Author: yudelbenyehudapress-com

Zev Eleff

In December 1924, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan wrote about Jewish rabbis and educators who seemed to him altogether incapable of “creating new Jewish values.” It disappointed him, since John Dewey and other important American educational theorists of that moment had already embraced the importance of concretizing the big ideas of education into values-based forms.¹ To his diary, Kaplan confided that his peers, particularly rabbis, were a “class of rabbinical breadwinners”—unable to distill Jewish tradition in a way that could make religion more meaningful to the three million Jews in the United States who Kaplan aspired to influence.²

Kaplan believed that teaching Jewish values could stymie disaffiliation by reinvigorating popular interest in Jewish culture. Kaplan had figured that he was in a position to influence the state of affairs at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he taught homiletics and served as dean of its Teachers Institute. However, by his own admission, few of his students and Jewish leaders within Kaplan’s considerable circle took up his cause. With that, Kaplan, at least for a moment, conceded his campaign on behalf of Jewish values. Eventually, though, this vision for Jewish values took root in American Jewish discourse.³ This article traces the rise of Jewish values in the United States and explores how the American Jewish community, based largely on external forces, proved Kaplan’s early prognosis wrong.

Kaplan believed that the whole of Jewish texts and heritage was far too difficult to transmit from parent to child in this modern age. His thinking on Jewish values also predates the rise of more immersive Jewish learning, i.e., the day school movement in the post-World War II period.⁴ Part of the problem was that the need escaped the consciousness of the American Jewish public. Kaplan was concerned that his coreligionists in the United States rarely considered how Jewish values might differ from other cultural values to which they were exposed. Kaplan suggested that in “pre-enlightenment days, probably one in a thousand experienced a conflict between traditional religion and the general world of ideas acquired outside Jewish education.”⁵ American Jewish life in the early twentieth century was different. “Nowadays the position is reversed,” wrote Kaplan. “Very few are immune to the modern intellectual climate, with its rejection of all religion.”⁶ He wished to empower Jewish leaders and educators to translate Jewish tradition and culture into higher order principles that would, Kaplan hoped, render Judaism more compelling to the rank and file.

Some took up Kaplan’s cause. His disciples such as Alexander Dushkin and Rabbi Max Kadushin trumpeted the need to furnish curricula scaffolded by discrete Jewish values. They agreed with Kaplan that the production of Jewish values could render Judaism relevant, reenergize Jewish life and save America’s Jews from “secularization.”⁷ Jewish values, Kaplan and his followers hoped, could approximate a wholesome and sustaining “Jewish identity” in the melting pot of American life.

Not everyone was so sanguine. For instance, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once asserted that it was the Greeks who dealt in “values.” The Greeks, though, were not the Jews. Heschel worried that reducing Judaism into a set of values would strip religious education of some of its most vital components. In particular, Heschel contended that the nascent Jewish values discourse stewarded by Kaplan and his acolytes obscured the importance of religious observance. Judaism, contended Heschel, “dwells on mitzvot.”⁸

In the earlier stages of his career, Kaplan had few allies in his crusade for Jewish values. The 1950s and 1960s proved, due to broader societal changes, to be the pivotal period for Jewish values. Perhaps as a result of Kaplan’s displeasure with the rabbinate, the Jewish leaders who took up the mantle of Jewish values were by and large educators and organization heads. The congregational rabbis who joined the Jewish values campaign typically had connections to these other Jewish professional fields. Still, Jewish pundits could not agree on how to formulate an authentic Jewish value. Because of this and shifting circumstances in American life, the rhetoric surrounding Jewish values changed from inward-facing strategies to ensure Jewish survival, as Kaplan had maintained, to the production of supposedly uniquely Jewish principles that could turn outward, to articulate the Jewish mission to the broader sociopolitical arena.

Mordecai Kaplan’s Jewish Values

Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan wrote a lot about Jewish values. He borrowed the idea from Ahad Ha’am, whose Cultural Zionism emphasized the need for a national site to foster Judaism’s innate ethical principles.⁹ In his seminal 1934 tome, Judaism as Civilization, which won a major prize sponsored by philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, Kaplan considered the “transmission of Jewish values,” stressing the need to discern the facts of religion from fallacies and fiction.¹⁰ Here, Kaplan surrendered all hope for the synagogue as the major site of so-called Jewish civilization. Instead, he charged Jewish schools with the “task of developing in the Jewish child a capacity to appreciate and adopt Jewish sanctions and aspirations.”¹¹

Kaplan returned to the subject several more times. Early on, he wrote rather circumspectly, resisting the temptation to indicate just what was a “Jewish value.” That hesitation portended future challenges to achieving a consensus on the taxonomy of Jewish values. In any case, Kaplan acknowledged that he had, to some degree, patterned himself after Solomon Schechter, who had written about “guiding principles and thoughts” but did not elaborate much beyond that.¹² Further back in American Jewish history, attempts to formulate a set of religious planks like the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform were on the whole concerned with somewhat esoteric forms of dogma. The Reform rabbis who architected the eight-point creedal statement in the late-nineteenth century issued just one actionable principle, though an important one, namely, a “duty to participate in the great task of modern times, to solve, on the basis of justice and righteousness, the problems presented by the contrasts and evils of the present organization of society.”¹³ This laid the foundation for Tikkun Olam, social justice, to emerge as the most oft-discussed Jewish value in American Jewish discourse.

In 1948, Kaplan published a chapter on “Basic Values in Jewish Religion.” The nine components of Kaplan’s slate of values were all pragmatic. As he defined it, “a value is any attitude or belief which is steered as of high worth, because of its importance for the impetus which it supplies to the striving for salvation.”¹⁴ Kaplan listed Spiritual Selection, Faith, Hope, Humility, Inner Freedom, Patience, Thankfulness, Justice and Love as “Jewish values.”¹⁵ For each, the erudite Kaplan researched the relevant rabbinical sources, ideas drawn from modern philosophy and, as was his wont, applied them to American Jews’ current predicaments and strategies to quell assimilation. For example, in his section on the value of “Inner Freedom,” Kaplan offered a commentary on democratic principles:

American Jews have a more crucial stake than any other group in the struggle of democracy against the new barbarism with which mankind is threatened. So long as the rest of the world is in danger of political serfdom and economic slavery, the Jewish people is in danger of annihilation. Its only hope is in the triumph of democracy. Destiny has placed us Jews on the firing line in defense of freedom.¹⁶

The other description of Kaplan’s anointed Jewish values read similarly. Kaplan’s “Spiritual Selection” was a response to Nazism, which he claimed had taken Darwinism too far. In step with other American religious leaders, Kaplan affirmed that Communism was “brutish,” unable to tap into a religious culture that “impels [people] to share in the divine process of making the greatest number of human beings fit to survive and to make the most of their lives.”¹⁷ Kaplan asserted that “Hope” ought to be registered as a Jewish value because of its capacity to raise Jews and non-Jews out of the Great Depression. Moreover, Kaplan prayed that this segment of their religious identity could inspire Jews as employers and laborers in a transformed economic system.¹⁸ These were all major concerns in postwar America; Kaplan desired that his coreligionists absorb these to help bolster their own Jewish identities. Another passage in his section on “Inner Freedom” connected Kaplan’s vision for democracy, Israel, and social justice:

As Jews, we dare not, in all this melee, give up our faith in God whose first revelation of Himself to our people was as the Power that brought them forth from “the house of bondage.” We must retain our individuality by refusing to die, so long as nations that believe in freedom are struggling to live. We must be prepared to sacrifice to the utmost, in order that our people shall live, that they who flee from the fires of persecution shall find a haven of refuge, and that Eretz Yisrael shall be able to play its part in the struggle for human hope and freedom.

We must shake off all the phobias which inhibit us from being true to ourselves and from making the most of our lives as Jews. We must not be afraid of standing shoulder to shoulder, and demanding the rights due [to] us as human beings; the rights of community, cultural individuality and spiritual freedom.

Thus, with hearts unreconciled to the supremacy of brute force, with minds challenging the Frankenstein monsters of man’s own making, and insisting on the high worth of the human soul, and with wills that are dauntless and cooperative, insisting on the love of freedom as the potential bond of human brotherhood, we shall help to speed the day when man’s inner freedom will assert itself in the creation of a worldwide democratic order of freedom, justice and human welfare.¹⁹

All told, each of these items were meant to convince American Jews that their interests were in fact Jewish values; that their American identity was truly a Jewish identity. Kaplan’s students followed their teacher’s lead but did not feel beholden to the master’s formulation of Jewish values. Two of his closest students, Eugene Kohn and Israel Chipkin, spoke about the “fortress of Jewish values and traditions” as well as refining “enlightened appreciation for Jewish values.”²⁰ Alexander Dushkin preached Jewish destiny and fellowship, faith, Tikkun Olam (he defined it as “world betterment”) and Torah study as primary Jewish values. What is more, Dushkin submitted that these were already imbued into the curricula of many Jewish schools and ought to be adopted by others, too.²¹ Likewise, Max Kadushin offered that there exist “many, many” Jewish values. However, he singled out Torah study, charity, spirituality and fear of Heaven as prime examples of inherently Jewish values.²² Kaplan’s disciples stressed that the inculcation of Jewish values was intended to support Jewish survival in the modern world. Dushkin and Kadushin echoed their teacher’s position, namely, that the production of Jewish values was educational, part of a needed intervention to bolster religious identity and combat American Jewish attrition against the forces of secularization. In his own call for stymieing assimilation, to offer one example, Kadushin trumpeted that “nothing other than authentic Jewish values will meet the needs of our youth. We must not attempt to give them shoddy substitutes.”²³

Others joined the Jewish values bandwagon. Rabbi Albert Gordon of Minneapolis published a 1947 manual for families to teach the “Jewish values” of Hanukah to their children.²⁴ Abram Sachar, then national director of B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundations and later founding president of Brandeis University, posited on several occasions that an “appreciation of Jewish Values” was a remedy for the “unhappy ignorance of Jewish survival.”²⁵ Rabbi Charles Shulman feared for “ignorance of Jewish values” and hypothesized that better adult education would yield improved “Jewish consciousness,” which Shulman claimed was the “key to Jewish survival.”²⁶ Rabbi Jacob Weinstein lectured Jewish Federation leaders at the 1958 National Conference of Jewish Communal Service in Chicago on the “preservation of Jewish values” and urged lay leaders to give Jewish education “first priority.”²⁷ The Zionist thinker Hayim Greenberg, who typically disagreed with much of Kaplan’s ahistorical approach to Jewish living, on this matter agreed with Kaplan; the former spoke of a “Jewish melody” whose notes, similar to Kaplan’s line of thinking, compose a ”Jewish personality,” one “nourished from sources which are regarded, at least formally, as religious.”²⁸ All in all, these education-minded Jewish thought leaders were of similar mind about the utility of Jewish values.

That Jewish values discourse picked up in the immediate postwar period is very significant. This was the era of so-called Tri-Faith America, an epoch in which many pundits spoke and wrote about “Judeo-Christian values.” The term can be dated to the turn of the prior century, but the expression did not gain all that much cultural currency until the 1940s. From then onward, “Judeo-Christian” rhetoric signaled to Protestants, Catholics and Jews that these groups shared a unified religious tradition. Discussion of Judeo-Christian values—usually drawing upon Scripture—rallied Americans against the purportedly “anti-religious” despots, Hitler and Stalin. The phrase tended to promote “civic harmony” while allowing each faith group to retain its most distinctive beliefs.²⁹ Understood this way, it made good sense that America’s Jews should think in terms of religious values. With increasing regularity, American Jews, in tandem with Catholics and Protestants, spoke of overarching Judeo-Christian values that preached Americanism and freedom of thought. Jewish leaders also clung to a fluid and narrower set of Jewish values that were meant to help their community retain their particularly Jewish identities amid other clusters of faith-enriched Americans.

Reorienting the Role of Jewish Values

Proponents of Jewish values-based education were missing something very important. The lack of consensus on what was a bona fide Jewish value hindered their initiative, introducing more than a modicum of discomfiture. Some worried that Jewish values were becoming diluted, more recognizable as general American virtues than statements engendering pride in Jewish identity. Once rooted in “religious Judaism,” explained a Columbia University sociologist, Jewish values “seem to be fairly disengaged from their religious context.” He enumerated support for Israel, commitment to humanitarian causes, higher learning and an indulgence of highbrow culture. “All these have one characteristic in common: They do not differentiate the Jew from the urban, liberal, educated citizen.”³⁰

In addition, Judeo-Christian rhetoric was falling out of vogue among Americans. The notion of pluralism was conceding ground to identity politics and ethnic pride. What is more, Judeo-Christian values failed to capture the urgent and fraught issues around race.³¹ Owing to this, Jewish educators and leaders unhinged their so-called values from the Judeo-Christian bandwagon and repositioned their intentions for teaching and disseminating Jewish values.

