From Summit to Precipice Conservative Judaism and the Challenges of the Twenty-First Century

Jonathan Rosenbaum

Prologue

This article seeks to explore the factors that led to the rise of Conservative Judaism as the dominant American Jewish movement from the immediate postwar period until the last decade of the twentieth century and the circumstances that precipitated a dramatic change in its standing in the twenty-first century. The common yet competitive connections between Conservative and Orthodox Judaism from the late nineteenth century through the 1960s and Conservative Judaism’s subsequent but gradual adoption of innovations that originated in the Reform Movement while preserving its commitment to halakhah comprise key foci of this study. Inextricably linked to these developments is the changing role of halakhah in Conservative Judaism. Many trends are inchoate and identifying areas for further research constitutes an integral goal of this study.

A Prescient Beginning

The inaugural issue of the journal Conservative Judaism possesses a jarring date: January 1945. The end of World War II was still on the horizon. In Europe, the Battle of the Bulge, the last major Nazi offensive, was challenging the Allied advance; in the Pacific, Okinawa, the bloodiest battle of that theater, had yet to commence. Military planners were designing the ensuing invasion of Japan, with estimates of catastrophic casualties and no end to the war until 1947. The term “genocide” had just been invented, and most did not know the full extent of the mechanized mass murder of Jews that would come to be known as the Holocaust.1

In a prescient introduction to the journal, Robert Gordis (1908–92) of the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) systematically identified the challenges facing American Judaism generally and Conservative Judaism in particular.2 While noting the increasing religious identification of Jewish soldiers, especially with Conservative Judaism, he succinctly pinpointed the movement’s deficiencies: weakness of organization, absence of a clearly enunciated philosophy, and widespread lack of success in its educational program.3 He even made note of the inapt name of the movement, an issue that has grown more pertinent in a politically divided society. Gordis nevertheless saw Conservative Judaism as the leading movement in postwar American Judaism:

No other group in American Judaism has grown as steadily and rapidly as Conservative Judaism. Orthodox Judaism has been, in recent years, becoming increasingly aggressive, often insisting on underlining a kind of isolationism almost Catholic in character. Yet it has steadily been losing ground, with growing numbers of orthodox rabbis going to conservative congregations, a situation true of the reform rabbinate as well, before the Chaplaincy absorbed a large number of the recent graduates. Reform Judaism has been holding its own only because of new accretions from traditionalist ranks, attracted chiefly by its social prestige or the personality of individual rabbis. On the other hand, Conservative Judaism has steadily gone forward in the number of its congregations, sisterhoods and men’s clubs throughout the country.4

Gordis did not take Conservative Judaism’s success for granted:

Many Jewish service men have for the first time been brought into contact with Jewish religious life. Their Jewish pride has been stimulated, their sense of Jewish comradeship strengthened…. All indications are that when demobilization sets in, the returning service men will at least at the beginning come to the synagogue and the rabbi for guidance and inspiration. If we have a vital program of spirituality and content to offer, they will be saved to Judaism forever. If not they will soon relapse into the old indifference.5

Gordis personified that rare combination of congregational rabbi and rigorous scholar. As an academic activist, he proposed incisive hypotheses and then personally tested them through implementation. Although well known as an influential biblical scholar, he embraced the role of religious philosopher. Conservative Jewish education in the 1940s consisted of three days a week of post–public school religious education plus Shabbat attendance. Gordis considered this regimen woefully inadequate and proposed a fourth day and a stronger curriculum, yet he declared that only a day-school education could provide sufficient Jewish learning, particularly in Hebrew.

Gordis saw the postwar potential of Conservative Judaism. He had witnessed the blossoming of the movement in the aftermath of World War I and the subsequent halt to such progress with the advent of the Great Depression.6

An Uneasy Commonality:
The Overlap and Competition of Orthodox and Conservative Judaism

On the eve of World War II, Conservative Judaism and what would come to be called Modern Orthodox Judaism overlapped theologically, halakhically, and in praxis. Many of their congregants strove for precise halakhic observance, and some achieved it. Many others were bound by a nostalgic and sincere but inconsistent commitment to observance. Although not unknown in Jewish history, the peculiarly American, paradoxical, even oxymoronic reality of nonobservant Orthodox Jews has attracted scholarly acknowledgement and analysis.7 Whether driven by financial necessity or social pressure, whether qualifying the nonobservant Orthodox person as tinoq shenishbah, mumar leteiʾavon, or even mumar lekhol haTorah, the phenomenon often linked interwar and postwar Orthodox Jews to their Conservative counterparts.8

In 1926–27, that similarity facilitated a serious attempt to unite JTS and the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS). It would be the first of two projects aimed at producing substantive halakhic cooperation between Conservative and Orthodox Judaism in America. (The second would converge on the problem of the ʿagunah, which receives attention later in this article.) The lack of consistent halakhic observance by much of the laity of both the Conservative and Orthodox communities reinforced the impression among some leading Jewish communal leaders that RIETS could be merged with JTS. Louis Marshall, perhaps the most influential Jewish lay leader of the day, initiated correspondence and meetings between financial supporters of JTS and RIETS as well as their presidents, Cyrus Adler and Bernard Revel, respectively.9 In theory, the merger seemed feasible.

On the surface, the institutions’ presidents seem to have much in common. Adler (1863–1940) was born in America, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, and earned the first American Ph.D. in Semitics at Johns Hopkins University (1887).10 In 1908 he became president of the newly established Dropsie College and remained in that role for the rest of his life. After the death of Solomon Schechter in 1915, Adler became acting president of JTS in 1916 and president in 1924. He led both institutions simultaneously until his death in 1940. A prolific scholar, Adler was a founder of the Jewish Publication Society (1888) and the American Jewish Historical Society (1892). He edited the American Jewish Yearbook (1899–1905) and was a departmental editor of The Jewish Encyclopedia (1901–06).11

Revel (1885–1940), a Lithuania-trained rabbi who had attended the Telz yeshiva and received semikhah at the age of sixteen, came to the United States in 1906. In 1912, he received the first Ph.D. granted by Dropsie College. In 1915, he left a family business to accept the dual roles of president and rosh yeshiva of RIETS. In those capacities, he framed RIETS’s academic structure, oversaw the emergence of Yeshiva College (YC) in 1928, the building of its campus in Washington Heights, and the establishment of its various divisions, including the graduate school that would posthumously bear his name.12

Both Adler and Revel were master builders and visionaries who maintained their scholarly output while administering and planning the growth of institutions that would become centers of Jewish scholarship and the training of rabbis and other klei qodesh.13 Yet, if one examines the educational philosophy of these leaders and their institutions, it becomes clear that the merger of JTS and RIETS was doomed from its inception.

