In Memoriam: Benny Kraut, 1947–2008

With the death of Benny Kraut in the early fall of 2008, the community of historians of American Judaism lost one of its ablest and most beloved interpreters. Born in 1947 in Munich, where his parents were consigned to a displaced persons’ camp, then raised in Canada, Kraut was serving as professor of history at Queens College of the City University of New York and was also a member of the faculty of CUNY’s Graduate Center. From 1986 until 1991, he edited the book review section of this journal. Upon the news of his death, the interim chairperson of the Academic Council of the American Jewish Historical Society, Jeffrey S. Gurock, did not exaggerate in describing Kraut as “a distinguished scholar and intellectual who wrote with elegance and taught with great style and enthusiasm.”¹

His higher education and his academic career were pursued in the United States. Kraut graduated summa cum laude in philosophy from Yeshiva University in 1968, then earned his M. A. in 1970 and five years later his Ph. D. from Brandeis University’s Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies. Ben Halpern supervised Kraut’s doctoral dissertation. Beginning in 1976, and for over two decades, Kraut directed Judaic Studies and taught Jewish history at the University of Cincinnati. He came to Queens College in 1998 to teach in the Department of History. At both Cincinnati and Queens, Kraut taught a prodigious variety of courses, including the history of Jewish civilization (from the Biblical through the rabbinic periods, from the middle ages down through the modern era); American Jewish history; the Book of Job and the problem of evil; the history of antisemitism and other Jewish-Christian encounters; and the history of Zionism. Both at Cincinnati and at Queens he was beloved by his students.

Having won two teaching awards at the University of Cincinnati, Kraut continued to win acclaim in the classroom at Queens College and to be admired and appreciated as a sagacious mentor. In 2004, Queens College bestowed upon him the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. On that occasion President James Muyskens cited the recipient’s “unyielding intellectual rigor combined with a deeply humane connection to the material,” especially in the teaching of the history and meaning of the Holocaust. Kraut had also come to Queens College to direct its Jewish Studies Program and to head the Center for Jewish Studies. The writ of the Center was outreach—to attract the larger, mostly non-academic community and to create an intellectual and cultural resource of high visibility and appeal for the Queens and Long Island area. With extraordinary energy and commitment, Kraut devoted himself to that task until his retirement from administrative duties in 2006, when Professor Elisheva Carlebach praised her colleague’s “brilliance and dedication” as well as his “great dignity, eloquence, integrity and sense of humor.”²

The combination of administrative competence and pedagogical flair are rare enough to be noteworthy, but readers of this journal are likely to be most familiar with the scholarly legacy of Benny Kraut; and thus his contributions to American Jewish historiography made him a triple threat. He won numerous grants and fellowships (from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Canadian Foundation for Jewish Culture, the New York Council of the Humanities, and the American Jewish Archives, for example), all of which testify to the promise he projected and the talent he demonstrated in capturing what is significant about the American Jewish past. His friend, Professor Jonathan D. Sarna, has drawn special attention to the importance of a series of articles that Kraut published on the interaction of universalist faiths, especially on the terrain where Reform Judaism and liberal Christianity met, in close-as-handcuffs alignment.³ Kraut’s essays on the entanglement of the Unitarianism of the late nineteenth century with Reform Judaism, on the attitudes of Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise toward liberal Protestantism, and on the agenda of the National Conference of Christians and Jews are central components of Kraut’s Nachlass.⁴ Moreover, a monograph on an Orthodox synagogue that...