Jewish values began to posture outward, to connote a patently Jewish contribution to the wider world. To some degree, this shift had already started in the 1950s. Among the Orthodox, the philosopher Marvin Fox preached on the importance of Jewish values as an educational instrument—but oriented his remarks away from the antidotes to cure American Jewish assimilation. Before an audience at a Torah Umesorah convention in Pittsburgh, Fox, a professor at Ohio State University, suggested that the burgeoning Jewish day school movement ought to take the lead in battling so-called value-free instruction—a late-1950s turn from Deweyian values-based education—to “add a distinctive note to American education.”³² Fox blamed moral-neutral education for the “hilarious experience of ‘Dennis the Menace.’”³³ Judaism, he contended, offered the correct dosage of authority and respect to solve this American dilemma. Fox also worried about “scientific naturalism” and a laissez-faire culture in which “parents are often terrified by their children and teachers are frequently afraid of their pupils. Much of this has come about under the guise of freedom and democracy.”³⁴ Fox’s solution was to instill Jewish values of morality and authority—virtues that he believed emerged from proper study of Jewish tradition. Another example from the close of the decade, from an exemplar of Jewish education very distant from Fox, is instructive. In June 1959, the Jewish educator Emanuel Gamoran told an audience of Jewish professionals that “we ought to define Jewishness by the complex of Jewish values.” By that, this Reform educator stressed that what he meant by Jewish values was both inward-turned “survival values” and broad-reaching “humanistic values.”³⁵

The reoriented and outward-facing sense of Jewish values resonated with Jews in the 1960s. Jewish assimilation hadn’t been solved. Intermarriage was at an all-time high. However, an increasing number of Jews were becoming very self-confident about their Jewishness.³⁶ Like many, the Reform scholar Eugene Borowitz pointed to tzedakah, charity, as an important Jewish value, and claimed that most Jews agreed with him.³⁷ In opposition to detractors who accused America’s Jews of being too theologically thin, Borowitz suggested that this trait reflected a pragmatic mission of American Jews and separated them from other groups. As well, Borowitz singled out the disproportionate numbers of Jews in suburban America who tended to vote in a liberal fashion and give to causes aligned with either Israel or civil rights.³⁸ Though he did not describe it as a Jewish value, Borowitz referenced “Jewish heritage, with its emphasis on intellect and self-assertion.” Notwithstanding a degree of triumphalist overstatement, that a Jewish intellectual offered that there existed a Jewish mission to improve the larger society is important for this historical moment. “No liberal, scientific, or cultural movement,” surmised Borowitz, “was without its youthful Jewish zealots.”³⁹ American Jews, then, were doing something right, demonstratively full of self-confidence and capable of holding up their religious teachings for the benefit of the world around them.

Other examples point to the rearticulation of Jewish values. In England, Rabbi Louis Jacobs penned an entire book on Jewish values to help his coreligionists understand the basics of Judaism “so that they might be expressed more effectively and with greater relevance to the dilemmas of the present time.”⁴⁰ His aptly-titled Jewish Values included chapters on Torah Study; Fear of Heaven; Love, Sanctification and Trust of God; Holiness; Humility; Neighborly Love; Compassion; Truth; and Peace. Jacobs also published an American edition, basically the same as the earlier British iteration, without any mention or motivation to ensure Jewish survival. His intention was to provide a means for Jews to articulate the religious messages that made their faith unique.

The line of outward-facing Jewish values thinking took hold in the 1960s, even as educators and organization heads—rather than congregational rabbis—steered the course. The result was a politicization of Jewish values. In November 1960, for instance, the American Jewish Congress held the first of four Conferences on Jewish values. Organizers boasted that the convenings in New York “exceeded all expectations not only in attendance but in the intense interest and vigorous response evoked by the various papers presented by a number of Jewish thinkers.”⁴¹ Echoing Mordecai Kaplan, the American Jewish Congress’s purpose was to explore the “reasons for Jewish survival.” However, most of the presenters reinterpreted their charge, understanding that Jewish values were meant to furnish Jews with a set of guidelines that could properly and outwardly represent their faith to the world at large. For example, Rabbi Charles Shulman, who in the 1950s had championed Mordecai Kaplan’s survivalist approach, addressed the importance of owning “democracy” and “peace” as core Jewish values. He asked his listeners at the inaugural meeting of the Jewish Values Conference to consider “how can these Jewish values be implemented in modern life?”⁴² Directly afterward, Thelma Richman, president of the American Jewish Congress’s Women’s Division, put forward a similar notion of Jewish values, urging that it was the essential task of Jews to use these values to counteract the “present values of the Western world” that, in her view, “impoverish the world in which we live.”⁴³

The trend continued. In subsequent installments of the Jewish Values conferences, participants pushed back against critics who supposed that Jewish life in the United States was far too ignorant and impious, and therefore susceptible to assimilation. “We can no longer accept the rebuke that we are not as good Jews as our forefathers,” complained the rabbi and educator, Judah Pilch.⁴⁴ He contended that pride in Jewish values attested to the communal health of American Jewry. Pilch surveyed the American Jewish record of support for Israel and contributions to Tikkun Olam. Survivalism was not at all on the mind of Judah Shapiro, who headed the newly established National Foundation for Jewish Culture. Shapiro lectured on the “production of Jewishness” for the sake of liberal America.⁴⁵ Manfred Vogel of Brandeis University was likewise adamant that Jewish values should “claim its authentic place in American society.”⁴⁶ Everyone at the Jewish Values conferences seemed to celebrate the state of American Jewish life rather than fear for its survival. Perhaps the change in perspective was best articulated by Isaiah Minkoff, founding director of the National Community Relations Advisory Council—the self-proclaimed “representative voice of the organized American Jewish community”—who shared at the American Jewish Congress’s final proceedings in February 1962 that his constituents “are no longer concerned, as Jews, to accommodate or adjust or conform to some synthetic conception of Americanism.” He rejected once and for all the Judeo-Christian alliance. In its place, Minkoff pridefully announced, in this new era of identity politics, that the articulation of unadulterated Jewish values was how his coreligionists “express ourselves as Jews.”⁴⁷

The Politics of Jewish Values

Jews cultivated outward-minded Jewish values to respond to the complex political moment. For instance, the all-encompassing Civil Rights movement and Vietnam War summoned Jewish leaders to align their values to the major political causes of the 1960s. Institutions like the National Conference of Jewish Communal Services trumpeted the “Jewish commitment to social justice.”⁴⁸ Albert Vorspan, who headed Reform Judaism’s social action agenda, published a bulky study on “Jewish Values and Social Crisis,” a work he freely admitted that was a “biased book.” Far more concerned that Judaism would play a role in the current social climate—particularly, racial strife, civil disobedience and antiwar protest—Vorspan told an interviewer that he “makes no apologies for his lack of objectivity.”⁴⁹ As could be expected, the politically-oriented calculus of Jewish values made it even more difficult to achieve a consensus among Jewish educators and writers, recruiting pundits such as Irving Kristol and Meir Kahane to weigh in—in stark contrast to Vorspan, from the Jewish political “right.”⁵⁰ It must have seemed to some Jewish readers that any political point of view could be packaged as a so-called Jewish value.

This made Jewish leaders even more protective of Jewish values and cognizant that they had to link their values to Jewish traditions. This was partly because Jewish values had become so rooted within Jewish discourse. “Federation leaders never wavered,” wrote Jonathan Woocher, “in their conviction that the Jewish values which were becoming increasingly prominent in the federation system’s self-legitimation were one with America’s own social values.”⁵¹ Philip Bernstein, the head of the Council of Jewish Federations, was very proud of the fact that the organized Jewish polity, to borrow a term from the political scientist Daniel Elazar, looked to link perceived Jewish values to Jewish texts and traditions.⁵² Bernstein championed Jewish values but synchronized them with traditional texts. He boasted that “more of our officers and our Board members seek greater knowledge of basic Jewish purpose, Jewish values, Jewish principles.” These exercises ensured that Jewish organizations committed to welfare and other causes understood their purposes in discretely Jewish terms. Bernstein reported that his own board had “begun to have Jewish study periods” introduce a “Dvar Torah at each Federation Board meeting,” and convene “Jewish study programs for the professional training and advancement of Federation staffs.”⁵³

This kind of Jewish values discourse carried a capacity to reorient efforts in a Jewish vein. Within the Conservative movement, the United Synagogue Commission on Jewish Education called for enhanced curricula that emphasized “traditional” concepts like social justice to engage heightened “sociological tensions.” Meanwhile, leaders of the Conservative-affiliated Camp Ramah constellation urged their staffs to provide a “value-culture” for their youngsters.⁵⁴ The influential Jewish columnist, Nathan Ziprin, very aware of the charged political proclivities of young people in the 1960s, implored Hillel educators on college campuses to make sure that “Jewish students of America are conscious of the Jewish element that impels them to the struggle for social and political betterment.”⁵⁵ More proactively, Shlomo Bardin brought hundreds of college students and young adults to his Brandeis Institute in California to summer programs designed to inculcate Jewish values around Zionism and contemporary moral dilemmas.⁵⁶

Most everyone at this time intuited Jewish values as the medium in which Jews impacted the world around them. In the late-1960s, Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg called on his Orthodox colleagues to “restore” a “wholeness of Jewish education.” He confirmed that the growing number of Jewish day schools had secured the persistence of Jewish life and observance among Orthodox Jews but worried about a rising trend toward insularism. While acknowledging the challenges imposed on a tradition-bound faith by a radicalized sexual ethic and political climate, Greenberg lamented what he viewed as a disregard for humanitarian values, dismissing statements produced by organizations like the Orthodox Union and Rabbinical Council of America as perfunctory. Greenberg interpreted the Second Vatican Council convoked by Pope John XXIII as a willingness to “rethink Catholic values,” and hoped that his community would do the same, stressing that a “value orientation that would experience these concerns out of the Jewish tradition must be inculcated.”⁵⁷

Jewish values discourse continued to languish in Orthodox circles but it flourished in virtually all other Jewish sectors.⁵⁸ To be sure, some Jews remained incredulous about attempts to canonize a set of religious planks, flouting “much talk concerning the teaching of Jewish values.”⁵⁹ These critics, while acknowledging the widespread use of Jewish values rhetoric, were bewildered about how to derive them and, programmatically, how to assess the dissemination of them.⁶⁰ For example, Arnold Eisen, a noted sociologist and future chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, posited that it was “simply not possible … to identify a uniquely Jewish constellation of values which can be normative to us in our situation.”⁶¹ Nonetheless, Jewish values endured as a central feature in the spheres of Jewish education and organizational life. Pundits forgave the triteness of the term due to its, well, intrinsic “value” in Jewish discourse. Most recently a few thought leaders, such as sociologist Jonathan Woocher, urged for the reformulation of “applied Jewish wisdom” to give the notion a better Jewish textual grounding.⁶² But from its inception as a pedagogical tool, as Mordecai Kaplan had envisioned it, to bolster Jewish identity to its role as a projection of the Jewish contribution to modern problems, Jewish values has emerged as a central expression within American Jewish discourse.

Zev Eleff, PhD is president of Gratz College and professor of American Jewish history. He is the author or editor of 15 books in the field of American Judaism.

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1. ¹ See, for example, Edward Scribner Ames, “Religious Values and Philosophical Criticism,” in Essays in Honor of John Dewey on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, October 20, 1929 (Henry Holt and Company, 1929), 23-35. On the interaction between Jewish educators and educational theorists in this period, see Laura Yares, Jewish Sunday Schools: Teaching Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (NYU Press, 2023), 128-44.

2. ² The quote can be found in the December 10, 1924 entry in Kaplan’s journals held at the Joseph and Miriam Ratner Center for the Study of Conservative Judaism Archives, Jewish Theological Seminary, New York. It is cited in Michael Cohen, “Jerusalem of the North: An Analysis of Religious Modernization in Portland, Maine’s Jewish Community, 1860-1950” (BA dissertation, Brown University, 2000), 66.

3. ³ Relatedly, the topic of teaching Jewish Values in Israel is addressed in Walter Ackerman, “Making Jews: An Enduring Challenge in Israeli Education,” Israel Studies 2 (Fall 1997): 1-20.

4. ⁴ See Alvin Irwin Schiff, The Jewish Day School in America (Jewish Education Committee Press, 1966), 48-50.

5. ⁵ Mordecai M. Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life (Macmillan Company, 1934), 499.

6. ⁶ Kaplan, 499-500.

