The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan

Notes

279 Preface 1. The Kaplan papers at the Reconstructionist College are now in the process of being catalogued. For Kaplan’s published work, see the complete bibliography in Emanuel S. Goldsmith, Mel Scult, and Robert Seltzer, eds., The American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 415–53. There are over four hundred items in that bibliography. There is also Kaplan’s diary, discussed throughout this book. 2. On Kaplan and community and his concept of “Judaism as a civilization,” see chapter 5. 3. For a very suggestive book on this issue, see George Stack, Nietzsche and Emerson: An Elective Affinity (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992). 4. See chapter 2 on Kaplan and Emerson, which discusses the Kaplan-Emerson prayer. 5. See Chapter 10 on Kaplan and Heschel. That chapter discusses the KaplanHeschel prayer mentioned here. 6. For Kaplan’s theological views, see chapters 6 and 7. Salvation (discussed in chapter 8) is, of course, a major category in Kaplan’s thinking, as important as his beliefs about God. The key to Kaplan’s well-known formulation of “God as the power that makes for salvation” comes from Matthew Arnold. See chapter 3 for a discussion on the way this poet influenced Kaplan’s thinking. 7. On the Kaplan prayer book and the excommunication that followed it, see chapter 1. That chapter also analyzes Kaplan’s attitude toward Spinoza. 8. For Kaplan’s views of prayer and of holiness, particularly the Sabbath and holidays , see chapter 9. 9. Milton Steinberg, The Prophet’s Wife (Springfield, NJ: Behrman House, 2010). 10. The original of the Kaplan diary is housed at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. There is also a photocopy at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Wyncote, Pennsylvania. The seminary has put the diary online, and it can be accessed at www.jtsa.edu/library/digitalcollections/archives/kaplan/html. A number of years ago, I edited a selection from the early diary titled Communings of the Spirit: The Journals of Mordecai M. Kaplan, Volume 1: 1913–1934, ed. Mel Scult (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001). Throughout this work where we quote a statement from the diary that is also in that collection, I shall indicate both the location and page number. In terms of N O T E S 280 Notes to Pages xvii–10 my use of the diary for publication, the first question is whether Kaplan intended the journal to be published. When I first examined the diary in 1972, Kaplan indicated that he had shown the early volumes to other scholars interested in his life and thought. His daughters reported that, from time to time, he read them passages. He noted in his will that the diary should not be published for five years after his death, thereby implying that, after that period, it was permissible to publish the diary. 11. Emerson diary, “Spring?, 1853.” Emerson in His Journals, ed. Joel Porte (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), 446. Porte apparently did not know the exact date of this diary entry. 12. Camp Cejwin was founded in 1919 by Albert and Bertha Schoolman as a way of implementing Mordecai Kaplan’s philosophy. The camp was a project of the Central Jewish Institute, created in 1916 “to integrate Judaism with the American way of life” (interview with Albert Schoolman, June 1972). Cejwin was the first of a system of Jewish community camps in the United States. It closed in 1999. 13. A number of years before I met Kaplan, he had a microfilm made of the diary. He allowed me to have a copy of the microfilm, from which I made a positive book-type copy of each volume. I recently gave my microfilm to the Jewish Theological Seminary, and it can be viewed in the general reading area. The original of the diary is in the Rare Books Department. 14. Kaplan diaries, May 14, 1931, Jewish Theological Seminary (hereafter JTS), box 2, vol. 6; Communings, 439. 15. American Hebrew, October 14, 1927. 1. Excommunications The epigraph is from Kaplan diaries, April 9, 1939, box 3, vol. 8. 1. Steven Nadler, Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). The interested reader might also want to look at Heidi M. Ravven and Lenn Goodman, eds., Jewish Themes in Spinoza’s Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). 2. For an Orthodox view of Kaplan, see Jeffrey S. Gurock and Jacob J...