Adler and Revel intersected at the nexus of Dropsie College, but their disparate connections to that institution dramatize their differences.14 For several decades after its founding in 1907 and its opening in 1909, Dropsie College was the only nontheological institution in the United States that offered the Ph.D. in Judaic studies. Revel’s dissertation, “The Karaite Halakhah and Its Relation to Sadducean, Samaritan, and Philonian Halakhah,” granted under Adler’s presidency, refuted Abraham Geiger, a key figure in the promotion of Wissenschaft des Judentums. Further, Revel had sought to found an organization that would unite Jewish academicians under Orthodox auspices, to the exclusion of non-Orthodox scholars, and even invited Adler, a devout Jew, to join.15

Adler had helped to bring Schechter to JTS from Cambridge, saw critical scholarship as central, and felt that JTS was broad enough in scope to accommodate faculty with relatively radical ideas. Schechter’s discovery and publications regarding the Cairo Genizah, his standing as Reader in Rabbinics at Cambridge (1894) and Professor of Hebrew at University College London (1897) fulfilled the ideals of earlier practitioners of Wissenschaft who saw the university as the rightful place of Jewish studies.16 Schechter himself enthusiastically espoused Wissenschaft and the critical analysis of texts and history it advocates as a “Temple of Truth.”17

Schechter and Adler evinced an openness to a wide spectrum of colleagues. Schechter invited Hebrew Union College (HUC) President Kaufmann Kohler to the dedication of the JTS campus (1903) and spoke at the opening of HUC’s new campus in 1913.18 Although opposed to Reform Judaism, he worked amicably with Kohler on the Jewish Encyclopedia (1901–6) and even attended an outing with Kohler and radical Reform Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch.19

Adler built on Schechter’s academic edifice of scholarly respect and ideological diversity and thus resisted attacks on JTS’s most radical faculty member, Mordecai Kaplan (1881–1983).20 Born in Lithuania, the son of a Volozhin-trained rabbi, Kaplan was ordained at JTS in 1902. At that time, JTS was seen as a seminary for training Orthodox rabbis, albeit rabbis with university training, fluent in English, and accustomed to American culture. Kaplan took an educational position at Kehillath Jeshurun. In 1908, while on his honeymoon in Europe, Kaplan received semikhah from Rabbi Isaac Jacob Reines (1839–1915). Reines, a founder and the first head of Mizrachi, was also a product of the Volozhin yeshiva, Lithuanian Jewry’s elite and most selective rabbinic center of learning.21 Despite his pedigree and Orthodox bona fides, Kaplan was already ambivalent about Orthodoxy and in 1909 willingly accepted Schechter’s invitation to become principal of JTS’s newly established Teachers Institute. Kaplan also served as the first rabbi of New York’s (Orthodox) Jewish Center, from its opening in 1918 until 1922, when his personal conflicts and disagreements with members led to his decision to resign. Kaplan’s rejection of Orthodoxy had become more pronounced, and, that same year, 1922, he organized the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, the synagogue vehicle that helped pioneer his development of Reconstructionist Judaism. Judaism as a Civilization (1934) laid out its program.22 Throughout this ideological evolution, Kaplan remained a key faculty member at JTS under Adler.

Kaplan’s (a)theological radicalism, which culminated in his rejection of a personal God who acts in human affairs, reached a defining moment with the publication of Reconstructionism’s Sabbath Prayer Book (1945).23 The work garnered no small share of popular criticism and led Agudath Ha-Rabbonim, the union of staunchly Orthodox rabbis, to issue a dramatic and immediate excommunication (ḥerem) of Kaplan, with one of its members burning the siddur.24 The ḥerem sealed Kaplan’s standing as a lightning rod among the most stringent elements of Orthodoxy, elements that were and remained integral to RIETS’s identity and mission. Yet his dramatic excommunication had an unintended consequence: it publicly revealed that leading members of JTS’s Talmud faculty were committed to defending Kaplan’s right to his views and, by extension, to academic freedom.

Since 1902, Louis Ginzberg (1873–1953) had led and built JTS’s renowned Talmud department, the pride and nexus of the Seminary. A product of the Lithuanian yeshivot of Telz and Slobodka, he also earned a doctorate at University of Heidelberg in 1898. Ambivalent about Wissenschaft des Judentums, he was nevertheless a committed advocate of the “Positive-Historical School” that became the Conservative Movement. Committed to the principles of Zacharias Frankel and the pedagogical method of the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar Fraenckel’sche Stiftung in Breslau, he produced rigorous critical scholarship. A descendent of Abraham, the brother of the Vilna Gaon, Ginzberg was a polymath who possessed the exquisite Lithuanian rabbinic credentials that made him formidable in Orthodox circles.

Ginzberg and Kaplan were “lifelong combatants.”25 Ginzberg served as the primary decisor of halakhic questions (poseq) for the Conservative Movement until 1927, when Kaplan and others succeeded in replacing him in his role as chief poseq with the Committee on Jewish Law of the Rabbinical Assembly (RA).26 Nevertheless, when the Agudath Ha-Rabbonim issued its ḥerem against Kaplan in 1945, Ginzberg, Saul Lieberman, and Alexander Marx opposed it in English and Hebrew publications, although they also critiqued and condemned Kaplan’s siddur.27

In retrospect, the proposed merger of JTS and RIETS was naïve. Kaplan’s evolving personal theology and concept of Judaism as a civilization in the 1920s made him a major stumbling block in the 1926–27 merger negotiations. The interlocutors acknowledged this fact at the time, but the greater barrier was methodological and theological, Wissenschaft versus the traditional talmudic exegesis and Breslau versus Volozhin.28

Ironically, the rabbinic representatives of the two institutions, Ginzberg and Revel, possessed similar Lithuanian talmudic backgrounds as well as the rare brilliance that marked that elite community. It was no coincidence that RIETS was named for Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Spektor (1817–96) who gave semikhah to many Volozhin-trained scholars and, in the 1880s and 1890s, encouraged them to go to America to serve communities in halakhic need.29 It was no coincidence that leading members of JTS’s Talmud faculty were either trained in Lithuania (Ginzberg in Volozhin, Lieberman in Slobodka) or students of those who were, but they also were committed to the critical methodology instilled by their university training.

To a significant degree, RIETS developed in response to its competition with JTS. In 1886, Russian Jews had established Yeshivat Etẓ Chaim, an elementary school, and in 1897, Rabbis Moses Matlin, Yehuda David Bernstein, and David Abramowitz founded RIETS as the first advanced yeshiva in the United States. RIETS became an amalgamation of both in 1915.

By 1902, the number of Orthodox rabbis who had been trained in Europe and come to the United States in the late nineteenth century was sufficient to establish a rabbinic association, the Agudath Ha-Rabbonim. On July 29, sixty Orthodox rabbis hailing from Lithuania, Russia, Poland, and Austria-Hungary met in New York City. They came from around the United States and Canada, from cities including Montreal, Toronto, Bangor, Des Moines, Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, Omaha, and Denver.30 Many, if not all, were the Orthodox rabbinic heads of their respective communities with the title of av beit din. Membership in the Agudath Ha-Rabbonim required yadin yadin ordination from a European luminary, rabbinic leadership of an Orthodox congregation, and a commitment to using Yiddish almost exclusively.31

By instituting a Volozhin-like, Yiddish-speaking curriculum and eschewing practical rabbinic training or secular learning, Agudath Ha-Rabbonim sought to make RIETS the counterbalance to JTS and even the budding Orthodox Union among whose leaders were Henry Pereira Mendes and Bernard Drachman, former JTS faculty members whom Schechter had fired. Those dismissals added a personal dimension to Orthodoxy’s ideological opposition to JTS and its rabbinic graduates. As Michael R. Cohen has observed, “[t]heir estrangement from the Seminary orbit helped split the modern Orthodox world in two, and…would have vast implications on the separation of Orthodox and Conservative Judaism in the ensuing decades.” 32

Crafted and to some degree controlled by members of the Agudath Ha-Rabbonim, RIETS’s curriculum did not play well with students seeking positions in the American rabbinate. Indeed, from 1906 to 1908, some RIETS students engaged in strikes. More importantly, some decamped for JTS. The competitive threat of JTS to RIETS did not go unnoticed or unanswered by the Agudath Ha-Rabbonim. In 1904, it issued a ḥerem against any synagogue that employed a JTS graduate.