7. ⁷ On this complicated term in American Jewish life, see Beth S. Wenger, “Secularism,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Jewish History, Shari Rabin and Michael R. Cohen, eds. (Oxford University Press, 2025), 299-315.

8. ⁸ Abraham Joshua Heschel, “The Moment at Sinai,” American Zionist 43 (February 5, 1953): 20. Kaplan, by contrast, rejected the bindingness of traditional Jewish ritual and sought out ways to replace “obsolete” observance with more “meaningful” rites. This separated Kaplan from “rightists” like Heschel and “leftists” among many Reform Jewish leaders who dispatched with many Jewish laws and customs but did not feel compelled to fill those voids with other ceremonies and rituals.

9. ⁹ See Ahad Ha’am, Kol Kitvei Ahad Ha’am (Dvir, 1965), 159-64. On Ahad Ha’am’s influence on Kaplan, see Steven J. Zipperstein, “On Reading Ahad Ha’am as Mordecai Kaplan Read Him,” Jewish Social Studies 12 (Winter 2006): 30-38. Rabbi Judah Magnes, who departed New York in the 1920s to found Hebrew University, and was likewise under the influence of Ahad Ha’am, also used the term, at least on one occasion. See “The Kehillah Convention,” American Hebrew (June 9, 1916): 147.

10. ¹⁰ See Mel Scult, Judaism Faces the Twentieth Century: A Biography of Mordecai M. Kaplan (Wayne State University Press, 1993), 338-48.

11. ¹¹ Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization, 497-98.

12. ¹² See Solomon Schechter, Studies in Judaism (The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1911), 180-81. On Kaplan’s relationship with Schechter, see Michael R. Cohen, The Birth of Conservative Judaism: Solomon Schechter’s Disciples and the Creation of an American Religious Movement (Columbia University Press, 2012), 70-78.

13. ¹³ See Mark N. Staitman, “From Pittsburgh Platform to the Centenary Statement: Developing Reform Judaism,” in The Changing World of Reform Judaism: The Pittsburgh Platform in Retrospect (Rodef Shalom Congregation, 1985), 81-89.

14. ¹⁴ Mordecai M. Kaplan, The Future of the American Jew (Macmillan Company, 1948), 246.

15. ¹⁵ See Kaplan, 244-339.

16. ¹⁶ Kaplan, 283.

17. ¹⁷ Kaplan, 255.

18. ¹⁸ Kaplan, 271.

19. ¹⁹ Kaplan, 294-95.

20. ²⁰ See Eugene Kohn, “Character Training in the Jewish Religious School,” Proceedings of the Rabbinical Assembly of America 4 (1933): 44; and Israel S. Chipkin, “The Israel Friedlaender Classes: An Experiment in Jewish Education for Youth and Adults, 1920-21 to 1930-31,” Proceedings of the Rabbinical Assembly of America 4 (1933): 182. I am grateful to Rabbi Jacob Blumenthal and Sasha Mastriano for furnishing scans of these articles for me.

21. ²¹ See Alexander Dushkin, “Personal Values in Jewish Education,” Jewish Social Service Quarterly 23 (March 1947): 285-89.

22. ²² See Max Kadushin, “The Teaching of Jewish Values,” Jewish Education 19 (Summer 1948): 23-26. On the particulars of Kadushin’s Jewish values, see Theodore Steinberg, “Max Kadushin, Scholar of Rabbinic Judaism: A Study of His Life, Work, and Theory of Valuational Thought (New York University: PhD diss., 1980); and Thomas L. Head, “Normal Mysticism: An Interdisciplinary Study of Max Kadushin’s Rabbinic Hermeneutic” (PhD diss., Edith Cowan University, 2013).

23. ²³ Kadushin, 26.

24. ²⁴ See Dianne Ashton, Hanukkah in America: A History (NYU Press, 2013), 194-98.

25. ²⁵ See “Jewish Values Held Ignored by Leaders,” New York Times (June 16, 1941): 28; and “‘Ignorance of Jewish Values’ Decried by Dr. Sachar at HTC Exercises,” Jewish Advocate (June 24, 1965): 8.

26. ²⁶ Charles E. Shulman, “The Key to Jewish Survival,” Congress Weekly (March 29, 1956): 8-9.

27. ²⁷ Jacob J. Weinstein, “The Responsibility of Jewish Community Services for the Preservation of Jewish Values: A Fixed Point of Reference,” Journal of Jewish Communal Service 35 (Fall 1958): 33-34.

28. ²⁸ See Hayim Greenberg, “Jewish Culture and Education in the Diaspora,” in The Essential Hayim Greenberg: Essays and Addresses on Jewish Culture, Socialism and Zionism, ed. Mark A. Raider (University of Alabama Press, 2016), 328. This essay quickly became one of Greenberg’s most well-known writings and was often reproduced. See, for example, a selection and editorial comment in Jewish Affairs 18 (April 1963): 7.

29. ²⁹ See Kevin M. Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to its Protestant Promise (Oxford University Press, 2011), 57-59. See also Mark Silk, “Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in America,” American Quarterly 36 (Spring 1984): 65-85. For an important corrective of Schultz, as far as American Jews are concerned, see Jessica Cooperman, Making Judaism Safe for America: World War I and the Origins of Religious Pluralism (NYU Press, 2018).

30. ³⁰ Amitai Etzioni, “Toward a Secular Judaism?” Reconstructionist 27 (February 9, 1962): 18.

31. ³¹ See Schultz, Tri-Faith America, 179-97.

32. ³² Marvin Fox, “Day Schools and the American Educational Pattern,” Jewish Parent 5 (September 1953): 5-6. On this period in educational thinking, see Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Educational Research (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 165-183.

33. ³³ Fox, 6. On the debate over value-free education, see Walter Kaufmann, “Educational Development from the Point of View of a Normative Philosophy,” Harvard Educational Review 36 (September 1966): 247-64.

34. ³⁴ Fox, “Day Schools and the American Educational Pattern,” 5-6.

35. ³⁵ See discussion section in Joachim Prinz, “Who is a Jew?” CCAR Year Book 69 (1959): 258.

36. ³⁶ See Rachel Kranson, Ambivalent Embrace: Jewish Upward Mobility in Postwar America (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 17-20.

37. ³⁷ Eugene B. Borowitz, “Crisis Theology and the Jewish Community,” Commentary 32 (July 1, 1961): 38.

38. ³⁸ See Kenneth D. Wald, The Foundations of American Jewish Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 141-57.

39. ³⁹ Wald, 37.

40. ⁴⁰ Louis Jacobs, Jewish Values (Vallentine, Mitchell and Co., 1960), 10.

41. ⁴¹ Sol Liptzin, “Introductory Statement,” Congress Bi-Weekly Supplement: Proceedings of Third Conference on Jewish Values (June 26, 1961): n.p.

42. ⁴² Charles E. Shulman, “Jewish Values and the Individual,” in Congress Bi-Weekly Supplement: Proceedings of (First) Conference on Jewish Values (January 16, 1961): n.p.

43. ⁴³ Thelma Richman, “The Value-Scale of Judaism,” in Congress Bi-Weekly Supplement: Proceedings of (First) Conference on Jewish Values (January 16, 1961): n.p.

44. ⁴⁴ Judah Pilch, “Old Values and New Purposes,” Congress Bi-Weekly Supplement: Proceedings of Second Conference on Jewish Values (April 17, 1961): n.p.

45. ⁴⁵ Judah J. Shapiro, “The Regeneration of the Jewish People,” Congress Bi-Weekly Supplement: Proceedings of Third Conference on Jewish Values (June 26, 1961): n.p.

46. ⁴⁶ Manfred Vogel, “Toward a New Frontier,” Congress Bi-Weekly Supplement: Proceedings of Third Conference on Jewish Values (June 26, 1961): n.p.

47. ⁴⁷ Isaiah M. Minkoff, “Living in a Plural Society,” Congress Bi-Weekly Supplement: Presentations made at the Fourth Conference on Jewish Values (April 2, 1962): n.p.

48. ⁴⁸ See, for example, “Jewish Values Called Basic to Participation in Rights Fight,” The Sentinel (June 11, 1964): 3.

49. ⁴⁹ See “My Book Lacks Objectivity, Value-Crisis Author Admits,” Bnai Brith Messenger (January 3, 1969): 12.

50. ⁵⁰ See, for example, Shaul Magid, Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (Princeton University Press, 2021), 36-37.

51. ⁵¹ Jonathan S. Woocher, Sacred Survival: The Civil Religion of American Jews (Indiana University Press, 1986), 60.

52. ⁵² See Daniel J. Elazar, Community and Polity: The Organizational Dynamics of American Jewry (The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1976), 3-10.

53. ⁵³ Philip Bernstein, “Synagogue-Federation Relations,” CCAR Year Book 86 (1976): 141.

54. ⁵⁴ See Jonathan Krasner, “The Place of Tikkun Olam in American Jewish Life,” Jewish Political Studies Review 25 (Fall 2013): 75-77. For a parallel in the Reform Movement, in March 1979, the Central Conference of American Rabbis’ Committee on Education strongly recommended a Jewish values-centered curriculum for all its affiliated schools. See Frederick C. Schwartz, “Report of the Committee on Education,” CCAR Year Book 89 (1979): 23-29. Then in the 1970s, Rabbi Simon Greenberg of the Jewish Theological Seminary touted his school’s Melton Educational Research Project as a bona fide effort to formalize Jewish values. See Simon Greenberg, “Educating for Jewish Values,” New Catholic World 217 (January 1974): 6-7. See also, Julius Weinberg, “The ‘Greening’ of Jewish Education,” Judaism 34 (Spring 1985): 180-96.

55. ⁵⁵ Nathan Ziprin, “Youth in Seeking,” Bnai Brith Messenger (September 24, 1965): 39.

56. ⁵⁶ See Boris Smolar, “Brandeis Institute Attracts Searchers for Jewish Values,” The Sentinel (December 11, 1969): 34.

57. ⁵⁷ See Irving Greenberg, “Jewish Values and the Changing American Ethic,” Tradition 10 (Summer 1968): 60-65.

58. ⁵⁸ See, for example, “Transmitting Jewish Values,” Jewish Advocate (November 6, 1986): 24; and “Jewish Values,” Jewish Advocate (January 22, 1987): 7. For an exceptional case of an Orthodox rabbi addressing Jewish values in this period, see “‘Jewish Values’ Institute Theme of JCA Leaders,” Bnai Brith Messenger (February 17, 1967): 7. Recently, this is changing, perhaps most illustratively with the formation of the Orthodox-led Coalition of Jewish Values. In addition, see Nachum Amsel, The Encyclopedia of Jewish Values (Urim Publications, 2014); and Joanne Palmer, “Our Values are Our Compass: Yeshiva University’s President, Rabbi Dr. Ari Berman, Talks about this Challenging Year,” Jewish Standard, March 10, 2021, available at https://jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com/our-values-are-our-compass/ (accessed February 1, 2026).

59. ⁵⁹ Hinda Blum, “Jewish Values,” Jewish Exponent (June 25, 1976): 32. See also Harry Stark, “Jewish Values,” Jerusalem Post (October 17, 1976): 8.

60. ⁶⁰ See “Assessing Jewish Values Impact,” Jewish Advocate (May 10, 1984): A2.

61. ⁶¹ Arnold Eisen, “How Can We Speak of Jewish ‘Values’ Today?” Forum 42-43 (Winter 1981): 70.

62. ⁶² See Bethamie Horowitz, “A Critical Eye on the Prize: Unpacking the Meaning of ‘Applied Jewish Wisdom,’” Journal of Jewish Education 85 (2019): 362-87.

Michael Hoberman

While Theodore Seixas Solomons is far less famous than the man for whom California’s best known high-elevation trail was named, he was instrumental in the creation of the crest-parallel footpath that links the entire length of the High Sierra from Yosemite to Mt. Whitney. In 1940, this San Francisco-born Jew recounted his earliest conception of what would become the John Muir Trail, which occurred less than a year after his bar mitzvah. Looking eastward from his uncle’s Fresno alfalfa field in 1884, Solomons recalled, he had been struck by the sight of “the flashing teeth of the Sierra crest.” Projecting himself forward in time and space, he imagined himself traversing “the immensity of that uplifted world.”¹ Today, we might ask ourselves: by what path did this city-bred Jewish youth become one of the most significant explorers in the history of the High Sierra?

We might also ask, given his background as the scion of one of the oldest and well-established Jewish families in the United States, why has his story been almost entirely ignored by scholars? With the exception of a single biography (by the Yosemite historian, Shirley Sargent) which was published privately in 1990 and has long been out of print, very little has been written about Solomons’ remarkable life and his outsized influence on the development of the Sierra Nevada as a destination for backpackers and other wilderness enthusiasts.² Despite his considerable relevance to both fields of study, Theodore Solomons has escaped the attention of Jewish American historians and environmental studies specialists alike.

