The Birth of Conservative Judaism: Solomon Schechter's Disciples and the Creation of an American Religious Movement by Michael R. Cohen (review)

Michael Cohen's The Birth of Conservative Judaism: Solomon Schechter's Disciples and the Creation of an American Religious Movement offers a valuable corrective to accepted narratives about the origins and development of Conservative Judaism. Arguing against those scholars who traced the start of the Conservative movement back to nineteenth century Europe, as well as against Marshall Sklare's 1955 claim that the postwar American laity was entirely responsible for its rise, Cohen focuses instead on Solomon Schechter and his disciples as the architects of the new denomination. Schechter and his followers, Cohen convincingly argues, built the institutional infrastructure of Conservative Judaism in the first half of the twentieth century. By the postwar period, their efforts enabled the next generation of postwar Conservative rabbis to create a new denomination of Judaism that was both organizationally and theologically distinct from the left wing of Orthodoxy and the right wing of Reform.

Cohen's evidence against the proponents of the "historical school," who traced the origins of the Conservative movement to nineteenth century European rabbis like Zacharias Frankel, proves particularly compelling. This claim, first advanced by postwar Conservative leaders who wanted to showcase the long lineage and historical legitimacy of their distinct approach to Judaism, obscures the fluidity between the right wing of the United Synagogue and the left wing of the Orthodox Union that existed until the 1950s. It distorts the history of a denomination that, Cohen astutely points out, should rightfully be considered a "new American religious movement" alongside Mormonism and Christian Science.

If the historical school overstated the longevity of a distinctively Conservative approach to Judaism, Cohen argues that Marshall Sklare understated it. According to Sklare's Conservative Judaism: An American Religious Movement (1955), the denomination owed its rise not to the strength of its ideological principles but rather to the many postwar American Jews who sought a compromise between the fervent Orthodoxy of the immigrant generation and middle-class suburban environment that they themselves inhabited. This approach, Cohen argues, does not sufficiently acknowledge those rabbis who deliberately and thoughtfully articulated a distinct vision for Conservative Judaism well before the postwar years, and were therefore able to effectively meet the demands of the laity when called upon to do so.

While I quite agree that Sklare's bottom-up approach is not sufficient in its account of the birth of the Conservative movement, I nonetheless wonder how well it served this study to dismiss it entirely. Though there are exceptions, within most of this volume the rabbis exist in something of a vacuum, communicating only with one another. It seems to me that it might have been beneficial to incorporate a bit more of the interplay between Schechter's followers and the laypeople they served. After all, while a conglomeration of disconnected synagogues may not have been able to create a national movement without some leadership from the top, neither could leaders have created a movement without support from below.

Focusing so heavily on the all-male leadership also seems to prevent Cohen from fully fleshing out the gender dynamics of the early Conservative movement. Though gender and its effects are not at the core of Cohen's argument, the exclusion of women from Solomon Schechter's inner circle is glaringly apparent throughout the narrative. Women such as Mathilde Schechter do occasionally appear on the margins of the story to serve tea to male seminarians, or to lead campaigns to "strengthen Jewish home life." (29, 91). Indeed, the volume records only one moment in which women become actively engaged with an issue central to the formation of the Conservative movement, when the Women's League of United Synagogue unsuccessfully petitioned the Rabbinical Assembly to come up with a solution to the problem of agunot in the late 1920s. That the Rabbinical Assembly did not, at that point, act...