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American Jewish History 87.4 (1999) 404-408



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A Modern Heretic and a Traditional Community: Mordecai M. Kaplan, Orthodoxy, and American Judaism. By Jeffrey S. Gurock and Jacob J. Schacter. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. x + 220 pp.

A Modern Heretic and a Traditional Community: Mordecai M. Kaplan, Orthodoxy, and American Judaism is a well-crafted volume, a collaboration between two scholars of Orthodoxy. Reading it, I could not help thinking of another duo, W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, of musical theater fame. Yeshiva University historian Jeffrey Gurock shaped the book's lyrics by delving deeply into the abundant primary and secondary sources about Moredecai M. Kaplan. Rabbi Jacob J.Schacter, spiritual leader of the Jewish Center founded by Kaplan, conducted [End Page 404] extensive interviews with people who knew Kaplan or his children and melodiously harmonized them with Gurock's research. Together the two scholars have composed a seamless and substantial volume that deals with the three major subjects of the subtitle: Kaplan, the renegade; Orthodox Judaism; and the formulation of twentieth-century American Judaism.

Briefly, our G & S trace Kaplan's life, including his European background, his childhood in Europe and America, and his early and persistent association with the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS). They cover his stewardship of two Orthodox synagogues, which was followed by a painful break with Orthodoxy in the 1920s and an excruciating repercussion over two decades later. Especially poignant is their depiction of the inner struggle between Kaplan's mounting theological heterodoxy and his cherished position within the Orthodox camp.

Students of Kaplan will recognize that this issue has been treated before, most comprehensively in Mel Scult's Judaism Faces the Twentieth Century: A Biography of Mordecai M. Kaplan (1993). The novum of Gurock and Schacter's book lies in their presentation of the detailed struggle within Orthodoxy as it first accepted Kaplan and then later rejected his rebellious thinking. Gurock, as he did in an earlier article, discusses accomodationism, the type of Orthodox Judaism Kaplan was hired to advance. Accommodators took on "the task of creating a viable, truly American traditionalist alternative to the attractions of reformers." 1 They challenged "resisters" to Americanization on their right. Gurock and Schacter argue that the Orthodox community's contact with Kaplan propelled them to draw a line on the left.

Meticulously, Kaplan perfected his talents as preacher, teacher, and inspirer of the young. Unlike many European rebbaim who led American congregations in the early twentieth century, Kaplan cherished a real sense of rabbinic vocation. He was therefore extremely attractive to the successful East European Jewish immigrants who selected him as rabbi of their flagship Orthodox Manhattan congregations, Kehilath Jeshurun (KJ) on the East Side and, later, the Jewish Center on the West Side. Synagogue members bathed in the reflected glory of a fully Americanized and university-trained rabbi rooted in the Lithuanian culture of his traditionalist father. [End Page 405]

Despite all this, Kaplan found himself increasingly at odds with the institutions he served. In a much narrower sense than Gurock's original definition of the terms, Kaplan's "heretical" pronouncements in print and the reportage in the popular Jewish press divided members of the Jewish Center into "accommodators" and "resisters."

The Center's "accommodators" were willing to allow him the freedom of the pulpit that he demanded for several reasons. Many enjoyed associating with the "refined preacher" and were sufficiently assimilated to American individualism to tolerate opinions different from their own. Gurock and Schacter speculate that some accommodators even shared Kaplan's philosophical doubts. A larger number never pondered theological matters at all. The more thoughtful congregational leaders who resisted Kaplan's radicalism had to balance their aversion to his ideas against their fears of splintering the institution they had struggled to form.

By 1909, when Kaplan resigned his rabbinic position at KJ, his philosophy was becoming increasingly radical. In 1921, after he openly stated his opinions before members of the Jewish Center and published his convictions in the Jewish press, the leaders of the...

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