Over the course of four summers in the 1890s, Theodore Solomons traveled hundreds of miles (and ascended hundreds of thousands of feet) in his quest to configure the best-known, oldest, and most scenically spectacular long-distance recreational footpath in the United States. In the aftermath of those trips, he published more than two dozen articles about his wayfinding, often accompanying them with maps he had drawn and photographs he had taken. Solomons’ name appears in much of the existing literature on the John Muir Trail, including the many guidebooks that have been published since the trail’s completion in the 1930s. Nonetheless, the fact of his Jewishness is rarely if ever mentioned in these contexts, despite its oddity: the Sierra Club, after all, was a notoriously Anglo-Protestant organization, and Jewish alpinists are few and far between in world history.

In 2021, I completed a thru-hike of the John Muir Trail. Even though I was relatively well-informed about the trail’s history and encountered dozens of fellow long-distance-hikers in the three weeks I spent on-trail, I never once heard Solomons’ name mentioned. By contrast, the legacy of John Muir, who had virtually nothing to do with the trail’s development (it was named in his honor when the state of California commissioned it a year after his death in 1914), is well-known both on- and off-trail. My argument is that Solomons’ Jewish identity played a central role in his marginalization. That being said, straightforward antisemitism was only one of the several factors that influenced his having been written out of American environmental history.

Lineally speaking, Solomons’ Jewish connections, which included Sephardi and Ashkenazi strains, were undeniable. On his paternal side, he was a great-grandson of Gershom Mendes Seixas, a cousin of Emma Lazarus, and genealogically linked to several other notable early American Jews, including Abigail Levy Franks and Uriah Levy. Solomons, who was born in 1870, grew up in an observant Jewish household and attended Hebrew school at San Francsico’s Temple Emanu-El, where he became bar mitzvah. Through his childhood and adolescence, both of Solomons’ parents were actively involved in San Francisco Jewish life. Gershom Solomons, who had been born in Montreal in 1828, served briefly as Temple Emanu-El’s reporting secretary. Hannah Marks, born to a Polish Jewish family in 1835, taught Hebrew school there. Solomons and Marks met in San Francisco in the early 1850s, shortly after both of them traveled there in the immediate aftermath of the Gold Rush.

Despite the facts of his ancestry and upbringing, however, the adult Theodore Solomons who explored the Sierra Nevada in the 1890s neither practiced Judaism nor had anything to say about it in any of his writings. In this respect, he resembled his siblings, only one of whom was actively and publicly involved in Jewish life through adulthood.³ Nonetheless, Ansel Adams, who knew Theodore Solomons well, claimed that antisemitism was a factor in his marginalization by the Sierra Club, the preservationist group whose founding in 1892 coincided with his first ventures into the California mountains.⁴

Solomons’ Jewishness mattered not so much because it evoked the hostility of others but because it helped to shape his distinctive views toward the High Sierra, which were almost always out of sync with those of his Sierra Club contemporaries. Most notably, and in contrast to better-known figures like John Muir, Solomons was not so much a vocal advocate for walling off the wilderness as he was a promoter of wider access to and navigational knowledge about the mountains. To borrow a term from US environmental history, he was a conservationist, as opposed to a preservationist.

When he first traveled to the remote environs of Mt. Ritter in 1892, for instance, Solomons couldn’t help but imagine that the broad lake that lay at its feet would one day become the perfect setting for “the ubiquitous Swiss hotel.”⁵ Many years later, as the Sierra Club was feverishly lobbying to prevent a road from being built across the spine of the southern Sierra (it would have bisected Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks), Solomons expressed his opposition to their efforts. If the places that he had frequented on foot and with the assistance of pack animals in the 1890s were to remain roadless into perpetuity, he argued, they would soon become the sole preserve of the “plutocrat and sub-plutocrat classes.”⁶

As an adjunct to his populism, much of Solomons’ writing hearkened to California’s pioneer era. He habitually trumpeted the expansionist ideologies that had inspired people from the eastern seaboard to settle on the Pacific coast. In the 1940 Sierra Club Bulletin article he wrote on his contributions to the creation of the John Muir Trail, Solomons spoke of having “completed a kind of reconnaissance of the unexplored High Sierra.” Today’s reader can’t help but take note of his tendency to describe wilderness travel as a quest. He freely employed the language of military conquest. “The vast Alpine complex called the southern High Sierra,” he stated in 1940, “remained much as it was—terra incognita” before he had begun his effort to map the trail. On the subject of his 1895 attempt to find an elusive pass over an area called the Goddard Divide, he wrote, “the ground was broken and a skirmish line traced from which in subsequent years” other Sierra Club explorers “continued to battle against the unknown.”⁷

In an ironic, or at least deeply disappointing, turn of events, the “skirmish line” that Solomons managed to establish on the basis of that 1895 trip would prove insufficient to the task of gaining him the recognition he sought. To echo the language of warfare was to invite indifference, or even scorn, when one failed to achieve a certifiable victory.

Solomons’ writing about the Sierra was also far less reverent than that of his Sierra Club contemporaries, and he often punctuated his descriptions of wilderness spaces with humorous and highly opinionated personal anecdotes. Returning to the Yosemite Valley from a five-day adventure in the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne in the summer of 1894, for instance, Solomons took pleasure in drawing a contrast between his own nearly famished party and a group of “lollers in silk” who, as he put it, considered “the hotel dining-table [to be] an object of greater interest and concern than El Capitan itself.”⁸ Solomons prided himself on his impatience with genteel manners, polite discourse, and all forms of sanctimony.

Accordingly, Solomons placed as much of a focus on the sheepherders and other people he met in the mountains as he did upon the pristine landscapes that he encountered there. His essays abounded with character sketches of sheepherders and other non-recreationally inclined denizens of the Sierra. Moreover, in the dozens of articles he published on his travels through the wilderness, his own and his companions’ misadventures featured prominently. They supplied insight into a theme that interested him greatly and about which he had much to say: “the duality of man.”⁹ The High Sierra, as he wrote about it, brought out the best and worst qualities of the people who visited its fastnesses. Solomons cared as much about the mountains’ history as an arena for social and cultural interaction as he did about their natural history.

Given his enthusiasm for highlighting human incursions into the mountains, it is no wonder that Solomons’ writing departed drastically from the precedent that stricter naturalists like John Muir had established, which typically dismissed human concerns as superfluous, if not entirely detrimental to the literature of the wilderness. Leaving aside their blatant secularity, in their humor-laden and rollicking spirit of public performance, Solomons’ essays hearkened back to an earlier era in which men attempted to reign supreme over mountains. Indeed, his articles about the Sierras sometimes echoed the works of nineteenth-century frontier explorers in their eagerness to dramatize human achievements (and, to be fair, failures) and their tendency to describe the wilderness as an obstacle to be overcome and even triumphed over.

For his part, John Muir did not revel in human triumphs over the wilderness, but that didn’t mean he sanctioned human frailty. For all of his tender and even affectionate personifications of various wilderness features, from gentle winds to sweet birdsongs to singing rivers, Muir freely condemned indications of vulnerability or weakness in human beings, especially when those traits turned out to be the flipside of arrogance. He also expected wilderness travelers to experience and express unmitigated joy at their every exposure to danger. A man proved his love for the natural world by facing its hazards with equanimity and always seeing the beauty, and even beneficence, that lay beneath the surface of its most threatening appearances. Muir’s entire career as a mountaineer was a testament to his philosophy. His writing abounded with episodes in which a superior force outside himself had come to his rescue.

The prevailing attitude in Muir’s depictions of wilderness travel was one of a quiet reverence toward the natural world and a pronounced indifference toward the feelings, concerns, or social stature of the human beings who entered it. If he admired his friend Galen Clark, for instance, it was because of his stoicism and understated character. “His voice was uniformly pitched at a rather low tone,” the naturalist wrote, emphasizing the Canadian-born mountaineer’s quality of unobtrusiveness. “Upon the whole, he was serious and industrious,” Muir noted, “and however deep and fun-provoking a story might be, he never indulged in boisterous laughter.”¹⁰ It made no sense to Muir, in other words, for human beings to upstage nature’s magnificence or glory with disruptive behaviors. For that matter, crowd-pleasing accounts of their own bumbling and pathetic practices were superfluous to their efforts to describe the transcendent beauty of the wilderness.

Solomons brought an entirely different perspective to bear on the wilderness than the one we gain from reading the works of other turn-of-the-century Sierra enthusiasts. While Solomons was a highly assimilated and non-observant Jew, his relationship to the Sierra was an outgrowth of a distinctly Jewish historical experience. His mentality had been shaped, first by the centuries of exile and landlessness that his progenitors had undergone, and then by the generations-long process through which they had come to think of America as their rightful home.

For scholars such as myself who are interested in exploring the relationship between Jews and the sense of place, especially in the North American context, Solomons’ career presents a range of interpretive possibilities. While his writing about the High Sierra was in some ways fairly typical for its period—at least nominally observant of romantic conventions, occasionally stilted, and highly dramatic in its depictions of a gargantuan landscape—it is also sufficiently distinct to merit attention for its differences from the work of late nineteenth-century naturalists such as John Muir. In fact, it is in Solomons’ writing about and in response to John Muir’s writing, that we gain some of the most valuable insights into his unique, and Jewishly-informed, perspective on the “California Alps,” as he more than once referred to them.

Theodore Solomons was too young to have known Muir well, but he did have more than one interaction with the elder naturalist in the 1890s, and mostly came to know him in the context of the Sierra Club, whose founding occurred in 1892. One year later, Solomons prepared a short but remarkably incisive critique of Muir’s oeuvre that was published in a periodical called California Writers and Literature. Several decades later, after he had long since stopped exploring the Sierra, Solomons published an essay about Muir’s influence upon his own work in the magazine Yosemite Notes. Muir also figured prominently in Solomons’ private writing and correspondence. Even when John Muir was not the central topic of his writing, however, Solomons found ways to refer to his legacy. He was the canonical figure whose example Solomons could never ignore, even when he wanted to reject it.

Two particular episodes in Solomons’ career as an explorer of the Sierra offer especially useful insight into how and why the younger writer’s attitude toward Muir matters and reflects meaningfully upon his Jewish background. The first, which occurred during Solomons’ first summer in the Sierra and about which he wrote three years later, highlights his rejection of Muir’s romantic viewpoint, especially as it bears upon the potentially fatal temptations of reverie within the wider context of mountain travel. The second, which resulted from Solomons’ most consequential exploration in the Sierra, during the summer of 1895, along an area called the Goddard Divide, enunciated his distinct viewpoint on the role that human beings play, or should play, in the natural environment.

Not a “nature-gusher:” Rejecting the Sublime

Early in his career, Theodore Solomons was an independent thinker to a fault. More than once on his trips through the High Sierra, his youthful and unstinting zeal for self-reliance could easily have gotten him killed. Instead of undergoing a period of apprenticeship and learning from his elders, he seized every opportunity to hurl his inexperienced self—and often his even less knowledgeable and unwitting hiking companions—at the mountains. Solomons’ first extended sojourn in the Sierras took place in 1892, when he was twenty-one years old. The young mountaineer fearlessly and foolishly embraced his first chance to travel solo at high elevation only a few weeks following upon his first arrival in the Sierras. If nothing else, the near-misses lent a spirit of adventure and drama to his writing.

The disasters that nearly befell Solomons as he ventured away from the relative safety of his friends’ campsite in the vicinity of Tuolumne Meadows in mid-August of 1892 would spur his lively imagination and launch his career as a wilderness author. Now that he was not just dreaming about making a trail from one end of the High Sierra to another but experiencing its uplifted world first-hand, Theodore Solomons would have stories to tell. His tales would play up the spirit of adventure that brought him to the Sierra in the first place. They would also evoke a singularly un-romantic skepticism from him that, for years to come, would set him apart from his contemporaries on the mountaineering scene.

Solomons had spent the first part of the summer traveling through and immediately south of Yosemite in the lively company of his friends. Only as his hiking companions returned to the city and the end of the short Sierra summer approached did he contrive his first solo adventure. His immediate destination was the large glacier that lay along the northeastern slope of 13,211-foot-high Mt. Lyell, which lay along the southern boundary of Yosemite National Park. Summiting the mountain, which had first been climbed in 1871 by J. B. Tilleston and was the park’s highest peak, would add excitement to the venture.

