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Vol. 70, No. 1 (Summer 2026) - Celebrating America’s Sestercentennial

The Making of Jewish Values in Postwar America

 

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.

  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.