Rabbi Bernard L. Levinthal (1864–1952) of Philadelphia was among the supporters of the ḥerem, yet indicative of both the overlap and separation between Orthodox and Conservative Judaism. A central if ambivalent leader of the European-trained Orthodox rabbis who founded Agudath Ha-Rabbonim and established RIETS and its early curriculum, Levinthal had studied at the yeshivot of Bialystok, Vilna, and Kovno and had received semikhah from Rabbi Spektor. Having arrived in the United States in 1891, he was the de facto chief rabbi of Philadelphia. Jeffrey Gurock has described him as his “era’s most ambivalent, conflicted, and perhaps hypocritical immigrant rabbi.”33 Despite his support of the 1904 ḥerem, he nevertheless accepted the decision of his son, Israel, to attend and receive ordination from JTS (1910). This inconsistency may be due in part to the fluid denominational identity of JTS in the first decade of the twentieth century. It may also be reflected in Schechter’s view of JTS as a seminary training rabbis who could serve Orthodox congregations, as well as in Schechter’s general discomfort with such labels. As Mel Scult stated it, “For Schechter’s generation, the words Conservative and Orthodox are used interchangeably.”34

Orthodoxy’s impact on JTS did not stop with its faculty. From the late 1920s until well into the postwar period, many of RIETS best students came to JTS. Israel Levinthal’s choice to attend JTS was indicative of an increasing trend. Revel’s assumption of leadership in 1915 and his curricular revisions quelled some of the student discontent, but the exodus to JTS continued.35 Beginning in the 1920s, RIETS suffered an ongoing brain drain of rabbinical students to JTS, by then its arch-competitor. Despite the formal establishment of YC in 1928, that trend increased with the Great Depression. Between 1938 and 1945, 37% of Seminary graduates came from YC.36 In 1936, two of JTS’s five rabbinic graduates had yeshiva backgrounds; in 1938, five of eight did; in 1939, five of eight had studied at YC’s college or high school. Nevertheless, a YC background was no guarantee of admission to JTS. In these same years, between 20% and 35% of those rejected for admission to JTS had come from YC.37

Even more momentous than the migration to JTS, the quality of the students who came proved transformative for JTS, Conservative Judaism, and RIETS itself. Gordis personified JTS’s capacity to attract RIETS’s best. He had attended RIETS’s Talmudical Academy for high school where his teachers identified him as profoundly gifted in Talmud.38 He completed a bachelor’s degree at City College of New York and a Ph.D. at Dropsie College before entering JTS, from which he was ordained after two and a half years in 1932 at the age of twenty-four.39 In 1937, he was appointed to the faculty of JTS, teaching Bible and philosophy of religion. While at JTS, Gordis served as a student rabbi at Temple Beth El of Rockaway Park, Queens, where he remained as rabbi for thirty-eight years. There he attacked the lacunae he had identified in his 1945 introductory article for the first issue of Conservative Judaism. In 1951, he opened the Beth El Day School, the second Conservative Jewish day school.40

Gordis personified the phenomenon whereby JTS attracted the best of YC, but he was not alone. Between 1946 and 1957, 60% of those accepted into the graduate rabbinical program came from Orthodox homes. For those who completed their rabbinical training in JTS’s elite four-year program, YC was the primary baccalaureate institution. In that same period, 51 out of 162 rabbinical students came from YC. By the mid-1960s, 20% came from Orthodox homes. By 1972, two members of JTS’s graduating rabbinic class had received their bachelor’s degrees at YC.41 By the late 1970s, virtually no one had.42 The numbers are stark, but they do not reveal the full impact of this history. Many who received their undergraduate training at YC and later trained at JTS became distinguished members of JTS’s faculty—for example, Max Arzt, Gerson D. Cohen, Shaye J. D. Cohen, Mayer Rabinowitz, and Jack Wertheimer.43

The influence of an Orthodox upbringing and especially a YC/YU education on interwar and postwar Conservative Judaism did not stop with the JTS faculty and students. Congregational rabbis with such backgrounds played key roles in molding the movement and constructing its success. Yet they did so not by themselves but in tandem with their JTS classmates and colleagues who had received their pre-rabbinic Jewish education within the movement. Nevertheless, the defining, demonstrable contribution that yeshiva-trained Conservative rabbis made to the movement can be demonstrated by a sampling of those who reached particular prominence.44

• Morris Adler (1906–66) was often seen as Detroit’s leading rabbi in his era. He attended RIETS and remained a proud alumnus of YU while he served as the rabbi of one of the largest and most eminent congregations in North America.45 He was the first chairman of the RA’s redefined Committee on Jewish Law and Standards (CJLS, 1948–51) and co-authored (with Jacob Agus and Theodore Friedman) the historic 1950 responsum permitting automobile travel to synagogue and the use of electricity to enhance Shabbat observance.46
• Harry Halpern (1899–1981), one of the RA’s most influential presidents, received semikhah from RIETS and earned two law degrees before entering JTS and earning a second ordination.47
• Isaac Klein (1905–79) was close to ordination at RIETS when he transferred to JTS, where he was ordained (1934). He was one of only three people (Boaz Cohen and Louis Finkelstein were the others) to receive semikhah (Hatarat Horaʾah) from Ginzberg. Klein also earned a Ph.D. at Harvard under Harry Wolfson. A traditionalist in Jewish law and prolific scholar, Klein taught practical halakhah at JTS and served on the RA’s CJLS (1935–79) and the Joint Bet Din of the Conservative Movement. He was a pulpit rabbi who led two congregations over thirty-eight years and president of the RA (1958–60), but his crowning achievement was A Guide to Jewish Religious Practice, a work that was meant to be a halakhic guide for Conservative Jews.48
• Aaron Landes (1929–2014) graduated summa cum laude from YU, where was class valedictorian and president of the student body. He was rabbi of Beth Sholom Congregation in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania for thirty-six years while simultaneously becoming the second Jewish chaplain to make flag rank (Rear Admiral) in the United States Navy.49
• Israel Herbert Levinthal (1888–1982) personified the overlap between Orthodox and Conservative Judaism. Born in Vilna, Lithuania, the son of Rabbi Bernard L. Levinthal and the descendant of twelve generations of rabbis, he was brought to the United States in 1891 and raised in Philadelphia. Levinthal earned a BA from Columbia University in 1909, was ordained in 1910 by JTS, where he also earned a Doctor of Hebrew Letters in 1920. In addition, he earned a JD from New York University in 1914. He introduced late Friday night services at Brooklyn’s Petach Tikvah (1915–19) and, in 1919, he became the first rabbi of the Brooklyn Jewish Center. He built on Kaplan’s synagogue-center model, and the center’s synagogue (1922) housed a pool, gym, and auditorium. He moved the center firmly into the Conservative sphere, introducing mixed seating and the RA and United Synagogue Sabbath and Festival Prayer Book (1946). He was considered one of the greatest preachers of his day and served as president of the RA (1930–32). Levinthal’s wholesale commitment to advancing Conservative Judaism stands in odd contrast with his father.50
• Judah Nadich served as rabbi of New York’s Park Avenue Synagogue from 1957 to 1987.51 Although his public profile did not emphasize his yeshiva training, it is documented. As president of the RA in 1974, just two years after Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) ordained Reform Judaism’s first female rabbi, Nadich requested the CJLS “to ‘give careful consideration’ to his proposal to admit ordained women.”52
• Chaim Potok (1929–2002) received a BA in English literature summa cum laude from YU in 1950, ordination at JTS in 1954, and a Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania in 1965. He taught at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles and became an editor of the Jewish Publication Society of America. His greatest recognition came from his carefully crafted bestselling novels, including The Chosen (1967), The Promise (1969) and, My Name is Asher Lev (1972), as well as his non-fiction (Wanderings, 1978).
• Harold Shulweis (1925–2014) was ambivalent about Orthodoxy while attending YC.53 Rabbi of Valley Beth Shalom (1970–2014) in California, he began synagogue-based ḥavurot and established Response, a support and educational organization welcoming members of the LGBTQ+ community before the invention of the term. His books sought to develop and reframe Jewish theology. Newsweek (and the Encylopedia Judaica) described him as “the leading Conservative Rabbi of his generation.”54