Solomons set out to climb the Lyell Glacier on August 16. He could tell that parts of it had been hollowed out because he could hear water rushing beneath its surface, see small holes in its surface, and also noticed numerous small pools of water that had formed intermittently along its length. He knew that he needed to be on guard against the surrounding dangers, but his steady hiking cadence and excitement about reaching the summit lulled him into a dangerous complacency. His first published piece in the Sierra Club Bulletin told the story. “I had been plodding up the sloping glacier,” he wrote, “my eyes fixed on the distant cliffs, when, happening providentially to glance downward I saw, with horror, that I was on the brink of a crevasse.” Had he not stepped back from the brink, he joked, his “brief career in the high Sierra would have abruptly terminated.”¹¹

Perhaps because it could so easily have put an end to him, the crevasse fascinated Solomons. He peered over the edge and tried dropping a rock into the chasm, but couldn’t gain any insight into its depth. “Beautiful beyond description are these crevasses,” he wrote in the Bulletin, “but the cold shiver which invariably gambols down the spinal column of the beholder is not always to be regarded as a purely aesthetic sensation.” Solomons’ reference to “purely aesthetic sensations” suggests that his Lyell Glacier experience shaped his thinking about the danger of natural reveries. He wouldn’t forget what had almost befallen him as a result of his reverential state of mind.

In May of 1895, almost three years after his near miss on Mt. Lyell, Solomons returned to the subject of what had happened to him there in a short story that he published in The Traveler, a California magazine which would feature a few of his articles through the mid- to late 1890s. “In a Crevasse of the Lyell Glacier” was the only one of the nearly twenty magazine pieces he would publish about his career as a mountaineer that fictionalized one of his trips in the Sierra.¹²

Unlike Solomons, the story’s protagonist loses his footing and falls into the crevasse. Eventually, through a combination of clear thinking and good fortune, he manages to escape from the abyss. Though the story doesn’t qualify as one of Solomons’ stronger pieces—it is melodramatic to the extreme—it is a powerful conveyance of his ideas about the wilderness and its enticements to fatalistic thinking. In contrast to John Muir, who was always eager to meld the self into the divine power of nature and, in so doing, or to negate it entirely, Solomons’ narrator keeps himself alive by actively resisting any temptation to declare his oneness with nature. Early on in the story, for instance, on the brink of giving in to despair, he catches himself “stupidly drifting away on an ocean of thought.”¹³

Soon afterward the story’s protagonist begins a journey that echoes classic tales like Homer’s Odyssey, which its author must have come across in his San Francisco high school days. He descends into an underworld, literally, in order to make his way out of the abyss. “There was but one avenue of escape,” he says, noting that when he was still above ground looking into the crevasse, he had seen that the distant and smaller end of the crevasse sloped upwards. “To gain that slope,” he thinks to himself, “I should have to traverse the bottom of an unknown abyss.”¹⁴ Solomons’ direct reference to Tantalus, later on in the tale, reinforces the connections between his narrative and the Homeric epic that had undoubtedly sat on his family’s bookshelf in San Francisco.

Downward he goes, past “overhanging pillars of ice” and the “zigzagging, angular faces” of the crevasse’s stunning inner topography. Before long, he finds himself “in a great blue chamber carved in simple, massive grandeur, with a vaulted roof curving far up to the crack.” He has come face-to-face with the remarkable architecture of the natural world, and, in his enthrallment with it, starts to sound like the caricature of a nineteenth-century Transcendentalist. The temptation to “pause spellbound at the sight” is the greatest threat to his survival. Deep in the “blue chamber,” he comes close to giving up entirely. It is “an ecstasy of nature-love,” in fact, that almost lulls him into the “soul-reposeful sleep” that will kill him.¹⁵

Only the extreme cold brings him back to life. His survival, in fact, depends entirely on his ability to avoid thinking abstractly or embrace any affinity between himself and the indifferent forces which are on the verge of doing him in. Solomons’ actual experience on the Lyell Glacier must have reinforced his sense that staying alive necessitated resistance, as opposed to acquiescence to those forces. Accordingly, the key line in “In a Crevasse” is the one that the protagonist delivers when he finally comes to his senses and understands that life necessitates struggle, as opposed to easeful surrender. “I was fighting against the beauty,” he says, “the freezing, stupefying supernatural beauty of the crevasse.”¹⁶ Mustering up his wits, the protagonist mounts the steep, snowy slope that, if he can find a way to trust his own physical strength, will lead him out of the crevasse and back into the daylight. On emerging into the land of the living, a swallow flies past him, “a reminder and a promise” of the gift of life and of his obligation to cling to it with every ragged breath.¹⁷

For all of its melodrama, Solomons’ fictionalization of his near mishap on the Lyell Glacier reified his distinctive approach to documenting and making sense of wilderness experiences. Considering his youth and relative newness to the backcountry, the fact that he upheld any particular philosophy on the subject is remarkable, and even somewhat ironic. Comparatively early on in his career as an adventurer and writer, and despite the errors in judgment to which he freely admitted in his writing, it didn’t take him long to acquire a reputation as an expert on the subject of Sierra mountaineering.

Indeed, on the basis of his single summer’s travels in the Sierra, Solomons was invited in 1893 to contribute a short essay on John Muir to a periodical called Californian Writers and Literature. The editors of that publication referred to him as “a young writer” and “a student of the literature . . . of . . . Californian nature-lovers and scientists” who had himself “invaded the Kings River country and other fastnesses of the High Sierra.”¹⁸ (Although he would eventually spend time in the Kings River area, he wouldn’t actually get there until 1895!) Solomons’ assessment of Muir’s writing talents began with an oddly noncommittal, even tepid statement about the elder author’s essays. “Mr. Muir’s literary work,” he wrote, “is not more unique than that work would seem to suggest in his character in a man.”¹⁹ What made Muir remarkable in Solomons’ view wasn’t so much his talent as an author but his accomplishments as a mountaineer. If John Muir was an artful poet, Solomons explained, it was because he found ways to channel the splendor of the mountains into his writing. It was the wilderness, not the man, that spoke through his prose.

Solomons, whose own oeuvre had yet to come into being, appeared not to care that his comments were out of step with the mainstream view. In withholding praise from a man who was universally admired, both as an author and as a mountaineer, he was taking his chances. At best, Solomons’ assessment of Muir’s writing comprised a backhanded compliment, its salient point being that Muir’s personality was of greater consequence than anything he ever published. While Solomons’ brief review would go on to praise the naturalist’s singular aptitude for landscape description, the strained neutrality of his opening observation set the tone for the entire piece. Even his ostensible defense of Muir’s literary reputation bore uncharitable overtones. After distinguishing the naturalist from the host of “indiscriminate nature-gushers” who specialized in wilderness writing, Solomons went on to note that some readers (ostensibly, not including himself) considered Muir to be “over florid” in his poetic descriptions of mountain features.²⁰

If the literary record of Sierra travel that he would go on to produce in the coming years is any guide, Theodore Solomons found Muir’s writing to be wanting in a single essential quality: humanity. Solomons was just starting out as a writer and seemed to be operating by instinct when he prepared his critique of Muir’s work. Nonetheless, his remarks about the older naturalist can’t help but bring our attention to the stark contrast between Muir’s studied indifference to human experiences and Solomons’ predilection for telling colorful stories about his (and other people’s) high-elevation triumphs and blunders. For all of the newfound pleasure he took in traveling through the Sierras, Theodore Solomons did not wish for them to be vacated of human beings, much less ineligible for elaborate consideration as a proper foil for the expression of human feelings.

In one extended passage of his Californian Writers and Literature review, Solomons employed a method for describing Muir’s writing that he must have intended to sound complimentary. He was outlining the elder author’s ability to negate his own humanity and to downplay the prospect of mortality. According to Solomons, John Muir habitually described the beauty of the wilderness without playing up its potential for destroying the people who came to it. As the younger writer put it, Muir’s

[was] the almost tragical poetry of the wilderness, of the remote solitude, of that sublimity of desolation which hovers in the atmosphere of the naked granite or the slow-moving, eternal ice. Yet he has complained of no desolation. There is in the poetry of his prose an undercurrent of cosmical ethics . . . to which the conception of a real desolation is utterly inimical.²¹

For Solomons, the desolation that Muir managed to keep at bay was, in fact, an active if not always dominant force. From his perspective, being prompted to think about and react to that desolation was actually as good a reason as any for a person to enter the wilderness, especially because it yielded captivating stories. If Muir’s accomplishment was praiseworthy, on the other hand, it was because it eliminated every shred of human emotion (most notably, fear) from nature writing, replacing the articulation of ordinary feelings with an oddly Calvinist reverence for the grandeur of the mountains. Muir’s asceticism precluded any indulgence on his part in anything that smacked of human drama. It was unique for its time because, as Sierra Club historian Michael Cohen points out, it was “rooted in a non-anthropocentric experience of the mountains.”²² By extension, it also assumed that people “who actually lived in the mountains . . . [were] incapable of appreciating their own landscapes.”²³ Solomons’ entire career as a wilderness author would comprise an extended repudiation of this mentality. For better or worse, Theodore Solomons wasn’t ready to relinquish his subjectivity or stop telling stories in which human beings, with all of their weaknesses and foibles, figured prominently.

“No where more generous is the recompense:” Humanizing the Wilderness

Sierra Club founder John Muir went to the mountains in order to document their sanctity and to advocate for their protection. Whether or not his wanderings had been influenced by the example of the “mountain men” of the previous generation, he devoted much of his career to repudiating his predecessors’ obliviousness to and exploitation of the natural world. In his writing about the wilderness, Muir, an emigrant from Scotland who had avoided service in the Civil War, eschewed the triumphalism of Manifest Destiny.

Theodore Solomons’ representations of the time he spent in the High Sierra, by contrast, often echoed the language of the earlier explorers. He had been cast in the mold of his ancestors, who were among the first Jews come to North America and had eagerly embraced the opportunity put their long history of landlessness behind them. Many assimilated early American Jews developed the habit of celebrating the continent’s vast territory as their birthright. In his dedication of Charleston, South Carolina’s new synagogue building in 1840, Gustavus Poznanski had put it simply enough: “This happy land [is] our Palestine.” (The first San Francisco Jew to be elected to the US Congress would make a similar pronouncement in his refusal to support the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. “The United States is my Zion,” said Julius Kahn in the aftermath of the Balfour Declaration in 1919, “and San Francisco is my Jerusalem.”) Having inherited a similar mindset, Theodore Solomons was untroubled by westward expansion. He freely compared his explorations in the mountains to the efforts of earlier pathfinders. He was on a navigational mission and wanted to create an exploratory legacy.

In July of 1895, Solomons spent several weeks in the middle portion of the High Sierra in hopes of closing a final gap in his attempt to map out his vision of a crest-parallel trail from Yosemite to Kings Canyon. He would come achingly close to realizing that objective. From a commanding height of land during the second week of their trip, he and his friend Ernest Bonner had glimpsed a pass over the Goddard Divide that would link existing pathways through the much better-known northern and southern portions of the Sierra. At a crucial moment, however, a freak snowstorm forced them off the crest. For all of the hidden wonders that they had seen in their travels, the viability of a crest-parallel trail that could run the entire length of the High Sierra remained in question. Thirteen years would elapse before Solomons’ friend Joseph N. (“Little Joe”) Le Conte, with the help of the expert map that Solomons drew after his 1895 trip, would finally make it over the Goddard Divide, assuring the trail’s eventual completion.

The two men set out from a sheep camp at Jackass Meadows on July 13, hoping to make relatively quick tracks for the Goddard Divide. They made five miles, camping at Blaney Meadows, where a stockman named John Shipp had built a homestead. To this day, John Muir Trail thru-hikers know the place well because of the opportunity it offers for resupply and bathing in natural hot springs. Now occupied by a dude ranch called Muir Trail Ranch (“MTR,” in hiker lingo), the meadows in question mark the halfway point between Whitney and Yosemite.

They began the most momentous portion of their trip by traveling eastward from Blaney Meadows along the South Fork of the San Joaquin, which Solomons described as “a deep canyon.”²⁴ Though it was not “Yosemite-like in character,” Goddard Canyon (as it is labeled on maps today) was “lofty and rugged.” After traveling fourteen miles along its length, they stopped for the night where the Middle Fork, the body of water that a shepherd had told them about a few nights earlier, dropped precipitously into the canyon they’d been following.

