of key phrases referring to the sacrificial rite in past tense rather than focusing on its renewal and the terminology employed to describe Gentiles.

12. ¹² Zvi Leshem, “HaRav Professor Dov Zlotnick z”l,” (2014), https://www.academia.edu/9671839/Rav_Professor_Dov_Zlotnick_z_l.

13. ¹³ Marc B. Shapiro, Saul Lieberman and the Orthodox (University of Scranton Press, 2006).

14. ¹⁴ https://www.jtsa.edu/team/joseph-brodie/.

15. ¹⁵ https://www.jtsa.edu/team/gordon-tucker/.

16. ¹⁶ Additional distinguished JTS-affiliated figures who enriched the religious landscape of my Riverdale childhood included Prof. Haim Dimitrovsky and Prof. Shamma Friedman. For a personal memoir related to the former’s Riverdale Shabbat routines, see Daniel Boyarin, “Walking and Learning on Shabbos with Prof. Haim Zalman Dimitrovsky,” Tablet (Sept. 13, 2021), https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/walking-and-learning-on-shabbos. For Friedman’s retrospections on his early JTS days, see Yitz Landes, “An Interview with Shamma Friedman,” The Talmud Blog (May 6, 2014), https://thetalmud.blog/2014/05/06/an-interview-with-shamma-friedman/.

17. ¹⁷ The role of Camp Ramah in nurturing a committed younger generation of Conservative Jews cannot be overestimated. See Steven M. Cohen, The Alumni of Ramah Camps: A Long-Term Portrait of Jewish Engagement, Berman Archives, Stanford University (2017), https://static1.squarespace.com/static/582c7e401b631bf8805b7364/t/59cc0dfbf6576ea26050c3d6/1506545148400/ramah_alumni_survey_full_report_2017.pdf.

18. ¹⁸ Our coach was a doctoral candidate at Columbia and former Ramaz basketball standout by the name of Jeffrey S. Gurock.

19. ¹⁹ https://www.jtsa.edu/prozdor/.

20. ²⁰ Other profound Orthodox Torah scholars with whom I studied demonstrated far greater appreciation for non-Orthodox Jews, see Adam S. Ferziger, Agents of Change: American Jews and the Transformation of Israeli Judaism (NYU Press, 2025), 107-131.

21. ²¹ Perhaps this contributed to subsequent efforts to locate my own deeply held beliefs and committed Orthodox observance in more organically porous landscapes of Israeli Judaism.

22. ²² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeshiva_of_Telshe_Alumni.

23. ²³ On Sable and the founding of the RJC, see, “RIVERDALE RABBI GETS SYNAGOGUE; At 30 He Enlists Orthodox Congregation to Build It in Time for Holy Days,” New York Times (Sept. 22, 1957), 40. On Greenberg, see Adam S. Ferziger, Miri Freud-Kandel and Steven Bayme, Yitz Greenberg and American Modern Orthodox Judaism: The Road Not Taken (Academic Studies Press, 2019). On Weiss, see Maya Bernstein, “An Open Letter to Rabbi Avi Weiss,” EJewishPhilanthropy (Jan. 28, 2014), https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/an-open-letter-to-rabbi-avi-weiss/.

24. ²⁴ Jeffrey S. Gurock, “Twentieth-Century American Orthodoxy’s Era of Non-Observance, 1900-1960,” The Torah u-Madda Journal 9 (2000): 87-107.

25. ²⁵ Andy Gross, “Jack Sable dies at 87, founded Jewish Center,” The Riverdale Press (Dec. 12, 2013), https://www.riverdalepress.com/stories/jack-sable-dies-at-87-founded-jewish-center,53453.

26. ²⁶ Ari L. Goldman, “Gerson D. Cohen Is Dead at 66; Ex-Chancellor of Jewish Seminary,” The New York Times (Aug. 19, 1991), https://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/19/nyregion/gerson-d-cohen-is-dead-at-66-ex-chancellor-of-jewish-seminary.html; Adam S. Ferziger, “Feminism and Heresy: The Construction of a Jewish Metanarrative,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 77, no. 3 (2009): 494-546.

27. ²⁷ Adam S. Ferziger, “Between Catholic Israel and the ‘K’rov Yisrael’: Non-Jews in Conservative Synagogues (1982-2009),” Journal of Jewish Studies 61, no. 1 (2010): 88-116.

28. ²⁸ Samuel C. Heilman, “The Modern Orthodox in America,” Routledge Handbook of Jewish Ritual and Practice, Oliver Leaman, ed. (Routledge, 2022), 192-202.

29. ²⁹ Marshall Sklare, Conservative Judaism: An American Religious Movement (Free Press, 1955), 207-210.

30. ³⁰ https://www.csair.org/prayer.

31. ³¹ https://www.csair.org/gala2025-honorees.

32. ³² https://www.hadar.org/learn/yeshivat-hadar.

33. ³³ Ethan Tucker and Michael Rosenberg, Gender Equality and Prayer in Jewish Law (Hadar Press, 2025).

34. ³⁴ Notably, the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale (HIR) continues to play a critical role in facilitating the religious ambience of Riverdale Jewish life. It was led by Rabbi Avi Weiss for over forty years, and today his protégé, Rabbi Steven Exler, is the senior rabbi. HIR exemplifies the “Open Orthodox” synagogue model within American Orthodoxy. This gains expression, among others, in the prominent role of women in the synagogue clergy team, an embracing approach to Jews of all levels of practice and orientation, along with non-sectarian social activism. Today HIR houses the banner rabbinical training institutions of Open Orthodoxy, Yeshiva Chovevei Torah for men and Yeshivat Maharat for women. That said, HIR’s mehitzah and limited inclusion of women within public ritual roles stakes out its place as an Orthodox, rather than egalitarian, religious space. See Steven Lipman, “Avi Weiss, Leading Modern Orthodox Rabbi, ‘Stepping Back,’” NY Jewish Week (Oct. 21, 2014), https://www.jta.org/2014/10/21/ny/avi-weiss-leading-modern-orthodox-rabbi-stepping-back.