As this group illustrates, yeshiva-trained Conservative rabbis did not necessarily occupy the traditional wing of Conservative Judaism. They chose their own paths. As Michael Cohen has recently demonstrated, the wide variety within Conservative Judaism can be traced to Schechter’s inability or unwillingness to actualize his own vision for the movement and his decision to pass that responsibility to his disciples and later alumni of JTS.55

During the first three decades after World War II, these alumni and their intellectual heirs led Conservative Judaism to become the largest American Jewish movement, but one that, despite all efforts at diversity, could not avoid debates that would produce division, occasionally schism, and, undeniably, attrition. Cohen uses the figures of “Heretic” (Kaplan) and a “Maverick” (Herbert S. Goldstein) to illustrate both division and diversity in Conservative Judaism. Kaplan’s radical originality and its impact on virtually all modes of Judaism have received incisive, systematic analysis.56 Goldstein is less well known but indicative of the broad boundaries of Conservative Judaism well into the mid-twentieth century.

Goldstein (1890–1970) was ordained at JTS in 1914, when such ordination did not necessarily define one as a Conservative rabbi. He was also ordained by Rabbi Shalom Jaffe, vice president of Agudath Ha-Rabbonim. Goldstein taught homiletics at RIETS and founded the Institutional Synagogue, the prototype of the synagogue center even before Kaplan, his former teacher and ongoing ideological opponent, succeeded in spreading the concept. He was the only person to be president of both the Rabbinical Council of America and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, and he was also president of the Synagogue Council of America. A fully Orthodox rabbi, Goldstein did not break his ties to JTS, was “well received” when he spoke there in 1937, and remained a member of the alumni association (i.e., the RA) until at least 1939.57

Deciding Halakhah in the Postwar Era

While the yeshiva-trained, JTS-ordained rabbis constituted a prominent faction within Conservative Judaism, the rigorous, text-based training that all rabbinical students received at JTS together with the commitment to halakhah that was an absolute requirement for admission and ordination produced rabbinic alumni bound to find solutions to contemporary problems of praxis through Jewish law rather than congregational consensus. Membership in the RA affirmed and enforced this halakhic commitment. As Kaplan’s disciples gradually shaped Reconstructionist Judaism, dissenters appeared, but the RA expended vast effort in developing halakhic mechanisms that would permit a variety of responsa within the bounds of halakhah.

In 1948, the RA reached a watershed. It restructured the composition, scope, and powers of its Committee on Jewish Law and renamed it the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards (CJLS). As Pamela Nadell notes,

The CJLS agreed to circulate among the RA minority and majority reports signed by those members of the CJLS subscribing to each opinion. Members of the RA were free to follow either responsum, even if the minority opinion bore only a single signature. However, in the event the CJLS made a unanimous recommendation, it became the official position of the RA, binding on all members.58

Two years later, the CJLS adopted responsa that acknowledged an ongoing reality of Conservative Judaism: congregants’ observance typically does not reflect the halakhic standards of their movement or their rabbis. The then upcoming generation that had fought World War II and come home to affiliate with existing synagogues and establish new ones did so in budding suburban communities. The ubiquity of the automobile characterized this new American life and facilitated living in single-family homes in neighborhoods where the distance to the synagogue made walking arduous or impossible. In 1950, the CJLS issued decisions permitting driving exclusively to synagogue for communal worship and the limited use of electricity on Shabbat. Morris Adler, Agus, and Friedman authored the “Responsum on the Sabbath,” which was linked to a call for a national Sabbath Revitalization Program.59 Ben Zion Bokser issued a responsum opposing driving.60 Remarkably, two of the three authors of the permitting responsum (Adler and Agus) possessed strong Orthodox credentials.

Despite these seemingly radical halakhic positions, Conservative rabbinic leaders, especially as represented by JTS’s Talmud department, whose members did not subscribe to such leniencies, maintained ties with Orthodox colleagues that could potentially address difficult halakhic issues. As others have noted, the thorniest of these challenges was the problem of the ʿagunah, a challenge that “obsessed” the RA from 1930 to 1970.61

Along with Ginzberg, Lieberman (1898–1983) had become the paramount figure in a globally eminent Talmud faculty. Recruited to the faculty by both Ginzberg and Finkelstein in 1940, Lieberman was regarded by many as the greatest talmudist of his generation (and perhaps others). He corresponded with the leading Orthodox decisors in Israel and America and received their respect and recognition. He did not hesitate to seek major cooperation with them, nor to chastise them publicly when he felt circumstances warranted.62 Lieberman was Dean of the Rabbinical School (1948) and Rector of JTS from 1959 until his death, but whether he was a Conservative Jew has spawned scholarly debate.63 Lieberman, JTS’s Talmud faculty, and most of its other faculty members and administration were Orthodox in observance. Indeed, David Golinkin has argued that at least until 1959 and perhaps until Finkelstein’s retirement in 1972, JTS was de facto Orthodox.64 Yet, Lieberman was neither Orthodox nor Conservative, and he eschewed such labels. Punctilious in observance, critical in scholarship, he generally avoided involvement in the halakhic debates that animated the RA—with one shining exception: the problem of ʿagunot. In 1953, the year Ginzberg died, Lieberman uncharacteristically entered the halakhic fray. He proposed a taqqanah to add a clause to the ketubah that would allow an ʿagunah to force a noncompliant husband to come to a beit din and ultimately to civil courts for disposition. Lieberman enlisted the support of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903–93), rosh yeshiva of RIETS and Modern Orthodoxy’s leading halakhic authority. Soloveitchik sought to facilitate the establishment of the joint beit din that would have the recognition of both the Orthodox and Conservative rabbinates.65 Soloveitchik faced enormous pressure from the Orthodox rabbinate to reject an association with the Conservative rabbis and especially a joint beit din, pressure that he could not ultimately overcome. When agreement had seemed to be on the horizon, representatives of the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America (RCA) demanded that the RA expel some of its more halakhically lenient members, a requirement that ultimately upended the joint beit din and Orthodox acceptance of Lieberman’s solution.66 Both groups eventually found reasonable, though not comprehensive solutions to the ʿagunah problem, the RA through a system of annulment when absolutely needed and the RCA though the establishment of a halakhic prenuptial agreement that progressively fines a divorcing partner for erecting a barrier against a spouse’s remarriage.67 Indirectly at least, the issue and Lieberman’s solution also stimulated serious thought among Orthodox scholars.68

Beyond the magnitude of the ʿagunah issue itself, the sincere but eventually unsuccessful efforts on the part of Lieberman and Soloveitchik illustrate the halakhic cooperation and recognition that Orthodox and Conservative rabbinic leaders considered achievable. Juxtaposed with the often overlapping rabbinic training and traditional halakhic orientation of many RA members, the incident of the Lieberman clause documents the inherent affinity and even alliance between Orthodoxy and Conservative Judaism into the 1950s and beyond.