The next morning, after caching three days’ worth of supplies for their eventual return, they began their climb along the sheepman’s recommended route up the Middle Fork. Their decision to do so was also fortified by their own calculated surmise concerning that body of water’s point of origin and overall importance. As Solomons would write in the “Minutes” that he prepared about the trip many years later, the two men “estimated that its stream flow indicated it to be the main South Fork in spite of its seeming to be merely a tributary tumbling over the north side wall.”²⁵ In other words, while the South Fork along which they had been traveling thus far was better-known and assumed to be the quickest path to the San Joaquin’s source along the Goddard Divide, the Middle Fork appeared to be conveying a much larger volume of water and was, in this sense, the “true” South Fork of the San Joaquin.

As Solomons and Bonner first encountered it on the floor of the Goddard Canyon, the Middle Fork presented “cascade falls in a continuous series twisting turning, spreading out in sheets over building rock surfaces, leaping over projecting ledges into little chasms, only to boil furiously out of them + precipitate itself over the next descent.”²⁶ Solomons had only once before seen such an amount of water passing through such a narrow space, in Yosemite’s Tuolumne Canyon. Even in the immediate aftermath of the trip, Solomons knew that he had come upon a landscape that deserved to be memorialized. “The amount of water that flows over this series of falls,” he wrote in his 1896 Sierra Club report, “is sufficiently great to name them to the dignity of important scenic features.”²⁷ In keeping with his enthusiasm for establishing navigational facts and precedents, Solomons eagerly called attention to the first discovery of his 1895 journey.

When Solomons and Bonner reached the top of the thundering gorge, the noise dissipated and gave way to sudden tranquility. Here, the Middle Fork widened its channel and meandered across six miles of nearly level ground. In the Sierra Club report, Solomons described this segment as “open spacious + entrancingly lovely” and “form[ing] a succession of meadows + groves alternating with picturesque irregularities of the side slopes.”²⁸ Today’s John Muir Trail follows the same exact trajectory. Hikers experience the Evolution Valley as a moment of level and wooded calm punctuated at both ends by precipitous—and exposed—ascents and descents. The river, as he wrote in the Sierra Club report, slows its pace, “alternat[ing] between gentle flow among boulders + lazy swims through lake like enlargements of [its] channel . . . through beautiful grassy flats.”²⁹ In the Appalachia article, Solomons provided still more poetic, if not hyperbolic, fare. “This valley,” he wrote, “I account one of the fairest paradises of the nowhere unlovely western slope of the Sierra.”³⁰

Ironically, given the fact that he’d never have gotten to it had it not been for the advice of the shepherd that he and Bonner camped with in Blaney Meadows, Solomons noted the Evolution Valley’s good fortune in having been spared from ruin by sheep. Evidently, the difficulty of approach—the tumultuous gorge that he and Bonner had climbed from the South Fork canyon—had been too steep for most sheepmen, not to mention sheep, to follow.

At the southeastern end of the river’s meandering portion, Solomons and Bonner confronted a new order of verticality. They were looking at “a colossal, sugarloaf-shaped buttress of fractured granite” that Solomons would soon name The Hermit. As that peak and its companion (and also considerably larger) peaks loomed in the distance, the two explorers confronted “an abrupt, semi-circular wall over which two streams poured in thunderous cascade.” They ascended the gorge formed by the Middle Fork and topped out onto “a splendid Alpine area” that Solomons would name in accordance with an emergent theme: Evolution Lake. He correctly judged the lake’s elevation to be roughly 11,000 feet. Whether or not he and Bonner had ever been preceded there, Theodore Solomons was without a doubt the first person to describe the place in writing in such a way as to make it possible for someone else to follow in his footsteps.

Solomons’ navigational priorities become even clearer when we contrast his description of Evolution Lake and its environs with the only other piece of writing that could, in theory, have been inspired by someone else’s visit to the same place. Interestingly, it was not the writer himself who made the claim, but a Sierra Club insider whose detective work may well have been intended to put Solomons, who claimed to have been the first person to see the area, on the defensive. In 1925, in an article he published for the California Historical Quarterly, Francis Farquhar asserted that John Muir had explored the Evolution Valley and the area surrounding Evolution Lake on an 1873 solo trip that he had made over the (as yet unnamed) Goddard Divide in his quest to climb “the highest mountain at the head of the San Joaquin.”³¹

Farquhar based his case on his interpretation of an extended passage from Muir’s book, The Mountains of California. In keeping with his usual indifference to navigational specificity, Muir had paid little attention to any of the landmarks he’d encountered along the way. In fact, the description that Farquhar identified in connection with Evolution Lake was one that Muir had included in his book’s chapter on “The Wild Sheep” of the Sierra. Muir’s purpose, ultimately, had been to tell the story of a remarkable encounter he had had with three of them.

From a quiet campsite in what would have been the Evolution Valley, Muir had written, he made his way “over huge, swelling rock-bosses through a majestic canyon, and past innumerable cascades, the scenery in general became gradually wilder and more alpine.” Passing through another area that he guessed had never been entered by human beings, Muir found his way to the foot of a cascade that plunged downward between two enormous rock walls. After climbing up a crooked seam in the rock to a viewing point, he sat down to view the territory he had just covered and realized that he was being watched by three bighorn sheep. Muir took in “the flowing undulations of their firm, braided muscles, their strong legs, ears, eyes, heads, their graceful rounded necks, the color of their hair, and the bold, upsweeping curves of their noble horns.”³² Where the encounter had taken place, in other words, was an entirely incidental matter to Muir, who had been dead for over ten years before Francis Farquhar had figured out where he’d been.

By contrast, when he and Bonner got there in 1895, Solomons knew that he had come upon a uniquely beautiful, but also historically and culturally consequential site, and he was eager to tell the world about it. Though he couldn’t yet have predicted that the crest-parallel trail would wind along the lake’s eastern shore or that its northern end would eventually play host to a succession of thousands of overnight campers, Solomons did understand that the area around Evolution Lake was the actual source of the San Joaquin. That understanding pertained to more than his immediate purpose as someone who was trying to create a crest-parallel trail and needed to know where one watershed ended and another began. Solomons grasped Evolution Lake’s symbolic importance within the framework of human experiences and legacies. The connection between the mountains and human history was a theme of greater importance to him than it was to his mountaineering peers.

Where his Sierra Club contemporaries might have been satisfied to sing its praises as a pristine alpine lake with unrivalled sweeping views of several surrounding peaks, Solomons pointed to Evolution Lake’s wider importance to the entire history and culture of California. “Such is the birthplace of the San Joaquin,” he wrote in his Appalachia article:

Such [is] the origin of that river which turns a hundred mills, irrigates a million acres of grain, fruit, and vine, and which imparts fertility and beauty to the largest and richest of California’s valleys. The Sierra crest is nowhere grander, and nowhere more generous is the recompense that awaits the wearied traveler, than here among the sources of the Middle Fork of the San Joaquin.³³

In 1884, Solomons had been a fourteen-year-old boy gazing at the faraway mountains while sitting on a bronco on the outskirts of Fresno—an inadvertent beneficiary, on his uncle Bernhard Marks’ farm, of the San Joaquin’s bounty. Now he was reveling in “the immensity of that uplifted world” that he’d once dreamed about visiting, thinking about how the two worlds were connected to each other.

Conclusion

In 1896 Solomons made two trips in the region north of the Goddard Divide. The second of the two, during which he successfully led an official Geological Survey party through the territory around Mounts Lyell, Ritter, and the Minarets that he had first visited and mapped in 1892, would prove to be his final outing in the Sierra for several decades to come, and also the last time he would be either making or following his own path through the mountains.

The events of 1897 led to a drastic change of venue for Solomons. In the flush of excitement surrounding the gold strikes in the Yukon, he traveled to Alaska and put family money to use in establishing himself there as a mine-owner. He did return to California some years after the turn of the century, visited the Sierra on multiple occasions, and even ended up building and raising his children in a house that he called Flying Spur, on the fringes of Yosemite National Park. The most rugged phase of his mountaineering and exploration career lay behind him, however, and his active contributions to the development of the John Muir Trail had come to an end. In the deliberations that took place between its official commissioning in 1915 and the completion of its final portion in 1938, Solomons weighed in freely but commanded little authority.

In large part owing to his background as a Jew, Solomons brought an entirely different perspective to bear on the wilderness than the one that we gain from reading the works of other turn-of-the-century Sierra enthusiasts. While Solomons was a highly assimilated and non-observant Jew, his relationship to the Sierra was an outgrowth of a distinctly Jewish historical experience. His mentality had been shaped, first by the centuries of exile and landlessness that his progenitors had undergone, and then by the generations-long process through which they had come to think of America as their rightful home.

As the scion of a Jewish family whose founding figure (German-born Moses Raphael Levy) had first come to North America in the 1690s, Solomons assumed its landscape to be his national birthright and imbibed an affinity for the wilderness during his childhood and adolescence in San Francisco. His proprietary attitude toward the Sierra amounted to a bold assertion of national identity and belonging. It echoed the brashness of two of his illustrious ancestors, Haym Salomon and Uriah Phillips Levy, both of whom loudly proclaimed their Americanness as a hedge against their rivals’ imputations of rootlessness and impertinence. Just as Salomon and Levy were marginalized by their non-Jewish contemporaries for being presumptuous in their embrace of American identity, so too was Theodore Solomons, at least late in his life, marginalized for claiming the High Sierra as his rightful preserve.

Solomons was a geographer who went out of his way to push past established discursive boundaries. His efforts to assert a literary and navigational claim over the mountains predated the deliberate attempts of early twentieth-century European Jews, through the development of alpine societies and agricultural projects, to inculcate a healthful and culturally assimilative alternative to centuries of urbanism and alienation from the land. Nonetheless, Solomons’ background was a launching pad for his distinct brand of landscape-based writing, in which the wilderness functioned as a foil for social commentary and the delineation of a specific geography was a method by which he could assert his belonging.

Michael Hoberman, PhD is Professor of English Studies at Fitchburg State University and an adjunct professor of history at Yeshiva University. His most recent book is Imagining Early American Jews (Oxford University Press, 2025). The John Muir Trail’s Jewish Founder: The Uplifted World of Theodore Solomons is to be published by the University of California Press.

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1. ¹ Theodore Solomons, “The Beginnings of the John Muir Trail,” Sierra Club Bulletin 25.1 (February 1940): 28.

2. ² Shirley Sargent, Solomons of the Sierra (Flying Spur Press, 1990).

3. ³ Theodore Solomons’ siblings, by birth order, included Selina (born in 1862), a prominent California suffragist; Lucius (born in 1863), an attorney and Jewish rights advocate; Adele (born 1868), a physician; and Leon (born in 1873), a pioneering psychologist.

4. ⁴ Sargent, 124.

5. ⁵ Theodore Solomons, “Among the Sources of the San Joaquin,” Sierra Club Bulletin 1.3 (January 1894): 71.

6. ⁶ Theodore Solomons, letter to William Colby, August 1940 (F. P. Farquhar Papers, Bancroft Library).

7. ⁷ Theodore Solomons, “The Beginnings of the John Muir Trail,” Sierra Club Bulletin 25.1 (February 1940): 34-35.

8. ⁸ Theodore Solomons, “Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne,” The Traveler Magazine (May 1895), 88.

9. ⁹ Solomons, “Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne.”

10. ¹⁰ John Muir, The Yosemite (Doubleday, 1912), 189.

11. ¹¹ Theodore Solomons, “Among the Sources of the San Joaquin,” 63.

12. ¹² Theodore Solomons, “In a Crevasse of the Lyell Glacier,” The Traveler Magazine, 75-79.

13. ¹³ “Crevasse,” 75.

14. ¹⁴ Solomons, “Crevasse,” 79.

15. ¹⁵ “Crevasse,” 79.

16. ¹⁶ “Crevasse,” 79.

17. ¹⁷ “Crevasse,” 79.

18. ¹⁸ Theodore Solomons, sketch of John Muir in The Story of the Files: Californian Writers and Literature, ed. Edna Sterling Cummins (World's Fair Commission of California, 1893), 155.

19. ¹⁹ Solomons, sketch of John Muir, 155.

20. ²⁰ Solomons, sketch of John Muir, 156.

21. ²¹ Solomons, sketch of John Muir, 156.

22. ²² Michael Cohen, The History of the Sierra Club, 1892-1970 (Sierra Club Books, 1988), 15.

23. ²³ Susan Schrepfer, Nature’s Altars: Mountains, Gender, and Environmentalism (University of Kansas Press, 2005), 25.

24. ²⁴ Theodore Solomons, “Mt. Goddard and its Vicinity, in the High Sierra of California,” Appalachia 8 (January 1896): 45.

25. ²⁵ Theodore Solomons, “Minutes of trips on the High Sierras of Theodore S. Solomons, 1895,” Yosemite Archives, Shirley Sargent Papers, Collection 2006.

26. ²⁶ Theodore Solomons, manuscript of February 1896 report to the Sierra Club, Lilbourne Winchell Papers, Bancroft MSS C-B 517, Carton 8.

27. ²⁷ Solomons, report to the Sierra Club.

28. ²⁸ Solomons, report to the Sierra Club.

29. ²⁹ Solomons, report to the Sierra Club.

30. ³⁰ Solomons, “Mt. Goddard and its Vicinity,” 46.

31. ³¹ Francis Farquhar, “Exploration of the Sierra Nevada,” California Historical Society Quarterly 4.1 (March 1925): 28.

32. ³² John Muir, The Mountains of California (1894) (Ten Speed Press, 1977), 315.

33. ³³ Solomons, “Mt. Goddard and its Vicinity,” 49.

Abstract

Eli Lederhendler

Some fifty years ago, three scholars set forth their respective approaches toward explaining the phenomenon of American Conservative Judaism. Each chose a different historical and sociological context that, in their eyes, was the essential fulcrum for understanding why, when, and how a distinctively identified denomination, neither Reform nor Orthodox, became a characteristic part of American Jewish life. This article looks at the models that were proposed by Moshe Davis, Charles (Yeshayahu) Liebman, and Marshall Sklare, respectively, and the differences among them.

Davis, a one-time dean at the Teachers Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary, outlined an ideological trajectory in the late nineteenth century that led modernizing but traditionalist rabbis to turn away from the already-existing Reform option. He linked these American-based developments to the role played by rabbis of the “positive-historical school” in Central Europe.

For his part, Liebman eschewed the idea of an ideological confrontation with Reform and, indeed, gave relatively little credit to rabbis of the “positive-historical school.” Instead, he argued that the Conservative synagogue was a product of non-elite (“folk”) origins and motives. He assigned a key role to the posture of religious laxity that prevailed among the many East European Jewish immigrants who arrived in massive numbers after the turn of the twentieth century.

Sklare, whose argument transferred the movement’s formative period closer to the middle years of the twentieth century, described it as an ethnic phenomenon that took root in the rising middle class neighborhoods of second-generation American Jews. Ideology, as with Liebman’s theory, played a minor role if at all.

One of the things they had in common was that each one of these theorists assigned great significance to the arrival of European Jewish immigrants: Central European rabbis, in Davis’s narrative; East European laypeople, in both Liebman’s and Sklare’s models. The arrival of the immigrants and the ways in which they negotiated their integration into American life proved crucial, whether one looked at the latter nineteenth century or the first half of the twentieth. The result was a blend of American denominationalism and religious privatization—co-opted from the prevailing religious environment of that time—infused with the spirit of Jewish tradition. This hybrid religious format, in turn, enabled Jews to appear less different, even as they practiced their own separate customs and traditions.

Looking at these scholars’ approaches today, after the passage of half a century, allows for a critical reassessment of their ideas. Davis’s ideological trailblazers approach was significantly challenged, not only by Liebman and by Sklare, but also by more recent scholarship. Jonathan Sarna posited a process of institutional and denominational separation of the JTS-affiliated rabbis from Orthodoxy during the second and third decades of the twentieth century. Michael Cohen, who also looked closely at the early twentieth century, demonstrated the crucial importance of a cadre of younger men, protégés of Solomon Schechter.

Liebman’s “folk religion” theory failed to fully take account of the fact that the version of Judaism that prevailed among the American Jewish congregations of that time was not, in fact, of the same type of popular religion that could be labeled as “native” to the East European immigrants. Rather, some interim, westernizing and modernizing stage or filter, weighted toward a conservative “Lithuanian” (i.e., non-Hasidic) mindset, could be observed among the congregants. This was a religious culture already transformed into something rather less intuitive, something more self-aware, than Liebman’s model of cultural inertia would allow.

Sklare’s notion of a middle-class “ethnic church,” emergent in American Jewish life toward the mid-twentieth century, must be contextualized in order to be fully appreciated. The very close analogy that Sklare drew between a religious middle ground, on the one hand, and a class-based “middle” of the socioeconomic scale, reflected the prevailing trend in liberal philosophy during the 1950s and 1960s. That philosophy (itself a by-product of postwar American life) lent vital significance to the convergence of “right” and “left” toward a liberal center, just as it underwrote the idea of a homogenized “middle class” as a liberal, American alternative to binary Marxian models of class struggle.

As suggested, in all these theories, Conservative Judaism served as a bridge to America’s prevailing culture and, hence, as a means to minimize Jewish differences. Some of the more recent transformations in Jewish and American life have continued to underscore the notion of Jewish conformity with western or American norms. Such changes include the internalization of lifestyle and gender egalitarianism and other aspects of the heightened privatization of the religious realm. On the other hand, Jewish differences, despite expectations to the contrary, have also become more visible in recent years, given the political travails in American society.

Eli Lederhendler, PhD is Professor Emeritus and Stephen S. Wise Chair in American Jewish History and Institutions in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Elliot Dorff

“America—Founded on Biblical Precepts” is a reading found in the Sabbath and Festival Prayer Book;¹ in Siddur Sim Shalom;² and, in shortened form, in Siddur Lev Shalem.³ It is a reading that has spanned the development of Conservative prayer books. As described in the Sabbath and Festival Prayer Book, “The selections are drawn alternatively from the classics of American political thought and the Bible.”⁴ The intention, as the title of the reading indicates, is to show that foundational American convictions are the same as those in the Bible, thus making American Jews feel that the values at the heart of their identities as both Americans and Jews are one and the same, and so Jews should feel at home in America.

Rabbi Louis J. Swichkow, z”l, the rabbi of the large Conservative synagogue in Milwaukee in which I was first educated in Judaism, loved this reading, probably because it spoke directly to what the adults in the congregation, predominantly second-generation Jews whose parents came from Eastern Europe, wanted to believe—as, I am sure, he himself did. The Friday night services were well attended, and at that service before each American holiday (except Christmas) he had the congregation recite this reading responsively out loud. As a result, it has been for me a piece of my identity as an American and as a Jew since I was old enough in my teens to understand it.

Subsequently, though, I became a rabbi and earned a PhD in philosophy, and those backgrounds have led me to compare American convictions with Jewish ones in print.⁵ Without repeating that material here, let me say that, indeed, some foundational American principles are the same or at least similar to American ones; some are very different. So before analyzing the asserted similarities in the reading, “America—Founded on Biblical Precepts,” I will zoom out to identify two of the most important foundational concepts in the two traditions that are alike and two that are different.

Foundational Principles that Are Similar and Different

Most fundamentally, both American and Jewish sources see the individual as worthy of respect and protection, although for different reasons. In the US Declaration of Independence, we are each created equal and endowed with rights; in the Bible, each of us is created in the image of God. Both traditions then spend considerable time articulating exactly what that precept means for, respectively, American and Jewish ways of thinking and behaving.

This is not obvious: communist societies and dictatorships prioritize, respectively, the interests of the community or of the ruler over those of individuals. The American and Jewish perspectives are also not anarchic. In the United States, it is “We, the people” who together create the Constitution, and we do so “in order to create a more perfect union” (than had been possible under the previous Articles of Confederation), and the Jewish people are in covenant with each other and with God. Still, the fact that the United States and Judaism insist on the value of each individual is an important similarity.

Another foundational similarity is that both traditions are committed to the rule of law. In Deuteronomy 17:13-20, the Torah requires the king to have a copy of the Torah with him, to read it “all the days of his life,” and to “observe faithfully every word of this Teaching as well as these laws.” Similarly, although this is now being sorely tested, American law, since its inception, has been understood to apply to the president and all other government officials. Thus both traditions describe a society governed by law, not by individuals in power.

On the other hand, the two societies differ in important respects. One of those is in how they understand the relationship between individuals and the community. The US Declaration of Independence affirms that we are individuals with liberty. In practice, this means that while it is hard to become an American if a person was not born in the United States, citizens who have not committed a felony can renounce their citizenship at any time by filling out a form in any US embassy or consulate outside the United States.⁶ Some Americans do that each year, largely for tax reasons.

In contrast, the central Jewish story is Exodus, Sinai, and the trek to the Promised Land, in which we leave Egypt not as individuals but as a group, and at Sinai we get, by traditional count, 613 commandments⁷ and not a single right. Rights and duties are often reciprocal: for example, my right to my jacket imposes a duty on you not to steal it. In a deep sense, though, if I get up in the morning as a person with rights, then the world owes me. In contrast, if I get up in the morning as a member of a community with duties, then I owe the world.

Furthermore, unlike the voluntary nature of American identity, which any citizen can renounce at will, Jewish identity is organic. A Jew is a member of a body politic, and just as your hand cannot decide to leave your body, so too, once a Jew, always a Jew. So Jews who convert to another religion are apostates and lose the privileges of being Jews—they cannot count as part of a prayer quorum (minyan), be married as a Jew, rely on the Jewish community for financial support or redemption from captivity, etc.—but they can renounce their apostasy and revert to being Jewish at any time with minimal requirements because, as the Talmud says, “A Jew who sinned is still a Jew.”⁸ American identity is thus strongly individualistic and voluntary, while Jewish identity is organic and much more communitarian.

Another significant difference between the two systems of thought and law stems from the stated mission of both groups. The US Declaration of Independence declares that “to secure these rights governments are instituted among men,” and the Preamble to the US Constitution describes a number of important, pragmatic goals for the government. While much of the Bible delineates how the Jewish community should behave to have a safe, just, and thriving society, akin to the pragmatic goals of the Preamble, ultimately the goal of Jewish law and thought is to create “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6) and even “a light to the nations” (Isaiah 42:6). Some American governments have sought to spread American style democracy to the rest of the world, but that aspiration is not built into the founding documents or even the law of the United States, while the Bible itself articulates aspirational goals for the Jewish community.

With these general comparisons of the two societies’ foundational convictions in mind, I will evaluate the degree to which the passages in the reading “America—Founded on Biblical Precepts” do accurately assert the same, or at least similar, viewpoints or values. The original reading in the Sabbath and Festival Prayer Book, reproduced in Sim Shalom, had eight such comparisons, but I will analyze only the four comparisons in Siddur Lev Shalem, the movement’s current prayer book, where the reading is called “America’s Biblical Heritage.”

First Comparison: Creation

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

—Declaration of Independence

Have we not all one Creator? Has not one God created us?

—Malachi 2:10

What these two excerpts share is the perspective that every person has, presumably in addition to that person’s parents, a divine creator, and that consequently all human beings are equally of divine worth. The two readings differ, though, in several ways.

First, Thomas Jefferson deliberately wrote “their Creator” rather than “God” because he, like most of the Founding Fathers, was a deist, not a theist. That is, he believed in a creative force but not a personal God. Malachi uses both the terms “Creator” and “God” in the parallelism common in biblical passages, indicating that he believed that they were one and the same, that our Creator was a personal God.

Second, although Jefferson wrote that “all men” are created equal, and although he might have meant all human beings, what the Founding Fathers wrote in the Constitution did not include all men. Only three-fifths of slaves were to count for purposes of calculating how many representatives a state would have in the House of Representatives⁹ (and that was a compromise, for the northern states did not want any slaves to count because they could not vote and because that would raise the representation of slave states). “Indians not taxed” were not counted; women did not count at all. It is not clear how expansive Malachi’s “all” and “us” are, but he seems to be referring to all human beings.

Third, and possibly most important, the lesson that Jefferson derives from human equality is that we all have rights. It is highly unlikely that this is what Malachi had in mind, given the duties-based conception at the heart of the Exodus-Sinai story. Malachi probably meant that we should respect every other person as a creature of God, which, in his mind, probably meant that we should fulfil our duties to each other.

Second Comparison: Justice

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

—Preamble to the US Constitution

Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may thrive in the land that ADONAI your God gives you.

—Deuteronomy 16:20

These two excerpts obviously share a commitment to justice. What, though, does that mean in the two cultures and legal systems? As I describe in my essay, “Justice,” in our movement’s Torah commentary, Etz Hayim, justice involves both procedural and substantive concerns.¹⁰ However, even a brief comparison of how justice in both senses is understood and applied in the American and Jewish traditions reveals major differences. With regard to procedure, the Torah requires, for example, two witnesses to confirm any claim, and the Rabbis require that the witnesses not be related to each other or to the litigants or culprits. In American law the testimony of only one witness or even circumstantial evidence can establish financial liability or even criminal guilt and the witnesses can be related to each other or to the parties involved.

With regard to substantive justice, Jewish law is much more demanding than American law in its provisions for supporting the poor, the sick, and the stranger. I describe more of these differences with their sources from both traditions in my book, To Do the Right and the Good: A Jewish Approach to Modern Social Ethics.¹¹ So yes, both systems are committed to justice, but what that commitment entails is understood very differently in the two cultures and legal systems. That there should be such differences should not be surprising, for the problem of defining justice is the subject of one of the first books in Western philosophy, Plato’s Republic, and that topic continues to occupy philosophers, legislators, and jurists to our own day.