In December 1970, the limits of the halakhic flexibility of the RA and its CJLS would be defined amid crisis. Under chairman Benjamin Kreitman (1966–72), the CJLS instituted structural changes. “While it still considered unanimous decisions binding on RA members, the committee recognized that its authority in this matter was limited to ‘moral persuasion.’ Now minority opinions voiced by one member or subscribed to by two in a written responsum carried ‘official and equal standing’ with the majority’s opinion.”69 In theory, this structure solved the problem of halakhic process by recognizing halakhically legitimate dissenting opinions. Yet, to be effective, every one of the twenty-five members of the CLJS had to commit himself to be bound by normative, historic halakhic principles and methods, to work within the boundaries of Jewish law. It was not to be. An emergency erupted when one member of the CJLS ruled that tevilah, one of the primary elements of the conversion process (giyyur), was unnecessary for conversion. This rejection of a fundamental element of personal status caused sixteen members of the CJLS to resign, effectively disbanding the committee. It did not reorganize for two years, until a special commission had found a solution.

In 1972, in recognition of the potential power of one or two members of the CJLS to legitimize extreme (typically permissive) opinions for Conservative Judaism, minority opinions were defined as requiring the signatures of at least three members of the CJLS, a number that was raised to six in 1985.70 Always cognizant of the classic role of the congregational rabbi as mara’ de’atra, the CJLS recognized its general inability to enforce its decisions with meaningful sanctions. In one area, however—namely, officiating at an intermarriage—the RA has compelled compliance by exercising its ultimate sanction: immediate expulsion. Section III (c) of הצנע לכת: A Code of Professional Conduct for Members of the Rabbinical Assembly bars members from officiating on pain of expulsion.71 Historically, this rule also prohibited RA rabbis from attending an intermarriage, but that provision was lifted in 2018.72

The RA continues to enforce this policy. In earlier decades, members who flouted this provision were brought before their colleagues at RA conventions, given the opportunity to defend themselves (although few did), and, if the act was admitted or proven, formally expelled.73 More recently, the RA has put in place internal structures to expel such members and since 2021 has posted a list of those expelled since 2004.74

If enforcement of halakhic discipline among RA rabbis is effectively limited to banning officiation at intermarriages, maintaining such observance among congregants is impossible. While the nonobservant Orthodox Jew has increasingly become an oxymoron in most Orthodox synagogues, Conservative Jewish congregants have been seen as consistently lax.75 In his influential 1970 analysis of Conservative Judaism, the sociologist Marshall Sklare wrote : “The fact is that there is not a Conservative synagogue in the country where most congregants practice the mitzvoth [commandments] according to the Conservative regimen.” Seymour Siegel echoed Sklare’s findings: “We have found, much to our chagrin, that many times we are legislating without a constituency.”76

Scaling the Summit and Hints of Decline: 1945–90

In the three decades after World War II, Conservative Judaism responded substantively to the challenges and opportunities that Gordis had identified as the war still raged in 1945.77 Three key developments illustrate the movement’s bold response: Camp Ramah, the Schechter Day School Network (SDSN), and United Synagogue Youth (USY). These three youth-oriented programs allude both to Conservative Judaism’s postwar success and to a decline that has emerged since at least the 1990s.

From the establishment of the first Camp Ramah in Wisconsin in 1947, the system has grown to ten overnight camps and five day camps serving 11,700 campers and university-aged staff members plus three hundred young Israeli adults.78 At Camp Ramah the camper lives a consistently Jewish life in concert with halakhah as interpreted by Conservative Judaism.79

The precedent set by Gordis’s own establishment of a Conservative Jewish day school in 1951 helped establish a model that led to SDSN with forty-five schools as of 2022. Parallel to Camp Ramah, the goal of the Schechter school was immersion in Jewish life and learning. Yet, SDSN began to decline in the 1990s. As of 2012, it had lost around a third of its schools since 1993, declining to 11,338 students today from 17,563 in 1993.80 This loss led the SDSN to break away from the movement.81

Beginning in 1951, USY and its local synagogue chapters provided a positive religious experience for teenagers in Conservative synagogues. Unlike Camp Ramah and Schechter day schools, access to USY essentially came with synagogue membership and sometimes even that was not required. As a consequence, USY was accessible to Conservative youth without the parental outlay of the substantial tuition that characterized the other two institutions. Nevertheless, the current USY website does not mention religious observance in its description of the program.82

In the decades immediately following World War II, Conservative Judaism reached a summit that it has not yet scaled again. Schechter had envisioned JTS as “nonpartisan rabbinical school…whose graduates would be immersed in the academic study of Judaism.”83 Yet, he gradually realized that JTS’s financial stability necessitated more. His disciples prevailed upon him to establish an association of the congregations that could benefit JTS and advance its mission. Thus, in1913, Schechter founded the United Synagogue of America and became its first president. Omission of the word “Conservative” was significant and intentional, reflecting the inclusivity inherent in Schechter’s concept of Catholic Israel.84 The United Synagogue of America in 1913 began with 22 charter congregations. By 1916, 50 congregations were members, 150 in 1922, 220 in 1927, and 229 by 1929.85 The Great Depression saw a decline in membership, but the return of soldiers after World War II with its concomitant rise in weddings and the postwar baby boom translated into a dramatic rise in Conservative synagogues.

Throughout the war and its multiple theaters, American and Canadian Jewish soldiers witnessed Jewish chaplains conducting services, counseling, and burying the dead. In all, 95 JTS alumni served as chaplains.86 This number constituted 31% of the 309 rabbis who were commissioned in the United States Armed Forces in World War II (as compared with a total of 26 in World War I). Reform rabbis exceeded this number (136, or 44% of the total), but, as Gordis had predicted, exposure to Conservative chaplains led many veterans, who were children of Eastern European immigrants raised in traditional homes, to affiliate with Conservative congregations upon their return to civilian life.87 The participation of rabbis as chaplains had an additional effect. Just as American Jews served in higher numbers than their proportion in the population, Jewish chaplains represented approximately two-thirds of the eligible qualified rabbis of the country and exemplified a commitment with which veterans could identify.88

By 1949 the United Synagogue had 365 congregations. From 1955 to 1957, United Synagogue welcomed 131 new synagogues, 58 from 1957 to 1959, and 80 more from 1959 to 1961.89 By 1971, at the conclusion of postwar growth, the United Synagogue had 832 congregations, comprising some 350,000 families with an estimated 1.5 million members.90 This number of members remained steady or may have grown as high as 1.6 million according to the 1990–91 Jewish Population Study.91 Despite these impressive figures, as early as 1970, data had begun to presage a decline. Between 1965 and 1971, not one new Conservative synagogue was founded.92 Between 1970 and 1990, Conservative membership remained virtually stationary, increasing by only about 40,000, or 3%, from the 1.53 million who reported themselves as having been raised as Conservative Jews.93 On the other hand, 41% of all affiliated individuals in 1990 belonged to Conservative congregations, and 40% of American Jews identified with Conservative Judaism.94

Descending the Summit

A quarter century later, new data confirmed a dramatically different picture of decline in Conservative Jewish numbers and identification. In 2013 and 2020, the Pew Research Center conducted two surveys of American Jews. They revealed that, in 2013, 18% (17% in 2020) identified as Conservative Jews, down from 40% in 1990–91. Numerically, the Conservative Jewish population in the United States had dropped from just under 1.6 million, to some 915,000 in 1990, to between 660,000 and a half million in 2020.95 The number of congregations in the United Synagogue of America (renamed in 1991 the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism) had dropped from 832 in 1971 to 760 in 2003, and to 562 affiliated congregations as of 2020.96 The membership per congregation shrank, and mergers became increasingly common.

Other statistics seem to be more revealing. As of the 2020 survey, “Conservative Jews are older than Jews who identify with other streams.” The median age of Conservative Jews is sixty-two, fifty-three for Reform, and thirty-five for Orthodox.97 Even worse, only 8% of Jewish adults under thirty identify with Conservative Judaism, compared to 29% of those under thirty who identify as Reform and 17% under thirty who identify as Orthodox.98 Conversely, 3% of Jews over sixty-five identify as Orthodox, while 25% identify as Conservative.

These data suggest a growing Orthodox population and a declining Conservative one. Part of this phenomenon is due to fertility rates: “The average Orthodox household in the survey contains 2.0 children, compared with 0.3 children per household among Conservative Jews and 0.5 children per household among Reform Jews.”99 Due to these rates and other factors of preserved identification, “fully one-in-ten U.S. Jewish adults under the age of 30 are Haredim, or ultra-Orthodox (11%), compared with 1% of Jews 65 and older.”100 This trend implies significant changes in the denominational composition of American Jews in coming decades.

The twenty years between 1970 and 1990 witnessed little demographic change in the number of Conservative Jews, but that period transformed Conservative Judaism. The 1970–72 crisis in the CJLS portended fundamental changes that would reshape the movement, most especially in its heartland, the United States. In 1972, the same year as the CJLS was reconstituted, Finkelstein retired after thirty-two years as Chancellor of JTS.101 This was the same year HUC-JIR ordained America’s first woman rabbi. Oddly, the concept of a female rabbinical student had a long history at JTS. In 1903, Henrietta Szold (1860–1945), founding president of Hadassah and celebrated translator and editor, had set the precedent that a woman could study at JTS on the condition that she did not seek ordination.102 In 1939, Helen Hadassah Levinthal (1910–89), daughter of Israel and granddaughter of Bernard Levinthal, became the first woman to complete the entire course of study in a rabbinical school (Jewish Institute of Religion [JIR] in New York), though she was denied formal ordination.103 Nevertheless, HUC-JIR’s action catalyzed a debate and process that would take more than a decade to resolve. As previously noted, in 1974, Nadich, then president of the RA, requested that the CJLS consider women rabbis. Surrounding the issue in the 1970s were halakhic questions regarding counting women in a minyan, their serving as shelikhot tsibbur, and the issue of ʿedut.104 Political and social, as well as the halakhic issues, framed the debate on women’s ordination.

In 1983, after a decade including a special commission and extensive debate and only months after the unexpected death of Lieberman, who had opposed women’s ordination, JTS admitted women and ordained Amy Eilberg in 1985, thirteen years after Sally Priesand was ordained at HUC-JIR. The ordination of women inevitably led to the Conservative Movement’s eventual embrace of egalitarianism, whereby women took equal roles with men in almost all ritual and halakhic activities.105

In 1985, Alexander Schindler, president of Reform Judaism’s congregational association, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC, later the Union for Reform Judaism, or URJ) from 1973 to 1996, confidently observed that “it usually takes [the Conservative Movement] about 10 years” to follow Reform’s precedent.106 Regarding the ordination of women, Schindler’s sardonic generalization had held true, but Chancellor Cohen, Finkelstein’s successor (1972–85), understood the challenge that egalitarianism represented. Simultaneously, he called for the “developing of our [i.e., Conservative Judaism’s] approach to halakhah.”

Conservative Judaism had placed halakhah at its center as a primary tenet—from JTS’s founding in 1886, to Schechter’s arrival in 1902, to the vision that he and his JTS disciples proffered, to Ginzberg’s responsa, to the 1927 establishment of the RA’s Committee on Jewish Law, to the developments for decision-making by the CJLS (1948, 1972, 1986) and the vast corpus of responsa that the CJLS has produced, to Klein’s manual of Jewish law.107 It was thus no coincidence that throughout these years Conservative Judaism had a close affinity with Orthodoxy. Well into the 1960s, Orthodox rabbis had led Conservative congregations and joined the RA. The two movements used almost identical traditional liturgies, and it is popularly assumed that, up to the 1950s, mixed seating is what differentiated the synagogue rituals of Conservative congregations from their Orthodox counterparts. Yet, the facts are more complex, for even the defining boundary of mixed seating was porous. For example, in 1950, Agus began a thirty-year career as founding rabbi of Beth El Congregation, Baltimore. He persuaded his congregants to introduce mixed seating and, as we have seen, co-wrote the CJLS that allowed congregants to drive to Sabbath services.”108 That same year at Adath Israel in Cincinnati, Rabbi Fishel Goldfeder, who possessed quintessential Orthodox credentials, supported mixed seating, although the issue caused a split in the congregation.109

At the same time, American Orthodoxy had not yet made the meḥitsah an absolute condition of congregational membership. In many traditional congregations formally affiliated with the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations (OU), the option of at least a section of mixed seating remained. In the 1980s, the OU finally began rigorous enforcement of a meḥitsah requirement, but the last OU Orthodox synagogue with mixed seating did not change its policy until 2005.110

JTS’s decision to ordain women and Conservative Judaism’s accompanying embrace of egalitarianism precipitated a schism on the right. For some Conservative rabbis and congregants, the specter of a decision that would cleave Conservative Judaism not only from Orthodoxy but from what they regarded as the fundamental norms of halakhah required radical action. In response, David Weiss Halivni (1927–2022), JTS’s leading Talmud scholar, left his post at JTS and accepted a faculty appointment at Columbia. Halivni, his rabbinic disciples, and their lay supporters founded the Union for Traditional Conservative Judaism in 1984 (Union for Traditional Judaism [UTJ] after 1988) and established a yeshiva, the Institute of Traditional Judaism (ITJ) to grant semikhah (although the semikhah program has been suspended since 2010), a rabbinic association, and published responsa.111 Although it is still active, the ITJ has faced challenges.112

Conservative Judaism’s split with its right wing in the aftermath of the 1980s ordination controversy did not siphon off large numbers from the movement, but the loss invariably rebalanced the movement somewhat toward the left. The larger theological and halakhic left wing had broken away twenty years earlier. Kaplan remained at JTS and did not countenance separation from Conservative Judaism. Yet, beginning in 1940 with the establishment of the Reconstructionist Foundation, Kaplan’s son-in-law, Ira Eisenstein (1906–2001), charted a path that would lead to the rise of a separate, new movement. Gradually, Reconstructionist congregations led by rabbis who espouse Kaplan’s religious naturalism and view of Judaism as a civilization, a synagogue association (eventually called Jewish Reconstructionist Federation), and a well-regarded journal emerged, but the event that formally defined a fourth Jewish movement was the founding of a full-scale rabbinical school, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 1968.113

Conservative Judaism Defined—in Theory

Shorn of its left and right wings by the 1980s, Conservative Judaism could define itself in formal terms. In 1985, forty years after his article introducing Conservative Judaism, Gordis became chair of the Commission on the Philosophy of Conservative Judaism, a group of thirty-five scholars and lay people who spent three years producing Emet Ve-Emunah: Statement of Principles of Conservative Judaism.114 This would-be pivotal publication of Conservative Jewish tenets spurred immediate discussion in congregations, but its impact proved fleeting. As of 2022, the websites of both the RA and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism lack any direct reference to it.115 With one exception, standard works on the movement give it passing reference or ignore it.116 The exception is Elliot N. Dorff’s Modern Conservative Judaism, which begins many chapters with an explication of the immediate topic as depicted in Emet Ve-Emunah.117