Third Comparison: Liberty

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

—The Bill of Rights (the First Amendment to the Constitution)

Proclaim liberty through the land, for all its inhabitants.

—Leviticus 25:10

Here again, there is a common theme in these two passages—that of freedom or liberty—but the liberties promised are very different. After Congress had completed the Constitution in 1787, they had what I often call an “oops” moment, for they had forgotten to include in that document the very freedoms that led them to revolt against England. So just four years later, on December 15, 1791, the first ten amendments that articulated those rights and gave them Constitutional status were ratified when three-fourths of the states approved 10 of the 12 proposed amendments that had been sent to them by Congress in October 1789. This excerpt, from the First Amendment, bans Congress from establishing a national religion or prohibiting the free exercise of any religion or from “abridging” the freedoms of speech, the press, assembly, or petition. The second through eighth amendments guarantee other specific rights. Then, to avoid another embarrassing need to add to the Constitution rights that they had not thought of, Congress established, in the Ninth Amendment, that “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people,” and, in the Tenth Amendment, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

In all these cases, these are rights against governmental interference, but despite their Constitutional status, the Supreme Court has interpreted these amendments in ways that do indeed “abridge” them, and Congress has adopted laws that limit them as well. With regard to freedom of speech, for example, one may not say things that were directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless actions, as, for example, a riot,¹² and with regard to the free exercise of religion, Congress adopted the Edmunds Act, also known as the Edmunds Anti-Polygamy Act of 1882. Signed into law on March 23, 1882, by President Chester A. Arthur, it declared polygamy a felony in federal territories, punishable by “a fine of not more than five hundred dollars and by imprisonment for a term of not more than five years,” deliberately making illegal the polygamous practice of the Church of Latter Day Saints. (Sephardic Jews and Muslims also have historically allowed polygamy, but those groups were very small in the United States of that time and were not the target of this legislation.) Thus, despite the Amendment’s promise not to “abridge” the rights of which it speaks, American law has done just that.

The verse in Leviticus is not liberty against a government at all. It is, in context, the liberty to reclaim the land of one’s family every fifty years, despite its being sold in the interim to other people. Yes, the verse is engraved on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia as a way of celebrating American freedoms, but that is a use of the verse counter to its original meaning. The authors of this reading in our prayer books are similarly using the verse against its contextual meaning. Moreover, the Torah definitely does not assert the liberty of Jews to adopt another religion or say anything they want. Indeed, what is known as the Second Commandment of the Decalogue (Exodus 20:3-6; Deuteronomy 5:7-10), the chapters of warning in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, and many verses in Deuteronomy ban worshipping other gods and describe dire warnings if the Israelites go astray in that way. With regard to the freedom of speech, the Torah—and the Rabbis later on—prohibit many forms of speech that American law allows.¹³ So juxtaposing these two excerpts not only reads the Leviticus verse out of context, but also misstates the position of Judaism to be the same as the freedoms of speech and religion affirmed in the First Amendment.

The author of this reading is not identified in any of the three prayer books that include it. It may have been Rabbi Morris Silverman, for it first appears in the prayer book he edited. He surely knew the dissonances that I described in the previous paragraph, so why did he use the verse in Leviticus that way? My guess is that it was either motivated by the same usage on the Liberty Bell and/or by the desire to make American Jews feel at home in America. It no doubt was also a way to acknowledge and express gratitude for the freedoms we have in the United States—in sharp contrast to the ways Jews were treated in many other nations throughout history. So interpreting the verse in Leviticus to reinforce a sense of congruence in American Jews’ Jewish and American identities was worth whatever dissonance that caused with its meaning in context.

There is another biblical text that more accurately affirms the kind of religious liberty and pluralism that the First Amendment asserts, but it is messianic. Micah, in the first three verses of Chapter 4, first quotes his teacher Isaiah (2:2-4), but then he adds two verses that change Isaiah’s vision of everyone in the future becoming Jewish to a religiously pluralistic, hoped-for future:

1. In the days to come,
   The Mount of the LORD’s House shall stand
   Firm above the mountains;
   And it shall tower above the hills.
   The peoples shall gaze on it with joy
2. And the many nations shall go and shall say:
   “Come,
   Let us go up to the Mount of the LORD,
   To the House of the God of Jacob;
   That we may be instructed in His ways,
   And that we may walk in His paths.”
   For instruction shall come forth from Zion,
   The word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
3. Thus, He will judge among the many peoples,
   And arbitrate for the multitude of nations,
   However distant;
   And they shall beat their swords into plowshares
   And their spears into pruning hooks.
   Nation shall not take up
   Sword against nation;
   They shall never again know war;
4. But every man shall sit
   Under his grapevine or fig tree
   With no one to disturb him.
   For it was the LORD of Hosts who spoke.
5. Though all the peoples walk
   Each in the names of its gods,
   We will walk
   In the name of the LORD our God
   Forever and ever.¹⁴

The biblical story of the Exodus from Egypt was a pervasive and powerful influence on the American colonies and the early United States, providing a foundational narrative of liberation and national identity. Colonists, particularly the Puritans, viewed their migration to America as a new exodus, escaping British oppression (Pharaoh) and establishing a “New Israel.” This “chosenness” narrative continued into the Revolution, with patriots like John Adams and Thomas Paine comparing King George III to Pharaoh and the colonists to the enslaved Israelites, with George Washington as Moses. The theme was so strong that Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin proposed designs for the Great Seal of the United States based on the Exodus story.¹⁵ So either the passage quoted above from Micah or a reasonably short selection of biblical verses describing the Exodus (e.g., Exodus 2:7-11; Deuteronomy 26:5-9) would have been a more fitting match to the First Amendment for this reading, both in what each text says about liberty and in the intentions of the writers of both passages as to its nature.

Fourth Comparison: Peace

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in … to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.

—Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address

They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift sword against nation, and they shall not again know war. People shall dwell under their own vines, under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid.

—Isaiah 2:4, Micah 4:3-4.

The chosen biblical verse is part of the verses I suggested above for the theme of liberty, but that works only if the next verse (4:5) in the Micah excerpt is added, as I did above in the third comparison. The verses quoted in the reading from both Isaiah and Micah do indeed look forward to a time of peace, as did Lincoln’s address, and because they both are dreams of a future of peace, this selection from the Bible is apt. Another possibility would be Psalm 34:15: “Seek peace and pursue it.”

In any case, the desire for peace in the ideologies of Judaism and the United States are certainly similar. Unlike some of the nations of Europe, Russia, and China, the United States has never sought to establish a colonial empire. Some of the colonies have been given the choice of becoming independent, as the Philippines did; of becoming states, as Hawaii and Alaska did. Others, like Guam and Puerto Rico, remain American territories. This, of course, does not mean that the United States has refrained from engaging in wars, including some like those in Vietnam and Afghanistan, that ended badly. War and conquest, though, are not the desired state of affairs in American ideology, as they were in colonial empires from at least as far back as Alexander the Great to the European empires of the last few centuries.

The Pharisees who shaped the rabbinic tradition opposed the Zealots’ efforts to fight Rome, choosing instead to establish the Sanhedrin in Yavneh. This decision to avoid war with Rome did not extend to the point of making Judaism pacifist. Jews have fought in wars for the country in which they lived through the ages, and the State of Israel has unfortunately had to engage in multiple wars and other military operations. That said, peace, not war, was the goal. That is articulated at least three times each day at the culmination of the Amidah, at the end of all forms of the Kaddish except the half-Kaddish, and at the end of Birkat ha-Mazon (the blessings after meals) as well, in each case, reminding the person saying the prayer that peace is the Jewish goal. This is also expressed in these two rabbinic passages:

Rabbi Shimon ben Halafta said: See how desirable is peace! When the Holy One sought to bless Israel, He found no term that included all the blessings He wished to bestow upon them except for peace. How do we know this? Because it is written, “May Adonai grant His people strength; may Adonai bless His people with peace” (Psalms 29:11).¹⁶

“Seek peace and pursue it” (Psalms 34:15). The Law does not order you to run after or pursue the other commandments, but only to fulfill them on the appropriate occasion. But peace you must seek in your own place and pursue it even to another place as well.¹⁷

In sum, many important American convictions are indeed the same or similar to Jewish ones, but some of the foundational beliefs and values of Judaism and the United States diverge; even a common belief or value is sometimes interpreted or applied in different ways in the two traditions. Despite bouts of antisemitism at various points in American history—in particular, in the first decades of the twentieth century and again in recent years—we Jews have rightfully been grateful for the opportunities we have had and the way we have been treated in the United States, motivated at least in part by the beliefs and values these two traditions share. The author of this reading sought to capture the feeling of many Jews that they are part of America and are grateful to America. In that, despite my demurs above, the writer was certainly correct.

Rabbi Elliot Dorff, PhD serves as the rector and Sol and Anne Dorff Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy at American Jewish University. His most recent book is Ethics at the Center: Jewish Theory and Practice for Living a Moral Life (Jewish Publication Society/University of Nebraska Press, 2024).

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1. ¹ Sabbath and Festival Prayer Book, Rabbi Morris Silverman, ed. (Rabbinical Assembly/United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, 1946), 353-354.

2. ² Siddur Sim Shalom, Rabbi Jules Harlow, ed. (Rabbinical Assembly/United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, 1985), 821-823.

3. ³ Siddur Lev Shalem, Rabbi Edward Feld, ed. (Rabbinical Assembly, 2016), 453.

4. ⁴ Sabbath and Festival Prayer Book, 353.

5. ⁵ See Elliot N. Dorff, To Do the Right and the Good: A Jewish Approach to Modern Social Ethics (Jewish Publication Society, 2002), chap. 1; and Elliot N. Dorff, Ethics at the Center: Jewish Theory and Practice for Living a Moral Life (Jewish Publication Society, 2024), chap. 3.

6. ⁶ Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) Section 349(a)(5). See U.S. Department of State, “Relinquishing U.S. Nationality Abroad,” https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/travel-legal-considerations/us-citizenship/Relinquishing-US-Nationality-Abroad.html.

7. ⁷ b. Makkot 23b-24a; b. Yevamot 47b; Maimonides, Sefer Ha-Mitzvot, Positive Commandments 1:1.

8. ⁸ b. Sanhedrin 44a. An apostate is considered as not Jewish “for all matters”: M.T. Divorce 3:15; S.A. Even Ha-Ezer 123:2. So, for example, the Jewish community may not use its resources to redeem an apostate from captivity: M.T. Gifts to the Poor 8:14, S.A. Yoreh De’ah 252:6. However, an apostate’s reentry into the Jewish community can be done with minimal requirements: S.A. Yoreh De’ah 268:12 gloss.

9. ⁹ Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the US Constitution (1787).

10. ¹⁰ Elliot N. Dorff, “Justice,” in Etz Hayim: Torah and Commentary, David L. Lieber, ed. (Rabbinical Assembly and Jewish Publication Society, 2001), 1427–1430.

11. ¹¹ Dorff, To Do the Right and the Good (at note 5 above), chap. 5 and 6.

12. ¹² Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969).

13. ¹³ For Jewish norms of speech, see Elliot N. Dorff, The Way Into Tikkun Olam (Repairing the World) (Jewish Lights, 2005), chap. 4, and the following responsa that I wrote for the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards: “Modest Communication,” https://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/sites/default/files/modest_speech.final.june.pdf and “Harmful Communication,” https://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/sites/default/files/harmful_speech.final.june.pdf.

14. ¹⁴ This is the translation in JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh (Jewish Publication Society, 1999), 1344-1345, which is the translation of the Bible that Conservative Movement publications have used in its prayer books and in Etz Hayim: Torah and Commentary (The Rabbinical Assembly and The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, 2001).

15. ¹⁵ Michael Frend, “How the Exodus Story Created America,” Jerusalem Post, March 29, 2013, https://www.jpost.com/opinion/columnists/how-the-exodus-story-created-america-308136;

    Stuart Halpern, “Exodus, America’s Ever-Present Inspiration,” Lehrhaus, April 13, 2020, https://thelehrhaus.com/coronavirus/the-exodus-americas-ever-present-inspiration.

16. ¹⁶ Deuteronomy Rabbah 5:15.

17. ¹⁷ j. Peah 1:1. Another part of this, of course, is learning to respect each other and live together amid differing opinions and patterns of action. For the historical, epistemological, and theological grounds for such pluralism, see Dorff, To Do the Right and the Good (at note 10), 37-60.