Conservative Judaism has nevertheless addressed major issues as they have arisen. Sexual orientation and particularly the rights of gay and lesbian people within Conservative Judaism was one such major issue. In 2006, the CJLS adopted three responsa ranging from stringent to lenient.118 Four members of the CJLS resigned in protest: the authors of the two more stringent responsa (Joel Roth and Leonard R. Levy, both members of JTS’s Talmud faculty), Mayer Rabinowitz, another member the JTS Talmud faculty, and Joseph Prouser, congregational rabbi, independent scholar, and the current editor of this journal.119 The 2006 resignations did not precipitate a crisis as had happened in 1970. Indeed, in 2007, less than a year after Ismar Schorsch had retired as JTS’s chancellor, JTS announced the admission of gay and lesbian applicants to its rabbinical school.120 In 2012, the CJLS adopted the ritual mechanisms and documents for officiating at same-sex marriages and divorces.121

In his farewell address after twenty years as chancellor (1986–2006), Schorsch criticized the attitudes of the seminary’s students. Building on the principles embodied in Emet Ve-Emunah, he defined Emet as the “spiritual aquifer which invigorates observance by making it meaningful” and Emunah as “a spiritual life animated by halakhah.” He accused JTS students of abandoning the deep, scientific scholarship of Wissenschaft des Judentums. “Our addiction to instant gratification has stripped us of the patience to appreciate any discourse whose rhetoric is dense and demanding. Mindlessly, we grasp for the quick spiritual fix.”122 The aquifer had run dry, he said. Schorsch’s remarks elicited anger, rebuttals, and reflection across the Conservative Movement.123

The Influence of Reform Judaism

Reform Judaism’s HUC-JIR had begun to admit gay and lesbian students in the late 1980s. JTS had done so twenty years later (2007). Although the number of years varied, Schindler’s observation that the Conservative Movement follows Reform innovations remained true. Nevertheless, on a variety of fundamental principles, Schindler’s glib assessment fails. Although Conservative Judaism no longer regularly finds common cause with Orthodoxy, it has not become a permutation of Reform. Although it often partners with Reform on social issues, Conservative Judaism has maintained a separate identity.

The primary boundary that separates Conservative Judaism from Reform remains halakhah. Reform Judaism is informed by halakhah but not obligated to it; Conservative Judaism is obligated to halakhah as defined by the structure for decision-making by the CJLS and the vast corpus of approved responsa.124 As mara’ deʾatra, the “lord of the place,” the Conservative congregational rabbi decides Jewish law for his or her synagogue.125 Yet, there are enforceable limits—namely, the Standards of Rabbinic Practice that reinforce the halakhic requirements of personal status:

1. No Rabbi shall perform a marriage for a divorced man or woman unless such a person has obtained a get or hafka‘at kiddushin.126
2. A member of the Rabbinical Assembly or of the Cantors’ Assembly may not officiate at the marriage of a Jew to an unconverted non-Jew, nor may he/she co-officiate at, nor be present at a purely civil ceremony, nor may the Conservative synagogue be used for such a marriage.127
3. Ascription of Jewish lineage through a legal instrument or ceremonial act on the basis of anything other than matrilineal descent; or supervision of a conversion which omits tevilah in the case of females, or tevilah and brit milah in the case of males, shall continue to be regarded as violations of the Halakhah of Conservative Judaism. They shall henceforth be violations of a Standard of Rabbinic Practice and be inconsistent with membership in the Rabbinical Assembly…128

The clearest example of these Standards is the RA’s prohibition against officiating at an intermarriage. Some rabbis and lay leaders would consider changes, but as of this writing, the Standards remain intact. Keren R. McGinity, the USCJ’s interfaith specialist has recently argued for a “new narrative” regarding intermarriage in Conservative Judaism.129 Her proposal has received a systematic rebuttal from Wertheimer, whose publications on Conservative Judaism justly qualify him as the movement’s foremost historian and analyst.130

In 2022, reconsideration of the RA’s standard prohibiting rabbinic officiation at intermarriages went beyond theoretical debate. Since 2018, the RA has set in motion opportunities for reconsideration of the Standards of Rabbinic Conduct.131 On December 11, 2022, the RA’s president emailed an extensive letter to the membership detailing initiatives including working groups and procedures that could lead to such changes.132 The president’s email did not remain among the RA membership, and the issue attracted coverage in the popular press.133 A summary in the email begins by noting: “[O]ur RA and its culture has been shifting away from hierarchy and enforcement, and towards an emphasis on wisdom, trust, and mutual support of our colleagues.”134 This phrasing could be understood to suggest that a goal of some in the RA could be to abrogate the enforcement mechanism—namely expulsion from the RA—for conducting intermarriages. The RA was quick to reject this interpretation, stating that the goal was to clarify how members should act within current rules.135

Historical precedent suggests that unintended consequences could arise if the sanction were nonetheless eliminated. An analogous case appears in the experience of the Reform Movement regarding rabbinic officiation at interfaith marriage ceremonies. In 1909, Reform Judaism’s rabbinic body, the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), stated its position that “mixed marriage is contrary to the Jewish tradition and should be discouraged.” In 1973, the CCAR reiterated this policy and declared its opposition to participation by its members in any such ceremony: “The C.C.A.R., recalling its stand adopted in 1909 ‘that mixed marriage is contrary to Jewish tradition and should be discouraged,’ now declares its opposition to participation by its members in any ceremony which solemnizes mixed marriages.” In 1982, in a separate Reform responsum, these positions were reinforced and enumerated again.136

Despite this policy, as of 2017, 84% of Reform rabbis officiate at intermarriages. These findings represent a jump over two decades. In 1995, a survey of Reform and Reconstructionist rabbis found that a combined 47% would officiate at intermarriages.137 Since Reform Judaism is not bound by halakhah but simply informed by it, the CCAR has no mechanism for enforcing its policies.138 As a consequence, since at least the 1970s, many Reform rabbis have conducted intermarriages. One datum that is presumably unattainable is the number of Reform rabbis who conduct such marriages not out of an ideological commitment but in order to preserve their rabbinic positions.

Beginning in the 1970s, rabbinic search committees in some Reform congregations began to require candidates for rabbinic positions to conduct intermarriages. In such cases, congregations curtailed the rabbi’s freedom to take positions of principle regarding officiation at intermarriages. The concept of a free pulpit in which rabbis had decisive authority and the right to express their views was not alien to Reform Judaism. When, in 1905, as a candidate for rabbi of Temple Emanu-El in New York, Stephen S. Wise was told that his sermons would be reviewed in advance by the synagogue’s board of trustees, he founded his own Free Synagogue (now the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue) in which no one could contest his exclusive rabbinic authority or “his right to speak and act as he chose.”139 Wise went on to become one of America’s most renowned rabbis, achieving recognition as an orator, Zionist leader, and founder of JIR (1922). His influence and ideals influenced many in the Reform rabbinate.

Conservative Judaism has defined itself at least in part by its deep commitment to Jewish law, or halakhah. The vast corpus of responsa outlined in these pages documents the process by which Conservative rabbis have made decisions. The RA’s three Standards of Rabbinic Practice are fully consistent with the historic halakhah of Jewish personal status, and expulsion from membership enforces compliance. That sanction also protects RA members from congregational pressures that could otherwise place their positions in jeopardy. Without such a sanction, the experience of the Reform Movement could become a prototype for the future of the Conservative rabbinate.

The issue of rabbinic officiation at intermarriages differs from all other controversial decisions taken by Conservative rabbis. Although some RA members opposed responsa like those permitting traveling on Shabbat or same-sex marriages, the proponents of those positions presented their cases in halakhically sourced responsa. Rabbinic officiation at intermarriages has no halakhic basis, no lenient versus stringent position. Such a marriage has no standing in rabbinic law. It is thus not within the authority of a rabbi as maraʾ deʾatraʾ to permit, since the maraʾ deʾatraʾ can only rule within the boundaries of halakhah. Thus, for the RA to allow its members to conduct such weddings would uproot the movement from its halakhic foundation and alter the very definition of Conservative Judaism.

Conservative Judaism faces a related challenge: the difference in observance between the congregant and the rabbi. As one Conservative rabbi told me anonymously and with evident irony, Conservative and Chabad rabbis are alike in one major respect: their congregants do not practice the same level of observance as the rabbi. The Orthodox and Reform Jews do so, he added. The Pew surveys of 2013 and 2020 confirm this yawning inconsistency and document the fact that Jews who received strong Jewish educations in the Conservative Movement now make up 10% or more of Orthodox congregations.140 An Orthodox rabbi observed that “Ramah is a great feeder for us,” and a lifelong, affiliated Conservative Jew who now increasingly attends services at Chabad stated that the Conservative Movement demands only “lip service and dues.”141

The tendency to avoid confronting laypeople with the centrality of halakhic observance can even affect Conservative Judaism’s most gifted leaders. In 2014, JTS Chancellor Arnold Eisen proffered a partial solution to the unabated increase in intermarriage. Leaving aside the Jewish tradition of discouraging prospective converts until they demonstrate a strong voluntary commitment, Eisen invited members of the public to convert. Through an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, he encouraged Americans who do not practice any faith to consider Judaism. He called on Conservative rabbis to “to use every means to explicitly and strongly advocate for conversion” and described the road to conversion as “a process of learning and living that culminates in a religious ceremony where immersion into an ancient ritual bath creates a new religious identity.” Yet he omitted any reference to the halakhic requirements of freely and sincerely accepting the “yoke of the commandments” (kabbalat ʿol hamitsvot) and a male’s obligation of milah or hatafat dam brit.142

Eisen’s call echoed Schindler’s own 1978 proposal to Reform Jews to proselytize “unchurched” non-Jews, “God‐seekers who voluntarily ask for our knowledge.”143 Conservative Judaism did not embrace Eisen’s call. However, although it had taken twenty-six years rather than ten, Schindler’s observation about Reform Judaism’s impact on the Conservative Movement had proved true again.

Eisen’s successor as chancellor, Shuly Rubin Schwartz (2020–), has worked assiduously to strengthen JTS, to contemplate ways to address the Conservative Movement’s current challenges, and to build on the seminary’s distinguished faculty. Raised in the movement and connected to it through her own career and her family over three generations, her penetrating scholarship prepares her to envision solutions to the problems that affect Conservative Judaism.

The river of enthusiasm that brought gifted, Orthodox-educated students to JTS from Schechter’s days to the 1970s has reversed course. Anecdotal evidence reinforces Pew’s statistics, suggesting that in many Young Israel and other Modern Orthodox synagogues, a substantial proportion of the membership came from Conservative Judaism. Further observation suggests a surprising additional trend in need of study: an unknown but significant number of Orthodox rabbis in the Modern, Hasidic, and Haredi communities grew up in Conservative Judaism.144

Some factors in Conservative Judaism’s demographic decline can be attributed to American attitudes to religion generally. American Jews are “far less religious than Christians and Americans overall.”145 Further, Jews are not unique. Declines in American Christianity from 90% in 1972 to 64% in 2020 to between 54% and 35% by 2070 are predicted based on trends in “switching”—namely, the popularity and acceptability of changing religions.146 Nevertheless, the outflowing of Conservative Jews to Reform, Orthodoxy, or no religion at all cannot be denied. The 2020 Pew study states that

67% of Americans raised as Orthodox Jews by religion continue to identify with Orthodoxy as adults. Similarly, most people raised as Reform Jews by religion also identify as Reform today (66%). The retention rate for those raised within Conservative Judaism is lower; four-in-ten people (41%) raised as Conservative Jews by religion continue to identify with Conservative Judaism as adults.147

This demographic leakage has had a material effect. Non-Orthodox institutions have faced unprecedented financial challenges and have responded pragmatically. Under Eisen’s effective leadership, JTS addressed long-standing fiscal concerns by selling the air rights to its campus to finance a new library and dormitory.148 American Jewish University, home to the Ziegler rabbinical school, acknowledged that “the cost of maintaining our Bel Air [California] campus during the COVID-19 pandemic had run counter to the university’s mission” and sold the campus.149 Neither Reform Judaism on the left nor the Union for Traditional Judaism on the right was immune. Reform’s HUC-JIR announced plans to address a record $8.8 million deficit and a drop of 37% in rabbinic school enrollment over the last fifteen years by closing most of its original flagship campus in Cincinnati after 147 years.150 The UTJ sold its building to a member congregation and suspended its semikhah program in 2010.151

These institutional financial difficulties highlight the fiscal problem faced by individuals—namely, the price of being a Conservative Jew. Beyond the expected expense of synagogue dues, the cost of a Schechter day school education or a summer at Camp Ramah can burden even an affluent family. Further, Conservative programs typically exceed the costs of comparable Orthodox equivalents.152

Finally, nomenclature matters. In the twenty-first century, “conservative” possesses a political connotation. The time to rename Conservative Judaism has long since arrived. That is the reason this journal, although the direct successor to Conservative Judaism, has a new name. “Traditional Judaism,” “Authentic Judaism,” “Halakhic Judaism,” “Masorti Judaism”—suggestions for the movement are welcome. However, maintaining the status quo constitutes an unforced error against a younger generation unaware of the original meaning of “Conservative” Judaism.

The Continuing Challenge

Almost sixty years after Robert Gordis wrote his introduction to the first issue of Conservative Judaism, his grandson Daniel, a rabbi, scholar, and prize-winning writer, penned an article with the funereal title “Conservative Judaism: A Requiem.” “Sans Conservative Judaism,” he said, “the vision of a traditional, literate non-Orthodox Judaism will be gone. And that is a terrible loss, for Orthodoxy no less than for American Jewish life at large.”153 Writing in response to the publication of the 2013 Pew study and, almost simultaneously, the appearance of the RA’s 981-page The Observant Life: The Wisdom of Conservative Judaism for Contemporary Jews, Daniel Gordis saw the former as a clarion call and the latter as missing the point by omitting any reason for caring about halakhah.154 He mocked lenient, socially justifiable responsa that, in his view, defied logic even for the Jewishly uneducated: “These men and women of the pews were not talmudic scholars, but they were sufficiently educated and had enough common sense to know that if combustion on Shabbat was prohibited, then driving on Shabbat simply had to be a violation of Jewish law.”155 He concluded with a challenge: if neither Orthodoxy nor liberal Judaism answers the needs of the American Jew, “is there no option for Jewish continuity other than Israel?” “There must be,” he concludes. “Those who care about the future of the Jewish people had better embark now on the search for what it might be.”

In the same year that Daniel Gordis issued his requiem for Conservative Judaism, the movement’s scholarly journal of the same name ceased publication. Revived now as Masorti, a more felicitous and apt title that conveys the movement’s just claim as an heir to Jewish tradition, law, and living, this new incarnation of rigorous—yes, Wissenschaft—scholarship can propose and test ideas that meet the challenge that yet another Gordis has issued.

Rabbi Jonathan Rosenbaum, Ph.D., is President Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies at Gratz College and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. He serves on the academic advisory board and as associate editor of this journal.